I'd do it myself, but I have never been to LDS Inc's web site, and I am afraid of getting Conference Cooties or something on me. :)

But seriously, I don't recall hearing the BoA quoted much at all in recent years - recent decades even. If someone used to searching the LDS GC database would do the grunt work and find out how much GAs speaking in GC have quoted from the BOA on the last 20 years or so, I'd much appreciate it.

Have you been to the temple? Everything there is out of Abraham.

If you take a tour of the Brigham Young residence in SLC, they go to great lengths to avoid the word "wife", because it invites the question "didn't he have other wives?" There is a picture of who I suppose is the first wife, and she is identified as "the lady of the house".

I assume they still do that. The tour guides have done that for a number of years.

The term "Lamanite" is now rarely if ever used by church leaders to refer to contemporary native Americans or Polynesians. It used to be commonly done, but now it invites the question "but I thought native Americans were of north Asian origin, and Polynesians were south Asian". Best not to go there.

I think the same thing has happened to the BOA. The GAs simply don't mention it anymore, and since most talks in LDS Inc these days are just members quoting from GC talks, the BOA has become a non-topic in LDS Inc. It's racist and it couldn't possibly have been written by the hand of Abraham. Rather than deal with those questions, it appears to me that they have tossed the BOA down the memory hole. It is still in the PoGP, but you'd never know it by how often it is quoted these days. I bet it will never ever again be a section of the Sunday School curriculum.

Didn't one of the famous apologists recently say that at GC they have only quoted the BoA something like 6% of the time compared to bible or BoM?

A BS straw man of course, because much of the church doctrine comes from BoA, so what the H has it got with GC? And I'll bet Mitt's $10,000 that an argument could probably be made that an even smaller % of the D&C is quoted at GC (and that's....well...that's the church's doctrine and covenants...you know, the ones from God...?)

They would do well to deep-six the Book of Abraham as that is the main source of all the racist crap.

BOA is racist, and an unreliable translation
D&C still says polygamy is doctrinal
BOM is racist, and not archeologically reliable

So what's left?
The Bible.

Meaning Mormons ARE Christian, after all!

:-)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/16/2012 11:01AM by PapaKen.

I risked Conference Cooties, after a poster said that the D&C is not even referenced in GC. That was too absurd to let stand unchallenged. So now I am no longer an LDS.Org virgin. :-/


The first 6 D&C hits were from the April GC of two weeks ago.

Here's what I got for other searches of General Conference talks:

"D&C": 2,025 hits, mostly scripture references.

"BOA": zero hits

"Book of Abraham" 14 hits, years, in order of presentation in hit list: 2001, 2006, 1989, 2005, 1985, 2005, 2000, 2003, 1971, 1976, 1973, 1976, 1981, 1993. None of the hits quoted from the book directly, just mentioned it.

"Abraham": 383 hits. Most are mentions of the prophet Abraham, or mention of general authorities with first name Abraham (there are several GAs with that name), or Abraham Lincoln (65 hits for Lincoln!).


Year of BOA scriptural citations in the "Abraham" hit list: 2012 (Hallstrom), 2010, 2010, 2010, 2010, 1975, 2011, 2009, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2009, 2011, 2006, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2006, 1974, 1976, 1999.

"Abr.": 155 hits, essentially all scriptural citations. The entire first page of hits (10 of them) dated from 1980 and earlier. The remaining hits were scattered between 1971 and 2011. There were a fair smattering in every decade, but the 1970s was clearly the dominant decade for "Abr." hits, but it was not like the other decades had practically no hits. I didn't do a complete tally - getting bored.

I have no idea how they determine the order of the hits in the lists. It looked like it at least started with reverse chronological order (most recent first), until I got to "Abr.", where the oldest ones came up first, and then that list ended with several pages of mostly old references (1970s) as well. ????



SO, my conclusion is that my hypothesis was wrong. The BoA has not been banished from General Conference talks, but it plays a pretty minor role, and that role took a significant nose-dive after 1978, which is no surprise.

If you want to fiddle around with their search yourself, here's the link for GC talks. Click the "search" link on the left to get started. I bet they store your IP address when you do a search. Just saying', in case you are paranoid about that sort of thing.

http://www.lds.org/general-conference/topics/2012/04?lang=eng



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/16/2012 12:05PM by Brother Of Jerry.

They even quote from Smith's letter to Nancy Rigdon where he said "Happiness is the object and design of our existence." That's the letter Smith wrote her the day after he hit on her.

They don't care where their quotes come from. They just blah blah blah say anything.

The BofA is far from being deep-sixed. In the Old Testament Seminary and Sunday School courses, the first several lessons are exclusively from the BofA. Its like the book of Genesis doesn't even exist when the creation story is discussed.