Ether 3: Light My Way

The brother of Jared continues his unlikely preparations for his improbable journey.

Who Abridges the Abridgers?
The opening verse of this chapter is, simply, a complete mess:

And it came to pass that the brother of Jared, (now the number of the vessels which had been prepared was eight) went forth unto the mount, which they called the mount Shelem, because of its exceeding height, and did molten out of a rock sixteen small stones; and they were white and clear, even as transparent glass; and he did carry them in his hands upon the top of the mount, and cried again unto the Lord, saying:

Why is that parenthetical comment needed?  Who cares about the number of boats right away in the middle of the sentence?   Why do we need to know the name of the mountain—a word that means nothing to us in any modern language?  Why do we need to know why the mountain was named that nonsense word because it happened to be a particularly tall mountain?  How exactly, were the stones both white and completely transparent?  And how is it at all important for us to know that the method the brother of Jared used to transport the stones to the peak of Mount Shelem was by using his hands?

Moroni has created the absolute worst abridgment in the history of abridgments.  If he's taking the salient points of doctrine from these records and carving them onto his own plates, why not keep it simple:

And it came to pass that the brother of Jared went forth unto a mount and did molten out of the rock sixteen small stones; and he did carry them to the top of the mount, and cried again unto the Lord, saying:

Look at that, I've cut the word count by roughly forty-five percent without breaking a sweat.  I suppose, realistically, that the word counts might not be the same in Reformed Egyptian, but still, it sure seems like this prophet was making a lot more work for himself than necessary and laying down some truly awful prose in the process.

Approximately Human
God stretches forth his finger and touches the stones so that they mysteriously glow to provide light inside the airtight Jaredite barges.  But that's—arguably, of course—not the weirdest thing about it.  The weirdest thing is that the brother of Jared is scared peeless by the fact that God has a finger of "flesh and blood."

The problem with this is that God isn't supposed to have blood at all.  As a resurrected, exalted, and celestial being, he's supposed to have the pure essence of spirit pumping through his veins.  Or something like that, as taught by some inconsequential person you've probably never heard of, by which I mean Joseph Fielding Smith, prophet of God and president of the church.  He's quoted in church-produced materials as saying:

After the resurrection from the dead our bodies will be spiritual bodies, but they will be bodies that are tangible, bodies that have been purified, but they will nevertheless be bodies of flesh and bones, but they will not be blood bodies, they will no longer be quickened by blood but quickened by the spirit which is eternal and they shall become immortal and shall never die.

But in Ether, which was translated by divine inspiration and is the most correct book on the face of the earth and contains the fullness of the gospel, God himself uses the word "blood" when referring to his own circulatory system.  Or at least to his own finger.

This is obviously not important doctrine that is essential to anyone's salvation, but in my opinion, these small but demonstrably contradictory discrepancies are exactly the kinds of things you should see if these concepts emanated not from a perfect deity but instead from a series of imperfect humans who were making stuff up as they went along.  You know, kind of the same way a detail in season seven of a TV show puts fans in an uproar because it doesn't jive with the backstory of the show based on that one line of dialogue from one character in season two.

  

The Awesomest Awesome that Ever Awesomed

The reason the brother of Jared sees God's finger, according to verse 9, is because no one else has ever come before God with so much faith.  This continues a trend in the Book of Mormon of absurdly idealized characters whose righteous traits exceed those of some of the most celebrated prophets of the Bible.  Who needs Moses and Abraham and Paul and John the Baptist and their middling feats when you have Moroni's theoretical power over the devil, Nephi's blank check of priesthood authority, and the brother of Jared's unprecedented faith to see the actual flesh of God?

This brings to mind a comment once made by David Cone of the New York Yankees:  "You run out of superlatives at some point."  When every Book of Mormon prophet is so amazingly amazing that no amazingness can express the amazement, it starts to get kind of old.  There isn't much else to say to make the next prophet seem important too.  And it's not just boring—it's unrealistic.  It makes the author seem desperate to one-up the larger-than-life figures of the Bible instead of trying to, as the cover of the book says, simply provide another testament of Jesus Christ.  The tone becomes competitive rather than complementary.  It reeks of fable rather than fact.

Make Up Your Mind!

