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7th June 2022 - Mormon Bishop’s experience of his shelf breaking

The Stories of Others

As I undertook my own faith transition, I began listening to the stories of others and how they felt during the process. I found this helped me because all I wanted to do was talk to people about the experience I was going through, but I didn’t know who to turn to. I didn’t want to stir up problems with believing members, and I didn’t want to explain the nuance to people who hadn’t been in the church. 

This video here was about a bishop who didn’t consider himself to be a spiritual person, who read the gospel topic essays, and found them to be deeply troubling. This was one of the first times I heard about these essays, which are written by anonymous authors and published on the church website in a not-so-obvious place. I heard someone mention that it’s the church’s liability protection for when people say, “Hey, the church never taught that.” The topics range from the wives of Joseph Smith, the translation process of the Book of Mormon, why the priesthood was withheld from the African race and so on. I think all members should give them a read, which is the advice the church also gives its own members.

When the bishop read one essay that talked about the translation process of the Book of Abraham, he found out that the source material (which was lost and then rediscovered and translated through the use of the Rosetta Stone) mentioned nothing about Abraham and in fact was discovered to be a generic piece of funerary text that was written hundreds of years after Abraham. In fact, it contradicts what the title page of the Book of Abraham says, that this book was written in hand of Abraham. 

This bishop felt like maybe the leaders of the church are just regular men doing their very best to lead and govern the church rather than actually being led by god. When I heard this I thought, “if that’s the case, then how far up does that go? To Joseph?” If that is true, then score one for the church not being what it claims it is, that it is in fact led by god. 

The church is not what it claims to be

The fact that the church is not what it claims to be does not mean it is not necessarily a good community for people to be a part of. I simply am saying that I believe the church is not what it claims to be, and I do think that is misleading. Imagine if the church leadership came out and said that every attempt to draw closer to god, no matter what denomination or what organisation it was, was sufficiently good enough to be a part of to come closer to god; that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was just one of many attempts to do that; that it is not the only true church but rather like the Christian church down the road, or the Buddhists or the Muslims or the Jewish community just to name a few. I wonder if in that day, church membership would do one of three things:

  1. Grow, due to a realistic acceptance that the misleading notion of a monopoly of all truth in a single place is not a healthy way to consider the world, and this would attract more people to the church as a good place to become a better person, 
  2. Shrink, because now the church isn't the "literal" church of god established on the Earth, and those that considered it so (like I did) would feel misled or dieceved into thinking it was literal, or 
  3. Change hands, by swapping out the literal believers for a less literal crowd. 
I believe it would take a leadership clean house for this to even be considered given that I believe the current leadership has been groomed and prepared to continue the narrative it has always taught, and as such would never allow such a notion to exist.

This is why I think the church will always continue to perpetuate the theology that the church is led by a living prophet who is led literally by god. Because they have been doing is since day dot. To change their stance on whether the church truly is God's one true church would uproot many things, including the doctrine of the restoration, the plan of salvation, temple ordinances and family history, the preisthood and its accompanying "authority" that follows it. These pillars of Mormonism would fall and cave. It would have to undergo a huge reform, and would probably come out as a regular mainstream Christian group.

And that may not be such a bad thing. There just may be a lot of hurt that would come. 

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