Remember the stories of how the Salt Lake temple was created with a big empty space right in the middle of it? Then when elevators were invented, the big empty space was magically the perfect size to fit an elevator?

What's your favorite FPR?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/04/2023 09:11PM by T-Bone.

Putting aside all of the three Nephite stories and all of the Dunnerisms, my favorite would have to be the one about the Japanese pilot at Pearl Harbor who tried to bomb the Hawaii temple, but his bomb wouldn't release until he started flying back to his carrier and then the bomb released and fell harmlessly into the ocean.

I considered myself so lucky to have Paul Dunn at my servicemen's branch on Okinawa. The local Okinawan church members came to hear him, too. He gave one of his signature talks about a-fightin' in the War, and taking care of a wounded Japanese soldier with whom he talked baseball. Then the soldier did something unexpected and surrendered to Dunn. The Okinawans and even some of the servicemen's families were in tears.

Yada-yada-yada, it was all bullshit. When that came out, he had a bad fall from grace. Others -- many others -- have done the likewise, however. I wanted to throttle Reed Bradford, an exceedingly popular religion teacher at BYU. He told fabricated object lessons and fabricated object stories, and the students hung on his every word. Then at sacrament meeting, students would pass on the stories in their talks, their testimonies, and their lessons. I did a lot of eye rolling.

The whole narrative about the "Windows of heaven" story regarding tithing and the rain in St. George.

I remember as a teenager watching that movie and just feeling proud that tithing observance brought such wonderful blessings.

I knew nothing about the monsoon season in Southern Utah. Such exploitation to guilt members into giving TSCC more money!

Being protected by garments, especially a GA telling a furst-person experience.

3 Nephites rescuing stranded motorists who couldn't change a flat tire or needed coolant for an overheated auto.

Usually these happen / happened to someone who isn't available (Why ?)

God and Jesus visited a young boy in a grove of trees. . .

Haha ha. After you bought that one anything at all is believable. That one primed us all.

Yep. It's the original sin from which all else stems.

The U.S. founding fathers appearing to Wilford Woodruff to ask why their temple work hadn't been done.

When, in fact, their work HAD been done, several times over...

My favorite rumor is that every time you get the opportunity to sit and reflect in the temple Celestial Room, you'll learn something new.

I never ever had the chance to sit down in the Celestial Room, so I can't speak to the truthfulness of this faith-promoting rumor.

elderolddog Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> My favorite rumor is that every time you get the
> opportunity to sit and reflect in the temple
> Celestial Room, you'll learn something new.
>
> I never ever had the chance to sit down in the
> Celestial Room, so I can't speak to the
> truthfulness of this faith-promoting rumor.

Depends which one you go to. Quiet temples are okay. But busy ones kick you out.

The ones about Mormons meeting Bigfoot. Especially the ones where Bigfoot turns up in the temple basement or declares himself to be Cain. (I thought Cain was supposed to be the ancestor of blacks?!)

Here's the quotation.

"As I was riding along the road on my mule I suddenly noticed a very strange personage walking beside me…. His head was about even with my shoulders as I sat in my saddle. He wore no clothing, but was covered with hair. His skin was very dark. I asked him where he dwelt and he replied that he had no home, that he was a wanderer in the earth and traveled to and fro. He said he was a very miserable creature, that he had earnestly sought death during his sojourn upon the earth, but that he could not die, and his mission was to destroy the souls of men. About the time he expressed himself thus, I rebuked him in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by virtue of the Holy Priesthood, and commanded him to go hence, and he immediately departed out of my sight."

It appears in MoF as a bizarre non-sequitur with no connection to anything before or after, testament to how very strange that hateful little man--Kimball, not Cain--actually was.

https://www.ldsliving.com/when-cain-appeared-to-joseph-fielding-smiths-brother-talked-with-an-apostle/s/83424

E. Wesley Smith, son of Prophet Joseph F. Smith, was serving as a mission president in Hawaii when he had his own encounter.

