Well, it really doesn't make sense lol. What scriptures did you think were deep but now realize are nonsensical?

I'm a born science nerd and voracious life-long learner. To this day I read college text books to learn what I do not know (currently Molecular Biology of the Cell, 4th ed). Which biography I present only to indicate I was all about that "deep meaning" claimed by the church I was born into by sheer bad luck. The administrative, social and tribal aspects of the church were something I endured for the access to that wellspring of deep, gnostic TRVTH that I thought had to be there. Bluntly put, I hated the social side of church, hated testiphony meetings with a passion, hated things like home teaching, etc.

It goes without saying that I was riveted to the Pearl of Great Price in general and Book of Abraham in particular. Hell, I built a small refractor telescope, including grinding the mirror, when I was 12. Kolob and Kokaubeam? Linked reference frames of time? Giants in the land? (I of course had a thing for dinosaurs.) Man, how cool was all that? There was deep TRVTH there to be sure.

Uh huh. By the time I was, oh, call it 16, I knew enough demonstrable, verifiable, *falsifiable* ideas to detect a major disconnect between the BoA and reality. Somewhere inside it was dawning on me that it was bullshit from start to finish, but it stayed submerged for another 15 years until I had enough self-confidence to overcome the mind fuck and admit the obvious: it *is* bullshit from start to finish. The entire church and its teachings. There was no TRVTH, only a charlatan's get rich and sex quick scheme that spiraled horribly out of control to afflict generations to this very day.

Now, at 55, I look back with something akin to awe that I could have been snookered by what was arguably horny joe's worst fraud (BoA) long after I knew better. It's a badge of shame I wear and sometimes contemplate which gives me more compassion for others still there. Those others who also seek and expect to find that "deep" scripture, because there, by the grace of god, went I.

Void K. Packer Wrote:
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> Hell, I built a small
> refractor telescope, including grinding the
> mirror...

Refractor telescopes use lenses, not mirrors.
Reflector telescopes use mirrors :)

Just pointing that out.
Fellow astronomy nerd, who has also ground his own mirrors...

WOW! I'm gonna leave that there because it's amazing I wrote that. It was of course a 6" Newtonian reflector, polished to 1/4 wavelength parabolic precision in "red" light. Amazing faux pas!

[edit note: I worked at the Hansen Planetarium in SLC for 5 years while going through college 80-85. Would you know me by chance?]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/20/2014 02:53PM by Void K. Packer.

I would have seen you around, I think. I was always going to those awesome laser shows in the dome.

Void K. Packer... you're amazing <3

Laman and Lemuel. I mean really . . . they had seen an angel, witnessed miracles, and yet they were still so rebellious.

The B of M chalked it up to them being hard-hearted, but it just didn't make sense. How could they be THAT dense?

NOW it makes sense. They were like the villains in a cartoon. One-dimensional characters that you can always count on to cause trouble.

"Angels speak by the power of the Holy Ghost; wherefore, they speak the words of Christ"

Talk about circular.

Deep scripture is nothing more than an empty well. Look at the bottom of either, and you'll find a rock.

is already on the fourth!

9 Now I, Chemish, write what few things I write, in the same book with my brother; for behold, I saw the last which he wrote, that he wrote it with his own hand; and he wrote it in the day that he delivered them unto me. And after this manner we keep the records, for it is according to the commandments of our fathers. And I make an end.


Yeah, this was always pretty deep...

A bit wordy to be carving into gold plates.

Free Man Wrote:
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> A bit wordy to be carving into gold plates.


But ther were no gold plates. We were all mistaken about their importance for our salvation. A rock in a hat was so much more in line with God's divine plan for his children.

I think I would assign more meaning to these types of doctrine because I so desperately wanted there to be more substance to the things I was reading. It was a fruitless task, but I devoted as much imagination to Mormonism as I did to any other fantasy I might have had.

The only thing that immediately comes to mind is how much effort and time I put into figuring out whether "If You Could Hie To Kolob" had some sort of secret and deeper meaning.

Hint: It doesn't.

I remember from the Book of Moses that there were verses about how the secret combinations that started up included that the conspirators "knew every man his brother" which I interpreted as gay sex. I always thought I was pretty smart to have learned about the great conspiracy of homosexuality.

Those secret combinations were used to keep the Government from finding anyone who had information about who was involved in the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

Secret combinations are used as part of temple worship, those signs and tokens allowing every man to know his brother and identify him from outsiders. Primarily adapted for the purpose of knowing who was a polygamist and who was not to know about it.

Secret combinations are how everyday mormons are able to pull off the funding for Prop8 while telling nonmembers that they didn't.

Those deep scriptures I always thought were about sneaky killers and practitioners of the shenanigen, but now I see it as a road map for the developing church.

Mormon interpretation of "deep" scripture is akin to the kid who spilled the milk coming up with a long, t*rtured explanation of what happened, instead of just admitting it.

On the other hand, the spilled milk actually exists.....

Oh, it all makes perfect sense now. JS made it up. End of subject.

Mine had to do with "eternities" and intelligences being co-eternal with God. That at some point and time, this eternity will end and another begin. There was even some who believed that at the end of this eternity, many of the Telestial and Terrestrial would be able to progress to the celestial. Then there were those that said those in the Telestial and outer darkness would die and their "intelligences" would go back to the cosmic soup only to go and get the chance all over again to be born spiritually, have a temporal life and test and then resurrected to the appropriate level again. A sort of Mormon reincarnation. Which would also give the chance for celestial cows to progress to say a horse or bear, which could lead that intelligence to progress to "Man" level. Having said that, what if there's another type of being higher level and not in God's image that we might be able to progress to?

My gut always rebelled at the stupid sounding made-up words. You know the ones: shinehah, pay lay el, kokoabeam, kolob, moronihah, osh kosh by go nash (or whatever the hell it was).

They never sounded like real words to me, and even as a TBM my bullshit meter would spike when I would see one of these. I think that Tolkien did a better job of making a real sounding elvish language than JS could do with god himself supposedly giving him this info. Klingon even sounds more real to me that all of JS's crap words.

Lol... So how do you feel when some tbm is doing one of those "in order to write a book like this Joseph smith would have to..." monologues and so many bullet points down they say "you have to introduce more names into the English language than Shakespeare?

‘Yes, that’s so,’ said Sam. ‘And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually — their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on — and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same — like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?’

—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

The entirety of Jesus the Christ. It was one of only a few books we were allowed to read on my mission. The whole book was a pain.

D&C 93

Mosiah 12-14, I believe. Where Abinidi preaches to King Noah and gives a very Trinitarian view of God. I always had a hard time wrapping my head around that one.

Kinda makes you wonder which came first- the Book of Mormon, or the First Vision...