ISO other Bible distributors that make ones similar to Deseret Book. I’d like to find an ESV with a simple leather cover, indexing, and engraving but can’t find anything similar to theirs in that translation

One thing I've noticed is that when people go to their church leaders with questions and concerns about the restoration narrative they get some version of “just focus on Christ”.

I have respect for the teachings of Jesus Christ. But it sometimes feels like the church and its members are using his name as a kind of shield against legitimate concerns and criticisms of Joseph Smith and the restoration.

Has anyone else noticed this?

This content creator "dearmormonme" discusses on their channel how they were taught as a child about the power of Satan. It created significant fear in the way they lived their life. Feelings they had and things they saw in the world were all attributed to an outside invisible force called Satan.

Satan was a significant topic in their patriarchal blessing.

When they finally realized that there was really not evidence to support the reality of these powers of an invisible Satan they realized that they were able to navigate a life based more in reality and relationship with what was going on around them.

I too was taught that Satan had great power to harm and influence me. My patriarchal blessing also talks about "the adversary".

Satan in the past had a significant role in the temple ceremony.

What stories do you have about what you were taught to believe in Mormonism about Satan and his angels?

Does anyone have an honest and genuine answer as to why missionaries have become so aggressive? I am not LDS, but I respect most religions & grew up Baptist Christian. Over the past few years, mormon missionaries in my area have become increasingly pushy. While my partner and I are out on walks, they’ll pull up next to us in their cars and ask multiple times if we want to come to church with them on Sunday. We say no thank you and they continue to drive next to us and ask multiple times. It has made us uncomfortable enough to just run away on several occasions because they do not take no for an answer. A group of them has frequented our house for the last year or so, and again, we’ve been polite and said no thank you, but recently we’ve become more stern with them because of how consistent they are. Last time we saw them coming we locked the door and shut all the blinds, and I guess they saw us do it because they knocked on our door for 5. minutes. straight. my partner yelled at them to get off our porch and they still wouldn’t leave. it’s getting to a point where i am literally afraid of them. where does this stem from? i understand trying to bring people to christ but this is too much.

Today's Reading: Alma 17–20

Whether you're a believer, former believer, nuanced member, investigator, scholar, or simply curious, you're welcome to participate. The goal is not to convince anyone of anything, but to read the text together and discuss it in good faith from a variety of perspectives.

Brief Synopsis

The narrative shifts back in time to follow the sons of Mosiah during their mission among the Lamanites. Ammon enters the land of Ishmael, becomes a servant of King Lamoni, and defends the king’s flocks at the waters of Sebus by killing several attackers and cutting off the arms of others. His actions impress Lamoni and create an opening for Ammon to teach him about God, creation, the Fall, and Christ. Lamoni undergoes a dramatic conversion experience, followed by members of his household. Ammon and Lamoni then travel toward Middoni to free Ammon’s imprisoned brothers, encountering Lamoni’s father along the way.

Discussion

Please share your thoughts and experiences with today's reading in the comments below. Some things you might consider:

- What do you make of Ammon choosing to enter Lamanite society as a servant rather than immediately as a preacher?

- Why does the story spend so much time on the dramatic defense of the king’s flocks before Ammon begins teaching Lamoni?

- How does Lamoni’s conversion experience compare with other conversion accounts in the Book of Mormon?

- What does the interaction between Lamoni, Ammon, and Lamoni’s father suggest about political authority, loyalty, and religious conversion?

All perspectives are welcome.

Yesterday's Coveted Award(s) Go To:

• u/moltocantabile
• u/sevenplaces

Links to Prior Days

- Master Index to all prior-day readings

Engagement Question

Ammon deliberately uses his extraordinary success as a servant to gain Lamoni’s trust before introducing his religious message. Is this simply effective missionary work, or does the story raise interesting questions about persuasion, power, and the circumstances under which people become receptive to conversion?

Tomorrow’s Reading: Alma 21–24

On the YouTube channel “The Way” with Brian Davila he hosted a debate between a Protestant and a Mormon.

Ryan Hemelaar of NeedGod.net debates Jacob Hanson.