According to Matthew Bowman's article published in the Journal of Mormon History, "A Mormon Bigfoot: David Patten’s Cain and the Concept of Evil in LDS Folklore," the night before the Laie Hawaii Temple was dedicated in 1921, E. Wesley experienced the following events:

"A man came through the door. He was tall enough to have to stoop to enter. His eyes were very protruding and rather wild looking, his fingernails were thick and long. He presented a rather unkempt appearance and wore no clothing at all. . . . There suddenly appeared in [Smith’s] right hand a light which had the size and appearance of a dagger. . . . A voice said, “This is your priesthood.” He commanded the person in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to depart. . . . Immediately when the light appeared the person stopped and on being commanded to leave, he backed out the door" ("Experiences with Cain,” n.d., MSS 5273, Archives, Family and Church History Department, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City (hereafter LDS Church Archives).

Thoroughly disturbed by the encounter, E. Wesley wrote to his brother, the then-Apostle Joseph Fielding Smith, about his experience.

According to Matthew Bowman's article, Joseph Fielding Smith wrote to his brother that the strange visitor was "Cain . . . whose curse is to roam the earth seeking whom he may destroy.”

Joseph Fielding Smith went on to say that there was "always unusual evidence . . . for a period just prior to the dedication of every temple" and Cain was representative of the "spirit of the adversary."

When a general authority met an Egyptian Prince in a museum in central america and the Prince was able to read the Mayan glyph.

The Holy of Holies: the room in the SLC temple where the prophet goes to meet with god. I’ve heard that the door can only be opened from the inside, so the prophet can only enter when the almighty himself opens the door.

I wonder how the room ever gets cleaned. Would god open the door for the members assigned for cleaning, or does a celestial janitorial crew do the work?

In the sixties everyone knew that the Blacks all had maps of all the Mormon homes in their area so they would know who to attack for their food storage.

This was eminently faith promoting because every Mormon knew that Civil Rights was part of the run-up to moving back to Jackson County.

I am telling you the 100% absolute truth.

In thinking about the point you're making, I didn't see any of this growing up in the Las Vegas 2nd Ward, and it occurs to me that a simple explanation is that nobody had a home with a basement...  Small homes, large families, meaning no place to store stuff.

Benson wrote a

“Civil Rights

Tool of Communist Deception”

Which many if not most Mormons (as Gladly called then…) accepted as gospel…

I remember those days and that mindset in Mormonism. I wish I didn't have to remember watching the race riots on TV and hearing "Give them and inch and they'll take a mile". I don't know which part of my brain to store that in. I don't want it to fit anywhere.

Benson. Old Testament all the way just like today's religious right that are even turning on their Jesus.

When swarms of crickets (actually members of the katydid family) threatened to totally destroy the crops, seagulls miraculously arrived to destroy the crickets.

No contemporaneous accounts exist of this event, which is simply part of nature's life cycle.

But years later, it was inserted into Mormon folklore with enough faith-building capital to inspire naming the seagull as the state bird and providing work for sculptors to facilitate the erection of monuments.

Will Bagley documented a locust event in the mid-1850s, when the ravages caused by the blessed seagulls were very severe.  Rationing was in place, and the saints were getting by on grass and thistle soups.

There were no flocks of seagulls those years.  But the church doesn't seem to want this part of the seagull sage told...


"AS 1855 DREW TO A CLOSE, all was not well in Brigham Young’s Great Basin Kingdom.  A plague of locusts that had been developing since the previous year became a crisis— an apostle estimated that grasshoppers had destroyed one-fifth of Utah’s crops by July 1854— and the following winter was bone dry.  An even worse grasshopper infestation returned in the spring of 1855.  By late April the Deseret News reported that the pestiferous creatures were “threatening to destroy all vegetation as fast as it appears.”

"By mid-May, the party that accompanied Governor Young to the capital at Fillmore “found nearly all the wheat eat up by the Grass hoppers all the way from Salt Lake City,” a distance of 150 miles.  The territory “seems to be one entire desolation,” Apostle Heber C. Kimball wrote to his son in England at the end of May 1855, “and, to look at things at the present time, there is not the least prospect of raising one bushel of grain in the valley this present season.  Still,” he added hopefully, “the grasshoppers may pass away, so as to give us a chance to sow wheat late, and also some corn.”

"By July, when not a drop of rain had fallen, a full-blown drought developed, creating suffocating clouds of dust. The parched canyons, north and south, began to burn.  Embittered Utes told Andrew Love of Nephi that “the Mormons cut their timber & use it & pay them nothing for it, & they prefer burning it up.”

