Vulgarity and Plain Words in Scripture and Life, Part 1

I have a long history of loving and hating vulgarity.  Like most devout Christians, I’ve been disgusted at how vulgarity now dominates everyday speech, and how our crass, dumbed-down society seems incapable of expressing anything without resorting to it.  And many movies, plays and TV shows with compelling stories and acting are made unwatchable by writers whose profanity-laced dialogues are harder to endure than a long swim in a cesspool.

But perhaps I’m as devout a hypocrite as I am a Christian, and because of that, I also enjoy some forms of vulgarity.

The LDS Church’s Most Overlooked and Underrated Scripture

In recent essays on this website, I have discussed two critical Book of Mormon scriptures (2 Nephi 4 and Jacob 2 and 3).  The exegesis of those verses by the LDS Church (hereafter also referred to as “the Church”) has been woefully inadequate and misleading.  I’ve hypothesized that these two scriptures contain troubling messages which contradict current LDS teachings, thus motivating the Church to ignore, downplay, confuse or misrepresent their messages.  In this short essay, however, I will discuss a scriptural passage that’s not only extremely important to all students of the Bible and/or the Book of Mormon, but should be crowned the most overlooked scripture in the entire LDS canon.  It’s 3 Nephi 15:22-23 (when considered in connection with 3 Nephi 16:4).

Before proceeding any further, I encourage readers to read 3 Nephi 15:22-23 in context from the excerpt following this paragraph and ask themselves two questions:  First, do you remember ever in your lifetime hearing any lesson in Sunday School, Relief Society, Priesthood meeting, seminary, Institute or college religion classes, or any talk in general conference, stake conference or sacrament meeting which discussed these two verses?

Jacob 2 and 3, Censorship, and Mormonism’s Avoidance of Stubborn Book of Mormon Truth, Part 2

In Part 1 of this essay I included the excerpt below from the LDS Church’s Teacher Manual for seminary (i.e., high school aged) students.  This excerpt is taken from the Book of Mormon lesson wherein the content of Jacob 2 and 3 is addressed. Readers may wonder why I didn’t include material from the lesson covering Jacob 2 and 3 in the Church’s Book of Mormon Teacher Manual for Institute (i.e., college aged) students.  (I truly do hope readers wondered that.  It would mean the reader is intellectually engaged in the discussion of this topic, for one thing, and that question naturally inheres in a discussion about how the LDS Church teaches difficult subjects.  But in this case, the question also leads to a very interesting answer.)

Jacob 2 and 3, Censorship, and Mormonism’s Avoidance of Stubborn Book of Mormon Truth, Part 1

By Scott S. Mitchell

Two Sundays ago, the lesson in my LDS priesthood meeting centered around a talk by Becky Craven in the April 2019 general conference entitled “Careful Versus Casual.”  Predictably, two things occurred during the classroom discussion.  First, the discussion quickly focused on two of the most prominently discussed Law-of-Moses-type items on Mormonism’s long checklist of do’s and don’ts–wearing the temple garment and Sabbath Day observance.  Second, two or three members of the class self-censored the comments they felt were most important to make.  (It should be obvious who one of them was.)  Had they not self-censored, they would have pointed out that neither temple-garment-wearing nor Sabbath Day observance were part of Jesus’ gospel when he preached that gospel to the Nephites.  Thus, as non-commandments, the rules of garment wearing and Sabbath proscriptions didn’t merit the attention LDS Church members give them.  In fact, it might also have been added that Jesus never even mentioned the word “temple” or anything about sabbath observance to the Nephites in all his teachings,1 nor were these items part of his teachings to the Jews.

2 Nephi 4 and the Pain or Exhilaration of Learning What You Thought You Wanted to Know, Part 2

In Part 1, I argued that the specific messages of 2 Nephi 4 in the Book of Mormon go almost completely ignored in the writings and teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (hereafter, “the Church”).  This chapter, which is accurately called the psalm of Nephi, contains, among other things, Nephi’s lament over his repeated susceptibility to sin and temptation, and the depression and loss of self-esteem he suffers as a result.  The reader is surprised to read his words, since Nephi’s stature as a prophet of God is almost unparalleled in both the Bible and Book of Mormon.  And, no part of the Book of Mormon, outside of this chapter, informs the reader of any sinfulness on his part, much less the nature of such sinfulness.  Since this chapter is unique in all of scripture, and the messages in it are so crucial to our understanding of how major, persistent weaknesses and exceptional spirituality can co-exist in the greatest of individuals, one would think that its substance would be the focus of much discussion among the lay membership, church leaders and scholars of the LDS Church.  It should be one of the most famous passages of scripture, and by itself, should be the subject of lessons and talks.  Below, I’ll attempt to not only delve into the vital messages of this chapter that I feel have escaped public discussion, but also explain why I think the LDS Church purposely shies away from those messages.

