Just_A_Guy

I wish I could remember more of Bradley’s arguments—I lent his book to my FIL a year and a half ago and he still hasn’t returned it . . . IIRC he derives his argument in part from miscellaneous statements JS and Harris made about the contents of the lost pages, thematic elements, allusions in other part of the BoM as we have it today, and nuances in the manuscript itself. My recollection is that Bradley hypothesizes that the Book of Mosiah actually begins with the reign of Benjamin’s father, Mosiah, who lived during a time of massive Nephite apostasy and basically re-enacted Nephi’s journey by taking a small group of followers and the holy Nephite relics and escaping to a new land (Zarahemla).

It may be worth noting here that I believe some linguists/researchers (Skousen, Bradley, maybe Gardner) suspect that the lost 116 pages included one or two chapters of the book of Mosiah; so what we call “Mosiah 1” is actually “Mosiah 3” or “Mosiah 4”.

I hope not to be terribly offensive with this, but . . . When I talk to lay Christians about the LDS notion of the Godhead, I find that most of them don’t really find it that objectionable and aren’t particularly attached to their understanding of the concept of the Trinity. (Internet-warrior Christians, of course, are a different matter entirely.) I think “different Jesus” is, to a significant degree, a scare phrase/crutch used by a subset of mainline Christian clerics and apologists who feel like they can’t defend the notion of the Trinity on its own merits and would prefer their parishioners just quit asking questions. As far as the OP goes: I think the Church over time has gone back and forth about whether, from a theological standpoint, it’s a big deal that outsiders consider/call us “Christians”. At times we’ve felt it’s important in order to reflect glory to our master, Jesus Christ; at others, we’ve felt the “brand” was irretrievably tainted and not worth pursuing (I believe President Young was of the latter opinion.) But from a socio-political standpoint, I think, it has consistently been a very big deal. Because frankly, as Americans, we have a significant national heritage of doing some pretty horrific things to “non-Christians”; and we tend to (rightly or wrongly) view use of that epithet towards us as being a sort of “battlespace prep” by a “Christian” majority that (we fear) is proud of what they did to us in the 19th century and wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to do it all over again.

British thinker Phillip Blond has a really concerning thread on X/Twitter right now. He’s thinking that Hamas *wants* Israel to respond and get bogged down in a ground war in Gaza, which will then justify a response from the West Bank and the Golan; forcing Israel into a three-front war and possibly eliciting a fifth-column uprising from Israel’s internal Arab minority as well.

Well, and toxic marriages come from toxic people; and divorce doesn’t stop the toxicity. To the contrary, it tends to morph the relationship from one of detente to open warfare—which doesn’t do the kids a heckuva lot of good, either. And really, the more you think about the argument, the worse it sounds—its proponents basically justify putting kids in a hostage situation. “I’m dissatisfied with my marriage partner and I WILL MAKE MY KID’S LIFE A LIVING HEck UNTIL YOU LET ME PICK A NEW PARTNER, after which time I’ll start acting like a decent human being again!” I mean—what?!?

I’m going to go on-record as suggesting Lehi, Utah. Maybe not this conference, but within the next 5 years.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Marry yourself another wife, and your kids won’t be in a two-parent family anymore.

This is entirely honorable; but it does sort of lead one to wonder whether President Ballard improperly judged Tim as guilty. A lot of people are suggesting that Tim was framed by Vice; but if President Ballard cut ties “many months ago”, then whatever the source of his info re Tim’s alleged wrongdoing was—it wasn’t Vice. One other thing to bear in mind about this is that we tend to immediately assume that leftist accusations of sexual misconduct against conservatives are ab initio fabrications. This may be true in some cases (Kavanaugh, Thomas); but it should also be noted that often the guys really were dirtbags but the left covered for them until a) the guys quit being leftists (Russell Brand, Donald Trump) or b) it became politically expedient to throw them overboard (Clinton, Epstein, Weinstein, Franken, and - probably coming soon - Biden). The point here being that just because someone gets accused of sexual conduct doesn’t mean that the accusation is untrue. Often, it just means the left has decided to stop protecting someone.

Indeed. Then again, the scenarios exonerating Tim are also based in an awful lot of speculation.

