If you avoid iced tea but drink hot cocoa because your scriptures say to not use "hot drinks" then you just might be a Mormon.
Forum: Recovery Board

Why does Mike do it? I think Sir Edmund Hillary had the answer.
Forum: Recovery Board

Yes, back then they used to be actually a bit scholarly. Now they are pseudo-scholarly with very carefully cherry-picked quotes to make some propaganda point. They have also become masters of plausible-deniability. They know how to insinuate something without actually saying so. About 13 years ago I attended Church for a few weeks as a favor to a friend who had been a missionary i
Forum: Recovery Board

Someone once referred to GC as a "convocation of sedated morticians." Richard Scott was the master.
Forum: Recovery Board

Then the Beatles were right.
Forum: Recovery Board

Overcoming doubt with . . . wait for it . . . FAITH! That's got to be the most insane way to deal with doubt. The REAL way to overcome doubt is with EVIDENCE. Then either the doubt goes away or else it is solidified into knowledge. That's what's happened to us--our "doubts" about the Church have been confirmed by evidence and now constitutes KNOWLEDGE that the Church is
Forum: Recovery Board

80%
Forum: Recovery Board

From "The Early Church and the Legal Profession" by James H. Backman (professor of law at BYU Law School): "Furthermore, Church courts had, by necessity, ruled on secular matters since the early 1830s. Generally, prominent Church leaders were assigned, without monetary recompense, to provide counsel and discipline to Church members and to adjudicate in member-to-member c
Forum: Recovery Board

Notevenhere Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Just mere coincidence? Probably.
Forum: Recovery Board

Even if he did get a 2nd anointing, he's not supposed to tell anyone. That's murder on a lot of people who want to brag but they've been told not to let anyone know. I recall a guy giving a talk in Sac. meeting and dropping broad hints that he'd had his. It's so secretive that they even suggest lies you can tell your friends and family about where you are going for the weekend.
Forum: Recovery Board

Amyjo Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Why would his heart and brain have been embalmed > separately, I wonder? If he had been mummified in ancient Egypt his heart would have been left in his body (all other internal organs removed and embalmed separately) and his brain discarded.
Forum: Recovery Board

The ancient Egyptian verbal system.
Forum: Recovery Board

"Meism"
Forum: Recovery Board

Yes, it's a real pain in the neck to spend a good bit of time polishing a reply only to have it snagged by the RFM spam filter. Hopefully cleaning out the banned-words list will help things in the future.
Forum: Recovery Board

smirkorama Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > His EPIC lack of genuine > and earnest concern for any thing else, like doing > real good, was glaring, Believing Mormons often have a "lack of genuine and earnest concern for anything else, like doing real good." In Mormonism the SUPREME good is Mormonism. Anything else can be sacrificed
Forum: Recovery Board

cludgie Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Anyway, it bothered me immensely when DW > and I team-taught the temple preparation class, > and there was hardly a thing in there that was > about the temple. Then you go, and you're really > surprised that it's about nothing. The temple prep class is designed to make you think that if you didn't h
Forum: Recovery Board

was that before April 1990 when they changed the ceremony and removed the penalties, etc., or after April when they had the sanitized version?
Forum: Recovery Board

I was specifically asked about masturbation by a very uncomfortable branch president. I lied. He didn't press it.
Forum: Recovery Board

This struck my eye. They had 12,000 "youth" at a huge rally to "celebrate" the rededication of the Idaho Falls Temple. In one segment a gazillion kids were dressed rather interestingly. They all had white caps (not too dissimilar to the "baker's hat" worn in the temple) white tops, and the girls all had green skirts (at first I thought they were the gree
Forum: Recovery Board

"Self abuse" was a common term for masturbation back in the 1800s when many doctors preached that it caused insanity and a whole host of physical maladies. The fact that Mormon leaders still use that expression shows that they are still stuck in the 1800s mentally. Here's an 1835 article from the "New England Journal of Medicine:" https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10
Forum: Recovery Board

I love them all. Loving the Brethren is what life is all about: "This is Life Eternal, that thou lovest and obeyest the Brethren." I'm joyfully reminded of the triumphant ending of George Orwell's Novel 1984: "But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."
Forum: Recovery Board

Years and years ago I home-taught a TBM artist-type guy. He had some business dealings with Boyd K. Packer. Nothing religious just sold him something once--or something like that. He described the experience including, "those guys can look right through you." He meant they could tell the details of his inner worthiness etc. by their awesome supernatural power of discernm
Forum: Recovery Board

So according to Mormon doctrine we were all "Spirit Children of Heavenly Father." Then Lucifer, one of us, got offended that he wasn't given enough credit and he rebelled and left with 1/3 of our brother and sister spirits. Well, they don't get bodies then, but we do. So, we're EVERY BIT what they are and MORE. I can't move anything physically without using my body, and
Forum: Recovery Board

A "testimony" is a decision you make to believe no matter what. The fact that you no longer believe meant that the decision back then wasn't really for "no matter what." So, in a sense, they're right.
Forum: Recovery Board

Causing much loud laughter and light-mindedness.
Forum: Recovery Board

If you say the Church is bad, rotten, ugly, etc. then people push back automatically. But if you point out that the current Church contradicts the previous Church on unchanging doctrinal points, or that "View of the Hebrews" foreshadows the main plot of the "Book of Mormon," then you've only mentioned an objective fact.
Forum: Recovery Board

"23 photos that will help you love president Nelson even more." I'm gonna print them out and put them up in my locker at school and inside my binder. He's so dreamy; I love him even more. http://www.ldsliving.com/Photos-That-Will-Help-You-Love-and-Understand-Our-New-Prophet-Even-More/s/87504/?utm_source=ldsliving&utm_medium=sidebar&utm_campaign=related
Forum: Recovery Board

Because as British Egyptologist I.E.S. Edwards said, speaking of Joseph Smith's "Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar:" that it was "largely a piece of imagination and lacking in any kind of scientific value." and he said it was similar to "the writings of psychic practitioners which are sometimes sent to me." But back in the old days, before the internet,
Forum: Recovery Board

Here you go https://www.amazon.com/Pythagorean-Proposition-Elisha-S-Loomis/dp/0873530365 367 proofs in one book.
Forum: Recovery Board

So they immediately kill anyone who steps across their border? Trump must be so jealous.
Forum: Recovery Board