LDS Stake Medium Council

The oddest thing for me is how the LDS belief in healing works.

Meaning, LDS believe there are three types of sick people:

1. People whom God isn’t going to heal. No matter how much praying or blessing you do, it’s their time, and God will take them or allow them to finish their lives with some sort of disease or discomfort.

2. People who are going to get better. Whether or not they get a prayer or a blessing, they’re going to get better.  God doesn’t need any encouragement to save them.

3. People whom God might heal. These are our biggest concern.  Apparently, there are people who have some illness, malady, or discomfort (even life-threatening ones), and God will intervene only if certain people do certain things.  It might be prayer (maybe, a whole bunch of people have to pray, or just a few), it might take fasting (again, a whole bunch or maybe just a few), it might take priesthood power (maybe a lot of faith and worthiness is needed on the part of the blessor and/or blessee, or maybe not so much), or it might take being on the prayer roll in a Temple.

But frustratingly, we just don’t know.  For any given sick person, we have absolutely no idea which category they are in until they get better, stay the same, or die.  For those in the third category, we don’t know which particular combination of actions God is waiting for.  Have enough people prayed?  Do they need another blessing, or is it a name on the Temple Rolls that is needed?  God won’t tell us, so we just have to hope we hit the right combination to get him to act, hoping the person is in category 3 to begin with.

And even after the fact, we have no way of ever knowing which category the person was in.  If someone gets better, we’ll never know if it was our fasting that did it, or if they were in category #2 and God didn’t need us to fast to take action (or no action on God’s part was needed in the first place).  If the person doesn’t get better (or dies), we don’t know if they were going to go anyway, or if we just didn’t meet the proper combination of fasting/prayer/Priesthood Blessings needed for God to positively intervene.

Even for faithful but analytically minded LDS, this can be a frustrating situation, because there is no way to know what kind of “data” we’re collecting as we go through life.  People in category #2 might be misidentified as being in category #3 if they get better after a fast, prayer or blessing.  While people in category #3 might be misidentified as being in #1 if they die, just because we didn’t know there was more we could do that would call down divine power to heal them.

Truly, God does work in mysterious ways.

Tags: Doctrines, Teachings, Policies and Traditions // 4 Comments »

[INTERIOR STUDY - NIGHT]

It’s a small room, with bookshelves along every wall. A small desk sits in the middle, with a middle aged man hunched over a book. A small light illuminates him.

JW: (singing)

Day after day, night after night
Searching…

Verse after verse, one more time
Reading…

The words on the page…beautiful!
The story they tell…wonderful!

(Beautiful, wonderful…)

Chiasmus!
I see you on the page
Chiasmus!
It will soon be all the rage
How could Joseph have done it…?
He didn’t!
Was it ancient Nephi…?
Yes, he did!

[DP enters from stage right]

DP: (speaking) John, it’s late. You need rest.
JW: (speaking excitedly) No Daniel. I’ve got it! Look at the words. It’s a pattern of reiteration, found in ancient Hebrew! And it’s in the Book of Mormon! It’s everywhere!
DP: Really, could it be…?
JW: YES!

DP and JW (in unison): Chiasmus!
DP: …and secret combinations…
DP and JW (in harmony): Chiasmus!
DP: …metal plates in Babylos…
DP and JW (big finish): Chiasmus!

[CAFETERIA- DAY]

It’s crowded at every table, mostly with college-age students. Everyone is white, and dressed in J Crew or Lands End.

A middle aged man, probably a teacher, sits at the end of a bench. He has some maps, and books, open in front of him. He is JG.

JG: (singing) The pieces of the puzzle…
in front of me.

How do they go together?
It tortures me!

(The ghost of Moroni appears on the balcony. No one can see him.)

Moroni: (singing softly) Cumorah….

JG: (still singing) Meso-america…and New York.
How was it done…it doesn’t work!
So many plates, could they be all gone.
Oliver said so, could he have been wrong?

Moroni: (even softer) Two…Cumorah’s.

JG: (Looks up, as if inspiration has come from nowhere…yelling) I’ve got it! Two Cumorah’s!

(All the students are stunned. Silence as they freeze and look at him)

JG: (singing energetically) One…two… Cumorah’s!
Student1: ..What did he say?…
JG: (standing on the table, singing louder) One…two…Cumorah’s!!!
Student2: …how can the be?…
JG: (running down the table, singing to the students) It’s all so easy, it all makes perfect sense.
One Cumorah, for Mormon, the other, where Joseph went…

Moroni: HE’S GOT IT!

(All the students turn and look at him. Moroni covers his mouth and looks embarrassed)

All students, dancing and singing: One…two…Cumorah’s!

Jews…like…menorah’s!

(A student in a 50’s style nebbish shirt and tie wanders in from stage right, carrying an armful of books. All others stop their wild dancing and turn to him. Spotlight…)

Nebbish: (singing softly) In the light of revelation, and the face of evidence…
from the Prophet Joseph, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer and common sense…
we cannot say…
in any way…
that the Hill we call Cumorah

All students: Yes!??

Nebbish: (Louder)That this hill we call Cumorah…

All students: What…!???

Nebbish: (yelling, with conviction and confidence) We cannot say this hill we call Cumorah…is in Central America!

(Silence. The students turn back to JG. JG pauses shrugs his shoulders, makes a funny face and yells…)

JG: I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you.

(Students laugh)

JG:(Singing)And one day, you’ll be gone, but the FARMS work goes on!!
Your thinking is limited, your vision obsolete…
You made your mind up long ago, and set it in concrete.