Despite the fact that this story is supposed to be in the founding book of scripture for a religion that rejects (and sometimes mocks) the concept of the Trinity, in verse 14 of this chapter, God and Jesus have become the same person again:

Behold, I am he who was prepared from the foundation of the world to redeem my people. Behold, I am Jesus Christ. I am the Father and the Son. In me shall all mankind have life, and that eternally, even they who shall believe on my name; and they shall become my sons and my daughters.

You are the Father and the Son?  Oh, man, this is getting really confusing.  Second Nephi, Mosiah, Third Nephi, and Mormon have already caused some problems where the identities of the members of the godhead are concerned.  I guess we can just add Ether to that illustrious list.

A Long Journey for a Useless Rock

In verse 23, God gives the brother of Jared two stones that can be used at a later date to translate the records that the brother of Jared was keeping.  This is kind of a strange thing for God to do because he's providing the means for future translations before the original manuscript is even close to being finished.  Even if he's referring to King Mosiah translating the Jaredite record (as opposed to Joseph Smith translating the entirety of the Book of Mormon), this is still centuries and possibly millennia in advance.  That means that Jared and Company are going to have to make sure these stones get safely across the ocean and are preserved for generations upon generations so that at some point on the hidden horizon of time, somebody else can use them to make sense of their writing.

That's crazy.  That's not foresight, it's totally unnecessary planning.  I mean, Moroni is just going to have to abridge everything later.  Why not provide the tools for translation then, when it's vastly more practical?

And it really sounds like God is referring to the Urim and Thummim here.  If that's true, then this makes even less sense, because according to Emma Smith, the Urim and Thummim were only used in the translation of the lost 116 pages and not for anything that wound up being part of what we know today as the Book of Mormon.  (I don't think I've ever done this before, but I don't have a website reference for that—it's on page 43 of No Man Knows My History.)

If anything, this makes God seem lazy.  He doesn't want to be bothered with giving translators the necessary tools so he thought he could kill two birds with one stone (get it?!  stone?!) while he was answering the brother of Jared's concern about lighting the barges.  So he threw the seer stones in with the lamp stones and made Jared's family do all the heavy lifting in making sure the tools were preserved so that somewhere down through the ages a translator might use them.

Ether 2: Back to the Future

So now that they're all speaking the same language and they've been assured they'll be led to a promised land where they can raise a mighty nation up unto God, Jared's family, their friends, and their families journey into the wilderness in a way that's oddly reminiscent of the plot at the beginning of this...ponderous tome.  However, since this all takes place long before the events back in 1 Nephi, perhaps it's Nephi's family who really got the recycled storyline.


I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
Thus far, the brother of Jared and God have been communicating through prayer.  The brother of Jared asks for things, God grants things, and then at the end of the last chapter, God actually says things in response to a prayer.  But apparently that relationship is about to take an odd turn (verse 4):

And it came to pass that when they had come down into the valley of Nimrod the Lord came down and talked with the brother of Jared; and he was in a cloud, and the brother of Jared saw him not.

Why?

They've already talked.  The brother of Jared has heard God's voice before.  So what is accomplished by having God visit him in person, only to shroud his physical form?  Especially when he's about to actually walk ahead of this roving group to lead the way?  Couldn't he have given them a Liahona?  Couldn't he have given the brother of Jared some inspiration?  Maybe he could have come to him in a dream and drawn him a map.  Why would God visit personally and make sure nobody saw him?

My guess, honestly, is that Joseph Smith was again trying to legitimize his fictional scripture by linking it again with the Bible—so he had God revisit his pillar of cloud trick spoken of in Exodus.


Terms and Conditions
God seems to make a hasty decision in anger as evidenced in verse 8:

And he had sworn in his wrath unto the brother of Jared, that whoso should possess this land of promise, from that time henceforth and forever, should serve him, the true and only God, or they should be swept off when the fulness of his wrath should come upon them.

Okay, "sworn in his wrath" is not an encouraging act to be ascribed to a deity.  The Mormon god is supposed to be just and reasonable, right?  As opposed to hotheaded and capricious?  And yet...here he is, in a fit of rage, making a decision that will affect millions of people over countless generations.  Not good.

But also it doesn't really seem fair the way that the principle taught in this chapter is hammered in over the next few verses—and really throughout the Book of Mormon.  So this is a land of promise, that's fine.  So whoever lives here should serve him...ehhhh, okay.  I mean, as long as everyone knows about this agreement to obey or be obliterated, I guess I could get behind it.  And also as long as everyone has the option to leave if they don't want to be included in this rather one-sided covenant.

