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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*David B. Honey and Daniel C. Peterson, "Advocacy and Inquiry in the Writing of Latter-day Saint History," BYU Studies 31/2 (1991): 139–79. | *David B. Honey and Daniel C. Peterson, "Advocacy and Inquiry in the Writing of Latter-day Saint History," BYU Studies 31/2 (1991): 139–79. | ||
*{{FR-18-1-16}} | *{{FR-18-1-16}} | ||
| + | *"The distinctiveness of religion demands methodological astuteness if we want to understand its practitioners, lest we misconstrue them from the outset. In seeking to explain religion, many scholars have employed cultural theories or social science approaches in ways that preclude its being understood. Instead of reconstructing religious beliefs and experiences, they reduce them to something else based on their own, usually implicit, modern or postmodern beliefs... | ||
| + | "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. | ||
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| + | "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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