Undercover work is necessarily shady business (I defended a couple of prostitutes who got caught in a massage parlor sting about 10-15 years ago; and after reading the report of what the SLC vice squad officers did, I really don’t know how those guys could go home and look their wives in the eye each night. Suffice it to say—they enjoyed their jobs. A lot.) I could easily envision a scenario where people who were already part of Tim’s organization (so, no donor/financial gain aspect to it) got uncomfortable with some of his methods and were reassured by him with something along the lines of “Don’t worry about this psychic thing, I have President Ballard’s personal blessing that what we are doing is totally legit!” Do I believe that President Ballard withdrew association from Tim without attempting to offer so much as a word of explanation? As someone who believes in President Ballard’s prophetic calling and good intentions and general character as a minister and a gentleman: No; no I don’t. Maybe he tried to reach out and Tim, basking in the success of his new movie, refused to take the call. Or maybe he *did* get through to Tim and that Tim now, as an experienced undercover operator, is using his particular set of deception and manipulation skills in order to misrepresent his past activities and entice his current audience into believing that he and they have the same fundamental values.

The Church’s response to Vice is legit; the Deseret News published the full statement. There are those suggesting that the author of the statement (LDS media relations director Doug Anderson) has somehow gone rogue; but the statement is now six days old and every day it goes unretracted/ unrebutted/ unsupplemented by the Church (and, every day that Anderson keeps his job) seems to bolster the conclusion that the statement said substantially what the Church leadership wanted it to say.

As I understand it Vice was prepping their story and asked the Church’s media affairs director for comment; he emailed them back and then later provided that email to the Deseret News as well. When the Church (or other comparable institutions) comments reactively in this way, the comments often don’t end up on their news release website.

(Apologies in advance for the bad thread title. It's late, and it's been a humdinger of a day at work, and my filter is kind of broken at the moment . . .) Back in July, I wrote: Since then . . . Vice - Mormon Church Denounces Tim Ballard’s “Morally Unacceptable” Activities Deseret News - Tim Ballard Considers Senate Run Amid Renewed Controversy Vice - Tim Ballard's Departure from Operation Underground Railroad Followed Sexual Misconduct Investigation Thoughts: I hope these are untrue. Yeah, I know, it's Vice. Even Vice isn't likely to be making this up out of whole cloth. President Ballard, at least, seems fairly convinced that Tim has to some degree been a bad boy lately.

And *that*, fundamentally, is why Disney is so destructive. LGBTQ issues are only a symptom, not the root of the issue. The fact is that love doesn't conquer all (nor, in many cases, should it). It is subject to all kinds of factors; some of which we can control and some of which we can’t. People’s inability or refusal to recognize this fundamental truth has been a major source of human frustration and estrangement and misplaced confidence and wasted effort and overall suffering over the last hundred years.

You can please all of the people some of the time, or some of the people all of the time. But with a little extra effort you can offend all of the people all of the time!

I frankly don’t understand why BYUTV exists, except maybe go train students as to how to produce and broadcast television programs. Their program content has generally struck me as unappealing (the odd devotional or scripture study roundtable punctuating hours and hours of Teletubbies reruns—shouldn’t it be the reverse?). The few decent shows they produced themselves turned out to be lemons that gave platforms to apostates and libertines (*cough cough* STUDIO C *cough cough*). I can’t think why on earth it would be a net positive for BYUTV to become a funnel through which to launder Church cash to Disney.

I’m not so sure. You can certainly get some mileage out of being the craziest guy at the negotiating table and (appearing to be) lacking in any long-term strategic commitments or alliances. North Korea is an excellent example of that. I think that was Trump’s style as well, and it did yield some successes where years—sometimes decades—of traditional diplomacy had given only a stalemate. The trouble is, the Pax Americana sort of depended on there being some basic ground rules and solid strategic alliances that could last in spite of occasional disagreements between the parties to those alliances. If you aren’t seen as, fundamentally, a promise-keeper—if you threaten to end the deal and walk away from the table too often—then less-powerful members of your alliance will start seeking more reliable protectors. Biden has been, of course, disastrous; but I’m unconvinced Trump was seen to have been a particularly devoted friend either. Additionally, presidents can only play the hand they are dealt. Regardless of the party affiliation of the current president, the simple fact is that the American public was not willing to fight a war—nuclear or otherwise—to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity. And Putin knew it. So the prospect of territorial aggression was always “when”, not “if”. It’s also why Taiwan and the Philippines (at least, the latter’s claims over a number of islands in the region) are basically living on borrowed time. I don’t think there’s anyone in the Republican field who can save them. (Maybe Vivek what’s- his- name; he seems to be an effective communicator and could perhaps persuasively rally the country to a war footing. But due to his ethnicity Chinese propagandists here would likely collude with anti-war, communist-sympathizing leftists to paint him as an agent for an India that’s looking to tweak China on its western border).