What God is really doing here is holding people accountable for things that he told their distant ancestors.  Which is absolute baloney.  If he expects the Jaredites to uphold their end of the bargain, he should probably make sure that future Jaredites actually know that the bargain exists.  Instead, he gets to throw a fit every time a few centuries goes by and not every person in the country is appropriately genuflecting to his glory.  This is a smaller-scale satire of the Plan of Salvation, really, because God has made a unilateral decision, made demands on his children, denied them access to knowledge of the decision and the demands, and thereby forced them into a system designed for their failure—a failure which he reserves the right to sanctimoniously cite as evidence against his children at a later date.

Also, the promised land that he's talking about in these verses is America.  So if possessing America without unflinching service to God results in being wiped off the face of the earth, how come the Nephites got exterminated but the Lamanites didn't?  I mean, the Lamanites are still around in the present day, so if they have it coming to them, why does God seem to hesitate for a couple of millennia before laying the smack down?


World of Pure Imagination
Now we get to the infamous Jaredite barges (verse 17):

And they were built after a manner that they were exceedingly tight, even that they would hold water like unto a dish; and the bottom thereof was tight like unto a dish; and the sides thereof were tight like unto a dish; and the ends thereof were peaked; and the top thereof was tight like unto a dish; and the length thereof was the length of a tree; and the door thereof, when it was shut, was tight like unto a dish.

This description is pretty useless.  I mean, I guess that the main takeaway here is that the barges are watertight.  And it sounds like maybe they're completely enclosed—more akin to a submarine than to a galleon.  But I don't understand what it means that the ends were "peaked" or what importance that detail carries.  And I certainly don't know how big they are because "the length of a tree" depends one what kind of tree we're talking about here.  Dogwood?  Redwood?  Give me a hint, here, Ether.

I, for one, am also very interested in how thousands of years ago, the Jaredites were able what is essentially a submarine, complete with watertight doors.

Behind the Curve

I had a recent conversation with one of my sisters in which she shared that she'd recently learned about Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to compete in the Boston Marathon.  My sister was shocked to learn that Switzer broke this gender barrier in 1967.

My sister is hardly what you'd call a feminist, but she was appalled that something like this happened so late in history—during both our parents' lifetimes, even.  This was almost fifty years after women had been constitutionally granted the right to vote in the United States, she reasoned.  How could it have taken so long for the culture to catch up with values of equality that should have been firmly in place decades before?

I agreed with her, of course.  It does seem crazy that Switzer faced such opposition because she was a woman.  And it does seem crazy that all this happened recently enough that she's still alive.  But as I sat there listening to my sister express her disappointment with her own society, all I could think about was the Mormon ban on black people holding the priesthood and attending the temple.

In answer to my sister's little rant, I mumbled vaguely, "Yeah, there are a lot of things like that that really should have happened way before they actually did."  I wasn't going to press the issue, of course.  I suppose that was my totally ineffectual way of trying to plant a seed of doubt.

But  I don't really blame my sister for not making the connection between the sexism of the Boston Athletic Association and the racism of the LDS church.  The story of Switzer affected her because she could identify closely with it.  My sister, obviously, is a woman.  During her college career she was in an environment overwhelmingly made up of men because of the major she'd chosen.  I'm sure she experienced a bit of sexism and at the very least a bit of masculine condescension.

But my sister has never been black.  She doesn't have much in the way of shared experiences with black people as far as racism is concerned.  So while she is opposed to racism, she hasn't arrived at any sort of disappointment with the church leadership for waiting so long to repeal its racist policies—because they don't resonate with her as deeply because they don't affect her.  She probably just hasn't given it a lot of thought.  And I can completely understand that because I'm the same way.  It took leaving the church for me to start to face some of the things that I should have always cared about but had never been confronted with.  It's something I'm still learning to do and something that I hope I never stop being able to do.

It would be more than a decade after Switzer first ran in the Boston Marathon that Spencer W. Kimball would reveal that God suddenly had no problem with black people holding the priesthood.  The United States government does tend to enjoy claiming moral authority in certain areas, but it does not claim to speak for God himself—and yet, bafflingly, as far behind the curve as the US government can be when it comes to things like race, gender, and sexual orientation, it's still far ahead of the religious institution that claims to be the only one hundred percent divinely sponsored church on the face of the earth.

