NOM

In other words, I haven't made that story up yet?

Church apologists argue in defense of the church. The role is inherently biased and not truth-seeking. Any discussion is had with the goal of convincing the other party; i.e. in bad faith.

I have little patience for any of that.

Happy New Year!

A get together sounds fun, let's do it.

Hagoth, is that a version of the stoic exercise of imagining the worst possible things so you are more grateful for your life?

Congrats sparky! Openly being your good, ATSSBUTOI, non-tithe paying self is quite satisfying. It's sad and amusing to see people try to fit you into their worldview. I occasionally bump into people in my ward at the corner convenience store when I get a morning coffee. At first it was very ...

And DCT is not a path I desire to participate in. What do you mean by "DCT"? Probably Divine Command Theory? Where anything God says is right, regardless of other moral frameworks. I.e. Nephi killing Laban to steal his stuff is good because Got told him to, even though murder and theft are ...

Here's another. Substituting the words "God" and "we/us" for "Church." Listen to just about any conference talk by one of the Q15. Every time they tell you what God wants you to do, or needs you to do, you can do that little word switch to make their statement more accurate. They obviously have ...

Sustaining callings in church. The sham of sustaining callings flips voting on it's head completely. Instead of private ballots everyone sees each other. Instead of votes meaning something, it doesn't matter if you vote opposed - the only possible action is that the person who voted opposed gets ...

Probably not the most harmful, but here are a couple lies that take my breath away when I think about them. Separating Joseph Smith's murder from polygamy. Somehow I didn't connect the dots from Joseph Smith's murder to the printing press destruction to polygamy for years after no longer believing ...

Man, what a night. It makes sense that the US wouldn't escape the incumbent backlash going around the world right now, but I was hoping. The post-COVID inflation shock was real and probably drove much of this, despite the US rebound significantly outperforming most other developed countries. I fear ...

I attended sacrament meeting yesterday and it was packed. For the believers there it seemed pretty special to have all the pews full again with the crowd filling half the gym. My DW had a 2 hour meeting as a primary presidency to review options because the number of children has tripled. It is nice ...

It looks like my ward and a neighboring ward are combining, in addition to my stake and a neighboring stake combining. Attendance has been pretty sparse since covid, so this is an overdue change. This is in Salt Lake County. I'm not looking forward to a bunch of new faces who may not know to just ...

I do miss the oneness I felt with my fellow mormons as a believer. I don't think you get that closeness without a significant amount of organization. And part of that organization requires demanding support from those within the organization so that they feel part of it. I get something similar from ...

In the morridor, my current bishop shaved his 15+ year goatee when he became bishop a couple years ago. One of his counselors has a beard. All the male stake leadership are clean shaven. I think there is more pressure on bishops and "above". But I suspect that is dwindling the further we get from ...

Oaks has the critical thinking horsepower of a nematode. But I agree with him about the Book of Mormon; it is either historical or it isn't. Until Mr. Oaks can prove that there were Nephites, logic compels me to stick with the latter. His takes are epistemologically violent, any non-indoctrinated ...

Thanks Cap!

This perspective was slapped down pretty hard by Oaks in the opening of a FARMS dinner speech in 1993 - https://rsc.byu.edu/historicity-latter-day-saint-scriptures/historicity-book-mormon . Some who term themselves believing Latter-day Saints are advocating that Latter-day Saints should “abandon c ...

I'm still here!! Thanks for getting things up and running again! It felt weird not doing NOMference. But Oaks will probably in charge in April, so we'll have to do something special for that sh!tshow!!! I missed NOMference too. It's nice to commiserate here. Although this session there was not much ...

“… The combined income from all of these business interests is relatively small... Relative to what? Assuming you don't play their game, but include their investments along with the pioneer era businesses, they exceed all other churches, so I guess we have to look at it relative to national tre ...

I'm trying to get into my former TBM justification mode on these statements, but they are making it hard! It seems like this kind of write up by the church is short-sighted. It may win some battles, but it is so obviously dishonest that it's going to lose them the war. "The majority of financial ...

The second sign of a Cult, (yes, I'm going to use that word) is it will demand, or coerce, or manipulate however it can, loyalty to the cult/personality over loyalty to the family. My family happily put more importance on my relationship with church than my relationship with them. Family was there ...