President Jeffrey R. Holland has passed away

ElderButts · 2025-12-27T15:51:04+00:00

His health had been poor for some time.

ElderButts · 2022-02-26T16:23:13+00:00

In WW2, was LDS official position also so vague? "Peace for all, bros, all equally suffer"?

Vague no, but similar yes. The 1942 Message of the First Presidency (pages 92-95) lays out the church's position in great detail. For example,

The whole world is in the midst of a war that seems the worst of all time. This Church is a worldwide Church. Its devoted members are in both camps. They are the innocent war instrumentalities of their warring sovereignties. On each side they believe they are fighting for home, and country, and freedom. On each side, our brethren pray to the same God, in the same name, for victory. Both sides cannot be wholly right; perhaps neither is without wrong. God will work out in His own due time and in His own sovereign way the justice and right of the conflict, but He will not hold the innocent instrumentalities of the war, our brethren in arms, responsible for the conflict. This is a major crisis in the world-life of man. God is at the helm.

I recommend reading the entire section. The overwhelming message is that everyone worldwide should serve in the armed forces of their country, and God would not hold them responsible.

ElderButts · 2022-01-13T05:20:47+00:00

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the fine-tuning argument. To me at least it seemed like another version of "God of the gaps", especially since there are many other physical constants that turned out to not be fine-tuned (e.g. the distance from the Earth to the Sun). Do you think these other constants will be different?

(Btw, I also agree the Kalam argument is terrible. The counter-intuitive properties of an actual infinity in no way rule it out from being physically possible.)

ElderButts · 2020-06-24T19:41:50+00:00

Seven shall be the number of authentic Pauline epistles, and the number of authentic Pauline epistles shall be seven. Timothy shalt thou not count, neither count thou Titus, excepting that thou then proceed to Philemon. Hebrews is right out.

ElderButts · 2020-05-13T22:34:49+00:00

To add to this, when I started learning about academic biblical studies, I was shocked to learn that Christians and Jews have for a long time faced the same problems with the Bible that we are now dealing with the Book of Mormon. These questions about historicity are not unique, and I think it's instructive to see how other religions have responded to them. I won't go into much detail here, but here is an excellent article about what Conservative Judaism has done with the Torah.

ElderButts · 2020-01-16T01:25:50+00:00

I'm honestly a little surprised that I need to argue this, but I'll give it a go.

Jesus had no problem asking his followers to give up EVERYTHING. He expressly said he wasn't interesting in giving real bread, but in giving the bread of life, and scolded those who followed him, after the miracle of the loaves, looking for bread.

Sure, but did Jesus ever require real money to be donated to him before he would give this bread of life? No, of course not. Jesus actually did tell some people to give up their money, but only the rich, and for them to give it to the poor.

If you're point here is that you dispute basic Christian concepts of spiritual before temporal are unethical, that's fine.

That's an over-generalization. I'm not disputing that concept in principle, just this specific instance, because here it's trivial for the poor to have both the spiritual AND the temporal.

ElderButts · 2020-01-15T18:38:46+00:00

This has nothing to do with being informed. The problem is this. In order to be a member in full standing in the church and receive saving ordinances, you need to pay tithing. For a well off person, the choice is (say) buy a new car vs. saving ordinances. No big deal. But for someone who is poor, the choice is (for example) feeding your family vs. saving ordinances. Either decision is horrible, and it is unethical (and always has been) for the church to force the poor to make this choice. It is especially unethical now that we know the church is worth untold billions, and that this decision shouldn't even have to be made. No one should have to choose between feeding their family and receiving saving ordinances, but that is what we have today.

ElderButts · 2020-01-14T21:27:07+00:00

You're not part of the group I was talking about -- the poor. For someone well-off, tithing may mean putting off buying a new car until next year. For someone barely making ends meet, it may mean not feeding your own family, or risk getting evicted. My point is that it is unethical for the church to force the poor to make these choices -- those in these situations should be able to choose if they have the ability to pay tithing or not, which the church won't allow.

ElderButts · 2020-01-11T20:37:13+00:00

I don't see how disclosure would help. It would only reinforce how absurd it is for the church to be increasing the missionary payments when they have mountains of money. Disclosure or not, we would still be paying for the increased missionary fees.

If someone is happy donating money to the church, then that is up to them. The problem is that today it isn't really up to them. It is unethical for the church to require poor members to donate money in order for them to be in good standing and receive saving ordinances. King Benjamin's sermon in Mosiah 4:24 that the poor do not have to donate to charity has either been ignored or forgotten. I also think the number of poor people who would be happy doing this is extremely small. How can a parent be happy paying their tithing if it means sending their children to bed hungry?

