First and foremost — Outer Blogness has gotten a major technical upgrade!!! This is such a huge and vibrant community that it deserves its own page where you can get a clear view of what’s up. It also means faster loading of our main page and more space in our sidebars for additional content. Thanks ...
Have you ever wondered what spirit prison would be like? Mormons believe that when people die, their spirits go to either “spirit paradise” or “spirit prison” to await Judgment Day. They also believe that missionaries from spirit prison can teach the gospel to spirits in spirit prison (who can be baptized for dead — perhaps ...
You get arguments like Lane Williams’s in the MormonTimes this morning. Williams begins by lamenting the fact that atheists occasionally receive media attention: Reporters have provided a great deal of attention to these atheists, stoking the controversy over the existence of God. Even if reporters had no purpose to question religious faith, doubts have become ...
What do Mormons believe? Seems like nobody really knows. I could swear they were once the church of modern-prophets-filling-in-the-Bible-gaps-with-concrete-answers. Then “correlation” came along and stamped out all of those (controversial!) specifics, and replaced them with a short list of vague warm-fuzzies like “faith” and “tithing”. But that hasn’t stopped the folks of Outer Blogness and ...
I love to joke around. I’ve got the perfect joke for just this occasion. It’s an oldie, so stop Me if you’ve heard it: Way back when Jesus and I were creating the world, I turned to Him and said “Hey Jesus, let’s create a really gorgeous mountainous region, with lakes and rivers full of ...
For some reason someone thought it would be a good idea to invite Dallin Oaks to Harvard to talk to students. First mistake. Dallin Oaks went. Second mistake. Dallin Oaks said something. Third mistake. Quick summary of what Oaks said: People in the US, generally, are ignorant about religion. He says that’s bad. Oaks then ...
A while back another blogger asked me to submit an essay about my Mormon experience. Probably, for good reasons he changed his mind and never published it. Since it is already written and might shed some light on my argument at Times and Seasons, I might as well publish it myself. It might help some ...
A while back, I heard a rather innocuous story about honesty at stake conference (ok, so it’s not as prestigious as general conference…). I didn’t care much about the choice of story he used, since it seemed trite (it was some Chinese feel-good fable), but as I read a passage in the scriptures today (and ...
I’m going to ask you to do something. Something you may not have done in a long time. Pull out a set of scriptures, wherever you can find them, and search for a scripture. This is my clever way of getting people to confront the scriptures. But don’t think I’ve gone off the deep end ...
These days, I don’t talk religion that much with people offline that much, and even when I do, I keep my religion/lack thereof cloudy until someone asks outright (it’s amazing how many people will talk and talk presuming you’re Christian and never ask you if you feel otherwise…but maybe that’s just because I go to ...
So, when I was checking through the list of scheduled posts at Mormon Matters, I was excited because I saw a post about the “Role of the Church in the Pursuit of Righteousness: Why it works for some and not for others.” And oh boy, I was so excited, because it was a topic that ...
…Sometimes, these blog entries just take too much time to set up…anyway, I was reading Mormon Matters and getting into the discussion there, and Bruce had said something that I found intriguing: …John Dehlin suggested that it was a mistake for modern Mormons to down play what he calls “19th century doctrines†(as he interprets ...
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 ...
So, I’m minding my own business being an atheist and not talking to anyone about it when I get a note from my TBM sister-in-law. Here’s what it says: I have a question for you. I have to do a presentation on “does God exist?” I have to use both sides and I can’t think ...
I left active mormonism when I was a teenager during a great deal of personal growth and change. Looking back on it, it’s hard to say what belief systems were part of mormonism, and what were just part of maturing (growing up). I would argue that there are many mormons (and adults, for that matter) ...