Church naming practices

All my decades in the church, i’ve heard the claim that when The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized in 1830, there were no churches already in existence that had the name of Jesus Christ in their names.

Even leaving aside the fact that that wasn’t the name of our church until a few years later, is that claim actually true? I’ve never seen any solid evidence for it.

Who should count?

Can we stop calling the Relief Society “the largest women’s organization in the world”? It strikes me as a bit of a dishonest label, actually—i mean, just because you happen to be female, have been baptized into the Mormon church at some point, and have survived to your eighteenth birthday (or gotten married, whichever comes first), well, that makes you a part of the Relief Society.

Sorry, folks, that’s not an organization, that’s a convenient label for a group of people. If women actually consciously chose whether to be affiliated with the Relief Society,* like used to be the case, well, then i could see that being a meaningful claim. But how many of the women whose “membership” in the Relief Society supposedly makes it such a large organization are actually involved in it? If someone’s so far outside of it as many of those women are, why in the world do we count them?

* Which was one of Joseph Smith’s quite emphatic bars to entry into the Relief Society. (Actually living according to gospel principles was another, and i’ll note in passing that that’s not a part of the requirements nowadays, either.)

On honoring and sustaining the law

Can we give up on the meme that one of the things that marks Mormonism as the true church of God is that we as a church always obey the law?

I mean, i guess it might be the case that Mormons always obey the law, except that i didn't realize that John Taylor was saying to obey the laws on polygyny when he died while in hiding from the federal government...

(Similarly, yeah, the people of Alma didn't pray out loud when it was illegal for them to do so—but Daniel did pray, and vocally, when it was illegal.)

Telling on myself

One time a list of blessings you get from attending the temple was included in the printed program for sacrament meeting, and one of them said “You will be thin.” I was rather surprised, since i figured that was a promise only God could make, and then only individually, until i realized that i had misread it. What it really said? “The veil will be thin.”

Priorities

I was going through some old papers, and i discovered notes i took from a stake conference where we were told they’d had their best youth conference turnout ever for a three-day “trek”* event. This was presented as clear evidence that trek is a wonderful thing.**

Me, i just find it worth noting that they probably wouldn’t have gotten as high a turnout for, say, a three-day project helping build a Habitat for Humanity house, and that’s just sad.

* For those of you who have happy enough lives that you’re unfamiliar with the phenomenon that is trek, imagine a bunch of teenagers risking heatstroke as they push two-wheeled wheelbarrows around, and you’ve pretty much got it.

** If the causality seems tenuous, congratulations! You are capable of basic logic.

Eternal blessings, sort of

I actually heard someone say that we’re blessed, because the Lord has given us “an eternal standard” governing how we should dress.

That eternal standard? That we should cover up those bits of our bodies that are covered up by the temple garment.

I think that some people need to learn their history before they say things like that.

The topbottom of the mountains

Where did people ever come up with the idea that, when Isaiah talks about people streaming to the house of the Lord in the “top of the mountains”, Isaiah’s talking about the Salt Lake temple? Might i remind everyone that Salt Lake City is in a rather deep valley?

Children and (pictures of) Jesus

I’ve started hearing, as proof of children’s spirituality, the fact that they’re so easily able to identify pictures of Jesus. Um, dude? First of all, we don’t know what Jesus looked like, and so there are a lot of different-looking representations of him around—find one that doesn’t match with what you’ve taught your children to identify, and you might be surprised at how unable children are to identify pictures of Jesus.* Also, take a child growing up in one of the completely non-Xian parts of the world, and i bet that child won’t be able to pass your spirituality test. You’re saying that those kids aren’t as spiritual as the ones who live near you?** How, um, lucky of your kids to live where they do.

* Yes, i realize the sort of person who makes such claims will cite that as proof that those aren’t what Jesus really looks like. I’m not even going to try to argue with that sort of twisted illogic, though.
** I do realize that there are some people who hold such positions. The technical term for such people, of course, is “idiots”.

On prophecy

The latest thing that bores me in sacrament meeting speeches: Someone reading something of the “If the world doesn’t repent, then God will pour out punishments on them” variety from, say, Spencer W. Kimball or Joseph Fielding Smith while they were president of the church, and then drawing the conclusion that the problems the world is facing now are in direct fulfillment of that prophecy, and that that’s proof that the prophet was divinely inspired, since otherwise how could they have known thirty whole years ago?

