Category: LDS Church

Commentator:

Bottom line is that the polygamy proclaimed by Joseph as a revealed concept was then and remains entirely bogus. It was bogus then, it is bogus now and we only silly ourselves up by trying to pretend that somehow the Mystical, Magical Thinking Man-Child somehow had a special corner on God’s ear and mouth as regarded the rest of humanity.

Joseph truly made it up as he went along.

John Crane:

Perhaps, but he came up with a pretty compelling story. Even people who compose fiction and who reach within themselves for thoughts and ideas can bump into truth and revelation, now and then. There are passages in literature that deserve to be considered scripture.

Commentator:

As part of the thinking-people-everywhere, where would you like to go from here?

John Crane:

Since you asked, here’s my vision in rough form.

I would like to see the Restoration put back on course and continue, right up to and through the Millennium. Churches, organized religion, prophets, apostles, and the lone reformer (after the mold of “the one mighty and strong”) have all been discredited. What’s needed is something new. We have a responsibility to establish a true Zion, and prepare the world for the second coming of Christ. I don’t believe he will come until we are ready. We will not be idle spectators to events that unfold, but through the power of the priesthood, through our UNITED faith, we will control future world events. I don’t believe Christ will come until we are ready, and we invite Him to come. He will not come to impose his will on people, or solve our problems, but we, the people of the earth, can undo the problems, we ourselves created.

I see it continuing through a NEW dispensation, building on all former dispensations, in harmony with principles laid out the Joseph Smith dispensation, but not copying it. I see God working through MANY men and women to bring this about, not just one “chosen vessel”.

In order for the new “church” to be born, the old “church” must die — in the hearts and minds of the people. By new “church”, I mean “church” in the Greek sense “ecclesia”: the out-called — the gathering of the elect. By old “church”: the Old English “cir”, meaning the building or the legal institution.

Let’s start with the definition of “perfection”. The word is mistranslated from a Greek word meaning to be whole, complete, finished. It has nothing to do with moral exactitude or following authority. Christ commanded to all to be perfect, and the famous scripture in Nephi says that the Lord will not give us a commandment without showing us a way that we can fulfill it. Therefore, if a person finds themselves constantly striving, but never achieving, then the thing to do is to to stop beating themselves over the head and look at what perfection really looks like.

This attitude might make the present-day general authorities mad, and your bishop might not like you telling him this, but I actually got a knowledge of this principle from an old stake president, and from Steven R Covey, in a class at BYU. We don’t achieve perfection over night, but we gain perfection in one area at a time, and we do that by making a promise to ourselves and the Lord that we know we can keep, and we keep it. To that extent, we build up our personal integrity, or our wholeness in that one area. Then, when we have mastered it, we go on to another area.

This is not striving. This is achieving. And, when you have mastered even a small area, instead of feeling discouraged, you get a sweet feeling of success and accomplishment like nothing else. This is a great feeling, and there is nothing wrong with getting addicted to this.

I didn’t get this from listening to church leaders, alone. I study the scriptures a lot, and that’s where I get a lot of my spiritual nourishment. There is a passage in the D&C that says if your eye be single to God, your whole body will be filled with light. And in the NT, Christ taught us to love God with ALL our heart, might, mind, and strength. These are just other ways of saying that we need to be whole, have integrity, be without hypocrisy and without guile.

For my own life, after fitting all this stuff together, I felt like I finally really understood what the Gospel was all about. The Gospel is doable, and a joy, not a job. It’s really not all that difficult, but the only hard part is to strictly follow it, not try to live up to some impossible, arbitrary code.

“You seminary teachers and some of you institute and BYU men will be teaching the history of the Church this school year. This is an unparalleled opportunity in the lives of your students to increase their faith and testimony of the divinity of this work. Your objective should be that they will see the hand of the Lord in every hour and every moment of the Church from its beginning till now.”

“Church history can be so interesting and so inspiring as to be a very powerful tool indeed for building faith. If not properly written or properly taught, it may be a faith destroyer.”

“There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of Church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not.”

“Some things that are true are not very useful.”

“That historian or scholar who delights in pointing out the weaknesses and frailties of present or past leaders destroys faith. A destroyer of faith — particularly one within the Church, and more particularly one who is employed specifically to build faith — places himself in great spiritual jeopardy. He is serving the wrong master, and unless he repents, he will not be among the faithful in the eternities. … Do not spread disease germs!”

