After starting its own YouTube channel with faith-promoting messages, there is now talk that BYU might lift its ban on the formerly evil YouTube. Now wouldn’t that be an intriguing change in policy: Prior policy: YouTube has bad stuff on it, so it is not acceptable. Plus, students are not capable of policing themselves, so ...
Oops, looks like BYU’s Daily Universe made a little boo-boo in the caption, upgrading the Quorum of the twelve to “apostate” status. Hat tip Miguel. BYU News Net explains the error here. Views: 711 ...
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 ...
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 ...
According to the philosopher Mircea Eliade, of whose work I learned at BYU, every community, tribe, or nation requires an origin myth. The account of a community’s or practice’s origin has far reaching consequences because it implies how they relate to the cosmos, which is necessary for human beings to imbue their world with shared ...
Since we now know that the “priesthood ban” was only temporary — from the days of Ham and Abraham (1:27) up through 1979 — it’s easy to selectively remember what things were like back when Mormons knew that the negro’s role was an eternal and immutable part of God’s plan. But our recent discussion of ...
By Dave Zirin x-posted from Edge of Sports with permission. As supporters of Gay Marriage have discovered, it’s never easy to be on the Mormon Church’s enemies list. The Church of Latter-Day Saints backed the anti-Gay Marriage Proposition 8 in California with out-of-state funds, and gave the right a heartbreaking victory this past election cycle. ...
The NYTimes recently mentioned the Fermi game of figuring “ballpark” estimates of real-world numbers for questions you, at first glance, think of as un-estimatable – for example, how many piano tuners are there in Chicago? Though I am generally bad at math (and shun it), I like this game, and it occurred to me to ...
On Tuesday I had my lunch interview with Paige. I started my school day as usual by swinging by the cafeteria and getting my meal plan breakfast and lunch as sack meals so that I would have some food to bring to share. After spending the morning in my Latin and Multivariable Calculus classes, I ...
According to a Salt Lake Tribune article, citing a survey conducted by a retired BYU sociology professor, only “1 percent to 3 percent of students say ‘making out and intense kissing’ are acceptable in a ‘hanging-out’ relationship.” No report on what percentage considers screwing like bunnies (or at least having oral intercourse) acceptable. This whole ...
In case you missed it, the BYU newspaper came out with an editorial on the word change in the BofM. The logic employed in this editorial is a brilliant representation of the flawed logic that I usually see in apologetics (though there are a few regular commenters on here who seem to do better than ...
I’ve told the story of my deconversion from Mormonism here, here, and here, but I haven’t quite explained yet how I got from there to atheism. Views: 938 ...