I would accept old East German aluminum coinage over the BoM.
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Just how many well-known actors were raised Mormon? It's always fascinating to read about them. All I remember off-hand is Aaron Eckhart, who even went on a mission to France. (Eventually, he became a cigar aficionado.) But I used to know several names.
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This is neither here nor there, but remember how church regional rep R. Dean Udy went to prison for affinity fraud? I believe he even died in prison. Anyway, that should have tipped smarter people off. But the church, as you might guess, just quietly disciplined him, and stuck another body in the position.
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Yeah, but I smell the usual Mormon hero-making, grand stories that may not have been -- and often weren't -- real. The thing I'll always remember about him is his 1890 "manifesto" on the abandonment of polygamy, and how he then took another polygamous wife in 1897. Hmm. Is this why the church had to publish a "we really mean it this time" Second Manifesto in 1904? One might we
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At the end of his life, Monson's dementia was real bad, according to scuttlebutt. Some said he had "elder rage," where an elderly person with dementia will scream and yell at people. And if you know any people with dementia, you've doubtless seen how some of them will talk openly about inappropriate stuff that is very personal and damaging, things that no sane person would divulge. Duri
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When I was placed in a Mormon foster family after my parents died, I was pushed by force into the scouts doing the old Explorers program. I thoroughly hated it, and it brought no good memories. One of the Explorer advisors -- my own foster father -- would sometimes physically abuse me. On one of our trips, he'd single me out each and every day. Once when I asked him to quit, he punched me full in
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But did you grope anyone today? Vape, maybe?
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Believe it or not, doTerra found its way to my UU congregation in Augusta, GA, where one of my friends there began hawking it. She told me that, thanks to one of the oils, or whaterverthehell, she was able to quit taking her Type-2 diabetes medications. Surprised me, that. I told her straight up that she should not have done that, and to get back on her medications ASAP.
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As was the usual case at BYU in the 1960's and 1970's, we married too young. I dropped out of school, got a loser job in SLC, was always broke, and finally went to my awful hometown in the middle of the Mojave desert and got a job at the mine. Best short-term choice I ever made. After that I joined the military and stayed for 21 years, before retirement and finding a job in Civil Service, where I
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We readers of the NT all know how Jebus loved attorneys and lawyers. The church did what Jebus would have done, i.e. call in His lawyers from Kirton McConkie. Praise God.
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Where's the part where they're BAKED?
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My oldest daughter, who is 47 and had never been married, married a lovable divorced LDS guy in his early fifties. His parents just drove from Utah to Washington to visit, and, although we had met them once at the wedding, we were invited over to all have dinner together. All I knew in advance was that she was the stronger one in the marriage, and was extremely outspoken, far right-wing, and beli
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Kinshasa, DR Congo, has a distribution center on one of their main "streets." The garments are heavily subsidized so that they are in financial reach of the locals. (On a lighter side, garments are a hit in places like DRC because the population has heavy belief in magical thinking. These are people who were killing each other when I arrived in 2005 for the notion that some personal
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What's going to be Lee's judgement by God for all the illegal financial stuff?
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I went to the Italian LTM in Allen Hall (once a dorm, located on the corner of 700N and 100E), and at some point was grilled over and over again by a guy who helped run the class, but who had no authority. He didn't seem to be armed with any facts, but was threatening me -- and I assume others -- with how I would be thrown out if anything came up. Interestingly enough, we had one missionary wh
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Per chance my nephew?
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I noticed the article mentions wilderness discipline camps, normally where a person of means (the camps can be very expensive) puts a rebellious child to have his or her bad ways strong-armed out of them. I know that the method has proven largely worthless, and most people today wouldn't do this to their kid. In fact, I think that it's illegal in some states, but Utah keeps holding onto the belie
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I don't think she *chose* me. I left out huge parts. During 1969 Christmas break, she had a bad vaginal infection, and went to the doctor. He explained that since she had been having lots of sex, she had that common infection that some women get after marriage. He -- quite unethically -- told her mother. My wife was, of course, mortified and horrified that her mother knew. So when the guy came to
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How many elders quorum lessons have you endured where some hapless moron insists that polygamy will be re-instated in the "Second Coming" by none other than Jebus himself?
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Absolutely not. Since the end of slavery, Southerners and right-wing, racist people of all sorts have tried to inflict a second form of slavery on the Blacks, whether sharecropping, Jim Crow, or wholesale arrest of Black men and lending them out to farmers and others, chain gangs, etc. Whatever comes and goes, they come up with new ways. But locking up Black men whenever they can find a flimsy re
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Well, again I will cite my über-Mormon sister, whom I mentioned in another thread. She says casually racist things about Black people whenever there is discussion that feature. She's clueless about casual racism, and is so high on herself, that she really believes that she couldn't be saying anything racist. "why," she begins, "we have a Black sister in the Relief Society!" I
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I'm tired of angry people identifying me as angry, and telling me that I need to quit being angry. But we all react to life's great jollies in different ways. I have a son with brain cancer, and another son who has lost his teaching position, as well as an über-Mormon sister (my only living sibling) who says rude and careless things about my abilities to judge now that I have left the church. Ye
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I think that the appeal to the youth and the potential appeal to non-Mormons, plus the ability to recruit man-on-the-street to become new members are now completely failed and beyond the ken of the "leaders" (such as they are). Their horse has escaped the paddock, as it were, and is now somewhere over the horizon. They are proving to be just plain old men who may not even have the techn
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But don't you miss the days of the crotchless long-john "ordinance garments" you had to wear if you were "endowed" and in the temple. I always wore briefs over them to hide the pubic area, which could be so visible at times. I had to wear them even while baptising the youth when they were doing that silly and culty"baptising the dead" ritual. Boy, that was a treat to
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The church's charitable work will only be as successful as Church News photographers make it.
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I've told this before here on the phorum, even if long before. This whole subject makes me feel a bit queasy. When I was a recently returned missionary at BYU making plans to marry, I found that my wife-to-be had been having sex with other guys at BYU just to see what she was, or had been, missing. The blow was devastating . We re-started our relationship again from the beginning, taking up too m
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Do NOT travel to Italy if you're not willing to order "un caf-FEE" at a bar or in your hotel. "Coffee" is expressed coffee, or as we know it, espresso, a concentrated punch of naturally sweet and oily coffee served in a tiny demitasse. Add a wee bit of sugar and a spot of creamed milk, and you got yourself a brew from heaven. But never order a second one; that's s really bad f
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If one had access to the Church Handbook of Instructions (the most sacred work of the Mormon church), one would notice that the church never addressed cremation as bad or damning. There were only protocols with how to arrange burials versus arranging cremations. Pretty much all we learnt in classes about the evils of cremation were merely passed on by people who believed that the church was again
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I love that explanation. Brambles! Brambles are the explanation about why we're related to the great apes and other primates, but do not descend from them. It's significantly difficult to explain the brambles to one who thinks that Darwin was telling us that humans descend from apes and monkeys. * *Not really applicable, but because I am pedantic, I plead, please don't get apes confused with m
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A friend is a friend no matter the details of his or her religion. Last Saturday I went to the funeral of a friend and well-known nice guy who was a pillar of our greater community. His passing was sad and unexpected. It was a great funeral as far as LDS funerals go, and I was sad for all the non-LDS attendees who had to endure the Gabby religious stuff, like testimonies and other bullshit. Howev
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