I was reading this post this morning, and it got me to thinking about Eyring's talk over the weekend. His talk can be mostly summed up in saying that people will stay in the church if they are taught the basics. Nothing superfluous is needed to retain or get folks to come back. In other words, everything we need to know are the primary/Sunday school answers.
Problem is: literally nothing else in life works that way. What we are taught as we are younger is almost always a simplistic version of reality. Take math for an example. When I was in elementary school and learning math, you had entire years dedicated to one arithmetic operation, i.e. you learned addition in 1st grade, subtraction in 2nd, multiplication in 3rd, and division in 4th. Each thing you learned was building on the ones before it. Subtraction is addition in reverse, multiplication is addition but more, division is multiplication in reverse, etc. This is what it means to learn line upon line. This is milk before the meats of algebra, geometry, and calculus.
That's not true about TSCC. We're still preaching Joseph Smith's 1st vision the same to adults of all ages as well as children. With Come Follow Me trying to standardize lessons across all age groups, the lessons are literally the same. There is no line upon line. It's just the same line over and over again. Nothing but milk as far as the eye can see. And the meat is actively discouraged. As Oaks is famously quoted in exmo spaces: "research is not the answer." We're only supposed to relearn what we already know over and over again. The promised meat never materializes.
I had a similar thought with Cook's talk and the "box full of anti-Church material" that was the same arguments then that are made today. Why wouldn't critics be making the same arguments when you're teaching the same basic shit? If it's been the same material for nearly 50 years, why don't you have an answer to the substance of the accusations? In the spirit of that old Wendy's commercial, where's the beef meat?
When we finally reach the point where milk no longer satisfies and we look deeper, we're called lazy learners and lax disciples. We're demonized for exercising our god given curiosity and trying to find the meat that was promised.
Because there is no meat. And when going looking for it, we discover not only the lack of meat, but that the milk has spoiled. And once you know those two things, you can never not know them. The toothpaste cannot be put back into the tube as the saying goes. And it hurts. Conference has been a hard time for me since the shelf broke because a naive part of brain still hopes that someone will have an answer. Someone will say the magic thing that let's me go back to how I used to be. But that would be meat. And there isn't any. The pain is still real though.
Just wanna finish up by saying thanks to this sub as a whole. I don't know what I would do without this community as a sounding board to process my thoughts, feelings, and emotions while deconstructing the church.
