Currently, I believe we can lump the challenges our faith faces to it’s modern acceptance as a legitimate faith choice by outsiders into the following categories: Issues regarding Race, Issues regarding Traditional Family Values, and issues regarding Christian doctrine.

Below I will enumerate these issues and discuss them. 

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So ten years ago, when I joined the church, it suddenly became slightly uncomfortable to me that despite having 11 years of catholic school education, I had never read the Old Testament. So I randomly picked a book of the OT to read, as a way of getting started. It was Nehemiah. As you can imagine, that didn’t go over too well. So I then began reading one chapter of each of the Standard works every day. That lasted for about 20 days, and then I lost my Bible in a car accident.  (I bought a new bible, but alas the habit was broken).  So another 9 months passed, I read the D&C and PoGP for the first time, and went on a mission. (I read the Book of Mormon 2 or 3 more times too) and I started at the OT again. This time I made it to Chronicles, then gave up. When I got married, My wife admitted she also had never finished the OT, and we read together, and made it to Leviticus once, then the end of Genesis, then the middle of Exodus, etc. etc. Then we tried backwards and made it to Jeremiah. So last May I bought the Old Testament on CD. It’s the ‘Inspired By’ TNIV edition, with a dramatized rendition by an all African-American cast.  And last week I finished it.

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As a mother I know that it is my sacred duty to help my children navigate through this thing we call life. I try to gift them with little pearls of wisdom every chance I get and I know that they are taking these shiny gems of advice and tucking them away in their hearts.

As I was growing up my own sweet mother would often bestow little nuggets of wisdom upon my humble head. She had one in particular that was her favorite and this is how it would usually go:
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Questions like this one don’t create any anxiety for me these days. I blame it on my creeping universalism.

By creeping universalism I mean this: I just can’t bring myself to believe in permanent divine punishment anymore. I know some people believe in it and I don’t begrudge them their beliefs — I just think they are wrong. Don’t misunderstand — I believe in divine justice. That is largely why I don’t believe in permanent punishment. If our souls are eternal I just don’t think there is anything we could do in 70 years here that would warrant infinite punishment. So I think people pay in some fashion for every sin they refuse to repent of; I just think that process won’t take forever. So when someone asks if I will end up in the highest kingdom of heaven (whatever that means) I feel confident in saying “yup”. I just think y’all will end up in the same condition too. (Heck, I now vaguely suspect we may have always been in that condition before our sojourn here on this planet as well…) That is what I mean by my creeping universalism. (more…)

So I finally signed up on Facebook this month. I did it reluctantly, but after Kristen signed up and immediately started getting interesting updates from various family members and old friends I was persuaded that it might be worth checking out.

It was worth checking out.
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So I spoke in Church yesterday.

Here are some comments I got after my talk.

“Hillarious, as always!” – Teenager

“Do you do stand up, you should do stand up, your speech was just like a stand up routine.” – Sweet Old Widow

“Dude, you are a great public speaker” – Guy who dressed as a whoopy cushion for Halloween.

“Why didn’t you give the talk you wrote!?!” – Spouse

My talk was on the Book of Mormon being for our Day. I went a bit off of my topic, but I remember talking about:

• A brief comment that the children were not doing well with the switch to afternoon church, and missed their naps (as did their fathers) as an Ice breaker.
• The Old Testmant not being written for our day, and being worse than an R or X rated movie
• Jeffrey R. Holland’s Master Thesis on the over 3,000 textual changes in the different editions of the book of Mormon (including the change last year)
• The Expansion Theory of Book of Mormon translation, and Alexander Campbell’s “delusions”
• The Book of Mormon pointing to Modern Revelation, Jesus being the Christ, and Prophetic Authority
• The Book of Mormon being a guide that points us to the value of the Church and the need to participate in the church community
• A passionate argument my wife and I had while reading “3 Questions for a Frantic Family” where we decided that the core purpose of our family was “working together to be happy and become like God”, which I believe is also the purpose of our church family.