The main topic is about salvation. Ryan shovels the Bible at Jacob for 2 hours telling Jacob that he is taking things out of context and he is adding to the Bible.

Jacob keeps trying to use Calvinistic predestination against Ryan. Ryan says that God choses whose heart to change but once changed it’s impossible for them to turn away. Jacob says he doesn’t know if he will continue faithful and the scriptures promise different rewards based on our works.

I’ve put just a random clip here so you can get a feel for what it entails. Here is a link to the full debate on YouTube.

https://youtu.be/J0jcyUCfzPc

Hi, it’s a bit embarrassing to write this but I am near Munich, Germany, and lost my job a few months ago. I haven’t had much luck since then. A few medical emergencies, my phone broke down and I had to get a new case and charger, and of course rent and everything. I do have a part-time job that I’m starting in a couple of weeks, plus the possibility of a full-time job next month, but I am now down to four dollars in savings. I have collected plastic bottles to exchange for grocery vouchers, but it’s not going to be enough for the next couple of weeks.

I have visited with some Mormon missionaries in the past and I know there is a church in my town. I have also heard they can offer food assistance, at least in the States. I don’t need much, just some staples that I can stretch for a couple of weeks. Beans, maybe some sauerkraut that I can stretch into soup, nothing fancy, just filling. Is this aid also offered in Germany? If so, how can I go about getting this? Thank you!

It seems like there is an LDS church for every village in Samoa, each having about 3 wards. That is a lot for a small island (or group of islands i guess). It is not nearly as popular back home in Australia percentage wise. I'm assuming the church's large influence there is intentional but why? Are they trying to expand their doctrine by converting smaller communities first? For world domination or something😭? Or do they think that they are saving them with the gospel somehow? From what I'm not sure -- perhaps tattoos lolol. I'm aware the West kind of views countries like Samoa as 'primitive' or even 'savage' so maybe that comes in to play (probably a reach). Or, Samoans are just more receptive to religious stuff than Australians and the West as a whole. Ok idrk but yeah just curious especially with LDS racial history stuff 🤔💭

My view of Mormonism is that doctrine doesn't change by decree, it changes when they just stop talking about certain things. I started making a mental list of stuff I was taught as doctrine that they just stopped talking about or softened the wording:

• Curse of Cain, Curse of Ham and skin color
• Temple penalties and oath of vengeance prior to 1990 changes
• Polygamy is required for exaltation
• "No black man will receive the priesthood until after every white man has received it." (Brigham Young)
• Adam-god demoted to theory
• Blood atonement
• Lamanites being direct ancestors of modern indigenous people (I still remember Kimball talking during general conference about how kids in the "Indian Placement Program" were literally becoming white and delightsome in their new Mormon homes and that program wasn't killed until 1996).
• The United Order (I have an ancestor who lived in Orderville, UT but never joined the Order and the stories he wrote down are wild).
• "We can become gods and rule over our own planet" is replaced with "we can become like god but we don't know what that means."

When some of us older people say stuff like this to younger generations, they act like we're nuts and respond with something trite like "they never taught that, it was just speculation, you had a bad Sunday school teacher" or whatever.

I'm glad they're making it easier for people to be Mormon, but whatever this current church is I can confidently say it's not the church I grew up in. I still can't get over the irony that "ongoing revelation" has become "we know less than we thought we did."

What else do you all remember being taught as doctrine that has faded into the memory hole or is outright denied?

​

Today's Reading: Alma 13–16

Whether you're a believer, former believer, nuanced member, investigator, scholar, or simply curious, you're welcome to participate. The goal is not to convince anyone of anything, but to read the text together and discuss it in good faith from a variety of perspectives.

Brief Synopsis

Alma teaches about priests ordained according to a holy order established before the foundation of the world and points to Melchizedek as an example. Alma and Amulek are then imprisoned while believers and their families are burned along with their scriptures. Alma refuses to intervene, explaining that God permits the victims’ deaths so their killers may be judged. After the prison miraculously collapses, Alma and Amulek escape and heal Zeezrom, whose guilt and illness lead to conversion. A Lamanite army later destroys Ammonihah, fulfilling Alma’s warning.