2 Nephi 4 and the Pain or Exhilaration of Learning What You Thought You Wanted to Know, Part 1

One of my daughters, who loves math and majored in statistics in college, recently challenged me to solve a math word problem to which she had already figured out the answer.  Since I generally enjoy word problems, and believed careful thinking on my part  would reveal the solution, I had no reason not to accept her challenge.  I also assumed that the problem was tricky and the answer counterintuitive, because otherwise my daughter would have no reason to use this problem to test me.  So, with what I thought was the appropriate amount of confidence and wariness, I said “Sure, lay it on me.”

Does the Book of Mormon Corroborate LDS Church Claims of Divine Revelation, and Do Church Leaders Receive More of It?

I feel the need to begin with this short clarification.  Although the second half of this essay argues that leaders of the LDS Church too often claim to have received revelation from God when they actually haven’t, I don’t believe these leaders are unrighteous men.  Indeed, I consider them generally righteous, well-intentioned, and highly intelligent men, who, like most members of their church, accomplish much more good than evil during their lives.  Their principle mistake, I believe, is that they accept unquestioningly traditional LDS views regarding their own authority, the superiority of their spiritual gifts, and what constitutes revelation and what does not.

What “Plain and Precious Things” did the “Great and Abominable Church” Keep Back from its Biblical Teachings?

In two unique chapters of the Book of Mormon, 1 Nephi 13 and 14, the prophet Nephi, writing during the 6th century B.C., relates what an angel showed him in vision about the future history of Christianity in Europe and the Americas.  One of the most salient features of his vision is a description of what happens after the Old Testament Jewish scriptures and the New Testament Christian gospel have been recorded and written in their uncorrupted form1 by Israelite and Jewish writers of the Old and New Testaments.  Over the centuries, as these records and writings coalesce into what is known today as the Bible2,  they are then adopted and accepted by Christians as canonical.  Thereafter, the Bible comes into the possession and control of what the angel and Nephi refer to as the “great and abominable church.”  The result is that the biblical message, formerly pure, becomes corrupted in the way it’s taught to Christianity’s adherents.  Specifically,  the church’s teaching is observed to be missing “many plain and precious things” which have been “taken away” or “kept back” by said evil church.  See 1 Nephi 13:26, 28-29, 32, 34, 40.

What Jesus Was and Wasn’t Talking About When He Spoke of Putting Away One’s Wife, Divorce and Remarriage

In some of the most perplexing passages in all of scripture, Jesus appeared to indicate that a man should not put away his wife for any grounds other than sexual immorality, and that any man who married a divorced woman was guilty of adultery.  In this essay I’ll attempt to demonstrate why this statement by Christ is not at all harsh, and is so widely misunderstood.

How We Know Shem Wasn’t Melchizedek, Part II, and What it Means for Christianity

In a previous essay, I laid out the evidence demonstrating why Shem and the ancient high priest Melchizedek couldn’t have been the same person, contrary to popular Mormon belief.  See Why Melchizedek wasn’t Shem, and Why it Does and Doesn’t Matter, elsewhere on this website.  By reading further information on this subject, which was brought to my attention by a reader of this website, I have found what I consider to be another forbiddingly strong argument that further solidifies the case against Shem and Melchizedek sharing the same identity.  At the end of this essay, I’ll explain why I think this new piece of evidence has important ramifications for our study and understanding of not only the Bible, but all other books that Mormons accept as scriptural.

The “new” (to me, at least) piece of evidence is that Shem had been dead for 570 years when Abraham was born, so he couldn’t have been present when Melchizedek later encountered Abraham as the latter returned from the slaughter of the kings.