I have been lucky to be surrounded by good family and friends throughout my life.

Even when I have have called someone TBM in my posts, it was not meant to be derogatory. I truly love and respect them.

But I have to pose a question -

Are they nuts?

As the pandemic has spread, I have not heard one of my TBM friends or family ask, "Why didn't the prophet warn us?"

My wife watched a conference talk yesterday from 6 months ago. The speaker spoke at length about when Gordon Hinckley was inspired to know where to locate a particular temple site. That's amazing stuff, right?

It's great that we can have a prophet on the earth to tell us to be good and love Jesus. It is wonderful that he can help us to know that we shouldn't swear or wear too many ear rings.

But how about letting us know that a pandemic is coming?

The crazy part for me is to hear my TBM associates go on about how brilliant the church has handled the situation. Are you kidding me?

For whatever social or emotional benefits mormon church membership may offer, can we agree that fortune telling and prognostication are not on the menu?

Instead of useful bits of insider information form planet cobol, mormons are treated to hucksters who offer cold readings.

TBM mormons put any coincidentally favorable outcomes in column A and the failures in column B, which they toss into the memory hole.

Oddly enough, the more perilous the times are the greater the dedication grows to columnA.

Am I imagining this?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/30/2020 01:33PM by Lowpriest.

No, you’re not imagining this.

My friend of nearly 40 years, whom (like you say) I love dearly, goes on and on ad infinitum about how magnificently the church has managed this ordeal and “months before anyone else has.”

No revelation? No worries!

They’ve grown to not expect revelation. They just want government—-not leadership.

I’m guessing if we challenged them with this they would say the prophets have always warned of pestilence and so on in the “last days”. I saw one Fb post by a TBM which said something along the lines of “Earthquakes, Moroni falling off the temple, and now disease....I think the time is near!” So, in other words, we should have expected this, and it is somehow sort of like good news because it proves their beliefs are right.
But whatever happens mormons twist it to fit their narrative. I find it all just so exhausting.

Jesus can't sneak up on the world like a thief in the night if he lets Rusty blab about the when and the where... Although John the Revelator sure seems to give a heck of a good timeline.

Was ghawd just messing with us when he gave all that info to John or was John high on something when he was being all prophetical and it's all just more of the ancient art of bullsheito?

They are SO desperate to believe that old geezer Dusty Rusty has some kind of special connection to the sky daddy that they are leaving no stone unturned of stupid parallels they are drawing between the virus and mormonism. All the "Grampa Profit Russ prepared us by teaching us how to do home church" (even though thousands of churches figured it out real quick), or "he told us to take our vitamins because April was going to be something really different." (Although I don't know of anyone who has been immune because they take vitamins).

Then they completely ignore the obvious fallacy--they have a supposed prophet who gave them NO warning about was to come so that they didn't have to rush to the stores and hoard everything in sight. But my favorite one is that the virus was Satan's way of trying to stop the big 200 year supershow. Yep, I love to tell all my non-mormon friends, "Well, you DO know why we have this virus, don't you? It's all because of Satan trying to take down the big Mormon party." They stand there with their jaws dropped, it's quite comical. Someone asked me why Satan started in China and not SLC. The only thing I could think of was that maybe it was to be more sneaky.

Norma Rae said, "But my favorite one is that the virus was Satan's way of trying to stop the big 200 year supershow."

I guess when you get lemons make lemonade.

When people make up thier minds and then evaluate the evidence everything confirms their beleifs. I wish they would reverse the order of this operation.

I hear you LowPriest. I know some wonderful TBMs who question to a certain point and then stop. Most of them know where I stand and still chose to be friends with me—unlike my earlier friends who dropped the friendship once I told them I didn’t believe anymore. I respect them as individuals, it’s about all we can do with family and friends. Between us, they’re fukkin’ nuts! Da Bone.

I would like to think that my mormon friends and family genuinely accept me, but I think that I am a project at best and a threat to be mitigated at worst.

All the warning they ever gave is... "there will be tribulation in the last days." Benson use to say our food chains would be disrupted and to plant a garden, which is odd considering that in the 30+ years since he gave that talk, Cities have grown denser and rural areas are becoming more abandoned. Most people can't have gardens. WE are fast becoming a nation of renters. Benson was stuck in the 1800s.

The more open-ended your assertion, the more easy it is to claim that you could predict the future....

There will be tribulation in the last days.... Like that was hard to predict. There has always been tribulation.

However, they were right about ONE thing, so I guess they must be the one and only entirely true church.

Nonsesne!