Blake Ostler has been a big influence on my thinking since I first ran into one of his papers in Dialogue. After that, I started doing searches in BYU library for all the articles I could find. I remember being very excited when I heard he was putting out his first book (which I devoured in one weekend). The chance to discuss his book with him here at the Thang is what got me into blogging.

So, I am happy to pass on his announcement that he has recently put up a website with links to his many works. My searches were clearly not exhaustive, and now I have some reading to do. Thanks Blake!

http://blakeostler.com/

Boyd K Packer is often maligned for his parable of the atonement he put for in his 1977 conference talk entitled the mediator.
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Well, I finally am moving on with a little bit more of Ostler, and I’ve stumbled into a problem.

You see, Ostler notes that original sin isn’t really as the rest of the world has conceived it. However, he does note that entrance into the world does submit us to genetic pre-conditions and the traditions of our fathers. This means we all do sin, based on these propensities built into us.
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Julie put up an interesting post over at T&S asking “Are Women More Spiritual Than Men?” This question has come up at several Mormon blogs recently and it has become pretty clear to me that before we can answer it we need to define the word “spiritual”. So what does spiritual mean to you? (more…)

The point of this post is not to give opportunity to arguing whether evolution or no death before the fall (NDBF)is correct. It is not to look at whether S. McMurrin and H. Eyring Sr. or J. Fielding Smith and B. Packer more accurately state the official position of the Church. If you have perspectives along those lines, table them, because those sorts of comments will be deleted here, even if you do have a fancy ™ on the end of your name.

The attempt here is to take the two positions, or for the sake of this post, assume BOTH are true. Then we can look at possible ways that both can work together.
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I am always hearing this idea that the Word of Wisdom is important because our physical appetites will go with us to the spirit world, but we won’t be able to satisfy them since we are absent our physical bodies. This is offered as a reason we should not develop addictions to tobacco and recreational drugs. Apparently the spirit world will double as a giant rehab center with lots of people quitting cold-turkey. (more…)

Most of us Mormons believe God reads our minds. I pray to God in my thoughts regularly in the belief that God hears and understands my thoughts as clearly as I hear and understand them. Now how God could read the minds of billions of humans all at once is a mystery but since this is God we are talking about such mysteries are par for the course.

The other thing that Mormonism teaches is that God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Ghost are “one God”. This is generally believed to mean that the members of the Godhead have completely unified purposes and enjoy what is sometimes called an “indwelling unity”. One would assume that indwelling unity among the members of the Godhead means they read one another’s minds just like we generally assume they read all of our minds.
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One of the conundrums for me has been in resolving how the effects of the atonement were efficacious before the cause of those effects had even occurred.
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After two long debates on the issues of free-will and determinism, Joshua summed up his response in this comment. His description gets to the heart of the matter in my opinion. At the end of the day, I think we are left with a fundamental problem on both sides and I think the problems are unanswerable. This creates a dilemma that I find quite fascinating. (more…)

My recent conversations with Aaron Shafovaloff, a devoted evangelical Christian and devoted critic of Mormonism (AKA devout member of The Fluffy Bunny Nice Nice Club(1) ) have reminded me of an important theological point: In Mormonism the grace and mercy of God are far more sweeping and robust and “amazing” than grace is on the evangelical view. (more…)

I occasionally spend a little time debating the fine folks at various anti-Mormon(1) sites. I have recently come to the conclusion that there are some advantages to believing certain popular but awful creedal Christian theologies. I am specifically thinking of the horrifying variety of Calvinism that one particularly well read critic of the church named Aaron described to me. Here are some highlights of what his theology looks like as far as I can tell: (more…)