Stephen was born December 19, 1955 in California. He grew up in transit, as the USAF moved his family around. After a mission to up-state New York, he got his bachelor's degree in Economics from CSULA and his J.D. from BYU. He was married January 26, 1985 and currently lives in Texas.
Orthodox, he was one of the founding board members of FAIR, runs the web site http://adrr.com/ blogs individually at http://ethesis.blogspot.com/ -- and is pleased to be a part of Mormon Matters where postings about all things LDS/Mormon "must have a deep and abiding love" for the Church and its people.
He and his wife are the parents of five girls, three of whom are deceased. Author Profile: Stephen Marsh
Stephen was born December 19, 1955 in California. He grew up in transit, as the USAF moved his family around. After a mission to up-state New York, he got his bachelor's degree in Economics from CSULA and his J.D. from BYU. He was married January 26, 1985 and currently lives in Texas.
Orthodox, he was one of the founding board members of FAIR, runs the web site http://adrr.com/ blogs individually at http://ethesis.blogspot.com/ -- and is pleased to be a part of Mormon Matters where postings about all things LDS/Mormon "must have a deep and abiding love" for the Church and its people.
He and his wife are the parents of five girls, three of whom are deceased. Author Archive for Stephen Marsh
Everyone does it. This essay is on how to do it with style and panache. For my proof text I will use “let women keep silence in the churches” but any verse will do.
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The view of God’s godliness ranges from God as a Bonewits Parasite to God as the ex nilho creator who controls everything down to the direction and location of sub atomic particles. Those views of omniscience and omnipotence as to God and just what that means inside and outside of time were to be Part Three.
Well, an FLDS update, that includes a link to an Ikea spoof.
What other things that everyone seems to be taking seriously can you think of spoofing?
Borrowing from Grits for Breakfast:
” here’s some recent coverage that may interest Grits readers:”
- Fort Worth Star Telegram: Polygamist sect fights back by emerging from isolation
- London Times: What next for polygamists?
- Salt Lake Tribune: Was FBI probe in 1980s lost chance to curbe FLDS leaders?
- Salt Lake Tribune: Jeffs daughter wants to ditch her attorney
- San Angelo Standard Times: CPS, judge threatened American foundation
- AP: Cost of raid tops $14 million
- The Spoof: Polygamists to replace same sex couples in Ikea ads (satire)
- The Common Room: FLDS June 22
When you think of God, do you envision?
- a proper English gentleman
- a modernized Biblical patriarch
- an erudite English professor at a Ivy league university
- a tame Lion (returning to the C. S. Lewis reference)?
Do you recreate God in your own idealized image?
- God is the God of Sparrows
- God is as seen through glass, darkly, the God of Mists
- God is a light in darkness, the God of Light
- God is at a distance
- God is plausible deniablility
- God is a God of almost miracles
- God is a God of Miracles
- God is tamed and trained Lion
Which of these is God to you?
I’ve been reading a lot this week as people complain that either God is hateful and evil or they are victims of gross unfairness at the hands of God’s servants (that God, of course, should have fixed or should fix now). Much of it is in the context of doctrinal and historical discussions that bring up a lot of pain.
It is tempting to apply the discussion to every template: gay marriage, ordination of women, Blacks and the Priesthood, and the death of children — especially the last as it is Father’s Day.
Joseph Smith has always been surrounded by stories, rumors and narratives. Those who had heard of the Book of Mormon would ask him how they should determine the truth. This was especially so since he freely told people that he was not perfect, but just like them.
Brigham Young’s favorite rhetorical style embraced hyperbole (common for his time). He also enjoyed doctrinal speculation based on his reckoning or logic. Several times he was braced by those who wanted him to be their sole light.
The responses both men made are ones we should remember. Continue reading…
Currently there are four active humor blogs in the Bloggernacle.
Amazingly, all of them delete material that someone considers personally offensive if you just politely contact them. I try to regularly read them, and used to comment.
Since all entities or groups will draw satire or humor, we can either nurture what we like or reinforce what we don’t by the way we react. Like many things, our choice is not in whether or not humor (like adversity) will exist, merely what shape it will take.
Do some good in the world. Visit some humor sites, encourage the good, pass on the bad. Nurture what you want to see.
It seems, sometimes, that the lessons I learned on my mission are the ones I see again and again.
One of the things I learned was the difference between spirituality, religiosity and emotionalism.
I end up talking with people on this theme several times a year.
There are people who feel terribly betrayed. Especially when a spouse leaves the gospel. Apostatizes.
The last part of the picture that frames affliction ties into the purpose of life. The only true affliction would be something that denied us access to life’s purpose, which is for us to gain bodies that can be resurrected. We would be truly afflicted if after birth we were denied death. Nothing else really gets in our way.
Now is there more to life?
Christ said:
Ye ought to forgive one another; for he that forgiveth not his brother his trespasses standeth condemned before the Lord; for there remaineth in him the greater sin.”
D&C 64:9 (cf Matthew 6:15; 18:35; et al).