It was 1954 when the United States Supreme Court ruled that public schools needed to be desegregated.  It was 1978 when God revealed that the Celestial Kingdom would be desegregated.  It was 1967 when Kathrine Switzer became the first woman to compete in the Boston Marathon.  It was 2013 when Jean A. Stevens became the first woman to pray in a session of General Conference.  It was 2015 when the United States Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples are constitutionally guaranteed the right to marry.  When will the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints catch up?

When will it actually start to take the lead, like God's true church should?

Ether 1: The Book of Mormon Reboot

And now we dive into Ether, a book of scripture that was aptly named, considering its distant and nebulous relationship with reality.


Genealogy, I Am Reading It
It's a long established claim here that the records that were eventually published as The Book of Mormon were created by pulling together many various accounts of ancient Americans and etching the most important things from these accounts onto a limited number of metal plates.  And this is precisely what Moroni is doing when Ether begins.

But the first five verses of Ether are a needlessly detailed explanation of the fact that Moroni is abridging an existing record.  And then the next twenty-seven verses consist solely of a genealogical line that links the characters in the book to the book's namesake.

Not only was this an absurd waste of effort and space, but it begs the question:  how, exactly, is knowing that Riplakish was the son of Shez essential to my salvation?  How is it essential to anything?  How was it worth writing down when Moroni knew damn well that the book was intended for the modern day, an era in which none of these names and their connections to each other would mean a thing to the reader?


More of God's Favoritism
Getting down to the actual plot here, we're introduced to a family living in the time of the Tower of Babel.  Our main protagonist, referred to so far as merely "the brother of Jared," is "highly favored of the Lord."  So when this brother of Jared prays that he and his brother will not have their language confounded, God grants this request.

And then when Jared prays that his friends and their families will not have their languages confounded, God grants that request too.  And then Jared prays to know whether God is going to relocate them and where they should go.  God replies by giving them directions to "a land which is choice above all the lands of the earth" so that he, his friends, and their families will be blessed and will found a society so awesome that "there shall be none greater than the nation which I will raise up unto me of thy seed, upon all the face of the earth."

This is completely unfair.  But it also seems to be the Mormon God's usual MO.  He plays favorites with the righteous people he likes and lets plenty of other people benefit from his favoritism even when they may not have deserved it.  Laman and Lemuel got rescued from the impending Babylonian captivity and taken to the promised land even though they were wicked.  Alma the Younger had an angel appear to him to convince him of the error of his ways because his daddy was the prophet.  And in this case, a whole bunch of people who may or may not have been righteous get dragged along for the ride to blessedness and prosperity because they (or their family members) are buds with Jared or his brother.

I thought God blessed us for obedience and punished us for disobedience.  How is God supposed to have any kind of moral authority when he's basically acting as a bouncer at the front door by letting the guys who know somebody important cut in line?


Not to Bring the Bible into my Criticism, but...
What I'd like to know is how these guys knew beforehand that God was going to give everybody a different language.  What I'd also like to know is why Jared and his brother would have been given different languages from each other.

Obviously, the Tower of Babel story has lots of problems if you interpret it as historical fact rather than as didactic parable.  But it does seem that, either way, the story offers an explanation for how humanity came to be so vastly multilingual.  And with that in mind, why would God have given every individual person a different language?  Wouldn't he have given each family or each existing social group its own language?  That way, when God scatters them across the face of the earth in Genesis 11, each group can successfully build its own nation.  So why would it be in God's interest that brothers would not be able to understand each other?  Did God also confound the toddlers so that they couldn't communicate with their parents, who also couldn't communicate with each other?  That doesn't make any sense.

Based on Joseph Smith's interpretation of the Tower of Babel story, we could have millions of languages today instead of just a few thousand.


Prayer by Proxy
I also think it's weird that everything the brother of Jared prays for is suggested by Jared himself.  If Jared is the one with the questions, why can't he pray about it?  If the brother of Jared is the one who seems happy to let things play out, why is he the one asking God for changes to the plan?  It's almost as if this story is quietly hinting that the effect of a prayer is dependent upon the identity of the person praying.  But we know that's hogwash because God loves us all equally, right?  God is no respecter of persons, right?  He that asketh receiveth, right?

Notes on the Sunday Afternoon Session

Okay, we're on the home stretch, ladies and gentlemen.

