the church’s* retreat from the BOA? could it be?

Anubis says: “hey, what happened to my head?”

what do you make of this?  are the apologists slowly retreating from defending the Book of Hor’s holiness as canonical scripture?

http://www.ldschurchnews.com/articles/57738/The-Book-of-Abraham-The-larger-issue.html

my favorite:

“So if what is most important needs to be defended, what are some of the things that need to be defended?” he asked.

He suggested six: God exists; Jesus Christ is His Son; God talked and still talks with men through the power of the Holy Ghost; Jesus Christ atoned for the sins of the world; the Atonement is available to those who trust Jesus, turn from sin, make and keep sacred covenants, and follow the course throughout their lives; and the Book of Mormon is true, an authentic record of God’s interactions with actual ancient people.

“Now, we may be called upon to defend smaller points than these, but if these six things are not true, there is no point in the rest,” Brother Gee said.

so, just bat your eyes in ignorance at your critical friend/family member and defend instead these six things.  if the critic insists on looking at the scientific evidence, point out they are caring more about man’s “evidence” and “science” rather than god’s holy church.

oh, also amazing is how the church’s most prominent BOA defender, Gee, totally distances himself and the LDS Church away from accepting the BOA as an important part of mormon doctrine:

“Now where is the Book of Abraham in this?” he asked. “It isn’t. The Book of Abraham is not central to the restored gospel of Christ.”

To illustrate, he said that of all the scriptural citations in general conference since 1942, the Book of Abraham has been cited less than 1 percent of the time. Most of those citations are the seven verses in Abraham 3:22-29, which tell of the pre-mortal existence. [yes, the other verses in the BOA are ideas which have since been thrown out of LDS belief, namely: polygamy, lying for the lord, and the origin of Ham (the negro’s) black curse- all gone, just like that]

*i say “the church’s” retreat because i don’t see anyone else alive today who could be considered as the main apologist of the BOA, other than the author of the church news’ article, john gee.

mormonthink‘s take on this story:  http://www.mormonthink.com/boaweb.htm#latest

It sure sounds like Gee is trying to cut a whole in the wall, to make a door to escape from having to defend the Book of Abraham any longer.   “The Church does not rise and fall on the veracity of the BOA.”  That sure sounds like an escape hatch the church would be happy to use. Could this be a foreshadowing of how the church will someday treat the Book of Abraham?

My Balls and My Word

So I have family staying with us who are strong TBMs. Why is it just a non-spoken given that we are supposed to always follow the religion of our fathers? Why is it that on Mondays they do not ask if it would be appropriate to have an LDS-centered FHE? where is he respect? How come they can’t fathom that maybe this family doesn’t accept their prophets anymore? Maybe this family is Pagan now. Maybe they’re simply Christian. Maybe they’re deists. Maybe they’re agnostic. What if we decided to be baptist? Would there be an unspoken rule that whenever so and so is over we still preach the BS of our fathers?

Part of me wants to just fake it for sake of the familial relationships but I can’t do that for a couple of reasons.

First off, thats such a cop out. It’s the easy way out. Treading your own course in the unknown wildereness is harder than just going down the beaten path so well trodden by my parents and ancestors. It’s harder to be an apostate among family and community. It can be hard! But do I really want to half ass it giving religion it’s unspoken reverance and then have my own children one day develop relationship-destroying beliefs and personlities? Do I want hem to go thru what me and my wife have to go thru with our parents? Do I want that same possible scenario for my grandkids?

It’s the harder path but it’s what has been ingrained in me for three decades of church membership: integrity and standing up for the truth! I can’t fake believing or even putting up with (I know there’s a better word I’m not thinking of) the church or religion in general. Like John Dehlin said “if u took the Mormon out of me I would be like takin the framin out of a house” and that’s why I must be true to myself and my integrity. And as bob McCue has said (alluding to he fact that it’s a hard path to go down being an apostate) “I’d rather tak these arrows now than have my children take them later”. I respect that so much and always remember those words. It’s what keeps me from being a NOM or sunstone Mormon.

Integrity. What else do u have?

“all I’ve got is my balls and my word and I don’t break em for no one!” – quote from a mob movie.

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.

apologetics

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.

To Embrace Atheism or Not?

I think there are so many positive things that come from accepting atheism or agnosticism. Intellectual honesty is a huge one. Finally you can simply say, “I don’t know, and you don’t know either”. And that’s honesty.

Although I find myself still talking to god and doubting if I’m an atheist just like angrymormonliberal said here. I’ve had a lot of little nice spiritual experiences that could pretty easily be explained by science but one spiritual experience was very profound for me. It was too big for me to ever dismiss just like that. It may keep me in agnosticism indefinitely but I keep thinking to myself, what about 99.9999% of the people in this world that didn’t have that strong experience like I did. How are they supposed to believe? And I don’t want to have special rights over my brothers and sisters in this world. I don’t believe god would work that way.

Another great thing about embracing doubt and uncertainty is the relief from Cognitive Dissonance that anyone religious must go through on a day-to-day basis. Leaving organized religion and embracing science gives you a great feeling of relief and elation. I can’t tell you how wonderful (for me) it is to be able to learn about human evolution and simply accept it wholly and also to be able to accept what that means to me in the big picture. I don’t have to be anti-science anymore, I don’t have to accept the evil selfish homophobic killer of a god of the bible.