Do you have enough faith to believe Christ?
If you do, then what did he mean?
An older friend of mine remarked that time seems to fly by now. She quipped that it felt like she was changing the sheets every morning. As you close on eight years old, a month is about the same part of your life that a year is in your nineties. At her age, changing the sheets once a week really has become subjectively changing them every morning in the time frame of when she was younger.
That comment made me think about the way time would dilate for me if I was a couple thousand years old. Or how it might dilate if I was twenty thousand years old. Or older.
Orson Scott Card has written some on King Mosiah, but I’ve got another point. He flees the land of their first inheritance. He arrives in the midst of a people who have fought many wars. Next thing you know, and the narrative doesn’t mention it at all, a Nephite faction leaves to go back, because they think they are strong enough to retake their homeland. That they come to grief surprises no one, but what should take your attention is that they think they can do it at all.
Think: Mosiah, Benjamin, Mosiah, three kings, in parallel, somewhat, to the King Noah and Alma, Alma the Younger story. Somewhere in there they gain enough additional strength and numbers that they think that instead of running away to avoid destruction, they are powerful enough to visit destruction instead. Continue reading…
Every so often I meet someone who has chipped a nail and then concludes as a result that there is no God or that God is not good. While there are variations on the theme, the bottom line is that the person has noticed adversity and decided that there is a level of adversity that is “too much” and from which they conclude that faith is vain.
By the 1980s the Church had clear and convincing statistical evidence that Scouting had no net positive effect on the long term success of LDS youth (using gospel markers such as temple marriage and missions) or on their activity rates. Several efforts were made to look for replacements.
More than twenty years later, the last “counseling” session between a member of the Seventy and local leadership in Oregon finished with one of the brothers asking for the Church to just scrap the Scouts and to use the Young Women’s program until further notice. You might ask, what has happened and just what is Scouting?
Explosive Church growth has had a real impact on one of the core experiences many LDS had growing up — knowing apostates. The lack of them hampers us and in many ways we need more apostates.
After all, it used to be that everyone, while growing up, would know at least one ex-apostate, someone who had left the Church and returned. Sure, the bloggernacle has some (e.g. Bookslinger), but someone on-line is a poor substitute for having someone in your ward or stake that you get to know and interact with. So we have a need for more apostates.
Whenever I heard about a “style of our own” I thought back to Moroni’s robe and David O McKay’s vision of the City of God. When I mentioned that I got accused of just wanting clothing that let me see into the bosoms of others, and a friend quipped up that he was interested in a dress code that banned underwear.
But seriously, why aren’t we dressed like the angels, why don’t we encourage men to go unshaven, to reject “the great unisex conspiracy” that C. S. Lewis said came of the devil and resulted in the apostasy of shaving?
There are three reasons generally given:
- Our dress bears witness of what and who we are and we should not bear a false witness to the world of who we are by dressing inappropriately;
- Our dress provides us with a brand image that is valuable and that communicates;
- Our dress communicates inwards — people are affected in how they act by how they dress.
That may be, but all of those assume that we are forced to abide by the styles and conversation of the world.
Why not have a style of our own that abides the styles and conversation of the celestial world instead?
It is easy to realize that you are right and everyone else is wrong. A number of people have asked just what they should do about that once they realize the gross errors the rest of the world has fallen into and the way the world is sinning against them. The following is a guide.
Deuteronomy 15:12-15
“in the seventh year, you shall let him go free from you …”
or
16-18
“be your servant forever” Continue reading…
So many people think they know exactly who and what God is. Most of what they base their certainty on is a combination of logic and a small collection of sources. Very little of what I see is based on interviews with either God or a wide cross section of those who have had recent contact with God. I’ve already written about what metaphor fits the Church, now I’m going to write about God.
I’ve a friend who is a linguist who often addresses things by asking people to find metaphors for them. It is interesting to ask people just what the Church is, not descriptively, but metaphorically. Something that is extremely accurate, I’ve found, is to compare the Church to a flotilla of barges, being sailed to a destination. Slow, dependent on the wind, dealing with tides and currents, with turbulence issues around the edges. Continue reading…
While in law school I had the chance to talk with Jack Welch about the kingmen in the Book of Mormon. From that discussion in 1980, I started to apply the tools of deconstruction to the text of the Book of Mormon. There is an amazing amount of perspective that can be found by taking the Book of Mormon as what it claims to be and then looking into the text to see what the text says for itself. Continue reading…
In studying Joseph Smith in the 1970s I was struck by how often Joseph Smith would remind the brethren that they did not know as much as they thought they did. He was also clear that he was much more human than they thought and that he did not know as much as he hoped to know or thought he did. He was sharply aware that his knowledge was limited by his language, his experience and his context and that what he could teach and communicate was further limited by the language, experience and contest of his listeners. He also knew that there was knowledge, truth and value he did not have and would surprise audiences (much like Brigham Young did) by pointing out that Methodists and others had truth that he lacked. (cf Discourses of Brigham Young, page 248). Continue reading…
