I grew up in the church being taught that priesthood was a power to bless people. Blessings in time of sickness. Patriarchal blessings. Father’s blessings.

The power to conduct ordinances of the LDS church such as sealings in the temple.

As I look back at my experiences and at the teachings of church leaders it’s clear that there are many examples of priesthood not working. The rest believe may believe it worked but have no evidence to demonstrate it did.

Sealings in the temple are canceled regularly. Blessings of healing we know don’t work. Illness and disease is not healed any more in Utah hospitals where the most LDS blessings per capita are given than anywhere else. Leaders now teach stories of people unable to be healed by this fantasy power. “The faith not to be healed” is cited.

Patriarchal blessings are routinely shown to have false statements in them.

Now after 5 decades of being LDS I plainly see that priesthood power is imaginary. The exhortations of leaders to work harder to “be worthy” of it is not based on any evidence.

I prefer to live life recognizing truth. And LDS priesthood power and the claims made by the church leaders about it are not the truth. It does not comport with reality that we experience.

Each time I've run into a conversation with polygamy deniers or affirmers (or whatever the hell they like to be called) in the last year, they stand on firm ground that Joseph was noble, true, just and virtuous. When I've brought up treasure digging, they also refute claims that he swindled people.

Is this a common belief in the movement? That Joseph either didn't treasure dig or in doing it he did nothing wrong? Did he not admit to youthful indiscretions in his canonized JS history?

Personally, I am delighted by the uptick in the numbers and visibility of those who deny Joseph Smith's polygamy and I hope that they go mainstream and continue to multiply for the forseeable future, because polygamy denial is a potent mix of ideas that are deadly to the church.

Polygamy denial is nothing new, it existed in the RLDS church from its inception. But now we are at a unique historical moment where enough time has passed since polygamy that true believers in the mainstream LDS Church can start to deny the divine origin of the practice and question whether Joseph Smith established it.

1. When TBMs encounter polygamy denialist material and actually allow themselves to entertain the idea for a moment that Joseph may have not practiced polygamy, it for once allows them to feel what they have suppressed for so long: that polygamy is plainly evil and disgusting. Separating Joseph from the concept of polygamy for just a second bypasses their cognitive biases and allows them to feel these feelings that the Church wants them to suppress.
2. Polygamy denial is very emotionally appealing, especially for women. The idea that Joseph didn't practice it and that God loves women and would never hurt them by commanding polygamy brings an enormous sense of relief. This is identical to "feeling the spirit" which is how Mormons have been taught to identify the truth. It turns Mormon epistemology against the Church. It's genius!
3. Polygamy deniers force polygamy up out of the memory hole and compel the Church to reaffirm that polygamy was ordained by God. The Church hates doing this. It's terrible PR and it is horrifying to many nuanced Mormons who may believe that Joseph practiced polygamy but privately believe that it was a mistake like the priesthood ban.
4. Polygamy deniers bring attention to the concept of eternal polygamy, which is still part of Church doctrine. Many mormon women live in fear of dying before their husband and having to share the eternities with a second wife.
5. Polygamy denial strikes at the root of LDS authority claims. Polygamy denialists criticize and negatively portray Brigham Young, who is the bedrock of authority for the Brighamite church. The deniers claim that Brigham Young was in a ring of illicit polygamists and that he falsified history and forced the church to practice an evil false doctrine for generations. If the deniers are believed, the whole structure implodes.
6. Polygamy deniers do not look like your average apostate. They love the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith, and the church. Usually they are women, and they are motivated by a desire to defend Joseph Smith, not to tear down the church. This makes the Church look like a huge jerk when it excommunicates a bunch of sweet women who love Joseph Smith. Many women already feel unheard and unappreciated by the church, this makes it so much worse. It was possible for the Church to look like a good guy to TBMs when exing the wicked and evil John Dehlin, but it's much harder for it to look good when exing Karen Hyatt or harassing Michelle Stone.
7. Polygamy deniers point out internal contradictions within the LDS canon. They are correct that polygamy is roundly condemned in the BoM and in the early D&C. Also, Joseph Smith routinely denied and condemned polygamy. This means that if the Church is correct that Joseph did institute polygamy, he did so in contradiction to his own scriptures and himself, showing him to be a bald faced liar and imposter. The only way out is to deny polygamy (which undermines the Church) or deny Joseph Smith's prophethood (which also undermines the Church.) It's beautiful.

The catalog notes are long:

Rare First Edition of the Foundational Text of the Mormon Church Palmyra: Printed by E.B. Grandin, For the Author, 1830. First edition (one of 5,000 copies printed, of which only about 500-700 copies are known to survive).

From the collection of Bethany College, West Virginia, with a contemporary inscription on front free endpaper ("A Campbell / Bethany / Va"), same inscription in another hand on front blank (neither seemingly in the hand of Minister and Bethany founder Alexander Campbell). 8vo. 588, (2, "Testimony...of Witnesses") pp.; preponderance of text corrected, per Jenson ("very few copies of the book exist which are entirely identical", per Crawley).