"Kimball’s hopes that late plantings could produce a crop proved optimistic.  “There are not more than one-half the people that have bread,” the apostle reported glumly the next spring, “and they have not more than one-half or one-quarter of a pound per day per person.”  Famine stalked the territory.  Even Kimball and Brigham Young put their families on rations.  Young himself had to “say something with regard to the hard times” as 1856 began. “I do not apprehend the least danger of starving, for until we eat up the last mule, from the tip of the ear to the end of the fly whipper, I am not afraid of starving to death.”

"At the same meeting, Jedediah Grant, Young’s counselor in the First Presidency, took the same bold tack: he was “glad that our crops failed.  Why?  Because it teaches the people a lesson, it keeps the corrupt at bay, for they know that they would have to starve, or import their rations, should they come to injure us in the Territory of Utah.”

"But during that grim winter and spring of 1856 thousands of desperately worried Utahns were already surviving on grass and thistle roots as they watched their livestock starve."

http://user.xmission.com/~research/central/handcart.pdf
(first page of this 16-page monograph on the handcart disaster)


These pioneers do deserve some praise for getting through some pretty hard times, which they did on their own unless they were miraculously hearing ghawd cheering for them high up in the owner's private seats...

And yet in the Utah Mormon ward I grew up in and Utah Mormon seminary we were taught that "the Lord tempered the elements" to enable the pioneer settlements to survive.

Easy to say looking back over a hundred years when you need a faith promoting story.

You are correct. Mormon crickets are actually katydids. I have them in abundance this year.

The one about Joseph’s Myth and Bring’em Young destroying their faithful followers lives by sending them on overseas missions so they could stay behind and play hide the sausage in their wives and teenage daughters!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/05/2023 02:20PM by schrodingerscat.

Yet again, it’s the men you portray as the victims. It’s the poor men who had their lives destroyed. The women only get referenced in their relationship to men (wives and daughters). They aren’t accorded the dignity of being recognized as Mormons, or as victims of JS.

I posted this once before. When I was attending youth conference in Provo, one of the teachers said that the U.S. patent office was about to shut down in the early 1800s because nothing else could possibly be invented. Then Joseph Smith had his vision with the heavens opening. The patent office stayed opened because, thanks to Joseph Smith restoring the gospel, inventions started happening again.

One of my bishops gave many weepy testimonies about being assisted by the three Nephites.

On my first trip to the temple to do baptisms for the dead the youth were told the story of a young man who traveled in a bus with his youth group to the temple. He was really rowdy in the bus on the way to the temple but really quiet on the way back. When asked why he was so quiet he said he saw people on the other side of the veil looking down on him when he was dunked.

*LOL* I once went to a youth conference at BYU in Provo. I got to stay overnight in a dorm. It generally sucked.

...faith-promoting rumor was the butter battle between the wives of two higherups in the church that forced dissension. The reason I like the story has nothing to do with whether it was true (it wasn't) or its consequences (the two families did leave the church but for very different reasons) but rather the fact that a children's book for kindergarteners was written based on this rumor and that that book, titled "The Butter Battle Book," was deemed sufficiently worthy(?) to be translated into braile by the Library of Congress back in the 1980s. (Fortunately, I never read the book, but I did read the actual story of what happened elsewhere on the Web).

Update: When researching this rumor (see below), I discovered that my memory about it was faulty. While "The Butter Battle" children's fiction may have been based very loosely on this story, it is clear that the rumor and truth were very different from that particular book. I do regret my error.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/06/2023 11:50AM by blindguy.

Salt Lake tabernacle
"The building’s acoustics allow a pin drop to be heard from 170 feet away. The unique design helped the Church achieve its goals of allowing a large congregation to hear the prophet and other Church leaders speak"
In my mind only a prophet of God could create such a building. So the church must be true.

I actually know a bit about building acoustics, and this story is a massive pile of horse hooey, Abravanel Hall, across the street from Temple Square, has outstanding acoustics. The Tabernacle is awful, and always has been. But yes, there is one spot toward the back, where you can hear a pin drop at the podium. Unfortunately, you can’t hear the pin drop anywhere else in the room. They never bother to point that out.

Is the Story about milk spoils what BlindGuy is referring to?

