h/t Natalie R. Collins Nebo School District official Lana Hiskey: “We’ve actually had a boatload of phone calls coming in and they’re very concerned about the content … [but] it’s not that his beliefs are different than other people’s beliefs, it’s not that at all …” Read Natalie’s commentary at Gay awareness signs too “adult-themed” ...
If you have to ban somebody over religious differences, it is probably a good idea to wait until the debate about what constitutes a bad religion is over. When you argue that religion provides a special path to the truth, you are not helping yourself by prohibiting your rhetorical opponent’s speech. You see, people who ...
Please go show this brave gal some love by subscribing to her YouTube channel! For folks who haven’t yet seen the recent Mormon TV ad campaign that Sarah’s clip is spoofing, check it out. And by the way, I just noticed Sarah’s letter to Joanna Brooks. If anyone here is giving Sarah a hard time ...
Over at the faithful Mormon blog Faith-Promoting Rumor is a discussion enticingly titled “Do Relationships Make the Church True and False?” This post is a short enough one that you should just go over there and read it, but I guess I will still highlight some points here…when I was reading it, I will say ...
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 ...
One of the more difficult things that came with recognizing that the Mormon Church wasn’t 100%, literally “True” was that this paradigm shift introduced incredible levels of uncertainty into my knowledge of God and the purpose of life. Views: 830 ...
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 ...
What is the probability of any one exclusive religion being the correct one (“exclusive” means: claims to be the only true one)? This question popped into my head the other day and made me think that you could theoretically calculate that probability using the following formula: n-(n-1)/(n+1) or 1/(n+1) Where “n” is the total number ...
Our revulsion at the cruelty of the Supreme Leader’s henchmen is a powerful refutation of the postmodernist credo that anything goes. After the enlightenment discredited the authority of tradition and religion, the notion that reason or civilization could provide an ersatz God has also collapsed. The efforts of analytical philosophy could neither remove the ambiguity ...
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 have been miserable at Church ever since my mission. I still couldn’t get out because I had to act on my testimony even though I experienced Church as toxic every Sunday. To me, the mission experience was dehumanizing and sacrilegious reducing converts to trophies and missionaries to tools. Any amoeba will leave an inhospitable ...
A recent discussion on a post mormon discussion board touched on the question of the possibility, or likely impossibly of steel swords in the new world in Book of Mormon times. The question was brought up “Is this a ‘gotcha’ in the mormon debate?” I responded that is was not, because mormon apologists, or mopologists, ...
For those who aren’t familiar with this phrase, it basically is asking someone who is bluffing, particularly in gambling – to ante up. To prove they can back up their boast. I would like to officially ask why, in the twenty first century, with all the data and resources available to reporters and reviewers that ...
The following is a comment I made on the Mormon Matters thread about whether the church should or should not teach the things it has so far not taught openly to the members. Views: 2484 ...
There are few things as enjoyable as coffeeshop philosophizing, and usually my favorite philosophical topic to mangle is epistemology, which is the study of whether it’s possible to know things, and if so, how we attain knowledge. Over the years, I’ve trended towards a viewpoint that I call radical subjectivity (using radical in the sense ...