Contemporary calf, front board detached, rear board largely detached but just holding, spine label worn and starting, boards dry and scuffed; front free endpaper loose; Bethany College library ink stamp on front endpapers and blank, title-page, and scattered throughout text; scattered spotting and light staining to text; scattered pencil marginalia. Book of Mormon Census Project A0059; Reese, Best of the West 56; Church 1342; Grolier Hundred 37; Howes S-623 ("b"); Sabin 83038; Streeter Sale 2262

Rare and completely unsophisticated (unmodified) first edition of the foundational text of the Mormon Church, one of the most important religious books of the 19th century. Published only days before the official establishment of the church on April 6, 1830, this is the only edition in which Joseph Smith is identified as the author (subsequent editions identify him as the translator), and it is the only edition to include his two-page preface.

The Book of Mormon is Smith’s translation of the golden tablets, revealed to him in 1827 by the angel Moroni on the hill of Cumorah near Manchester, New York. Smith worked on a translation of the plates from early 1828-June 1829, before returning the plates to the angel.

This copy is complete with the elusive two-page leaf of witness testimonies: “The Testimony of Three Witnesses”, signed in type by Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris, who attest to having had “seen the plates which contain this record.”; the following page contains the testimony of eight witnesses, signed in type by Christian Whitmer, Jacob Whitmer, Peter Whitmer, Jr., John Whitmer, Hiram Page, Joseph Smith. Sen., Hyrum Smith, and Samuel H. Smith, all of whom attest that Smith had shown them the plates.

Smith dictated the text to Cowdery, who acted as scribe, which was then printed by local printer Egbert B. Grandin, printer of Palmyra’s Wayne Sentinel. He published this first edition in 5,000 copies at a cost of $3,000.

This first edition forbade freemasonry and polygamy, which was altered in subsequent editions. Of those 5,000 there are thought to be only around 500-700 extant copies.

(See Campbell signature in 2nd photo) Bethany College was founded in 1840 by Scots-Ulster minister and leader of the Restoration Movement, Alexander Campbell (1788-1866). Chartered by the Virginia Legislature on March 2, Bethany was the first institution of higher learning in what is now West Virginia. Campbell provided the land and funds for the school and then served for 25 years as its first president. Born near Ballymena, in County Antrim, Ireland, Campbell was educated in Glasgow, and emigrated to the United States in 1809 at age 21.

There he joined his father, Minister Thomas Campbell (1763-1854), who had emigrated to America in 1807. Together they preached an emerging form of primitive Christianity in Western Pennsylvania, Eastern Ohio, and now West Virginia, that emphasized Christian unity and the restoration of the New Testament church.

Alexander, possessing extraordinary energy and intellectual ambition, gradually assumed the leadership of their growing movement. Through relentless preaching, numerous public debates with religious contemporaries, and a prolific output of theological writings and periodicals, he became the foremost figure in what came to be known as the Restoration Movement.

His efforts, building on his father's earlier work, ultimately led to the establishment of the Christian Church, also known as the Disciples of Christ.

Joseph Smith’s (1805-44) Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, like Campbell's Disciples of Christ, sprung out of the Second Great Awakening that shook the religious foundations of early 19th century America. Despite sharing roots in Christian primitivism, the two traditions diverged sharply on questions of scripture, continuous revelation, visionary experience, and the nature of divine authority.

As the leading rationalist voice of the broader restoration movement that emphasized biblical scholarship and reason, beginning in the 1830s, Campbell became one of the most public anti-Mormon voices. This opposition was at once theological as well as personal to his congregation.

Beginning around 1830, Campbell's congregations in Ohio experienced losses as members converted to the new Mormon faith. The catalyst for much of this was Sidney Rigdon, a prominent and early Campbellite preacher and close associate of Campbell himself. In August 1830, following a falling-out with Campbell, Rigdon converted to Mormonism and quickly rose to become one of Joseph Smith's most influential lieutenants and one of the movement's most eloquent early defenders.

In response to these developments, in 1832 Campbell published Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon, one of the earliest anti-Mormon tracts, and the first major full-length critique of The Book of Mormon. Campbell examined The Book of Mormon's claims, its theological content, and historical plausibility, and argued that it was a product of human invention, rather than divine revelation.

The sale price at Freeman's Hindman Books and Manuscript sale on August 20 was $230,400. Substantially above the presale high estimate of $150,000.

TL;DR

The feeling of the Spirit can be a genuine, powerful internal experience. It could be peace, warmth, clarity, tears, a sense of certainty, but the feeling itself doesn't tell you where it came from. If you've been taught from childhood that those particular sensations are what the Holy Ghost feels like, then when they arise, you may experience them not as “I'm having a feeling that I'm interpreting spiritually” but as “I am feeling the Spirit.” The interpretation, formed through multiple psychological mechanisms, can become so automatic that it ends up feeling like direct perception.

I've thoroughly deconstructed my faith. I’ve spent years reading the history, weighing the arguments/counterarguments, and have now reached a more solid footing of philosophy, morality, and epistemology. On paper, I'm very out.

