The Gospel According to Jeffrey

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....

I just had a very interesting experience. I’ve technically been on Twitter for several months, but I’ve just started getting the hang of following stuff. Recently, I noticed that a lot of blogs have been using the  #mormon hash tag, so I added that to my list of stuff to follow, and the results have been—shall we say—less than 100% enjoyable. Besides the wonderful pages that have popped up with information that’s actually relevant, this morning I saw a British preacher tag his podcast with the #mormon tag. Interested, I listened to the entire thing: it was a one-hour sermon on how to identify a cult, and was actually quite good. In fact, I agreed with virtually every word he said, except when he offhandedly ran down a list of so-called “cults” and, with absolutely no indication of why he was doing so, included the slur “Mormons” as part of his rapid-fire list. It frankly rather amazed me: the whole sermon was wonderful, and then he tossed in that one, tiny, off-the-cuff slu...

As a young boy growing up in Whitney, Idaho, young Ezra Taft Benson (or “T,” as he was known) learned to love the song I Am a Mormon Boy . Even eight or nine decades later, when “T” served as President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he “often delighted youngsters of another generation by singing all three verses… in his clear tenor voice” ( President Ezra Taft Benson: A Sure Voice of Faith , Ensign 24:7:8 ff .). So why does it rub me the wrong way? Over the last few months, I’ve noticed what I can only describe as a rash of inappropriate use of the term “Mormon” on the web. The Church’s own media Style Guide is pretty explicit on what they will and won’t accept, but even Church-owned and -operated sites ( e.g. the Church News ) have started falling victim to the errors. I’ve sent multiple emails to Church News editor Gerry Avant—who incidentally agrees with me—but have been forced to content myself with responses such as the following email, dated 19 November 2009...