(The following is a re-post of something our “son” wrote on his blog last year - and that I posted at T&S when it occurred and I was guest blogging for a couple of weeks. I was struck immediately by the similarities between his experience and the parable of the Good Samaritan. I cleaned up the language a bit for those who don’t want the full linguistic brunt of his ire on his own blog.)
“Today, I lost my faith in humanity. Continue reading…
Now that we’ve discussed the nature of the First Vision, what did it mean?
There are many meanings, the most vital being those which each person can discover for herself or himself. Here are those we are most familiar with, because they have been written and spoken about at length in the official media of the institutional LDS Church:
And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.
Exodus 33:23
The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us.
Doctrine and Covenants 130:22
God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.
John 4:24
And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.
1 John 4:16
Do you believe that God the Father, the Son, and maybe even the Holy Ghost visited Joseph Smith in the spring of 1820?
Or did Joseph have a vision of them?
Does the difference matter? Do you base your testimony, your faith in the existence of God, your continued participation in Mormonism, on a visit of Deity to a young farmboy?
In my last post I wrote about how we are all forced to take a thought and translate it into words and that this is a sloppy and imperfect process. To make matters worse, the person that has to take those words and decode them back into a thought will fail to do so correctly in many cases because they’ll get stuck on the words used, either because they don’t realize words have many meanings or because they have incentive to misunderstand.
In this post, I want to apply what we’ve discussed to a real life situation: Bruce R. McConkie’s talk on worshipping Jesus.
Case Study 2: Do Mormons Worship Jesus?
The word-offense in question comes from Bruce R. McConkie’s now famous (infamous?) talk entitled “Our Relationship with the Lord” where McConkie states that Mormons do not worship Jesus. Continue reading…
For the unindoctrinated, MBTI (Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator) is a psychometric that classifies people into one of 16 profiles. It is primarily used to help people get along better at work (along with staples like Wacky Bowling and Ropes courses). So, what is Jesus’ MBTI type? Does Jesus’ personality type create a subtle bias against religious leaders (or even followers) with different personality traits? Continue reading…
