FAIR is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing well-documented answers to criticisms of the doctrine, practice, and history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Difference between revisions of "Censorship and revision of Church history"
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"What people believed in the past is logically distinct from our opinions about them. Understanding others on their own terms is a completely different intellectual endeavor than explaining them in modern or postmodern categories. . . . I fail to follow the logic of a leading literary scholar who recently implied, during a session at the American Historical Association convention, that because he "cannot believe in belief," the religion of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people is not to be taken seriously on its own terms. Strictly speaking, this is an autobiographical comment that reveals literally nothing about early modern people. One might as well say, "I cannot believe in unbelief; therefore, alleged post-Enlightenment atheism should not be taken seriously on its own terms. | "What people believed in the past is logically distinct from our opinions about them. Understanding others on their own terms is a completely different intellectual endeavor than explaining them in modern or postmodern categories. . . . I fail to follow the logic of a leading literary scholar who recently implied, during a session at the American Historical Association convention, that because he "cannot believe in belief," the religion of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people is not to be taken seriously on its own terms. Strictly speaking, this is an autobiographical comment that reveals literally nothing about early modern people. One might as well say, "I cannot believe in unbelief; therefore, alleged post-Enlightenment atheism should not be taken seriously on its own terms. | ||
| − | "Could bedfellows be any stranger? Reductionist explanations of religion share the epistemological structure of traditional confessional history. Just as confessional historians explore and evaluate based on their religious convictions, reductionist historians of religion explain and judge based on their unbelief...." - Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 9 cited in {{FR-18-1-16}} | + | "Could bedfellows be any stranger? Reductionist explanations of religion share the epistemological structure of traditional confessional history. Just as confessional historians explore and evaluate based on their religious convictions, reductionist historians of religion explain and judge based on their unbelief...." - Brad S. Gregory, ''Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 9 cited in {{FR-18-1-16}} |
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