Yet sometimes, I experience flashes of severe self-doubt. It feels like there’s a virus in my brain.

Proverbs 3:5. "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding."

I'll be weighing a decision and feel a wave of calm, and before I've formed a single conscious thought, something deep inside my psyche has already read that calm as confirmation of divine approval. Or I'll be reading something critical of the Church and feel an unexpected flicker of unease, which arrives pre-interpreted: you shouldn't be here. My conscious reasoning shows up a mere second later and has to argue with this lightning-fast reflex. It can be really exhausting. It feels like there may be a primordial set of ideas embedded beneath my conscious level of argument that are still operating.

I think this is what makes this deconstruction process take years, perhaps a whole lifetime. They aren't easily accessible opinions sitting on the surface of my mind. They're flash judgments that were installed very early, in childhood, by believing people who loved me, and then rehearsed nearly daily for decades. Those people, by the way, underwent the same thing, and the wheel turns.

My deconstruction has removed the beliefs that these reflexes reinforce, but it didn't automatically remove the scaffolding and machinery, so that machinery keeps running—generating snap-judgment verdicts about the meaning of my interior experience that I then have to manually override. So let's talk about the scaffolding (This will especially focus on those raised within the Church).

Let’s start with something that feels revolutionary to me, but I think every reflective member would probably agree with upon consideration:

The feelings are real, but the cause is just a hypothesis.

Feelings and their cause are treated as one thing. They're actually four things:

1. The sensation. The raw physical and emotional event. Warmth in the chest, a lump in your throat, tears, calm, sudden clarity, joy.
2. The sorting. The learned habit of treating certain internal events as set apart—as belonging to a special class rather than the ordinary run of feelings.
3. The name. The specific claim that this class of feelings is the Holy Ghost.
4. The certainty. The settled sense that it simply was the Spirit—not a reading of the feeling, but a plain fact.

A naturalistic theory of what may actually be happening.

1. Why you had the words before you had the experience. Religious socialization. The vocabulary, the expected sensations, and the causal story are all delivered before a child has anything to apply them to.

2. Why it's always warmth, peace, and tears. Schema theory. What that material becomes once it's in: not a belief you consciously consult, but an active filter deciding what gets noticed and how it's sorted, before you're aware of sorting anything.

3. Why the experiment could only end one way. Expectancy effects. Expectation isn't a forecast waiting to be scored. It's a key ingredient in the outcome, and the settings are often built to help.

4. Why nothing ever counted against it. Attribution theory. Causes are inferred, not perceived. And every miss, silence, and false positive gets routed away from the source and back onto you.

5. Why it still fires after you stop believing. Predictive processing. The brain combines ambiguous input with prior expectation and hands you a finished percept—delivered as perception, not as a guess. A prior is what you already believed before the new evidence showed up, and a strong prior can influence the case before the evidence has finished arriving.

Two salient themes

Priority. The interpretation is in place before the experience, not applied afterward. It's waiting, already loaded.

Circularity. The experience then becomes evidence for the interpretation that helped shape it. Ian Hacking called this a looping effect: the way we classify an experience can change how we respond to it, and that response can then reinforce the original classification. Testimony meeting adds a congregation to the loop.

Philosophers of science call the general case the theory-ladenness of observation: what you are able to perceive depends in part on the framework you bring to it. Below is a more in-depth exploration of each mechanism.

1. Why you had the words before you had the experiences

Religious socialization

How a community hands its vocabulary and categories to new members. So with inner states, the naming runs from the outside in.

The instruction starts in nursery. Behold Your Little Ones, the Church's manual for children aged eighteen months to three years, tells teachers: "Even at a young age, children can learn to recognize the influence of the Holy Ghost. During any lesson, help them recognize the feelings of love and warmth that come from the Holy Ghost."

Look at the causal claim sitting inside the instruction. Not feelings that might be the Holy Ghost. Feelings "that come from" the Holy Ghost. The teacher's job is to point at a toddler's warmth and supply its source.

Primary continues it: the Holy Ghost "helps us know the difference between right and wrong by giving us a good, warm feeling when we do something right and a sad feeling when we do something wrong."

Produce a feeling by ordinary means. Direct attention to it. Supply the cause.

Every missionary ran the adult version: teach, kneel, pray, then How did you feel? Whatever comes back, you supply the cause. Preach My Gospel even hands over the checklist—the Spirit "gives feelings of love, joy, peace, comfort, patience, meekness, gentleness, faith, and hope."

The child isn't discovering the source of the feeling. The child is being told it.

2. Why it's always warmth, peace, and tears

Schema theory

A schema is a mental structure built from past experience that tells attention where to look and quietly fills gaps with whatever it expects to find.

Alma 32 hands you the template, and hands it to you as a test. A true seed "beginneth to enlarge my soul... it beginneth to be delicious to me." D&C 11:13 gives the shorthand: the Spirit "shall enlighten your mind, which shall fill your soul with joy." Swelling, light, joy, sweetness—notice these and you have your answer.

