The Temple and Freemasonry, in Darmstadt

Scott Gordon, the president of FairMormon, is speaking right now on the topic of “Freemasonry and the Temple.”  In particular, at the moment, he’s discussing the origins and history of Freemasonry.  Quite interesting, and well presented, with good illustrations.

To begin with, though, he called several people up from the audience to enact a brief and simple little sketch for which he had prepared them.

A young woman, probably just about to leave high school for college, is going out on a date.  She’s excited, because her date — think of someone like me, if you need help visualizing this — is handsome, and quite a hunk.

She looks in the mirror.  She’s pleased.  The new dress looks really, really good.

She comes downstairs.  Her parents say, “You look beautiful!”

Her date rings the doorbell.  When she opens the door, he’s visibly stunned.  “Wow!” he says, with undisguised admiration.

They head out on their date, and, after they’ve arrived, two women come up to her, separately, to tell her how beautiful she looks.

Then, however, someone else comes up.  A stranger.  “Yuck!” she says.  “What an ugly dress!  It makes you look really fat!”

Our heroine will almost certainly pay far more attention to this last comment than to all of the others combined.  She’ll stew over it for the rest of the evening.  She’ll think about it for the next week.  She may never wear the dress again.  Certainly, it will be forever tainted.

That’s a very plausible reaction.  It’s humanly believable.

And, Scott said, it’s rather the way some of us react to anti-Mormon talking points.  We have to be sure that all of our good experiences and our reasons for believing and our hopes aren’t slain by a stray criticism or a single unexpected allegation, inflated beyond all reasonable proportion.

Posted from Darmstadt, Germany