Then again, in 2 Ne 2:15, Lehi suggests that the fruit of the tree of life (in Eden) is bitter; in opposition to the forbidden fruit, which he describes as sweet.

1 Nephi becomes more poignant when we remember that Nephi is writing this story down the second time (he’s already written the large plates), and he’s writing over twenty years after the events he’s writing about, and he knows the later events—the arguing, the disintegration of the family group after his failed efforts to maintain unity, the ensuing bloodshed that he has seen and that he knows is only the beginning of a thousand years of war that must end in extermination. This is Nephi the (guilt-ridden and somewhat disillusioned, Hardy suggests) old man, writing about Nephi the invincibly optimistic boy.

1 Ne 4:26 is where the word “church” appears. I believe most Biblical scholars would tell you that the synagogue only came into being as an element of Jewish worship, after the destruction of the Temple. Personally, I think that even given the dominance of the temple and the familial nature of Jewish worship/teaching at the time, there must have been *some* sort of institutional forerunner through which worship practices were prescribed, ancient texts preserved and relayed (perhaps primarily in oral form) and local religious controversies mediated and resolved; and the word “church”—though inevitably a problematic term—was probably as good an English term as any to describe that institution. (cf “horse”, “elephant”, “curelom”, etc).

Just saw this. Like @Carborendum, the reading pace is a little ambitious for me; but I’ll chime in if I feel like I have anything useful to contribute. @Jamie123, if you have a few extra dollars (pounds?) lying around, consider springing for this edition of the Book of Mormon. I’ve found it immensely helpful in coming to understand the BoM more as a cohesive text (once you’re done, you might also look at Grant Hardy’s “Understanding the Book of Mormon”). I will note, FWIW, that probably the premier scholar of the BoM text from a linguistic standpoint is Royal Skousen. I believe he has concluded that the BoM’s English is primarily 16th-17th century, and even contains some archaic linguistic constructs from that period that do *not* appear either in the KJV Bible or in colloquial 19th century New England speech patterns. I understand he has a pet theory/speculation (and of course, it could never be more than that) that Wycliffe, Tyndale, and others who were involved in generating the text that evolved into the KJV may have been part of a sort of “spirit committee” that was delegated, beyond the grave, to produce the translation that was given to Joseph Smith.

I get where you’re going here; and generally agree. But I would note that I think it’s a rare Saint who vets potential counselors solely on their Church membership status or hires the first Mormon counselor they run across. I cannot speak as to the particular case under discussion in this thread. But I stand by my general comments earlier in this thread and will propose that the problem with most of the nominally/formerly LDS families who wound up in the news over the past few years isn’t that they listened to their bishops too much; it’s that they didn’t listen to their bishops closely enough.

Didn’t JFS-II also suggest that self-inflicted wounds (ie tattoos, piercings, wounds by suicide) don’t heal—or at least, leave scars— in the resurrection? That sounds vaguely familiar.

BYU delenda est.

I want to offer a cautionary note here, gleaned from hard experience both personal and professional: Many people like this, actually deeply love the Gospel (as they understand it). They search their scriptures. They take fastidious notes at conference. They pray for hours, and think they receive revelations; some of them very beautiful and moving. But it goes in a weird direction, and suddenly they start thinking they’re getting better revelation than the mainstream Church; better revelation than their local priesthood leaders. We will be seeing more of this, not less, in coming decades; and the Church will not always be quick to hold membership councils for people who deserve it. Guys, stay humble. Stick with your priesthood authorities—from the Prophet down to your elders quorum president. Do. Not. Let. Go. A lot of tragedies could have and would have been avoided if some of Mormonism’s most infamous psychopaths of the past five years had stayed a little closer to, been more patient with, and considered with more humility the counsel of their bishops and stake presidents.