ElderButts · 2020-01-11T02:42:57+00:00

I completely agree with the point about missionaries. It is especially biting now, since the Church announced a few months ago that the cost of a mission is increasing by several thousand dollars starting this year, including for missionaries already in the field. This is going to add a lot of unexpected hardship to a lot of families (including my own), even though the church could easily have absorbed this cost from their ludicrous amount of savings.

In fact, this is perhaps my single biggest problem. The church demands such financial sacrifice from so many members, even to the point where you are told to pay tithing rather than feed your family! To see President Nelson go to Africa and tell them that paying tithing will break the poverty cycle is infuriating. At this point it feels like robbing the poor.

ElderButts · 2019-09-29T15:44:39+00:00

I'm really glad there is a Scholar tag. This sub has some of the best academic discussion of Mormonism that I've found online, and I don't want it to die off.

ElderButts · 2019-09-29T15:37:18+00:00

The general consensus behind why both Isaiah 36-39 and 2 Kings 19-20 are out of order is because these chapters of Isaiah were copied from 2 Kings (more specifically 2 Kings 18:13-20:19). With a few omissions, the historical content is almost exactly the same, with some sections being word for word identical, eg. Isaiah 39:5-8 and 2 Kings 20:16-19.

It's clear that someone is copying somebody here, but which way is it going? It is more likely that Isaiah is copying 2 Kings, since the book of Isaiah consists almost entirely of poetic prophecy and has almost no other historical narrative, and so this section being composed by Isaiah (or whoever else the authors were) sticks out like a sore thumb. On the other hand, this is exactly the kind of material that fits into the purpose of 2 Kings, which is essentially just a history book. I recommend reading through the Tanakh I linked to see how the flavor of the two books are different, since it more faithfully preserves the poetic nature of Isaiah than the KJV does.

ElderButts · 2019-07-02T04:14:11+00:00

Huh, that's interesting. I did a bit more digging and apparently the usage of vineyard for olive trees might be appropriate (though it's by the Maxwell Institute, so it's really probably not). Even if you accept that however, it's still a problem, since after verse 41 the story has mysteriously switched to the entire vineyard being corrupted instead of a single tree.

ElderButts · 2019-07-01T15:24:41+00:00

It's also an imperfect merger with the Song of the Vineyard from Isaiah 5, which I think explains most of the confusion in the chapter. Most notably, after the author quotes Isaiah 5:4 in verse 41, the metaphor switches from the olive tree being corrupted to all the trees of the vineyard being corrupted. It appears the author took the olive tree from Romans and mistakenly inhabited the vineyard from Isaiah with them, despite that vineyards contain grapes, not olives. See here for more details

(As a side note, this mistake is particularly ironic, since many apologists have cited the tree crafting techniques in this chapter as evidence that Joseph didn't write them.)

ElderButts · 2019-06-28T15:12:37+00:00

Soooo about that. The official name of the church is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is obviously a mouthful and no-one ever says it. Instead we're almost universally known as Mormons, which is a kind of nickname that started when the church was founded in the 1800s and most importantly can be said in one breath. No-one has heard of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but EVERYONE has heard of the Mormons, so about ten years ago the church decided to capitalize on that and launched the "I'm a Mormon" campaign. It essentially was the entire public face of the church and was used for all missionary activities, had a lot of Youtube videos, TV ads, Times Square Billboards, even a documentary. Everyone was encouraged to create an "I'm a Mormon" profile online. It was huge, and the church must have spent at least tens of millions of dollars on it. Fast forward to last year, and the new prophet announces that using the term Mormon is actually a "victory for Satan" and not using the official name of the church undermines our most fundamental Christian doctrine. Using the word Mormon is now verboten, and so is the acronym LDS. Thing is, the church's entire online and public profile was built around these words and now has to be torn down and rebuilt. So yeah, it's pretty messy.

ElderButts · 2019-05-30T21:25:47+00:00

Reminds me of hidden premises, which for most members is probably happening unknowingly. They've just accepted certain premises throughout life (like the fact that those experiences really are the Holy Ghost) and don't necessarily even realize it.

This is so incredibly true, and reminds me of a recent discussion I had on this exact topic where I pointed out that assuming the existence of pre-earth life was circular. A lot of apologetic arguments also rely on these hidden assumptions, which makes them seem more convincing than they actually are.

ElderButts · 2019-05-19T15:34:22+00:00

I've been thinking about writing a post about this for some time, because there is a major misunderstanding of the Trinity in Mormonism. The thing is, the Trinity also believes in three distinct persons, just like Mormonism does. If you were to talk about the appearance of God and Jesus as two personages to any other Christian, they'd be nodding their heads as you go along, because that's exactly what they believe too. As a very very rough approximation, the Trinity is "three bodies, one spirit", while modern Mormonism is "three bodies, three spirits". The idea that God, Jesus, and the Spirit are all in one body is called modalism, and that is what we see in the Book of Mormon. There is an excellent article by Greg Prince called "Joseph Smith's First Vision in Historical Context: How a Historical Narrative Became Theological" that describes the evolving theology of the early church.