– Apostle Boyd K. Packer, “The Mantle is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect”, 1981, BYU Studies, Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 259-271

Here’s proof that you can demonstrate for yourself.

If a man’s words ring true to you, speak to your soul, edify you, call forth your own intuition, or induce the spirit of revelation in you, then you can safely assume that, at that particular moment in time, the man is in touch with God and is speaking truth.

In that brief moment in time, he is a prophet, as are we all, given similar circumstances. But, to automatically and unconditionally proclaim a man to be a prophet in every circumstance, and because of that, to follow him unconditionally, is idolatry of the worst kind.

There are certain passages in the D&C and certain speeches like Joseph Smith’s address to the Twelve, Oliver Cowdery’s address to the twelve, and Joseph Smith’s final two addresses that stir me to the very depths and make my bones to quake. There are other occasions when he was a blustering fool. He created drama and crisis wherever he went, and seemed to thrive on it, by stirring up jealousy, suspicion, and keeping everybody else off balance, to his advantage.

Question: When did you first begin to lose your “Mormon faith”?

Don’t put words in my mouth. No church is the proper object of anybody’s faith, but I’ll play your game.

It started for me when one of my religion profs at BYU planted the idea in my mind that the church and the gospel were not the same thing.

I started noting a disconnect between what the scriptures taught, what the church taught, and how church members lived.

I grew up in small towns in the Pacific Northwest, where the members were all faithful and stuck together. I was shocked when I first visited Utah and Idaho and saw the lack of reverence and respect for the temple and how the supposedly “good” church members of Provo preyed upon the BYU students.

I also noticed that after sitting through long, boring sessions of General Conference, I could go back to our little student ward where our bishop addressed us and feel more Spirit there than I had in all the sessions of Conference put together.

Over the years, I stayed close to God and the scriptures, and mostly ignored the church. When I was excommunicated, it felt more like a graduation than a condemnation.

What I eventually discovered about the real Gospel, the true God, and about reality and existence in general completely eclipsed the meager understanding and limited world-view of Mormonism. Yes, Mormonism is pretty mind-blowing, when compared to the other Christian sectarians, of which Mormonism is quickly becoming a part. But, what I found is even more mind-blowing.

Yet, I can fit the fundamental teachings of Joseph Smith completely within this greater view. He was onto something. Maybe he was just concocting a bunch of fairy tales to captivate a frontier audience, but along the way he stumbled onto some profound truths, and in tapping into the “ethers” to pick up some of his ideas, God saw an opportunity to work in an idea or two, edgewise. And what ideas!

As true Mormons, we are supposed to keep searching for truth wherever we find it, and not get so stuck in something we think we have found that we that we are afraid to progress beyond that point.

I’m not bitter toward the church. I think it is a great upbringing for young kids, but they need to be taught to move THROUGH it and BEYOND it.

You don’t stay stuck in the 4th grade all your life, unless you keep flunking out. But, what if you discovered that you were stuck in the 4th grade and realized that you weren’t learning anything new, but were repeating the same boring stuff over and over? Then, the teacher figures out that you know this, and instead of pointing you toward more advanced educational opportunities, she condemns you and kicks you out of the class to fend for yourself?

This is what I see happening with so many people either leaving or questioning the church today. At its core, there are some fantastic ideas. But the leaders lack the vision to execute on them. Further, they lack the vision to harness the drive and talent and instead drive it from the church.

So, my advice to everybody is to realize that the church and the gospel are not the same thing, and to make a clear distinction between the two. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

A comment from Steven B Stew:

One word. Epistemology. The moment I realized that people use “know” language for things they can’t possibly know, everything started making so much more sense. Mormons will tell you themselves. If you don’t trust your feelings (the spirit) more than the apparently observable facts, if you don’t put faith over science, Mormonism doesn’t work. So for me, it doesn’t work anymore.

Steven B Stew, I agree with you. People who say they “know” when they merely believe are liars and bearers of false witness. To me, belief is a poor imitation of faith. Faith is a tool with which to obtain knowledge. Knowledge is obtained by experience and observation.

But, experience and observation take in far more than just the dense physical plane. There are higher and more refined spiritual realities, and more senses than just the five that we acknowledge.