I woke up on the floor. I felt really thirsty and had to pee. The T.V. was still on but not making any noise. Someone must have muted it at some point. I stood up and looked at Tanya lying there asleep on the couch. I felt confused and wanted to go home. Read the ...
Outer Blogness is popping up all over!! By that I mean that people are actually starting to put the lovely list script in their sidebars! The first one (from way back) was the popular atheist group blog Unscrewing the Incrutable, but more recently others have done the same: Jesus’ General, Soul Threads, My Secret Garden, ...
According to Harper’s, Spanish authorities are investigating Bush administration officials for torture. That includes the former BYU law professor Jay Bybee who signed off on John Yoo’s infamous torture memos. The premier Spanish newspaper El PaÃs reports that judge Baltasar Garzón is involved in the investigation. Garzon is famous for prosecuting Basque terrorists and for ...
So, I’m reading the news this morning, enjoying my bagel with strawberry cream cheese and hot chocolate when I catch this article about abortion in Brazil. Apparently a 9-year-old girl was raped by her stepfather, became pregnant by him, and was carrying twins. The doctors who performed the abortion said that if she didn’t have ...
Todd just found a youtube video of the documentary Legacies about the treatment of Mormon gays by their church: Spencer Kimball’s attitudes about sexuality, unfortunately, can only be characterized as superstition. In the Mormon case, superstition is intertwined with claims to personal revelation. The latter is defined such that the superstition cannot be legitimately questioned ...
Please be sure you have read the warning/disclaimer before proceeding to this week’s section. ...
Folks, sorry to be a day late on this! I have had an insanely stressful week which kind of bled over into the weekend, and I was barely able to get the Skeptical Parent Crossing carnival done on time. But there have been some interesting items in Outer Blogness this past week, and I don’t ...
by Dan Aiello Bay Area Reporter Reprinted with permission Chino’s Preface: Fred Karger, of Californians Against Hate fame, recently marked the launch of his new Mormongate.com site with the publication of several never-before-seen internal LDS documents regarding a 1990′s contest in Hawaii over the issue of marriage equality. In the course of reading through Fred’s ...
I was chatting with a colleague the other day about a book I reviewed for an academic journal when Lewis R. Rambo’s name came up (one of the books drew rather heavily on some of his research). As soon as Dr. Rambo’s name came up, my colleague told me he had to recount a story ...
On Wednesday all of our family was arriving for Thanksgiving. We didn’t normally all get together for Thanksgiving, but after the fight that Mom and Dad had had with Rex when he was visiting over the Summer, they decided that they wanted to try to make a special effort to get the whole family back ...
I guess that is the ultimate question of today’s post. On Mormon Matters, Mormon Heretic (the Mormon part’s the dominant side of that name, btw) wrote a post trying to discuss positive black history in the church. And I guess, stinker that I am, I just had to approach the issue with skeptical comments. See, ...
Everybody‘s talking about the big news items this week: Secularism is rising dramatically in the U.S., and HBO is showing the Mormon temple ceremony! Let’s have a look: ...
I know, it’s the most cynical interpretation of religion there is, but sometimes religions do things that just point so strongly to the money aspect that you can’t help but be cynical. Here’s a NYTimes article about religious leaders battling a bill in New York that would remove the statute of limitations on child sex ...
I’m not sure why, but an idea has been floating around in my mind the last couple of weeks. I’m not usually in the mood to help a religious group survive, but I figured this thought was worth putting into the public domain for criticism at the very least. The FLDS have a pretty serious ...
Assumption: American’s are ignorant. Premise: I belong to a small religion, Mormonism, the members of which make up about 1% of the US population. Proposition: Because American’s are ignorant and I belong to a small religion, I bet Americans who don’t belong to my religion will be ignorant of my religion. I could test this ...
The next morning I called up Joe and Sam to ask them if they wanted to go to the mall. Mostly I wanted to get myself a Cat Stevens album after the movie I’d watched with Andrea the night before. It turned out that Sam didn’t have to go to football practice that day so ...
So, instead of cleaning my apartment yesterday as planned, I spent the morning going through the Outer Blogness list, updating and correcting it. There are still a few bugs to work out (explained here), but now the blogroll here and the Outer Blogness list have been synchronized, and they contain all of the exmo/post-mo/DAMU blogs ...
I’ve been reading an article at Mormon Matters about More Open Mormon History, and it seems to me there is a fundamental idea at play here: if you hear about “true Mormon history,” you’ll lose all hope and faith and then apostasize. OMG! The author, Mormon Heretic, tries to deflect this claim. He posits that ...
I caught this article about an email campaign that allegedly has the support of the LDS leadership to contact state representatives in Illinois on civil union legislation. I have to admit, it seems fishy to me. I don’t think the LDS leadership would sponsor an email quite like that. Does anyone have “further light and ...
“Your family moved here so that you would date Mormon boys?” “Essentially. When I told my parents I didn’t believe in God and didn’t want to go to church anymore, Dad completely flipped out. He blamed it on the kids at school being a bad influence on me. But apparently he’s not opposed to peer ...
When I left the church, I found that more things made sense to me. I didn’t have to start rationalizing things to make it fit in with doctrine, and I could just believe in the world based on how I saw and experienced it. So, I’d definitely say that when I left the church, I ...
Pixelfish reports a tragicle: the death of Paul Harvey. She and her readers reminisce about listening to “The Rest of the Story” — I know that for me it brings back plenty of memories of the long drive to seminary, at 5 a.m., in the still-freezing car when the weather was twenty below. Good times! ...