The Gospel According to Jeffrey

One of the most beautiful practices of The Church of Jesus Christ  is that of performing ordinances for the deceased, by proxy. Latter-day Saints believe that baptism is essential to salvation, and that other temple ordinances ( e.g. endowment , sealing , etc.) are essential to exaltation. We also believe that, since God is just, absolutely everyone will have the opportunity to accept those ordinances. A just God, for example, would not damn one of His beloved children just because that child was unlucky enough to be born in, say, eighth-century China, and go his entire life without even hearing the name of Jesus Christ. Because this practice is so beautiful to us, it confuses us to no end when people react so adversely to it. An extreme example of this occurred in the late 20th century, when a Holocaust-survivors group objected to somebody having submitted the names of hundreds of thousands of Holocaust victims for proxy baptism. The Church’s response was to issue an official...

In recent days, my beloved wife, Anna, has been conversing with a friend who has left The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I don’t think she’s actually had her baptism invalidated or anything, but the point is that she’s no longer attending Church and is identifying herself as an “ex-Mormon.” The saddest part is that when asked why she left the Church, this friend consistently cites a so-called “doctrine” that is actually diametrically opposed to what the Church teaches, but that she has somehow gotten into her head as the end-all and be-all of so-called “Mormonism.” I’ve actually interacted with plenty of self-described “exmos,” over the years, and as said interactions have forced me to study my own faith in greater depth, I have been somewhat bruised and battered along the way, but am ultimately much stronger for the experience. What has never ceased to amaze me, though, is how similar almost all of their stories are. Regardless of the specific issues they cite (which ...

A woman on Twitter just referred me to page called Difficult Questions for Mormons to Answer . I thought the page was so concurrently sad and funny, I just had to post the questions (and my responses) here. Enjoy. If the Book of Mormon is true, why do Indians fail to turn white when they become Mormons? (2 Nephi 30:6, prior to the 1981 revision). The Book of Mormon isn’t about Indians; it’s about the descendants of a Bedouin sheik. You’ll notice that the Lamanites whose skin became “white” are not all those who joined the Church, but those who actually amalgamated themselves into Nephite *society*. This is completely consistent with Bedouin culture, which regards city dwellers as “white-skinned” and nomads as “dark-skinned,” presumably at least in part because of the dirtier lifestyle of the latter. If the Book of Mormon is true, then why has the Mormon church changed it? Examples are: 1 Nephi 11:21; 19:20; 20:1 and Alma 29:4. Compare these with the original Book of Mormon....