Lies, Damn Lies, and Apologists

While perusing an LDS apologist site I ran across this article that was a response to the movie 8: The Mormon Proposition. I have no interest in taking apart the entire article or even discussing the movie, except to make a point about apologists.
The article first makes this claim about the movie

17:37
Claim
A woman who is claimed to be a "former Mormon" states that in the temple "we promise to give of our means and our time to defend the Church and to forward its mission, and we're told that we will lose our eternal salvation if we don't keep that promise."

The apologists are being accurate here, this is word for word what is said in the movie.

The problem is their response

Response
There is no promise made in the temple that includes those words and no place where it is stated that anyone will lose their eternal salvation if they do not keep their promises. That having been said, there can be no question that to enter into any covenant with God and then to knowingly and purposely break that covenant must certainly disqualify the individual for the blessings that God has promised to the faithful.

I don't wish to get into any specific details about the LDS temple ceremonies, but anyone who has been through the temple knows that what the former Mormon says in the above quote is accurate. To claim otherwise is a blatant lie. But notice the full quote above by the apologists. Let me point out a couple of huge problems with their tactics.
First, they complain that

There is no promise made in the temple that includes those words.

Well of course it doesn't use those exact words. The woman wasn't claiming to be quoting the temple ceremony. Either they are deliberately being dishonest here, or they have the listening skills of a five year old.

Then they say

and no place where it is stated that anyone will lose their eternal salvation if they do not keep their promises.

This has got to be one of the most dishonest things I have ever seen a Mormon say. Yes it is true that there is no place in the temple where it states those words, but to claim that the Mormon temple doesn't teach that is absolutely a lie. Any Mormon who has been to the temple knows those are the most important covenants you can make. To claim that your eternal salvation doesn't rest on the covenants you make in the temple would be in contradiction with the LDS church itself.

Then their little game of deceit gets even better, because notice what they do next.

That having been said, there can be no question that to enter into any covenant with God and then to knowingly and purposely break that covenant must certainly disqualify the individual for the blessings that God has promised to the faithful.

This part is astounding to me. This entire paragraph completely contradicts the preceding one and agrees with absolutely everything that the former Mormon said. So they first attack what she says because she didn't use the exact wording that the temple uses, and then use wording that agrees with the exact intent of what the woman said.

I use this example, not to discuss gay marriage or the temple ceremony, but to point out how dishonest apologists are. They don't care about truth, they care about defending a position. Here is how an apologist works
1-Assume all the truth claims of the church are true.
2-Find any possible evidence you can to support those claims
3-Reject out of hand an evidence that contradicts it
4-If the evidence against becomes too overwhelming to deny, just assert that it doesn't really matter because proposition 1 is true.

I hope you can see that those tactics, while useful for maintain belief, are not the way to discover truth. You don't assume the conclusion prior to even gathering any evidence.

The real truth though, is that apologists don't exist to convince people like me. Apologists exist to give people who want to believe justification for doing so. If someone runs into a tough question but really wants to believe they can go to an apologist and get an answer. It doesn't really matter to people like this what the answer really is, just that there is an answer. All they need to see is that a bunch of smart people looked at the issue, found an explanation, and are still believers. That is all the believer needs to maintain faith.

I do have to confess one thing. I wasn't just perusing an LDS apologist site. I actually had a goal in mind when I went there. My goal was to go to the home page of FAIR and see how long it took me to find a blatant lie or misrepresentation by an apologist. I found the one discussed above in less than two minutes. It's just too easy.