Sometimes those who raise a warning voice are dismissed as judgmental.  Paradoxically, however, those who claim truth is relative and moral standards are a matter of personal preference are often the same ones who most harshly criticize people that don't accept the current norm of "correct thinking." 
—D. Todd Christofferson

Make no mistake—this is nothing better than a very calm temper tantrum.  He thinks he's being so sly by pointing out some kind of paradoxical thinking, but all he's really doing is trying to lob criticism back at his critics while trying to give himself the appearance of being above it all.

Not to buck your trend here, Todd, but I dismiss your religion as judgmental, except I don't think truth is relative or that moral standards are a matter of personal preference.  And while I don't believe that you accept "correct thinking," I don't think that "correct thinking" should be accepted because it's the current norm.  It's because I think it's correct or further progress in the direction of correctness—at least insofar as the issues you're getting all butthurt about are concerned.

The guilt culture may be harsh, but at least you can hate the sin and still love the sinner.  The modern shame culture allegedly values inclusion and tolerance but it can be strangely unmerciful to those who disagree and those who don't fit in.
—D. Todd Christofferson, quoting David Brooks

So...is Christofferson advocating a guilt-based culture?  What the hell?  It's especially confusing considering that he's clearly using this quote to attack the shame culture, except that his own organization is guilty of the exact things that Brooks is condemning.  The modern LDS church allegedly values inclusion and tolerance but it can be strangely unmerciful to those who disagree and those who don't fit in.  This is why it tries to excommunicate the Dehlins and the Runnellses in its midst and this is why it disciplines members in homosexual relationships and demands that their children disavow their parents' lifestyles.

So that's a nice heaping two-thousand-calorie bowlful of hypocrisy there....

How much better it is to have the unchanging law of God by which we may act to choose our destiny rather than being hostage to the unpredictable rules and wrath of the social media mob.  How much better it is to know the truth than to be tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine.  How much better to repent and rise to the gospel standard than to pretend there is no right or wrong and languish in sin and regret.
—D. Todd Christofferson 

Props for getting out the words "unchanging law of God" with a straight face.  Should we discuss polygamy?  The law of consecration?  The prophetic and apostolic reasoning provided for the priesthood ban against blacks?  The fact that the Word of Wisdom was more of a suggested guideline until the 1920s?   The church's waffling over its stance on oral and anal sex?  Or there's also the well-documented fact that the Lord's laws did change, once, pretty significantly.  Something about a savior fulfilling the law of Moses or something.

And I really don't understand how following the law of God allows us to act to choose our destiny but somehow following the rules of the "social media mob" doesn't.  Having an active Twitter account doesn't restrict one's free agency.  How, exactly, is following the rules of the social media era classified as being held hostage but following the rules of God isn't?  Don't we still get to choose which set of rules we want to follow?  Isn't the level of enslavement the same whether we choose to follow the social media madness or the Mormon mania?  And how on earth did we get from talking about social media to talking about pretending there is no right or wrong?

Christofferson is aggressively trying to paint everyone who disagrees with him with a broad brush of mischaracterization, and it's getting to the point where I have no ungodly idea what the hell he's talking about anymore.  And since he gets to quote secular writers without naming the source, let me just follow suit by saying that his rabid philippic is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Elites get and stay married and make sure their kids enjoy the benefits of a stable marriage.  The problem however, is they tend not to preach what they practice.  They don't want to impose on those who really could use their moral leadership.  But it is perhaps time for those with education and strong families to stop feigning neutrality and start preaching what they practice pertaining to marriage and parenting and help their fellow Americans embrace it.
—D.  Todd Christofferson

Oh, you smug, supercilious snob.

The level of arrogance in this statement could bring down a grizzly bear at one hundred yards.  He's appealing, I suppose, to some kind of silent majority that will stand up for the family unit.  I thought he was going into a lecture against gay marriage, but he never mentions it.  It could be aimed at those who choose to have families without entering into legal (and lawful!) marriage, but he never really says that either.  But whatever he's getting at, you can bet that it's time for people to start standing up for it.

He even uses the word "elites" multiple times.  He calls on those who have "education" to provide "moral leadership."  So basically, what I'm understanding here, is that rich, educated people have strong morals and they need to start teaching it to the indigent simpletons who think it's okay to have atypical non-nuclear families or something.