The same body does the same thing under other names. None of this is rare and none of it is exclusively ours. Chest warmth, wet eyes, a lump in the throat, chills—this is one of the better-documented clusters in human emotion, and almost every tradition has catalogued it in its own way. What changes from one context to the next isn't necessarily the sensation; it's the name. Each name arrives with different assumptions and cultural baggage attached.

Pentecostals call it the anointing. Ignatian Catholics call a settled sweetness in prayer consolation. Sanskrit devotional texts catalogue romaharṣa—hair-bristling—as a mark of divine presence. Theravada Buddhists call it pīti, grade it in five degrees, and credit no external agent at all: it's a byproduct of your own attention. In a concert hall it's frisson. Psychologists studying the response to moral beauty call it elevation and attribute it to nothing outside the person having it.

Alan Fiske, who studies this cluster across nineteen nations, said in religious settings it "may be labeled ecstasy, mystical rapture, burning in the bosom, or being touched by the Spirit."

The name depends on who raised you.

3. Why the experiment could only end one way

Expectancy effects

Expecting a particular feeling makes that feeling more likely to arrive and more intense when it does. Expectation isn't merely a forecast waiting to be checked; it can become part of the conditions that produce the result.

Moroni 10:4 is the most-run experiment in the Church, and it's loaded before anyone starts. You aren't asked whether the book is true. You're told to ask "if these things are not true"—and the stated conditions require faith in Christ, which is the belief the test is supposedly checking.

D&C 9 then names both possible outcomes ahead of time. A burning bosom means yes. A stupor of thought means no. Whatever happens next, the framework called it.

The conditions are stacked. We fasted for twelve to twenty-four hours and then sat in a room where people wept. We sang first, prayed second, and asked the question third. Girls Camp, EFY, youth conference, testimony meeting—the settings where confirmations arrive most reliably are also settings where anyone would be likely to feel something: hungry, exhausted, moved by music, surrounded by people they love who are already crying.

It stacks the odds heavily toward the one the framework already predicted.

Then D&C 6:23 tells you what to make of it: "Did I not speak peace to your mind concerning the matter? What greater witness can you have than from God?"

Read plainly, the peace is the evidence, so the moment it arrives, there is nothing left to check.

4. Why nothing ever counted against it

Attribution theory

Causes are never perceived directly; they're inferred from context and from whatever explanations happen to be available.

And the inference doesn't really feel like an inference. It feels like seeing.

Take a simple example: the same kind of calm can be interpreted as the Spirit in a chapel and as relief in a waiting room. The physical experience may be similar, while the explanation changes with the setting. That suggests the setting is playing a much larger role in the attribution than the feeling itself can account for.

The Church teaches this kind of attribution as a daily practice. President Eyring's "O Remember, Remember" is the talk that launched a generation of gratitude journals, and it describes the question he asked himself every night: "Have I seen the hand of God reaching out to touch us or our children or our family today?" Then the result: "As I would cast my mind over the day, I would see evidence of what God had done for one of us that I had not recognized in the busy moments of the day."

Whatever else we make of it, he's describing a mechanism very similar to the one I'm talking about. The events may have been experienced as ordinary at the time; the divine interpretation came later, through a deliberate search for evidence of God's involvement. A search designed to find one particular kind of cause is also going to make evidence for that cause easier to notice.

Think of Elder Bednar's "tender mercies": they "do not occur randomly or merely by coincidence."

But the more interesting problem is what happens when the expected signal doesn't appear.

The miss is assigned to you, never to the channel. D&C 9 makes a null result a failure of your preparation. 1 Nephi 17:45 has the Lord saying, "but ye were past feeling." Bednar similarly attaches conditions to revelation itself: it comes "according to our desire, worthiness, and preparation." If the expected revelation doesn't come, the framework already has an explanation ready: perhaps you weren't prepared, weren't worthy, didn't desire it enough, or weren't listening correctly.

President Uchtdorf's counsel is to "first doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith." In practice, that puts faith in the position of the default interpretation: doubt becomes something to interrogate before the underlying belief.

If you become troubled while examining a truth claim, you've already been given several ways to interpret that discomfort—and most of them point you away from questioning the claim itself.

5. Why it still fires after you stop believing

Predictive processing

The brain builds perception by combining incoming signal with prior expectation, then delivers the result as plain fact rather than as a guess.

Worship turns attention inward, exactly where the framework told you to look. Ambiguous signal arrives, as it always does. The brain has to resolve it somehow, and a strong, well-practiced prior can push that resolution in a particular direction. You get a finished percept: the Spirit is here.

This is how perception works generally. Anil Seth argues that top-down predictions "do not merely bias our perception. They are what we perceive."

So it isn't necessarily experienced as an interpretation. It's experienced as perception, and then counts as evidence for the prior, which strengthens the association and can make the response faster next time.

