A daguerreotype has been found that may well be an image of Joseph Smith. Joseph was 38 years old when he died; I suppose the photo looks like someone about that age, if they’d had a hard life. The man in the photo doesn’t look all that charismatic or appealing…
Category: Joseph Smith
Joseph Smith as Peeping Tom
by “Faraday” This essay hopes to solve a great mystery: the origins of the naked part of the endowment. The mystery Most people know that the signs and tokens of the temple come from Freemasons. And the Adam and Eve part comes from the book of Genesis. But where do…
Sunday in Outer Blogness: Sucked into the vortex edition!
Remember the fun we had last week with creative apologetics? Well, this week we learned that it’s only fun and games until someone actually tries to follow the footnotes and gets sucked into the vortex! It started on a fascinating note as Runtu provided an detailed and specific analysis of…
Sunday in Outer Blogness: Losing control of the story edition!
If you’re a faithful Mormon, there are a lot of possible ways to rationalize the various sticky issues of the CoJCoL-dS. Take the problem of Joseph Smith “marrying” a bunch of teenagers and married women, and lying to his wife and everyone else about it — it can be explained…
Knowing Emma and Joseph’s History: A Response to the Speculative Essay on Early Polygamy– Alison Udall
It was really enjoyable to work my way through this. This is the first response I’ve done with these new church essays since I had read enough to be able to notice things that I recognized were missing, or implications that were being made that felt incomplete or inaccurate. As…
Joseph vs. The Gold: Help me script it!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08wRRff8x0k Ever since seeing this not so good version on youtube, I’ve been wondering what a good recreation of the Joseph Smith run with the plates might look like. Â It’s all based on Lucy Smith’s account: “The plates were secreted about three miles from home… Joseph, on coming to them,…
SOME THINGS I HAVE LEARNED BY BEING GAY AND MORMON
SOME THINGS THAT I HAVE LEARNED One thing that I have learned is: although Gay people are born gay; when gays have gone through the process of: first denial, then self-loathing and other steps, and finally acceptances; then Gay people are ready to move on to healthy relationships. Another thing…
Joseph Smith: The Prophet of the Restoration (review)
For kicks, I decided to pass the time during my lazy, uneventful day off by watching Joseph Smith: The Prophet of the Restoration, a church-sponsored film about the life of Joseph Smith. I found it on YouTube, split into five pieces, each with a description of the video containing a…
My place in Mormon history
A lot of people — upon leaving the CoJCoL-dS — are amazed to discover how fascinating LDS church history really is. It’s not just that the whitewashed history in Sunday School is incomplete and inaccurate. It’s that you’re force-fed this watery-porridge version of church history that inoculates many people from…
Mormon Times says religion can be bad, but not theirs
I couldn’t help but stop by MormonTimes.com for this headline, “Elizabeth Smart case shows best and worst of religion’s influence“. I thought since Brian David Mitchell is a splinter from Mormonism the writers at MormonTimes might suggest something really “out there,” like, maybe, Mormonism can, in fact, be bad for…