NOM

The LDS leadership has this really stupid practice of ALWAYS protecting their predecessors, unless and until they have no other choice. Holland is lying. I'm sure he has his mental-gymnastic reasons for doing such, but its a lie. The 1949 message you quote is definitive, and even used by the FP as ...

The current issue of the Ensign contains this statement from Elder Holland: From the mid-1800s, the Church did not ordain men of black African descent to the priesthood or allow black men or women to participate in temple endowment or sealing ordinances.1 No known records exist that explain the orig...

I don’t want friends who are only friends if I share their religious views. If that’s the case, it was never a relationship between them and me anyway, it was a relationship between them and the Church and me. If you take the Church out and the friendship collapses, you were in some kind of bizarre ...

It ought to be a giant red flag when an organization that purports to be the “true” Church fights so hard to keep things that are true from being known by its members. Leonard Arrington fought the good fight for truth, but the Church won - until the internet came along and pulled the rug out from un...

There are plenty enough verifiable stories about Elder Bednar being a jerk, we don’t really need to speculate about him being abusive to his wife. It may be she is just shy. But we do know for a fact he’d have all of the students at devotionals at BYU-I raise their scriptures in some kind of Nazi-Es...

Authenticity may be over-rated. We all hide aspects about ourselves that others might find unpleasant. Untidy bedrooms and pooping come to mind as examples of hiding our authentic selves. I think what you may really want is to go live a new life. My recommendation is just go do it! without making p...

You are right, there is no "correct" answer. Much depends on your spouse, and how accepting he or she is, and how willing to tolerate disengagement from the Church. Myself, I've been in a similar place, I've been playing along for a long time now, attending meetings, holding callings, but doing the ...

Will the Church maybe reach a point where enough members leave that it has to soften the rhetoric against those who leave the Church? Nope, that would be the humane thing to do. Instead, they will try and frighten those who remain into staying, causing more grief. But how much needless pain and hear...

Hope can be cruel. The believing family member who holds out hope for the return of the unbeliever sometimes torments themselves needlessly for years. Unfortunately, the Church perpetuates that with its "no empty chairs at the table" rhetoric, so the believer often goes on hoping...

Recently I met with the bishop to discuss some changes in the way I interact with the Church, not participating in “ministering” being one of them. I was annoyed when he asked if I read the Book of Mormon every day, and later in an email to my wife he said he doesn’t worry about her testimony if she...

“Families are Forever” - nowhere is it mentioned in the Book of Mormon. Think about it - this is the one concept that binds members to the Church more than any other, and there isn’t even a hint of it in the Book of Mormon. It never registers with members for some reason, but wouldn’t something so i...

When a person in a position of trust uses that position to enrich himself at the expense of the public, yeah, I’d say that’s a problem.

The remarkable thing isn’t that you are angry. The remarkable thing is so many members whose children are asked similar questions aren’t angry.

You bet it’s “creepy” - your daughter nailed it.

Quit being so judgmental. My point was that if the laws of the U.S. allow men to marry men and women to marry women, the laws should also equally allow other forms of marriage. I don't see women as sex objects at all but I do see some as too annoying, which would make plural marriage intolerable fo...

Sorry about the double post, I got a little wound up and wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing.

For me, it's not a question of true vs. false anymore. It's a question of authorship and creation. Did Joseph Smith make it all up and essentially "create" Mormonism? I believe 100% he did. Is it true? Not relevant. Is it false? Not relevant! Does it entertain and make people happy? Sure, but not e...

But as I said in my post in the other thread, where has there ever been a group that practiced polygamy where it wasn’t coercive, abusive, and generally just bad for a substantial number of the women in the group? There has never been a group that practiced polygamy where it resulted in most of the ...

Regarding polygamy, it should never be legal. Why? Because it has never been practiced by any group without a significant number of young women and female children being coerced into it. I hate it when people talk about polygamy as though it were entirely consensual, because it hardly ever works tha...

AGEISM exists and it is mostly male bashing, i.e., males are discouraged from marrying whom they love (or lust after) when the females are much younger. But, like I said, I am glad that Nelson set the example for the members. After all, follow the prophet, right? He married a person 30 years younge...

No matter how much we toss around different wording or semantics, it doesn't change the evidence: The church is not what it claims to be. It never has been. Whether Joseph was deluded, and every "prophet" since Joe, right up to old Russel continue to be deluded, the church is still not what it clai...