Some of you don’t know what the “Letter to a CES Director” is. It’s a letter that’s been circulating online for about a year now…a year and a half, I think, as far as I know, that has gotten quite a bit of circulation. It’s a kind of compendium of standard critical arguments against the truth claims of the Church. It’s entitled “Letter to a CES Director: Why I Lost My Testimony,” and it was written, as the story goes, by request of a CES director who wanted to know why this young man had decided to leave the Church. He wrote the letter. The CES director said he would get back to him with answers, but he did not, according to the story. Now the thing is about 90 pages long, and it’s just a rata-tat-tat list of objections. I can understand why a normal person confronted by that would say, “Well, you know, I’ve got a life. Its 90 pages of quick and dirty objections would take 500 pages to respond to, and probably wouldn’t do much good, so, never mind.”

I have to say, some people have said and speculated online that I’m addressing this topic out of my deep concern and paranoia. Well, I am sort of concerned about the letter in the sense that it’s had some impact, but actually it was not my idea to address it. Someone said, “You know, maybe you should address that. Maybe that would be a good topic.” I said, “‘Yes, OK. I’ll think about that,’ and the next thing I knew, PR was going out saying that’s what I was addressing. So, I will do it. Why not? I was asked to do it and I have to say, my reaction to reading the thing, which I put off reading for a long time, was sadness and frustration. I found it very painful to go through the 90 pages. It is wearisome reading and, at point after point, multiple times per page, I was exasperated. My impression is that the author is someone who had leanings in more of what you might call a fundamentalist direction than my own, but he was blindsided by things that he was learning about history and historical difficulties that he had not encountered before. He lost his trust and felt betrayed, and so he’s in a position now, where anybody speaking on behalf of the Church is probably lying. So, what I say today will not be of much value or interest except to make him mad.

But, I’m not really addressing him. I’m addressing people who might run into these things and are still puzzled by the charges that he makes. As I say, it’s a kind of compendium, not original at all…not really pretending to originality. It’s a compendium of charges and accusations. My impression—I will give you the bottom line–is that the author spent too little time and effort looking at these questions, that he “jumped ship” too soon, that there are answers, at least adequate, and in some cases really much more than adequate to just about every issue raised.