I heard Glenn Beck talking about it the other day, and it turned out to be a bible reference, but as part of appearing normal, I suspect a lot of Mormons say as "Study scripture" to appear "mainstream" & mean the same as "Bible study".

OTOH, a lot of LDS scripture is ripped off from the bible, and a lot of the rest too wacky to study if you're going to stay in the church and keep your integrity whole.....

All the decades I was a member I never once heard a challenge to read the bible from cover to cover. Ditto for the D&C and POGP. It was always the BoM. That seemed to be the #1 book to be read. Over and over and over.

I could never understand why the BoM is considered so key. I never took it as truth because it has exactly the appearance of fiction, a book of tall tales. It never convinced me. Maybe that's because I could never bring myself to do that thing they do where they pray and talk themselves into believing it. I always strongly suspected that process had to be bogus, because essentially you can do that with anything if you try hard enough. It's just a process of purposely deluding yourself. A TBM who was trying to re-activate me accused me recently of being to rational, relying on reason and logic and not letting the spirit guide me. Ummmm... yes. He nailed it.

I like how you put it. Mormons only pretend to care about the bible to appear mainstream.

When I was an impressionable teenage boy, I liked to study the new testament. One day in Sunday school they asked if we had the faith to read the BOM every day. I told them that I DID read scriptures every day, but not always the BOM. They said that wasn't good enough. If I wanted to read the bible I had to read the BOM that day too.

That stuck with me until I realized the BOM and bible are both bullshit anyway. But until then, I mostly just read the BOM after that day. I mean hey, if you've already done your obligatory scripture reading with the BOM, who's going to do more just for fun? Those books are boring as hell.

The Bible was spoon fed to me in Mormonism. We read from the KJV which is damn near impossible to understand, so if a seminary teacher explained it to you, you just took what he/she said at face value.
The last time I studied the Bible in earnest in Mormonism was in seminary back in 1987. I started reading The CEV Bible last December and that's what convinced me that Mormonism is contradictory to The Bible.

I missed out on a lot I guess...made a conscious decision early on to have nothing to do with scripture...did I miss much?

Ron Burr

You missed out on a lot of anti mormon material. The ones with the strongest testiphoneys were always the ones who read the scriptures the least.

I would say that I read the BOM roughly twice as often as the new testament, and the new testament twice as often as the old testament. I hate to say it but the BOM was more interesting to me than the New Testament.

I was one of those guys who didn't fit in. I read the Bible a lot - mostly the New Testament. The Book of Mormon seemed like pure fiction to me. At least with the Bible we were talking about real places on the map. And at the time I was TBM I believed that there was a real Paul, real Jesus, etc. So the Bible actually seemed real to me, the BoM, meh, not so much.

I always felt uncomfortable and like I didn't fit in because I didn't care for the BoM but loved the New Testament. Everybody else seemed to think "studying scripture" was the BoM. To me studying the BoM seemed like a farce.

I was BIC, but I was raised on The Bible. My parents preferred the Bible, but I think it was also more important in Mormonism then. Gradually, The Bible and Christ became weaker and weaker in Mormonism. They stopped teaching about "love." The BOM stories took over the old Bible stories. Our favorite old Christian hymns were eliminated altogether.

I hated the BOM. I thought it was gory and immoral. I was a bookworm, and many, many pieces of writing inspired me far more! Of all the short stories, books, and poetry I read, the BOM was at the very bottom of the list. What a lousy piece of writing.

I still like The Bible, and though I haven't read it since childhood, I still find myself quoting it. I think Aesop's Fables inspired me the very most, as a child, and that is where I learned ethics!