I don’t recall many details

By Common Consent/ Milk Strippings / Thomas B Marsh



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/05/2023 11:38PM by GNPE.

Yes. I have two links on this, one with the story and one with the actual truth.

First the story:

https://emp.byui.edu/satterfieldb/quotes/ThomasBMarsh.htm

And now the truth:

http://www.mormonthink.com/glossary/thomas-marsh.htm

(This is a full biography of Mr. Marsh that mentions the story in passing but does explain the full truth in several paragraphs before it lists the story and its source).



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/06/2023 11:45AM by blindguy.

My favorite is the fact that the whole seagulls and crickets story was fabricated. I don't know how long after the supposed incident occurred that the romantic signature Mormon story got its wings and legs. But I'd wager now that even some of the GA's believe the story.

cludgie Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> My favorite is the fact that the whole seagulls
> and crickets story was fabricated. I don't know
> how long after the supposed incident occurred that
> the romantic signature Mormon story got its wings
> and legs. But I'd wager now that even some of the
> GA's believe the story.


So in effect you're suggesting - saying that some of the GAs are GULLIBLE (?)

WHO KNEW????

And then some guy (NNN) fabricated his personal temple recommended (bar codes too) and managed to record everything that happens in the silly, strange and bizarre rituals called the endowment session.

messygoop Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> And then some guy (NNN) fabricated his personal
> temple recommended (bar codes too) and managed to
> record everything that happens in the silly,
> strange and bizarre rituals called the endowment
> session.

I thought New Name Noah borrowed his temple recommend from a disaffected friend?

I don't think this was wide spread but in our stake the story went around about a young priest who was a little wild and while partying with friends raised his arm to the square with a beer in hand and said the sacrament blessing on it and his arm immediately shriveled up and stayed shriveled.

Such a story might have tempered my masturbatory habits!!!!

Similar story. Some drunk elder gave the priesthood to a lamp pole and was struck by lightning.

The holy prophet Joseph Smith in the Articles of Faith wrote "... we believe all things ..."

There are stories about Ouija boards pinning people to walls, or spelling out the time of someone’s death, or whatever.

You know, the teen equivalent of “there’s a monster hiding under my bed, but it can’t move as long as my foot doesn’t touch the floor.”

In the Fall of 1962, while at the U of U, I attended a party in Bountiful, and some Laurels were playing with a Ouija board in the finished basement.

A few minutes after the small group I was with entered the room, one of the girls announced that the Ouija board had stopped working.

Naturally, I told myself it was because the 'power' that runs Ouija boards doesn't work in the awesome presence of even The Aaronic Priesthood.

So they were calling on the spirits to reveal themselves and you showed up?

I'll bet that experience was shared around the campfire at one of those summer testimony meetings.

Back in the day, were Lamanites and Bigfoot confused?

"Back in the day?"

  
  

It was back in the 1980's that I heard this but it was something like computers were invented to help the church, a quote I remember was "you like our computers" meaning all computers on earth but they are here on earth specifically to help the church.

In the 1980s, many church manuals (especially targeted at the youth) used to have unprovable yarns about leather processing. Apparently, each hide treating vat needed to changed within a certain period of time or the animal skins would be ruined.

Big hocus pocus: the Mormon tannery owner discovered that he could shutter his tannery on Sunday to observe the glorious Sabbath and the skins would not be ruined as God blesses businesses that observe God's holy day.

Being curious as to where these modern-day miracles were occurring, I asked the SS teacher. He didn't know but suggested that it must be all over Utah.

Imagine my horror when my family's summertime vacation was announced: Utah!!!

I expected it to be a stinky smelly trip.

We drove the entire Morridor between Ogden and Provo and didn't encounter a single tannery making leather.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/12/2023 12:45PM by messygoop.

London, Paris, Istanbul, Rome, and Ogden.

It must have been an unforgettable vacation.

I heard a story where I think it was David O McKay and Heber J Grant and some other mucky-mucks were visiting Hawaii, and were at the crater of Kilauea volcano. They were standing on a rock ledge just inside the crater.

They felt impressed to get off the ledge, and just after they did, it broke off and fell into the crater. I guess the point is even when you do stupid stuff, God will protect you.

That was in some book I read. Yes, it was a standard FPR for a long time.