NOM

Churches don’t save, redeem, rejuvenate, transform or even love. They are just a structure; a container for our personal and collective spiritual observances. And until the priesthood recognises and repents of the collective sin of their self-idolization the Mormons will forever be stuck in the thick of the church’s own arrogant self-congratulation. And God will stay imaged as the priesthood, perpetually entombed in the narrow confines of its own ailing spiritual and mortal imagination.

Instead of creating community, anxiously engaged in bringing forth the Kingdom of God, the church is burdened with homogeneity, conformity, idolatry, judgement, a narrowness of mind, authoritarianism, unreasonable work expectations, manipulation and a tedious and ugly emphasis on right belief – as if belief saves.

Conclusion. I don’t know what the goals or motives of the BYU administrators have been over the past thirty years in relationship to the Book of Mormon. I suspect they haven’t actually considered the implications of their policy decisions at all. Their focus is on other important aspects of running a university. However, the law of unintended (and perhaps even some intended) consequences has resulted in a series of administrative policy decisions over the past thirty years all of which have combined to result in undermining serious ancient Book of Mormon studies at BYU. Indeed, if their actual goal was to intentionally minimize the discipline of ancient Book of Mormons studies, they could have achieved that goal no better than by making precisely the decisions they have made.

2bizE wrote: ↑Mon Sep 11, 2017 10:51 pm Gina has a marvelous way of stating the obvious that I somehow could never put into words. How true that Mormons have given up belief in christ for belief in priesthood leaders.