happy grasshopper

funny quote from The Big Bang Theory (Rajnesh drinks for the first time and shares his feelings as he gets tipsy):

Penny:  okay, if you’re going to drink on this date, promise me you’re not going to overdo it.

Rajnesh Koothrappali: overdo what?  happiness?  freedom?  this warm glow inside of me that promises everything is going to be hunky dunky?

i LOL’d.

Blogging

I want to start blogging again. I think I will try to post thoughts randomly as I have them. I also have some unfinished posts to tidy up and publish. Well see how it goes.

my family

[from a letter i wrote today to a friend about "where my family is at in regards to the church"]:

my wife just “doesn’t care”, but really doesn’t believe, either.  she finds it almost offensive, however, for me to hang out on atheist websites or watch atheist documentaries.  at the same time she sees the bible as an old book with ridiculous stories in it.  i tell her she is what’s considered “a deist”.  but she’s still got a thing for jesus and doesn’t like to see much skepticism towards him.  her dad used to be a stake pres. and her mom is the epitomy of brainwashed latin-american relief society sister lacking any knowledge at all of church history (and in s. america there are really no good

apologetics

words of advice from an apostate

just got this letter from a freethinking internet friend:

I stop by your [other] blog every now and then and you [have] awesome stuff.. I download the youtube vids jus so I could show them to my mom. Keep it up man.

My brother is serving a mission in [****] and he writes back every now and then, mostly to my mom. He mentions that is he concerned about me and all, here is an excerpt from his last message.

How is [***] doing, still beliving whatever he believes or has god manifested himself to him. I had been thinking about it alot and maybe we should seek the help of [our local] Mission President, see if he can help. I know he doesn’t know anything about the gospel and maybe starting from the basics will do him some good. I even put his name in the pray book. I know this is the lords work that im doing and I love the fact that he loves us all. I love feeling the spirit here and I know I have learned so much while being here at the MTC and it amazes me. There is so much to learn. This is Jesus Christ’s church. I know he lives and he is our savior. The book of Mormon is true and I love reading it. I say this is

angry ex-mo street-cred Post

The following happened a couple of weeks ago- it sat in my personal journal for a while but I feel like publishing it here because I doubt I will have many if any more rants like this about Mormonism. So here’s my “angry ex-Mormon street-cred Post”.

Joseph Smith’s Abstrakt

Pretty cool artistic play on Joseph Smith and the plates.

I’ve got some other drafts that I just haven’t posted yet so stay tuned for those…

(video via)

Lost Purse and a Useless Organ: Possible Trials of Faith?

A couple of days ago my wife’s purse was stolen. She left it in a fast food restaurant for ten minutes and when we came back, it was gone! Yeah- right here in Utah County- I was surprised too! Along with it were some important documents and ID’s, our canon camera, my iPod video and a nice cell phone. Probably a little over a thousand dollars worth of stuff.

Ever since my wife and I went inactive in the church, things have been going pretty well for us “blessings”-wise. But we have been kind of leery of the day that anything would go bad for us because our two TBM families would probably jump at any opportunity to point out any lack of blessings (my mom actually told me last fall that I would “surely pass through some difficulties and hardships as a result of not following the Gospel”). I knew from then on out that they would be watching us like a hawk for any visible failings.

The Golden Rule: Where does Morality come from?

a year ago i got into sunstone. i learned that the blacks being denied the priesthood was based on racist ideals. i realized i had given hundreds of hours to studying this other side of mormonism and thought i should give some time to god in prayer to see if he had anything to say about my belief structure that wasslowly changing. i wanted to give him a chance to respond to the new information i had been learning and accepting as true.

god, what do you think about all of this? to me it makes since but just say the magic words and i’ll do my best to throw out everything i’ve recently learned and go back to blind faith if needs be.

as i was losing my faith in mormonism, i was growing a newfound love and respect for people of all races, sexual preferences, belief-systems, etc. i started to not see gays as sinners and bad people. i stopped seeing blacks (even if just sub-consciously) as less-valiant fence-sitters in the pre-existence. i wasn’t seeing non-lds folk as “lost”, anymore. so i prayed to know if this was “okay in god’s eyes”. yeah, it sounds weird that i had to pray about something like that but those ideas conflicted with what i had learned in church and in my own private study of the doctrine.

Someone Jacked My Thoughts

…actually, someone more coherently organized the thoughts, feelings and conclusions I’ve had myself lately, in a more understandable dialogue. Check out his well-worded post here.

Kullervo said:

As I’ve said before, I do not deny the existence of God, but there are some things that I do deny. Many of them actually assume that God exists, so what I mean then is that “if there is a God, I deny that he is like x.”

Agreed. He continues:

I deny the existence of hell. That an even marginally good god would damn people to eternal punishment and torture for finite sins committed in virtual ignorance is absolutely preposterous. That some people do believe this makes my mind boggle.

I deny the infallibility of the Bible (or any other religious text), of human religious leaders, of religions, and of philosophies. The claim of infallibility is unbelievably arrogant, and reality usually shows the truth.