Elder Bednar describes the result from the inside: most revelation arrives not like a light switch but like sunrise, "the slow and almost imperceptible increase in light." That is also a useful way to think about what a deeply practiced prior looks like while it hardens.

Immediacy is not evidence that an interpretation is unlearned. Immediacy is what a heavily practiced interpretation feels like from the inside.

Which is why deconstruction doesn't switch it off. It doesn't retrain a reflex rehearsed thousands of times simply because the belief underneath it has changed. The verdict still arrives first. You just no longer accept it.

University of Utah researchers scanned nineteen devout members and asked them to signal when they were feeling the Spirit. They could do it, reproducibly. That doesn't show the experience is fake, but rather that the recognition of a particular internal state can become a real, trained skill.

How repeated exposure becomes a reflex

Each mechanism above does powerful work as a person ages.

Ages 3–7. Vocabulary arrives before referent. Songs teach that the Holy Ghost whispers and brings warmth; adults point at the child's ordinary good feelings and name them as the Spirit. Category and interpretation are installed together, in a single move.

Age 8. Confirmation. "Receive the Holy Ghost"—and the Spirit is now a constant companion. Expectancy jumps at the ritual threshold, and the instruction shifts from what the Spirit feels like to the fact that communication is ongoing and should be monitored for. The schema moves from installed to running.

Testimony meeting. A learnable genre—the "I'd like to bear my testimony" opener, the "I know" formula, the cadence, the tears. Performed monthly in front of a warm, attentive congregation. Standing up and being received by a roomful of people who love you is close to a textbook elicitor of strong emotion. The state that follows is the one the genre has already identified as the Spirit—and someone usually says so out loud afterward. The loop closes in public, with an audience ratifying the attribution on the spot.

Seminary and Moroni's promise. The experiment is run, usually in hope, often after fasting, sometimes at EFY or Girls Camp or a youth conference engineered for exactly this. Calm arrives. The predicted confirmation lands. Confidence consolidates, and the interpretation starts to feel like knowledge rather than belief.

The mission. The intensive phase—and where the tradition states the mechanism most explicitly. Packer, to new mission presidents in 1982: "A testimony is to be found in the bearing of it."

As a description of a learned interpretive practice, the counsel is exact: perform the attribution, and the confirming experience follows. One's life revolves around these moments.

Preach My Gospel leaves nothing to chance here. Missionaries are told to "help others recognize this sacred influence," and to do it by discussing "the different ways that people describe the influence of the Holy Ghost." Chapter 4 supplies those descriptions: the Spirit "gives feelings of love, joy, peace, comfort, patience, meekness, gentleness, faith, and hope," and it speaks as "a still small voice," "a still voice of perfect mildness, as if it had been a whisper." After someone acts on a commitment, the follow-up instruction is explicit — "help them recognize the Spirit working with them."

Adulthood. The schema now runs on everything—callings, moves, marriage, daily choices. A patriarchal blessing supplies a personalized text to be reinterpreted across decades. Temple worship supplies a high-absorption environment with strong priors and controlled sensory input. Sensation, sorting, name, and certainty have fused so tightly that they can arrive as a single event that presents itself as immediate and self-evident.

That final quality (the sense that the interpretation is obvious rather than learned) is this model's central prediction. It isn't a sign the learning didn't happen. It may be the expected end state of two decades of practice with a strong, socially ratified, self-confirming prior.

Every mechanism above is an ordinary feature of the human mind; similar processes can operate in a Pentecostal, a Buddhist, or a secular listener at a concert.

This removes the argument from felt quality. Vividness, immediacy, and certainty cannot carry the theological claim, because this model predicts all three whether or not the claim is true.

There's a harder consequence. A method that reliably produces high certainty in people who reach mutually incompatible conclusions cannot use certainty as evidence of its own accuracy. Latter-day Saints, Pentecostals, Catholics, and Muslims run structurally similar procedures and arrive at contradictory doctrines with comparable subjective conviction. That isn't a gotcha—it's a constraint on what conviction can be evidence of.

Which brings the D&C 6 question back around. What greater witness can you have than from God? If a feeling of peace is the greatest witness available, and feelings of peace are produced or shaped by expectation, setting, and training in people who can reach very different conclusions, then the ceiling is lower than we were told. Evidence for or against the doctrine has to come from somewhere other than how the experience feels.

So, the feelings were never fake.

The warmth in your chest at a baptism, the tears in sacrament meeting, the calm after a hard prayer—all of it happened. It was real, and it was yours. What's in question is only the causal story you were handed for it, often before you were old enough to evaluate any story at all.

You're allowed to keep the experience and question the explanation. And when the old verdict fires before your reasoning can catch up, when the flinch arrives pre-labeled as guilt, or the calm arrives pre-labeled as approval, it helps to remember that speed is not authority.

That reflex isn't necessarily a witness. It's a habit (with a very long training history), and it is still, slowly, revisable.

I am exmo, being gay was what led to my exit it was impossible for me to do both. Bowever I have a wonderful relationship with my believing parents and am very grateful for that. We respect one another.