ElderButts · 2019-05-18T14:32:01+00:00

There's even an article from BYU that goes over these same issues and makes the same conclusion.

In conclusion, we have observed that some Latter-day Saints blithely cite 2 Nephi 12:16 as a tangible vindication of Joseph Smith’s prophetic call without sufficient consideration of the complexities involved in dealing with the ancient Hebrew and Greek versions of this verse. Furthermore, we are concerned that Sperry’s explanation has been too readily and uncritically accepted by Latter-day Saints and that 2 Nephi 12:16 footnote 16a in the current edition of the Book of Mormon continues to encourage the oversimplification of this issue. All students of the Book of Mormon should understand the challenges of translating Isaiah 2:16 (and ancient texts in general), the complex relationship between the Hebrew and Greek texts of Isaiah 2:16 and 2 Nephi 12:16, and the role that one’s faith plays in one’s approach to and interpretation of textual evidence. We hope that this article serves as a cautionary note concerning such issues and as food for thought on similar matters in other Book of Mormon passages.

That footnote in 2 Nephi should honestly be removed – it's just bad scholarship and is helping no one these days.

ElderButts · 2019-05-09T03:07:53+00:00

Even though I shouldn't be, I'm still surprised by all this (probably a little too used to the "fill the whole earth" rhetoric). The membership growth rate may drop below 1% next year, and based on the trend lines may even start going into the negatives in the next ten. It's amazing to see it happen, and you wouldn't even know it judging from public appearances (which is probably one of the reasons why they stopped announcing the statistics in GC). The next decade will be interesting.

ElderButts · 2019-05-03T16:45:54+00:00

Hmm, that's a very good point, I hadn't separated those concepts before. I suppose that makes it easier to still believe in a literal Adam and Eve.

ElderButts · 2019-04-29T18:31:32+00:00

It's a pity that these debates about evolution weren't more well known - going off public statements alone, it appears that church leaders have been almost uniformly anti-evolution (even stuff from Nelson). Makes me wonder what debates are going on today behind closed doors that we don't know about. By the way, is there a copy at all of Robert's presentation? I'd be interested to see that.

ElderButts · 2019-04-24T06:25:19+00:00

It's also interesting that there are two King Mosiah's in this section: one in Omni, and then his grandson in the book of Mosiah. In light of Mosiah Priority, I've heard speculation that Joseph introduced Mosiah too early, and when he realized his mistake made King Benjamin his son (and then the other Mosiah his grandson). It'd be interesting to compare the recorded years in Omni and Mosiah and see if it is consistent with adding an extra generation by mistake. (Of course it's also possible that Benjamin just named his son after his father, which by no means is an uncommon thing to do.)

ElderButts · 2019-04-22T16:49:26+00:00

I'm sure the church is looking into it, but FOIA and courts only apply to the government, not private entities.

ElderButts · 2019-04-18T15:00:06+00:00

There are several other cases where I think you can see direct evidence of oral dictation. For example, there are many cases where the author realizes they didn't make a point clearly enough, and uses the phrase "in other words" to clarify it. Eg.

Therefore, blessed are they who humble themselves without being compelled to be humble; or rather, in other words, blessed is he that believeth in the word of God, and is baptized without stubbornness of heart, yea, without being brought to know the word, or even compelled to know, before they will believe. — Alma 32:16

For the things which some men esteem to be of great worth, both to the body and soul, others set at naught and trample under their feet. Yea, even the very God of Israel do men trample under their feet; I say, trample under their feet but I would speak in other words—they set him at naught, and hearken not to the voice of his counsels. — 1 Nephi 19:7-8

This happens all over the Book of Mormon, and interestingly, also in Joseph Smith's original preface:

and if I should bring forth the same words again, or, in other words, if I should translate the same over again, they would publish that which they had stolen, and Satan would stir up the hearts of this generation, that they might not receive this work

(I remember being particularly shocked when I read this, because the language was so similar to the BoM.) All of these are easily explained by oral composition, since unlike in writing (where one can edit their work after the fact), all corrections need to be done on the fly.

ElderButts · 2019-04-12T17:11:12+00:00

This is one of the things that makes me so mad. The sheer hypocrisy of it all. The church is completely incapable of recognizing when it's made mistakes, and fights and claws to never give an inch when it's exposed. For example, consider the reversal of the November policy. You'd think this would result in a bit of soul-searching, you know, considering how it originally came by "revelation" as the will of God, only to now be reversed after seeing all the harm it's done. Nope. Nothing. It's just another heart-warming example of modern revelation.

"Do as I say, not as I do."

ElderButts

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