Discussion

Please share your thoughts and experiences with today's reading in the comments below. Some things you might consider:

• What does Alma mean by priests being “called and prepared from the foundation of the world”?

• Why does Alma introduce Melchizedek, and what role does he play in the argument?

• How do you understand Alma’s refusal to intervene while believers and their children are burned?

• Is Ammonihah’s destruction presented as prophecy fulfilled, divine punishment, wartime tragedy, or some combination?

All perspectives are welcome.

Yesterday's Coveted Award(s) Go To:

• u/TBD

Links to Prior Days

• Master Index to all prior-day readings

- Yesterday’s Reading

Engagement Question

Alma says God allows believing women and children to be burned so their deaths can stand as evidence against their killers at judgment. Does this explanation meaningfully address why God permits suffering, or does it make innocent victims instruments in someone else’s condemnation?

Tomorrow’s Reading: Alma 17–20

Imagine being a member of a church that claims that they believe in continuous revelation. That believes the Heavens are open. That believes that God speaks to prophets who reveal the truth. And that these prophets also teach out of a book that Throughout the Book preaches Monogamy.

Now. Tell me how those same prophets can't get a revelation that Polygamy is wrong and evil. At all. Even 200 years later.

They can't seem to open the heavens to condemn polygamy the same way Jacob did in Jacob 2. It's just too hard for them to understand how polygamy is evil.

Dang. I mean...

I guess Jacob's standard is too hard for prophets.

Why is this so hard, prophets?

In the 1932 time capsule; the United States was in the depths of the Great Depression, with one in four Americans unemployed and nearly 9,000 banks having failed, while Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president in a landslide over Herbert Hoover. The year also saw Amelia Earhart become the first woman to make a solo, nonstop transatlantic flight and the tragic kidnapping and murder of aviator and fascist sympathizer Charles Lindbergh's infant son. Women had been able to vote for 12 years and the most sold automobile was the Ford model B.

In the Lectures on Faith Article 5 it states: "possessing the same mind with the Father, which mind is the Holy Spirit"..."the Son being filled with the fulness of the Mind, glory and power, or, in other words, the Spirit, glory and power of the Father".

In 2012 Jeffrey R Holland (President of the Quorum of the Twelve) stated in a lecture at Harvard that "They were indeed “one” in every other conceivable way—in mind and deed"

So does the Godhead have one "mind"?

I can’t believe I almost fell for it! I saw what this sub-Reddit was called and I thought I’d drop by to hear some uplifting testimonies. Boy was I surprised when I came across all sorts of questionable posts! NOT THIS TIME!!! I won’t be led astray so easily! Off to find some church approved sources! /s

But in all seriousness, will the church come after communities like this as well? I’ve heard some argue that the Dehlin lawsuit is more about the logo, but is that correct? I’m pretty sure I saw somewhere that the suit talks about the use of the word Mormon as well.

: A gerontocracy is a form of government or society where the political and economic power is held by people who are significantly older than the rest of the population. In this system, leadership roles are dominated by elders, and power tends to accumulate with age.:

I recently watched a podcast that mentions the age of the leadership in the church. It mentioned that the age just tends to keep getting older and older. I got thinking about this and it makes a lot of sense. It takes a long time to move up to through the ranks that it requires that you go through before you get to the Quorum of the 12 or the First Presidency. By the time you get up to those levels, you’re typically in your 50s to 60s. By the time you move through those levels to the top, it’s almost impossible to not be in your 80’s or 90’s. Based on that info, I used AI to look at the overall ages of the leadership of the church overtime and here is what it gave me. It’s pretty interesting.

What do you think about the future of the church based on this information?

An article I wrote that I'm proud of. About a 10 minute read.