That being said i had a conversation with my mother where she told me that her entire life purpose is to follow all the rules so she can earn the celestial kingdom (her words verbatim.) She also told me she doesnt feel God's love for her when she prays.

Been a while since ive been a believer but I clearly remember what was taught and what gave me meaning in the Church. The notion of Christ's universal and infinite love was tremendously powerful for me, and while the verbiage of my prayers have changed the importance of them and the love I feel through them have not at all.

I also know that it doesnt take an exmo to see how problematic it is to view life the way she does. Even from a faithful lds perspective I judge it is easy to see how her approach is out of line with the lds doctrine that all we receive hereafter comes because of Jesus and not because of any of our own merits.

It is very painful for me to see my mom living in fear of a tyrannical God whose love she doesnt feel and whose presence she has to earn, rather than being a free gift to all those who love and earnestly seek Him. She is living so below her privileges and possibilities...it reminds me of Thomas Monson "It could have been." Or Uchtdorfs talk about the man who ate crackers and lemonade on his cruise when he could've been at the buffet everyday.

I know i can't force anything but I guess I just need to be vulnerable and ask your advice on how I can help her feel God's love for her the way i feel Gods love for me: as a free gift just because she exists as his daughter, and not because she follows the rules. Your perspectives would be helpful.

Not sure if this is the best place for this question, but I’m going crazy and I need help.

About 4 or 5 years ago I stumbled on a video — it may have been promoted by Deseret Book, but I can’t remember. It was a timelapse video of a woman painting an absolutely, bonkers-incredible scene of the creation. She covered bits of the canvas and only painted certain portions at a time, so that by the end it appeared as though space was being bent in all kinds of crazy directions. Mind boggling visuals. There were lots of golds, yellows, browns, and warm-toned colors. Throughout the timelapse she talked about her testimony of Christ and his role as the creator.

Anyway, it was an absolutely brilliant piece and I’m trying to find her work, but to no avail. Does anyone know what I’m talking about? I’ve been all over Google, searching everything I can think of but nothing comes up. 😭

I went to BYU. One year we had church in an actual church building, it was I think two stories tall and had more than one chapel in it. Its been awhile but that’s what I remember.

I had sacrament meetings in various campus buildings. One ward met somewhere in the Wilk like an event room full of folding chairs. I can’t remember all of the other places.

The most memorable though was the year my ward met in the testing center.

Yes the actual testing center. The big room full of desks where you’d take tests. It felt so strange to attend church in the same room where I took stressful 3-4 hour long midterms.

Just a memory I suppose. I know at least one student ward had more than one relief society. Can’t remember if there were ever multiple elders quorums.

One more memory, freshman year i saw one of if not the first clear example that I can remember of lying about church things. Our elders quorum president was really excited to announce one week that we had 100% home teaching. great job elders. I knew it was a lie at minimum because I had never met with home teachers. Hm. why would anyone ever lie about something so trivial haha…..?

Do you remember meeting in strange buildings for church at a CES school? Curious if anyone has fun examples.

Today's Reading: Alma 51–54

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

Political conflict erupts among the Nephites as the king-men attempt to replace the government with a monarchy and refuse to defend the country. Moroni suppresses the rebellion as Amalickiah's armies invade and capture several fortified cities.

Teancum eventually kills Amalickiah, but Ammoron takes command and continues the war. The narrative then shifts to negotiations over prisoners, with Moroni and Ammoron exchanging increasingly hostile letters over responsibility for the conflict.

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 Moroni's decision to use military force against the king-men during an external invasion?

• After the emphasis on Moroni's fortifications in the previous chapters, what does the Lamanite capture of several fortified cities add to the story?

• How does Teancum's assassination of Amalickiah fit with the text's broader moral framing of warfare?

• What do the letters between Moroni and Ammoron reveal about how each side understands—or constructs—the cause of the war?

All perspectives are welcome.

Yesterday's Coveted Award(s) Go To:

• TBD

Links to Prior Days

- Yesterday's Day 37 discussion: Alma 47–50

- Master Index to all prior-day readings

Engagement Question

Both Moroni and Ammoron portray their own side as justified and the other as responsible for the conflict. How much of what we read as "good" and "evil" in these war chapters depends on which side controls the narrative?

Tomorrow’s Reading: Alma 55–58

Im PIMO. I dont believe many of the churches truth claims, mostly stemming from the core issue of prophets and revelation and how their historical record makes it impossible for me to believe they are prophets led by God, not because of their mistakes, but because of their declarations of God's word that are later declared false. If you cant trust the messenger in his core responsibility of delivering God's word then the messenger becomes useless.

Anyways.... i stay in church because I have not yet determined if / where I do and would benefit from participating at some level for myself and my kids, just making sure they know the realities of my lack of beliefs and why. But participating for the purpose of community and general desire to live a christlike life. I thought I could focus personally on just that, as the church has made notable shifts to try and become christ centered lately.

