Contemplative Dexterity

With my quest for more information regarding celestial marriage and sealings, I realized how little I knew about the actual temple ceremonies, and more specifically, the endowment ceremony. I was told that you can actually find videos on YouTube of the ceremony. I was completely floored by this! Some soul was brave enough to take a hidden camera into the temple and record the entire ceremony?! Sacrilege! At least that's what I would have thought if I was still an active member of the LDS church. Watching one of those videos sounded like a much better plan than me pretending to repent of my "sins" so I could go through the temple and experience it myself, which has crossed my mind once or twice. However, since I do the majority of my research on my downtime at work, I haven't had the opportunity to watch more than about 30 minutes of the ceremony. I did find a transcript online though, so I have read the ceremony in its entirety. The actual ceremony isn't going ...

The LDS church recently published an article that addresses polygamy. You can read the article in its entirety here.  After reading the article at work, I decided that I needed to look for more information and went directly to mormonthink.com . I needed something that could explain the multiple facets involved in polygamy, something that would present evidence rather than try to cover it up or pass it off as just something that we can't fully understand right now, but will be revealed to us in the eternities. Polygamy has been one of those things about Mormonism that never sat right with me, but after asking why and receiving the answer "because God commanded it", I stopped pushing for a reason and tried to ignore it.   In a conversation with my boyfriend the other day, I was relating to him all of the information that I could remember from the portion of the polygamy section that I had read that day. Like myself, he had accepted polygamy as "one of those things...

What a "great" talk!  I came across this talk while I was doing some research for my last post. I wanted to include it in that one, but it was already exceedingly lengthy. I would consider this post as a continuation of the previous one, with its focus being marriage and the obsession that Mormons have with it.   In the above talk, President Benson is speaking to the priesthood holders in the church, but more specifically, to the SINGLE priesthood holders of the church. He goes over dressing and grooming, following the commandments, serving dutifully within the church and feasting on the "Words of Christ". But the majority of his talk centers around a letter from two concerned parents. These parents reference a group of young men who have reached their early thirties and remain unmarried:   “In our experience these are usually young men who have been on missions, are well educated, and are living the commandments (except this most important one). There doe...

It would probably be good form to write about what the purpose of this blog is and how I came to the decision to start exploring the possibility that the religion I had been raised in might not be the "true" religion, and not only that, but begin to question the existence of God. Better late than never right? I could never honestly answer the question about why I was a Mormon. I gave the typical believer answer that I just knew it was true because I'd prayed about it and felt that it was true, yadda yadda. While the praying part was true, I can't say that I ever received an actual answer. Moroni's promise in the Book of Mormon says that "if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ" then the Holy Ghost will tell you if the Book of Mormon is true(note: this operates under the premise that if the BOM is true, then the Church is true). I've done this, multiple times, and each time I would stay on my knees waiti...

I want to continue for a bit on the theme of prophecy's, and more specifically, those of the self-fulfilling kind. Let's take a step back and actually define what a self-fulfilling prophecy is: "A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior."                                                                        -as defined on Wikipedia The problem that arises in  society is that many people, while understanding the above definition, don't actually see it occurring in their own li...