Sunday in Outer Blogness: New exits edition!

A cool new blog appeared this past week, starting with a (perhaps familiar) story:

In many ways, nothing about me has changed and yet everything has. The thing is, I’ve really only changed in the same way every other person reading this changes—subtly and over time. None of us are the same people we were a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago; remaining unchanged in one way or another is impossible. We meet new people, we have new experiences, something sparks and suddenly—BAM! Lightning bolt; we’re forever changed. We go through these infinite, tiny changes during the course of our lives that are too subtle to be defined, and yet they define who we are in every way.

Moving away from the church the last few years has been freeing in ways that are difficult to convey to anyone who hasn’t been through a paradigm shift of this kind.

Welcome Rebekah — sounds like your journey is going well! Then I encountered another recent tale about understanding exmos (not quite sure whether it’s an exit or not):

Over the next couple of months I looked into what I had always believed were anti-Mormon lies. As it turns out, they weren’t lies. Almost none of the things I thought were lies were actually lies. Seriously, almost none. It was crazy. My natural response was to read the scriptures more, pray harder, fast, all that good stuff. The problem? Moroni’s promise didn’t work anymore.

And then there was a tale from a guy who is a faithful believer who can’t seem to squeeze any life out of the current meetings:

This ward (and I think the whole stake) has adopted a standard of always assigning Sacrament speakers to talk about a General Conference talk. The opening line of almost every talk (after the apology and joke section) is “The talk I’ve been assigned to talk on is …” To put it politely, this doesn’t make for the most engaging worship service.

I guess the biggest recent Mormon-land scandal was some questions arising about the finances of John Dehlin and the Mormon Stories Foundation. It looks like some people are not happy that a (perhaps surprisingly?) high proportion of the tax-deductible donations go to paying Dehlin and not to paying female content providers. It’s not totally clear to me what’s up, and the most baffling bit of all was Zelph’s satire about Dehlin eating a pet lizard…

In other mystery/humor, apparently a statue went missing,

Oh, and the Prophet is no longer well enough to attend church. If only there were a way for him to step down. (Weirdly reminds me of something I was saying just last week.)

In church culture, there was some discussion of the superficial bits: identifying the “temple-worthy” just by looking at them and excluding the tattooed from serving LDS missions. Plus more discussion of the problem with “porn addiction” and other sex hangups.

Gina Colvin wrote an interesting allegory of the CoJCoL-dS as McDonald’s, which is kind of apt except that, really, your family doesn’t care if you don’t like McDonald’s.

The official CoJCoL-dS magazines got some critiques this past fortnight! The New Era article on threats to religious freedom had some significant problems, and the Ensign apparently ran a piece that was a little mainsplainy:

Having a husband lecture his wife on being Christlike when he is sitting enjoying breakfast and she is cleaning up “messes she didn’t make” feels manipulative and self serving. Perhaps the actual situation wasn’t that way, but it’s not an unreasonable reading.

In non-Mormon-land other theocrats have their problems.

And let’s wrap up with some announcements: the feminist Mormon housewives are offering a single mom scholarship, there will be a Mormon Humanities Conference in May, and Mormon Arts Sunday will be June 11th.

Happy reading and have a great fortnight!