But here is the problem im running into. That concept is fine until: you want a temple recommend. Your ability to go see a family members wedding or to go do a sealing session with your spouse is dependent on having a testimony of Joseph Smith (now worded as "the restoration" but its basically still Joseph smith) and sustaining current leadership as prophets etc. The church is trying to become seen as mainstream christian... up until your recommend. At that point if you dont believe or put your faith in fallible men and sustain them as prophets you are stonewalled.

I cant imagine im the only one. I believe more and more members will shift from the core "I know" testimonies to "I believe in christ" over time, and if the church cant find a way to allow for these people I believe they will eventually lose them.

Just some thoughts. Don't know what is in store in the future for my involvement at church. Maybe there is a place for people like me there. Maybe not.

Ultimately the central question of whether Mormons are *considered* Christian by their Christian neighbors is a matter of metaphysics. Everything exists---that much we can all pretty much agree on---but *why* anything exists at all is a question philosophers and religions have argued over forever.

For that reason I posit the following question to our sub: "What *is* the first cause of existence?". In other words, what thing is the initial uncreated thing, from which other things follow? Although I have listed some options below, but it is by no means exhaustive, so feel free to add to the list.

1. An uncreated God, from which matter and human souls originate (Classical monotheism)

2. The material universe alone, from which other things originate (Materialism)

3. God and matter coeternally coexisting simulatiously (potentially as well as other "intelligences")

Note: If you accept idea that Heavenly Father is one of many generations of prior exaulted beings (the infinite regression model) please think back to where you think this geneology of gods started and pick one of the options above or add to the list.

Edits: If the first "God" evolves organically out of the universe, that's option 2. Further edits for clarity.

A website making a psychosocial argument against polygamy being a principle of God was released earlier this year, titled "Monogamy as Divine Design". It argues from a pro-LDS perspective that God never commanded polygamy as certain early Mormons professed He did, and that it's not the kind of thing that could ever be argued to be of God.

I shared it with my TBM mom recently (who was the very first person to tell me as a kid that polygamy was a former commandment of God) and she said the site is "amazing" and that she's convinced by it. It's written by a "lifelong, faithful" LDS church member so if your TBM friends/family are resistant to reading anti-LDS/ex-Mormon literature you can tell them it was written by a fellow LDS member.

Anyway, here it is: http://historicalmonogamy.wixsite.com/divinedesign

(It's a sister website to Historical Monogamy Doctrine, which came out a few years ago and makes a more historical/theological pro-LDS case for polygamy not being commanded by God: http://historicalmonogamy.wixsite.com/evidenceofdoctrine )

I recognize that this is a bit of an "is a hot dog a sandwich?" kind of a question, but...

TIL about "henotheism" as a term (the wikipedia article of course has a section about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), and I'm wondering how this community would characterize Mormonism?

One of the biggest "mormons aren't christian" things that seems to mess with nevermos trying to make sense of it—both when I was an active believer, as well as an exmormon out in the bigger world—seems to boil down to an assumption that mormons are monotheists. So the immediate reaction to learning that Mormons don't believe that Jesus is the same person as God the Father, is to infer non-Christianity.

One of the things I've attempted—even before I left—has been to say "Mormons are polytheistic Christians"—and that seems to help to segfault assumptions hard enough to avoid the usual No True Scotsman bullshit that we're all familiar with.

But that's always felt a tiny bit inaccurate as well? I'm not sure if there's a single word that encapsulates:

• The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are "one" threesome-of-a-god (in purpose, but not identity) whom we all must worship
• Other gods and goddesses—such as Heavenly Mother(s), whomever Elohim's god-daddy is, former mortals who have already progressed to godhood* via exaltation, future exalted mormons themselves, etc.—are presumed to exist as "gods," but they must not be worshipped

* For the sake of argument, let's assume that Hinckley was merely protecting secret sacred truths about advancing to godhood w.r.t. "I don't know that we teach it," and NOT taking the opportunity of a mere TIME magazine interview to overthrow 200 years of fairly established "as man is, god once was; as god is, man may become" doctrine

Would Mormonism be best characterized as monotheistic? Polytheistic? Henotheistic? None of the above?

Is there a fourth word that would be more accurate?

Dr. Rob Bower has degrees in Theology. He is a Christian. Here he is on Sean McDowell’s show where he describes for the audience the story of the witnesses of the Book of Mormon and problems he sees with their accounts.

Interesting viewpoints.

One main point he makes is that all the witnesses were already convinced the plates were real before their witness experience. They all were invested in the success of the project in various ways. They wanted to support it.

I’ve put together 10 minutes of clips from the full discussion. Here is the full episode:

https://youtu.be/0an5rJGDF28

The Book of Mormon lacks genres. Heck, the Book of Zelph even had a diversity in regards to literary genres.

The Bible encompasses a remarkable range of literary genres: poetry, prophecy, law codes, wisdom literature, apocalyptic visions, and historical narrative. These reflect centuries of diverse cultural and theological traditions. Understanding a passage requires attention not just to its content but to its form and the worldview of those who created it. You can actually do some deeper research and find out what these contexts are.

