Sunday in Outer Blogness: Court of Love edition!

Perhaps you’ve heard — the CoJCoL-dS has decided to hold a court of love for Jeremy Runnels!! They had ironically scheduled it for Valentine’s Day, but it has been postponed.

The fact that they might excommunicate Jeremy Runnels surprises me quite a bit. I’ve always believed that they excommunicate people for apostasy simply to discredit them in the eyes of the faithful — so the faithful will know that that person’s writings are “anti-Mormon”. People like Jeremy Runnels — who are outspoken non-believers — have already discredited themselves to that crowd, so the church doesn’t need to sully their hands with them. So why would the church go after Jeremy? This is only going to give more publicity to the CES Letter and to the church’s charming hobby of excommunicating people. (See this hilarious new policy from President Newsroom!)

Naturally this makes me wonder if they’re going to excommunicate me. Obviously I’m not as famous as Runnels, but the common wisdom about who gets X’d and who doesn’t has just gotten thrown out the window, so anything’s possible. Not that I would particularly care — except that it would annoy me a bit if they X me in the same year they excommunicate Jeremy Runnels since that would completely ruin my chances of ever winning X-Mormon of the Year. >:(

They also just excommunicated this other blogger (a believer).

In other news, the Oregon standoff is over, the Mormon Therapist discussed the problems of seeing Satan in mental illness, and the church’s claim of “30 talks about child abuse in General Conference since 1976” has been debunked.

In other churchy fun, we have some more brutally honest Mormon coloring pages, the Mormon drug wars aren’t over, and Zina listed 14 things Exmormons are tired of hearing.

In scripture study, there’s the Deutero-Isaiah Problem in the Book of Mormon (a.k.a. how did Nephi get a book that wasn’t written yet?) and more military strategy in the Book of Mormon.

In personal stories, the cultural hall had an interesting back-and-forth regarding Mormon slut-shaming, Steve Otteson went on a pilgrimage, and myrtlejoy recounted her exit story a tale of the power and beauty of doubt:

If the church wasn’t true, all of these people I loved and trusted were wrong, and the paradigm upon which I had based my entire life was faulty.

If the church wasn’t true, how was I to explain the mysteries of the universe? How could I answer the ‘big’ questions (why were we here, where did we come from, where were we going?), if the church wasn’t true?

If the church wasn’t true, what was?

But, conversely, if the church wasn’t true, I was okay. If the church wasn’t true, I no longer had to wrestle with my doubts. If the church wasn’t true, I no longer had to squeeze myself into a box that didn’t fit.

Well, that’s it for this week — happy reading, and try not to get X’d! 😀