Mormon Heretic

The book for my book club is by Sarah Baringer Gordon,  The Mormon Question.  It’s bee n a really hard book to find at the library (nearly impossible), so I got a late start on it.   It takes a very different approach to the polygamy question.  Ms Gordon has a law degree, and so she talks about the legal arguments concerning the separation of church and state.  I’ve learned a lot about the evolution of legal thought and the Constitution.  There hasn’t been a strict separation, especially during the 1800’s.  The Mormons helped define that line.

Read more…

I have really been enjoying the book More Wives than One by Kathryn Daynes, an associate professor of history at BYU.   In my previous post on the book, I mentioned that marriage wasn’t as regulated as it is today.  There were no marriage licenses, blood tests, or even ceremonies required.  If a couple said they were married, then courts ruled that they were.  That was all that was needed.  It seems that many of the marriage regulations we are familiar with today were influenced by the federal government’s efforts to stamp out Mormon polygamy.  Daynes gives a history of marriage starting on page 58.

Read more…

This is a post to talk about a lesser known Mormon hero.  My wife has many pioneer ancestors.  In reading The Forgotten Kingdom, by David Bigler, he makes a few references to Reddick Allred, who is a distant uncle of my wife.  I wanted to highlight a good, Mormon man, relatively unknown, who just did the best he could.

Chapter 5 deals with the Handcart disasters so many Mormons are familiar with.  The Martin and Willie Handcart companies started for Utah too late in the year, and ended up stranded in early blizzards in Wyoming.  Reddick Allred was part of the rescue team.  Here’s what the book says on page 115,

Read more…

If one searches around the bloggernacle, you’ll find a snarky comment about how the church traded polygamy for statehood, or that the church just wimped-out on polygamy.  Such comments don’t seem to take into account how much pressure the US government was putting on the church–it was literally trying to snuff it out if the church didn’t back down from polygamy.  I’d like to get into some of these details leading up to the Manifesto.  I talked about the Manifesto previously in the context of whether the prophet would ever lead the church astray.  It should be noted that the church had been fighting anti-polygamy legislation for nearly 30 years, so I think it should be noted that the Manifesto banning polygamy in 1890 was not a spur-of-the-moment quick capitulation.  UPDATE:  I just finished Forgotten Kingdom, and I want to add some additional information.  I’ve highlighted this in purple below.

Read more…

I just saw this movie last night.  I had never heard of it before, and literally knew nothing about it.  I told my wife to pick a movie, and I thought she would pick a chic flick.  She said she thought I might like it because it had something to do with numbers and predicting future events.  I don’t want to give away any plot lines.  It’s not the kind of movie that I typically like.  In fact, I’d say that for about 90% of the movie, I thought, “This is just a weird, creepy movie.”  Then the end came, and I really liked it (though my wife just thought it was a weird, creepy movie.)

Here’s what IMDB said about the movie, and a couple of trailers. Read more…

A friend of mine let me know about this news item at Signature Books.  Apparently, one of their authors (David Wright) has a new book published by Oxford University Press.  For those of you who don’t know, Oxford is known as a pretty tough place to publish.  They have pretty high scholarly standards, so getting published there lends one some great credibility.  So, the original press release at Signature stated that the Ten Commandments were plagiarized from Hammurabi.  The old quote from the site is below.  However, David Wright brought to my attention a correction in the press release.  I will show both of them.

Read more…

The 8th Article of Faith for the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints states:

8 We believe the ^aBible to be the ^bword of God as far as it is translated ^ccorrectly;

This has to be one of the most oft-quoted articles of faith by members of the LDS church.  In one of my previous posts on Scripture Literalism, the comments referred to Biblical inerrancy and literalism.  Some evangelicals believe that the Bible is both inerrant and literal, and take great issue with the Mormon stance on the Bible.  They don’t believe there are any mistranslations, and that every word in the Bible was spoken by God.  Many of these people discount any contradictions in the Bible.

The Documentary Hypothesis is a theory that seems to identify at least four different authors/editors of the first five books in the Bible (also called the Torah in Judaism, or the Pentateuch.)  I think many Mormons would find great agreement with the Documentary Hypothesis, though they might not agree with every part of the theory.

Read more…

Thanks to FireTag for letting me know about a recent statement by the current prophet of the Community of Christ.  He talks about scriptural literalism.  The videos can be found on the CoC website, and this quote comes from Chapter 4.  Let me quote from Pres. Veazey directly: Read more…

I don’t know why, but I love to learn about archaeology, especially religious archaeology.  A few years ago, Simcha Jacobovici came out with a documentary and book called The Jesus Tomb.  In it, he makes a claim that the bones of Jesus may have been located in a tomb unearthed in Jerusalem.  Of course, the Da Vinci Code, while fiction, makes a claim that Jesus and his wife, Mary Magdalene were actually buried in France.  A few months ago, I watched a documentary called Bloodline, which actually goes further, and makes the case that yes, indeed, the bones of Christ and Mary are found in France.  (You can learn more at the official website.)  I just came across a third source, which claims that Christ’s bones are actually located in India.  See this website.

Read more…

I came across an article about the Apostle Paul.  After Emporer Nero burned Rome, he blamed the fire on the Christians.  Various apostles were rounded up, and tradition has it that the Apostle Paul was beheaded around 60 AD.  A basilica was built to house parts of his body in about 390 AD.  (Oddly, his complete body is not there, but spread throughout various churches.  Apparently, the Orthodox/Catholic churches felt that bones from dead saints hold some spiritual power, and have often arranged to have bones sent to various churches so that many can share a claim to have various saints bones.)

Read more…

Ok, comparing these two books might seem a bit odd, but let me explain.  First of all, I’ve already done a few posts on Abraham.  In the first, I compared the Book of Abraham to the Koran, and wondered if Joseph might have translated an Islamic text, because the story found in the Book of Abraham where Abraham destroys his father’s idols is quite similar to a Koranic tale.  Then my second post on Abraham, I learned that this story is also found in the Jewish Midrash, so there is another non-biblical source for this story.

Read more…

I’ve been talking about doing a post about Abraham for a long time. People often reference Abraham when talking about things like Joshua’s Unholy War, the Priesthood Ban, or polygamy. Usually the reference is to the sacrifice of Isaac.

So, this post is to serve two purposes: (1) to show some different perceptions about the sacrifice of Isaac, (as well as some other strange stories of Abraham), and (2) to introduce some new information from Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and archaeological scholars. I’ve had fun learning about it, and hope you do to. While I believe Abraham is a prophet, I find some things that Abraham did as troubling, and I’ll point them out below.

Read more…

With St Patrick’s day being here, I wanted to tell the story of St Patrick. Mormons love good missionary stories, and I think the story of St Patrick is a wonderful missionary story. The information below comes from a DVD titled, Christianity-The First Two Thousand Years.  (It was originally aired on A&E.) If you want to learn more, there is an interesting article in the Deseret News about St Patrick.

Read more…