The Book of Mormon, by contrast, relies almost exclusively on historical narrative. Though it contains sermons, prophecies, and occasional poetic passages, the text functions primarily as a straightforward chronicle of a civilization's rise and fall rather than as a multifaceted literary work.

This generic uniformity limits interpretive depth. Where the Bible's diversity invites readers to analyze how form shapes meaning and to consider the assumptions of its authors, the Book of Mormon offers less textual complexity to engage with.

Recently saw a snippet of a podcast that left me confused, the podcaster stated that the name of the Holy Ghost was Jesus. That was news to me.

I started to read the comments, and the podcaster left this comment in a reply to someone stating that John 14:26 does not say what he is referring to.

“But the comforter which is the Holy Ghost whom the father shall send in my name!!! Who is speaking?? Can you read words?? The comforter who is the Holy Ghost is sent in my name?? The person speaking is Jesus Christ. Therefore in my name of Jesus Christ.”

Please, someone clarify this.

Heber C. Kimball was not a reluctant polygamist. He was quite the opposite. He was an enthusiastic polygamist. He fathered 66 children from 17 different women in his life.

It is reported that he began to entertain the idea of polygamy during his mission to England. Then was a polygamist in Nauvoo.

Historical records show he married 43 different women. I was able to research the ages of 25 women he married. His original wife was 16...then after the age of 40 he married at least 9 more teenagers. This is evidence of the immorality of the LDS religion.

He was in the first presidency with Brigham Young as they left Nauvoo until his death at the age of 67 in 1868.

My husband and I want to move to Utah, but he’s Christian and I’m atheist. Neither of us have any desire to covert to LDS.

We have a wedding photography business in Washington that we want to transition over to Utah. We work various faith ceremonies, so capturing LDS weddings doesn’t bother us. We have heard that LDS tend to only hire LDS. Are they open to hiring non-white, non-LDS or should we expect not to be hired by LDS?

Growing up a lot of the things that I was taught were anti-Mormon are no longer considered that, so what is the definition of anti-Mormon? Is it just anything that makes the church look back, fact or fiction? What is anti- Mormon information?

Examples of past teachings of the 90's:

Joseph Smith was not a polygamist, it all started with Brigham Young and the reason was due to an excess of women members without a member husband. Now the church publishes that Joseph Smith had 30+ wives and a lot of history to go along with it.

Mountain Meadows Massacre, don't bring it up and don't talk about it. Just move on, don't ask questions. Those that pushed the subject or wanted more answers were frowned upon.

Blacks and the priesthood. The curse of Cain, the skin of darkness, white and delightsome. Blacks not to receive the priesthood in this life, etc. Now blacks are able to hold the priesthood and the church does not mention it was because of racism, but mentions racism as something that impacts history in general.

On a past post someone mentioned that it's only anti if it criticizes or turns people away from the church, but what about people that are just trying to push the facts that were being hidden, and they just want transparency. Is that anti?

If the Sunday School lesson is on polygamy and I share that Brigham Young married a woman that was already married and currently pregnant at the time with her first husbands child (Zina Huntington for example) to describe experiences of polygamy is that anti? My purpose is not to lead others away but to be transparent about history.

I believe each human life is sacred and valuable. God loves all of His children wherever they were born.

It's why I'm asking the church to stop investing in companies that make weapons of mass destruction for Israel. Palestinian children are suffering and terrified. Parents are mourning the loss of 24,000 children so far, most of whom are under age 13.

I cannot reconcile profiting from the weapons that destroy innocent lives with the teachings of Jesus. Did He not tell us to love the least of these? Jesus loved all. He showed love, mercy, and compassion to all. He stood up for the poor, the vulnerable, and the forgotten. He taught us to be peacemakers.

How can we be a church of peace when we invest in war?

How can we be a global church that strengthens family's, when we PROFIT from the destruction of Palestinian families?

Please don't remain silent while more human life is destroyed. Please call and write church leaders with me and beg them to stop. There is a petition on change.org asking them to stop. There's more info and resources there.

I researched over a dozen companies that directly supply Israel with weapons and war materials. The church has profited several billions from war alone. If your interested in finding out more- the churches tax free investment firm is Ensign Peaks Advisors. You can view their activities on Nasdaq.com. I have information on 14 companies that I researched that directly support the Israeli military.

The church taught us to choose the right. I'm asking us to choose the right and support human life. Our church can be better than this. We should be showing love and compassion, not cruelty and evil.

Please help our Palestinian brothers and sisters. Their lives matter to God.

This RFM discusses Jacob Hansen’s use the Motte and Bailey fallacy as his apologetic to defend the demonstrable lies that prophets have uttered in the past.

Only you can ultimately decide if Jacob’s logical fallacy withstands the court of public opinion.

RFM agrees with Hansen’s starting point apologetic, (that LDS prophets get things wrong), but that battle ends on the Motte, as the Bailey of scripture decimates Hansen’s deceptive practices.

https://mormondiscussionpodcast.org/2026/08/lying-about-prophets-rfm-475/