Not sure what was funny about any of that in hindsight.  Sometimes I worry about being funny.

There has been lots of talk about Twilight on the Mormon blogs over the last few years.  The author of the series, Stephenie Meyer, is a practicing Mormon and it is not too hard to sniff out the Mormon influences in the story in my opinion.

One of the complaints occasionally lodged is that no real guy could possibly compete with the fantasy that is Edward, the romantic hero of the story. On some levels this is obviously true: As a vampire Edward has super strength and super speed, plus he is independently wealthy as a teen, plus he is magically handsome, plus he can read minds. But I’m not sure those are really the most important things that make Edward desirable. It seems to me that Edward has other things about him that regular guys (single or married) can compete with: (1) Tremendous self discipline, (2) a powerful moral compass, (3) a desire to understand the girl, (4) a drive to protect and defend his loved ones, and (5) skills at being a tease. Plus regular guys can take advantage of important attributes Edward lacks: (a) A sense of humor, (b) a tan, (c) the ability to intermingle comfortably with human beings, and (d) the ability to live in a sunny place.
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…a Crematorium. 



 

 

I decided this a while back because one of my good friends passed away growing up and her funeral expenses nearly ruined her parents financially, coming in at over $10,000 dollars (which is fairly common for a coffin, phermaldahyde, etc burial). On the other hand Cremation costs around $600. I can’t stand the idea of leaving a financial burden like that to the kiddos, and I figure it is my way of repenting to mother nature, as I figure the land I would have been buried in is approximately equivilant to the amount of land I used in landfills by using disposable diapers. (6 ft deep, by 7 ft long,  by 4 ft wide, you do the math)

But I have heard that there are some LDS concerns about this. I mainly blew them off as outdated ideas with no place in the worldwide church, but then, upon the urging of some, I looked up one.

The latest I found was an opinion of a GA which noted that burial is preferable as it leaves the body to decay via natural means and scriptures site “You were made from Dust and to Dust you shall return”. First, I was raised Catholic and I am pretty well aware of the whole “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust” idea. Second, there is absolutely nothing natural about injecting preservatives into my body, locking it in an airtight metal box and burying it. Third, nothing says “Dust to Dust” more than being reduced to the same.

So I ask you, does anyone have any legitimate objections to cremation?

Dear Oregon Department of Transportation,

This weekend I took a group of scouts on a winter camping trip to Mt. Hood. We left on Friday morning at around 8am and arrived at Frog Lake at roughly 11am. The driving conditions were terrible as they always are in Oregon when it snows and freezes. The shoulders of the roads were littered with cars and semis that had slid or rolled off the road. When we arrived, we donned snow shoes and hiked in about a mile from the parking lot to the lake. It was a beautiful hike with some light snow and gospel conversation. The assistant scoutmaster and I discussed the implications of belonging to a Church run by imperfect prophets who make mistakes and often reflect the biases of their times and culture. (more…)

Dear Family & Friends,

This morning I was going over my long holiday to-do list and saying to myself, “This is out of control! I’ve got to get rid of some of this stuff.” I ran my finger down the paper and stopped at “Send out Christmas letters and cards”. Yes, that would be the first to go. No Christmas cards from the Js this year.

Then a picture came to my mind of everyone chasing down their mailmen and shouting, “Where is the J’s Christmas letter? I haven’t gotten it yet and the holidays won’t feel right until we get that letter!”

The harried postman would reply, “Look lady(or dude), I just deliver the mail. Call the Js and ask them yourself where their stinking letter is.” So, for the postman’s sake I decided to write the letter.
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I am currently Young Men President in my Ward, and in order to give the Young Men ample opportunity to learn to teach by basically rotating the responsibility of who teaches each week from person to person. (We do combined Priests and Teachers, so there are 8 guys between 14 and 18) I’ve been doing this for about 6 months now, and teaching hasn’t really improved much.

We currently have 3 rules:

1. Don’t Suck
2. Don’t be Boring
3. When paraphrasing a scriptural story, don’t attribute the curse words to members of the Godhead (more…)