Thirty years? Thirty years is nothing! I mean, John prophesied all that in the Book of the Revelation nearly two thousand years ago! And how about Daniel, long before that?

Wealth and tithing

Today’s exhibit in stupid logic tricks: People who talk about how people who have a lot of income should be admired for the strength of will it takes to pay so much money in tithing.

Let’s think about it for a moment. If someone makes $20,000 a year, after tithing $2,000 they have $18,000 to live on, while if someone makes $1,000,000 a year, yeah, sure, they tithe $100,000, but that leaves them with $900,000 for the year—and i’ve taken enough math and done enough budgeting to recognize that it’s easier to figure out how to get by on $900,000 than on $18,000. Really, it’s the poor who tithe that we should praise!

(Of course, i do realize that if you have no income, then tithing’s easy, so…)

Honoring the prophets

Actually heard someone say that the honors given to recent prophets by governmental leaders is proof that God and God’s laws are unchanging. Really? It signifies that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever that the US government now honors Mormon leaders instead of trying to imprison them? Guess it must be valid logic, since it came over the pulpit…

The law of witnesses

Mormons* are often weird about the law of witnesses idea. (You know, the thing from Matthew 18:16, or Deuteronomy 19:15, saying that it takes two witnesses to testify of truth.) For example, to take one i heard recently, since Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all testified that Jesus is the Christ, that proves that he was.

Of course, there’s lots of witnesses to the transcendence of the Buddha, as well.

In a different direction, i’ve also heard (happily only once, so this is an outlier) the claim that since Jesus is the Christ, the fact that both the Bible and the Book of Mormon testify of such proves that the Book of Mormon is from God, since it and the Bible both testify of truth. That one’s so flawed and circular that i still haven’t figured out how to explain how wrong it is.

*I assume that people in some other denominations do this, too, but i have no experience there.

Scriptural ambiguity

Chapter 1, verse 30 of the book of Doctrine and Covenants, particularly the last bit of it, is often taken as a simple confirmation by God that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is God’s one true church:

And also those to whom these commandments were given, might have power to lay the foundation of this church, and to bring it forth out of obscurity and out of darkness, the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth, with which I, the Lord, am well pleased, speaking unto the church collectively and not individually—

[Emphasis added—db]

However, this statement is structurally ambiguous—it could mean any of a number of different things:

1) The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the only true church,* and God was pleased with it—the usual Mormon reading, i’d say.

(2) The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was one of more than one true churches, but that God was only pleased with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

(3) At the time, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the only true church in an active state, and God was pleased with it, but that there were other true churches in some other, perhaps then dormant, state.

(4) God was pleased with many churches, and out of those churches, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the only true one.

There are other readings, but these—especially (1) and (2)—seem to me to be the most basic.

Anyway, i think it’s worth pointing out that prooftexts like this can only go so far.

* With “true church” meaning what Mormons generally mean when they say “true church”.

I am officially tired of the claim that the toes of the figure in Daniel 2:31-33

This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay.

refers to the countries of Europe. You know, if my religion allowed me to wager, i’d place serious money on there being texts from the late pre-Xian era saying that the toes of iron mixed with miry clay referred to the Greek states or the Macedonian empire or somesuch.

Just give up on saying that the symbology of Daniel proves that the second coming is day after tomorrow, okay? It’s gotten old.

In (dis)praise of simplistic arguments

I’ve heard it lots of times in church meetings, you’ve heard it lots of times:

Joseph Smith was a true prophet—and if Joseph Smith was a prophet, then The Church is true.

You know, that’s absolutely right! If Joseph Smith was a prophet, then the Community of Christ is…Wait, no, then the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—you know, the Strangite group—is…Well, um, then maybe the Church of Christ with the Elijah Message? The Church of Christ (Temple Lot)? The Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times? The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints? Zion’s Order? The True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days? The Restoration Church of Jesus Christ?

Wait a minute—what was the question?

Not an American church, eh?

So i found out that the good folks over at Worldmapper (an absolute nirvana for a demographics geek like me) have come up with a map of the world’s distribution of Mormons. The map follows, but you should look at the page it’s from to get all the background and such:


I plan to point to this map anytime somebody tries to say that we’re not an American church—really, we’re not that strong outside the Americas (with the minor exception of the Philippines), and the sooner we admit it, the sooner we can get to improving our preaching elsewhere.