You need to expand…your outlook.
It’s so easy, it’s all right there…it’s in the Book!
You’ll never make it in the world with ideas like that.
Scripture can be misinterpreted, hey…the Bible says Earth’s flat!

Students: (laughing and singing) The Bible says Earth’s flat…

JG: (continues) You lap up old ideas, like a bird from a bird feeder.
Stay away from talking scholarship, especially if you become a Church leader.

(Nebbish shakes his fist in anger. Moroni and Students laugh.)

(Festive music starts…everyone dances. Moroni is doing the charleston.)

Students…JG and Moroni: One…two…Cumorah’s!

(Nebbish looks resigned, and walks off stage. Festive dancing continues for until big finish.)

Tags: Humor, LDS Apologetics, Movie, Book and Music Reviews, Uncategorized // 1 Comment »

Just think, if humans could have babies before the age of accountability, and some sort of virus was introduced that limited the lifespan of every human to die before the age of accountability, then everyone could be saved according to God’s plan (see D&C 137:10)

I believe Stephen Covey calls that a “Win/Win”!

Tags: Uncategorized // 2 Comments »

In a recent article on “MormonTimes”, LDS apologist Michael Ash tackles the problem of “Others” in the Book of Mormon.  The problem being that the book doesn’t clearly acknowledge there being existing peoples and civilizations when the Lehites landed.

Why aren’t other peoples mentioned in the Book of Mormon?

For reasons I do not know, Ash declined to acknowledge some of the reasons people feel strongly that there weren’t “others” here when the Lehites landed (for the purposes of discussion, “Others” refer to people not specifically integrated into the Book of Mormon narrative; the Jaredite remnant and Mulekites aren’t counted.)

So, for the benefit of those who like to see both sides of an issue, here are some of the reasons people might believe there weren’t others:

- For a book that is so focused on Christ and bringing people to him (and missionary work in general), it seems odd that they wouldn’t mention the conversion of whole cultures of natives in the first few decades of their colonization. The mass conversion of such people (who didn’t even share a common language upon Lehite Landfall) would be one of the greatest miracles in the history of Christianity, and hopefully worth mentioning somewhere between the  lengthy transcriptions of Isaiah and descriptions of Nephite coinage.

The Lehite conversion of the indigenous pagans would also offer an interesting precedent for missionary work throughout the rest of the BoM. At the very least, I can imagine the Sons of Mosiah being inspired by the story of their ancestors long ago converting whole populations at the same time they were learning their language.

-Jacob 1 (~40 years after Lehite landfall) presents a “laundry list” of the existing population, naming each group by name.  There is no “other” category.  This may be explained by having every existing native aligning with a Lehite sub-group, but that kind of destroys the “small sub-culture” theory of Lehite integration.

13 Now the people which were not Lamanites were Nephites; nevertheless, they were called Nephites, Jacobites, Josephites, Zoramites, Lamanites, Lemuelites, and Ishmaelites.

14 But I, Jacob, shall not hereafter distinguish them by these names, but I shall call them Lamanites that seek to destroy the people of Nephi, and those who are friendly to Nephi I shall call Nephites, or the people of Nephi, according to the reigns of the kings.

- Intermarriage.  Traditionally, the God of the Old Testament takes a dim view towards his chosen people intermarrying with the pagan natives in designated promised lands.

-2 Nephi describes the Promised Land as being “kept as yet from the knowledge of other nations; for behold, many nations would overrun the land, that there would be no place for an inheritance.”  This would seem to be at odds with the idea of a land already populated by numerous pagan cultures.

It would be like someone inheriting a house from a grandparent and being told the house had been “preserved” for them as a special place of sanctuary and peace.  Then, when the family shows up, they find it overrun with a bunch of squatting Canadian illegal immigrants.  They then look at the fine print in the will, and see that the grandparents knew about the squatters, and that it was intended for the two families to intermarry and get along sharing the house.

- When Nephi catalogs what they find in the New World, he includes cows, horses, goats, wild goats, and “all manner of wild animals”. He also includes gold, silver, and copper.   But no mention of…unusually dark skinned, loin-clothed people who speak an odd language but are particularly susceptible to conversion to pre-Christianity?

- In the Wentworth letter, Joseph Smith describes his first visit by Moroni, in which Moroni gives an other-less overview of the history of the Americas:

I was also informed concerning the aboriginal inhabitants of this country, and shown who they were, and from whence they came; a brief sketch of their origin, progress, civilization, laws, governments, of their righteousness and iniquity, and the blessings of God being finally withdrawn from them as a people was made known unto me.
———————————————-
In [The Book of Mormon] the history of ancient America is unfolded, from its first settlement by a colony that came from the tower of Babel at the confusion of languages to the beginning of the fifth century of the Christian era. We are informed by these records that America in ancient times has been inhabited by two distinct races of people. The first were called Jaredites and came directly from the tower of Babel. The second race came directly from the city of Jerusalem, about six hundred years before Christ. They were principally Israelites, of the descendants of Joseph. The Jaredites were destroyed about the time that the Israelites came from Jerusalem, who succeeded them in the inheritance of the country.  The principal nation of the second race fell in battle towards the close of the fourth century. The remnant are the Indians that now inhabit this country.

(emphasis added)

So, while I agree there are some interesting (and, as it turns out, necessary) arguments to be made for “others”, we shouldn’t forget why some believers in Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon might find such arguments to be less than convincing.

Whether or not the expression of such ideas would be welcome in “MormonTimes”, I can only imagine.

Tags: Church History, Doctrines, Teachings, Policies and Traditions, Joseph Smith, LDS Apologetics, The Book of Mormon // Add Comment »