A Community for Anyone Interested in Mormonism.
I am in the process of upgrading the server for this site and its sister sites (MAA Books, Outer Blogness, and ExMormon). There will probably be some downtime *** ETA: It appears that the server migration was successful. Please comment (or email me at chanson dot exmormon at gmail dot com) if you notice any […]
Continue Readingby Johnny Townsend On the surface, Mormons are generous. They give a full ten percent of their income to their church. They donate countless hours every week to various “callings,” as Sunday School teachers, Nursery leaders, temple workers, and janitors. The bishop of every congregation may volunteer 20 hours each week tending to the members […]
Continue Readingby Emily Waite Growing up in the Mormon church, the voice that narrated my life up until now was screaming of perfection. For as we know, though we will never reach it in this life, perfection is the goal – always. After leaving the church I had shed the rules and perfection of Mormonism. But […]
Continue Readingby Johnny Townsend I am baffled that so many Mormons support Donald Trump. At one point, the percentage of Mormon Trump supporters was the highest of any religion (61% according to a 2017 Gallup poll). While some Mormon opposition has existed from the start, the vast majority of Mormons heartily endorsed a man who admitted […]
Continue Readingby Johnny Townsend While the devastating effects of the climate crisis will help fulfill prophecies about the terrors of the “last days,” that’s about the only benefit the Mormon Church will receive from them. Virtually every other effect will weaken the Church. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints often feel they […]
Continue Readingby Johnny Townsend If you were a Jewish couple in 1938 Berlin, would you choose to bring a child into the world? Groups like Conceivable Future and Birthstrike are among several that have formed recently as more and more young people watching weather reports every day face a question most people in the U.S. have […]
Continue Readingby Johnny Townsend Religious conservatives often accuse secular or inclusive people of conducting a “War on Christmas!” or “War on Religion!” or “War on God!” I would rephrase that. I and many others are anxiously engaged in conducting a war against ignorance, a war against bigotry and selfishness and greed and short-sightedness, a war against […]
Continue ReadingAlthough the leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints spent decades instructing their official teenage representatives to rush to challenge everyone they meet to be baptized, they are apparently baffled as to why their official teenage representatives have for decades rushed to challenge everyone they meet to be baptized: Church leaders don’t […]
Continue Readingby Johnny Townsend In the life of every atheist raised in a religious household, there comes a moment when we encounter our first question that can’t be answered. For me, it was when as a young Mormon teen reading lots of science fiction novels, I encountered aliens with amazing abilities. I’d think, “Wouldn’t it be […]
Continue ReadingOnce you strip away all the Book of Mormon’s pretenses of scriptural import, what you have is nothing more nor less than a lusty tale of America’s favorite subject: families and murder…. Murder and ruin are written across the breadth of Joseph Smith’s pre-American panorama, and because violence always demands an explanation or a solution, […]
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