Jonathan Streeter and I continue our analysis of October 2020 General Conference with the Saturday afternoon session! This session may contain the worst GenCon talk I have heard in forty years! The audio is a bit sketchy toward the beginning (thanks, Zoom!) but it levels out pretty quickly! Hang in there and you will be amply rewarded!
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Jackson’s talk immediately took me back to a zone conference in Darkhan, Mongolia in 2004. I looked it up and this dude was the visiting area 70. He gave this exact talk. At least a very similar one. He talked about people needing to leave their culture for the culture of christ. I’ll have to look up notes if I still have them but this dude clearly does not like unique culture.
I think the modern mormon prepper mentality reached its apex in the 1960s, the high water mark of the cold war, in particular the Cuban missile crisis. I remember getting duck-and-roll training at my grade school while my father did research on bomb shelters and my mother canned food and stored grain like crazy.
I too have noticed that the church’s cathexis for prepping has all but disappeared since then.
RFM……… “CULTURE” ????? Yeah…Heavy on the “CULT”!!!!!!!!!
Your conference deconstructions are my fave! Too much to comment on. I’ll just leave one thought.
The story of the dying boy being so indoctrinated in the “culture”, that he takes his poor pain riddled, immune compromised little body to church is sickening on so many levels You both hit on such good points.
One thought I had was that what are other dying, sick, terminal members supposed to feel when their decision is to take a time out from church work to savour what little time may be left with each other…or , heaven forbid, to stay home and put their fragile condition above church attendance???….
What are they to conclude when this squeaky clean, uber obedient, general authourity sacrifices the here and now with his son, to continue business as usual, for the promise of later?????
I suggest that his self righteous , virtue signalling just makes others in the same boat feel even more inadequate and despairing in an already unbearable circumstance.
Don’t get me wrong…I feel for the family’s trial and loss, but I found him sharing this story post mortem to be quite exploitive of his vulnerable son, all for the sake of elevating himself and making others who can’t measure up feel inadequate and guilty if they can’t do the same….or don’t want to. I don’t think he would say that was his intention…it is however his result.
This is the ‘Plan of Happiness?’
Its never enough!!!!!!
And that man is the perfect profile of the type of yes-man the church cultivates and promotes to general authority. …a man who , no matter what , will tow the line laid out in the impossible check list.
Like Abraham of old, he was willing to take his son to the sacrificial alter, but unlike Isaac, the mormon god did not spare his son in the test….just a metaphor for what the church asks of its people.
BTW….What has happened to the comments on your podcasts and your interactions with us?…Im such a boomer…it seems like the party went somewhere else, but I have no way of knowing where???
I am so sorry for my absence from the comments section here. Podcasting is rapidly becoming a second full-time job! I don’t want you to feel ignored, though.
I think the party may have moved somewhat–over to my Facebook page, where a red carpet is rolled out for you anytime!
As to your comment, I feel like one of the worst things about this particular conference talk is that the father used his son’s experience in order to compel compliance with church requirements among all members, regardless of how ill they might be.
Even if you’re dying of cancer, you need to be at church fulfilling your responsibilities.
And if you’re not dying of cancer, you are left without excuse!
I am sure that made perfect sense to the speaker, and he did it out of a sense of honor to his son and his memory.
But am I the only one who found it a wee bit cynical?
thank you RFM…that was the point I was trying to make, done so much better by you. If you mean by cynical that he intended that guilt trip?…then call it what you want. It was clearly too manipulative to be unintentional.
I sensed you have been busy, busy, busy with producing so much and it is greatly appreciated. Ill see if I can find the party. LOL
Thanks for bushwacking through the jungle of gaslighting planted by the LDS church in GenCon.