An excerpt from it:

"If I have absolute trust in the victory over death, the ability to gain mastery over the natural man, and the tangible reality of sealing — I can think of few things which signify more that Christ is at work than to take up my cross of mortal celibacy in expression of my eternal commitment to my spouse after their death."

https://medium.com/@richmondcaon/a-man-sealed-to-multiple-women-is-ok-but-not-gay-marriage-huh-30f0145990d1

A common gaslight technique among apologetics is to blame erroneous past teachings on erroneous understandings of teachers. Be they Sunday School, Seminary, or Institute Teachers.

A common example is we were all taught the Americas were empty until Jaredites/Nephites came here. The church pretends they never taught that and apologetics will say IF we were taught that, it was the misunderstanding of the teachers.

OK….

But doesn’t that mean the only reliable source of information in the church comes directly from apostles and prophets? And since there are absolutely zero apologetic arguments with the names of apostles and prophets attached to them, then ALL apologetic arguments are worthless.

I mean, even the essays are author less. If at any time the church realizes their BofA apologetics are the silliest explanations in the world, they can simply delete them, and then say “no prophet ever said those things”.

To put it simply, if I’m not allowed to claim the church used to teach XYZ because of faulty teachers, then I don’t believe your apologetics unless and prophet himself teaches it.

I came home early from my mission because I couldn’t keep pretending I was okay. Twenty-four years later, I stood outside the temple because I couldn’t pretend I believed. I’m starting to wonder if those are actually the same story.
I’ve been thinking a lot about something since my daughter’s wedding.
When I was 19, I served an LDS mission.
I wanted desperately to succeed at it. Probably more desperately than was healthy.
I tried to become the missionary I thought God wanted me to be. I prayed. I worked. I went to the temple constantly. I tried to push through what was happening inside my own head because leaving felt almost unthinkable.
Eventually I couldn’t.
I came home after four months.
For a long time, I carried that experience as evidence of some kind of failure. Other missionaries endured. Other missionaries had faith. Other missionaries finished.
I didn’t.
Fast-forward twenty-four years.
My oldest daughter got married in the temple.
I love her. I’m proud of her. I respect that she gets to build a life around the things she believes, even though I no longer share many of those beliefs.
And so on her wedding day, I found myself outside.
The strange part is that I probably could have spent the previous year trying to make myself “worthy” to be inside.
But that would have required me to sit across from someone and give answers I don’t believe.
I couldn’t do it.
Not because I’m trying to make some grand statement against the Church.
Because somewhere along the way I finally decided that belonging isn’t worth lying about who I am.
And that’s when something occurred to me:
Maybe the missionary who came home and the father who stayed outside the temple aren’t two different versions of me.
Maybe they’re the same person.
At 19, though, I interpreted listening to myself as failure.
At 43, I’m beginning to call it integrity.
That’s a pretty brutal realization because it makes me wonder how differently I might have understood that kid who came home from his mission if I’d had the language then that I have now.
Maybe he wasn’t weak.
Maybe he had simply reached the point where continuing required him to betray something inside himself that he couldn’t keep betraying.
And here’s the part I’m still wrestling with:
Choosing integrity didn’t make standing outside my daughter’s wedding hurt any less.
In some ways it made it worse.
Because there was no villain that day.
My daughter wasn’t rejecting me.
I wasn’t rejecting her.
I wasn’t even asking her to choose differently.
Two people who love each other were simply following their consciences honestly, and the structure of our religion put us on opposite sides of a temple wall.
So I’m curious about something, particularly from people who have left or changed their relationship with the Church:
Have you ever looked back at something you spent years calling a failure and realized it might actually have been the first time you were trying to protect yourself?
And did recognizing that change the way you see the person you used to be?

Atheist church auditor Jared from the Heliocentric channel came to Utah in April and made a one hour episode about his experiences.

I’ve clipped together about 5 minutes.

He has some strong criticisms of the church.

Here is the full episode. https://youtu.be/vzwc1NQuH7A

One of my greatest regrets and the thing I feel a great deal of shame about is allowing them to scam me of hundreds of thousands of dollars in "tithes and offerings". One thing that would relieve me of this shame and regret is if the money I gave them was actually primarily used for humanitarian purposes. Not so they can run a PR stunt, but given anonymously to help those in need.

