Posted by:
tywebb
(
)
Date: October 19, 2016 05:27PM
The last few weeks/months of conversing with my brother regarding his standing in the church has introduced me to an entirely different perspective on what the church membership has evolved/devolved to.
When I was raised in the church, I was taught that WE, and only WE had the truth. The Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Baptists, etc were all "led by the devil". When I left on my mission and gained my testimony, it was based on that black and white version of truth. Either it happened or it didn't. Joseph saw God, he translated the BoM by the "gift and power of God", yada, yada, yada...you know the rest.
Well....apparently "given all this new shit" (the real historic details) as Jeffrey Lewbowski so famously said, I, we just took things too literally. That's right fellow ExMo's we just took things way too seriously. And by things, I mean the restoration, the BoM, the temple, etc.
It's been well over 10 years since my wife and I left the church. Over the years, I've been frustrated with family members and friends who just refuse to look at the true history of the church. However, given what I've just recently been exposed to, this new faction of "mystic Mormons" have eclipsed that "head in the sand" approach and taken mental gymnastics to a whole new level.
I'm not sure how many of you had the pleasure to listen to Greg Prince's latest podcast with John Dehlin, but what a mindblowing experience. I learned all kinds of things. The apostles and prophets are just normal guys "doing the best they can", Joseph's revisions were as Prince says "....giving it flesh as he goes along. If you want to call that making it up, alright he made it up. But he didn’t make up the essence. He was working on the form of it, but the essence was there from the beginning."
I'll spare you the other crazy responses. It's available if you want to check it out. What I'm getting at, and my brother and I have shared several laughs since about this, is that somehow in all of this, we're the fundamentalists. Silly of us, those who were raised in the church or converts who took the discussions from missionaries who bought into the whitewashed version of the restoration. Price and others like him don't necessarily fault us for leaving, but they certainly imply that we just don't get the nuances of how all this works.
Why in the world would anyone want to give 10% of their income, make the sacrifices serving callings, going on missions, cleaning the ward buildings, going to the temple, etc if the Mormon church is no more true than any other? Don't these guys get it? You cannot have it both ways.