The Gospel According to Jeffrey

A few days late, I realize, but I’ve just discovered that Liam Hoare (sorry I misspelled your name, by the way; I’ve fixed it in the original) has responded to my earlier post,  I Believe… . As my regular readers know, brevity is not my strong suit, but I will attempt to deal with his complaints succinctly. Liam’s response deals with the Church’s position on race—an issue which I asserted, and continue to assert—has been a non-issue from the start (see previous post). I will thus deal with his arguments in turn. 1. “Jeff makes the assertion in his reply that Joseph Smith was some kind of Lincoln before there was a Lincoln.” I actually didn’t say that, but it’s a good point. Joseph Smith, Jr., actually did run for President of the United States on an anti-slavery platform, in 1844. His position was that the United States government should outlaw any new slavery, then sell all federal lands and use the money to purchase the freedom of all existing slaves—which, by the way, wou...

Liam Hoare has a new post on Hackeryblog , wherein he asks several questions of Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, regarding his faith. Unfortunately, it’s obvious that Mr. Hoare knows little to nothing about the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ and, instead of taking five minutes to do some research, has decided to learn about it from the new  The Book of Mormon musical from the creators of South Park , presumably on the grounds that they portray everything else so accurately. ;-) Anyway, the point is that I’d like to take a few minutes to answer his questions. Hopefully Mitt won’t mind. :-) Hoare asks: Do you believe that the current President of the LDS Church Thomas S. Monson speaks directly to God? First of all, there’s no such thing as “the LDS Church.” Mitt Romney is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If you’d like a shorter version of that name, “the Church of Jesus Christ” will do. If you’d like more information on this, please check ...

If you missed my last post, check it out . Otherwise, here’s Part II. :-) I’m now going to conclude my thoughts by pointing out something I’ve spoken of, many times before: the issue of how men are treated in the Church. I don’t claim to know how things were done in the 1980s or the 1880s or whatever other era, but I can certainly say that in the almost 20 years I’ve been a member of the Church, men have been treated like crap. This past Sunday would be a perfect example. Last Sunday, Anna and I attended the  Auburn Hills Ward  in the Wichita, Kansas Stake. Following the youth speaker, the second speaker was a single mother in her mid-30s, whose topic was womanhood. The crux of her talk—which point she kept revisiting—was, “I don’t claim to know what’s it’s like to be a man, but being a woman is really hard.” The implication, of course, was that women’s roles are so difficult to balance that merely filling them at all is enough to warrant praise. Following her rema...

Warning: this is a long post, and it actually kind of devolves into a rant, for a while. If you’re a first-time reader, don’t worry; I’m usually not this bad. ;-) So I saw an interesting post, this morning, on a Latter-day Saint blog called  Times and Seasons . The post, entitled Women and Meetings , cited a recent professional conference the author attended, in which speaker  Dr. Bruce D. Perry  stated that “The IQ of group decision-making goes up in direct proportion to the number of women participating in the group.” The blogger’s question, therefore, was what the reader thinks of this claim, and specifically its implications for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Recent changes making the Ward Council (with three women) rather than the PEC (with zero women) the primary group decision-making body at the LDS congregational level improves the quality of decisions made at the local level. The absence of women in the senior councils of the LDS Church at ...

So in case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past week or two, the Rapture is upon us . According to radio broadcaster  Harold Camping , tomorrow, 21 May 2011, will begin the “End Times” as millions of Christians are taken up into Heaven and everybody else—presumably including those of us who do not revere Mr. Camping as God’s duly authorized mouthpiece—will be left behind (perhaps with Kirk Cameron ) for Earth’s last five months of existence before the end. (And you thought that the end wouldn’t come until 21 December 2012. Of course, dear reader, you are wrong.) Of course, the biggest tragedy of all this is that after fourteen months of waiting, our ward’s  new meetinghouse  isn’t scheduled to be dedicated until Sunday evening, 22 May 2011. This wouldn’t be so bad, except I would think that Elder Lansing—the seventy who is scheduled to dedicate it—will presumably be twinkled into his resurrected state tomorrow, and I guess he probably won’t come back until after...

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...

“…and having seen many afflictions in the course of my days, nevertheless, having been highly favored of the Lord in all my days; yea, having had a great knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of God…” As I pointed out in my last post (seven months ago! Wow! How did that happen?!), education was obviously very important to Nephi. Given the fact that we are reading scripture, though, it should come as no surprise that his education includes more than just secular learning. What may surprise us, though, is how fully this integrates into the dichotomy expressed in 1 Nephi 1:1. For those that have read the Book of Mormon before, the subtle hint that Nephi has “seen many afflictions” is a subtle use of understatement. While he indubitably lived much of his life in happiness, the scriptures rarely teach us of mundanities, preferring instead to focus on the major events of the prophets’ lives. Thus, we read of many trials through which he passed, the “ refiner’s fire ”of his mortali...