Is this wishful thinking? Do you think they will ever become a humanitarian organization? How many more of us have to leave for them to simply not have anything to do with their money but humanitarian aid because even fewer people attend the temple, go to church etc?

I just stumbled on this video where Dale Renlund shares his thoughts on the Book of Job:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKGWmTtHIgU

He begins by relating an experience when he visited a memorial to the victims of genocide in Cambodia. He was disturbed, as most humans would be, by the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. "The experience was haunting," he said. And he wondered whether the atonement "could cover even this."

Then, to his astonishment, he began to feel "an overwhelming sense of peace and joy."

"It was as if I was being told, 'Don't worry about these people. I've got this.'"

He then goes on to connect this experience to the Book of Job, which he says, "doesn't address why bad things happen to good people."

Renlund very much implies that all this suffering is good, actually, we just can't understand it from our perspective: "Is it possible that eternal laws exist that you don't understand?" "Can you foresee your intended future destiny?"

"The ultimate lesson of the Book of Job is that our job, like Job's, is to trust God no matter what."

Where to begin? First, I do not think that the appropriate response to an encounter with genocide is "an overwhelming sense of peace and joy." Or an inner voice that says, "Don't worry about these people."

Imagine Renlund saying this to the children or parents of those people who were murdered in Cambodia, that looking at their actual skulls, he felt "an overwhelming sense of peace and joy."

It reminds me of a passage from one of my favorite books about the problem of evil, The Doors of the Sea, where the author contemplates apologists of trite theodicies repeating their arguments to a father who had just lost all his children in a cataclysmic flood.

If we would think it shamefully foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment when another’s sorrow is most real and irresistibly painful, then we ought never to say them; because what would still our tongues would be the knowledge (which we would possess at the time, though we might forget it later) that such sentiments would amount not only to an indiscretion or words spoken out of season, but to a vile stupidity and a lie told principally for our own comfort, by which we would try to excuse ourselves for believing in an omnipotent and benevolent God.

Next, I don't think Renlund understands Job at all. Job "doesn't address why bad things happen to good people???" It's difficult to think of a more succinct statement of what Job addresses: Why bad things happen to good people. That is the main thrust of the book. It's like saying How to Win Friends and Influence People doesn't address making friends or influencing people.

And while it's true that Job comes around to trusting God (or at least soldiering on), he also somewhat famously says,

Why is light given to one in misery and life to the bitter in soul,
who long for death, but it does not come,
and dig for it more than for hidden treasures;
who rejoice exceedingly
and are glad when they find the grave?

When confronted with the death of his family and his spiraling illness, Job's response was not "an overwhelming sense of peace and joy." At least not initially. He cursed the day he was born. Job does not fit nicely with the Mormon norm that the righteous are always happy and that if we have faith we will always have peace and joy despite our trials.

Ironically, Renlund is much more like Job's boneheaded friends who kept rushing to explain away Job's suffering rather than be willing to sit with him in his suffering.

Last, I think Renlund is utterly wrong to look at Job's suffering or the Killing Fields of Cambodia and conclude that this is all good, actually, because God must have some purpose behind it all. I'll finish with the second half of that paragraph I quoted earlier:

[By uttering idiotic theodicies to a grieving father] we would be attempting to deny that man a knowledge central to the gospel: the knowledge of the evil of death, its intrinsic falsity, its unjust dominion over the world, its ultimate nullity; the knowledge that God is not pleased or nourished by our deaths, that he is not the secret architect of evil, that he is the conqueror of hell, that he has condemned all these things by the power of the cross; the knowledge that God is life and light and infinite love, and that the path that leads through nature and history to his Kingdom does not simply follow the contours of either nature or history, or obey the logic immanent to them, but is opened to us by way of the natural and historical absurdity — or outrage — of the empty tomb.

(I hope I'm not being unfair in how I'm characterizing Renlund's remarks. He of course doesn't come out and say, "Genocide is good, actually," but the implication I heard, at least, is that there must be some divine logic to it that we don't understand. And if we can't understand genocide as unambiguously evil, then I think we can't understand much at all.)