The Gospel According to Jeffrey

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....

“He taketh three days’ journey into the wilderness with his family.” It’s so funny that I would get to this sentence, this morning. Last night I was researching something related to the Bible and discovered a web site that mocks the Book of Mormon. Such sites are, of course, a dime a dozen, but this one was different: never before have I seen such inaccurate information as this. I mean, it’s one thing to take issue with the doctrines or even the historical narrative; it’s quite another to come up with such incredibly obvious straw man arguments. Such is the statement that is brought to mind by this passage: “It only took Nephi and his family three days to travel from Jerusalem to the Red Sea. (A distance of 250 miles)” Let’s ignore, for the moment, the fact that this author couldn’t even manage grammatical accuracy in his argument. Where on Earth did s/he get this idea? Lehi didn’t start from the city of Jerusalem; he started from “the land of Jerusalem” (see “ Headnote, Part II ”). J...

I was checking out my Facebook page, this morning, when I saw an update from my “friend” Brian Dunning. (I put “friend” in quotes because he’s really more of an acquaintance, but he seems to be a genuinely nice guy and I’m therefore happy to call him “friend” on Facebook.) Brian is a big name in the FileMaker world, in part because he maintains a very popular Custom Function repository . Furthermore, since he’s good IRL friends with the partners at Excelisys, we’ve met a few times at the FileMaker Developers Conference. Somehow, though, I’ve missed something big: in clicking on his Facebook page, I discovered that he also runs a very successful Podcast called “ Skeptoid ” that has managed to remain below my radar until now. The concept of Skeptoid is a simple one: each week, Brian takes an aspect of religion, pseudoscience, pop culture, etc., and debunks it in about ten minutes. At least, that’s the intention. I decided to see if Brian had anything to say about The Church of Je...