Ewww.

Because wealthy, educated people don't get divorced, right?  They never mess up their kids, right?  I keep reviewing this, trying to figure out if there's something else he's getting at here, but it sure looks like he wants the moral upper class to teach the common people how to do things right.

And to top it off, his statements on the subject are blatantly America-centric.  I thought he was a leader of a worldwide church.  Surely the weakening of the family unit isn't a problem only seen within the borders of the United States.

Through following the promptings of the Holy Ghost, President and Sister Tataoka and all missionaries were safely assembled.  They were out of harm's way and miles from the devastation of the tsunami and the nuclear fallout.
—Gary E. Stevenson

That's a pretty terrific story.  One person's prompting to hold a larger-than-necessary gathering of the missionaries kept everyone in the mission out of harm's way.  But the disaster itself wasn't averted.

Which makes me wonder...what about all the people living in the affected areas who hadn't had an opportunity to hear the message of the gospel?  I understand that the missionaries were protected because they were followers of Christ and their leaders were inspired.  But what about everybody else?  What about all the people who were killed or injured because they had no opportunity to receive promptings from the Spirit—it's not that they chose to ignore the promptings, it's just that they didn't have access to the spiritual apparatus required to receive them.  So God chose to save the people he'd already made contact with and then left those he hadn't yet contacted to fend for themselves?

Stevenson's story relates what could be a great miracle.  But when you read between the lines, it kind of points to a callous god who shamelessly plays favorites and allows people to suffer so that he can teach his favorite people more about how to be his favorite people.

What then, has the Lord revealed to President Monson that we need to continue doing so our light can be a standard for the nations? ... The Lord has always revealed his will to us, line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little, therefore we should not be surprised by what may seem like small things because of their simple and repetitive nature. For the Lord has already counseled us, telling us "blessed are those who hearken unto my precepts and lend an ear unto my counsel, for they shall learn wisdom; for unto he that receiveth, I will give more."
—Benjamín De Hoyos

...and that's the end of that.

De Hoyos gets startlingly real when he flirts with the possibility that the Lord hasn't really revealed anything important to the current prophet.  But after asking what those things might be, he essentially avoids the question.  The most specific he's able to get is that the things the Lord has revealed to President Monson may be simple and repetitive.

Long gone are the days when God would reveal specific things to individual members, as canonized in the Doctrine and Covenants.  Gone are the days when angels appeared to minister unto prophets, as in the Book of Mormon and early church history.  Gone even are the days when the prophet revealed important shifts in doctrine like the manifesto on polygamy or the abrogation of the priesthood ban.  And so all we're left with as far as revelation is concerned are the very things that are most easily confused with no revelation at all—little things and redundant things.

That's not very helpful, De Hoyos.  If that's how revelation works, just about any idiot could pretend to receive regular revelation.

...we concluded that [my brother's] decision on whether to serve a mission depended on three issues:  one, was Jesus Christ divine; two, was the Book of Mormon true; and three, was Joseph Smith the prophet of the restoration.
—Quentin L. Cook

Notice that none of these issues has anything to do with Cook's brother.  There's no talk of whether serving a mission might strain an already tense family relationship.  There's no discussion of whether the family had the resources to send him.  And even the assessments of the gospel's veracity are laid out in impersonal terms—it's not about whether Cook believed these things, it's about whether these things are true.  It sounds as though his brother made a decision to give up two years of his life by removing himself entirely from the equation.

Which, from a perspective of faith, is admirable.  But too many decisions made based on admirable faith have too many disastrous consequences.  I think it's healthy for a little reason to enter the mix.  Even if the faith is justified, it's too easy for people to get carried away with devotion and make life-altering choices without weighing all of the variables.

What about the aids to translation—the Urim and Thummim, the seer stones?  Were they essential, or were they like the training wheels on a bike until Joseph could exercise the faith necessary to receive more direct revelation?
—Quentin L. Cook

There's some nice little apologetic footwork here.  But what I really despise about this comment is the casual delivery that not-in-so-many-words tries to imply that the Urim and Thummim and the seer stones are the same thing.

They're not.

Stop trying to gloss over problematic issues.  Stop trying to bring them up slyly to pretend like you've made the information public.  Stop whitewashing your church's origin story.

I believe weekly participation in sacred sacrament meetings has spiritual implications we do not fully understand.
—Quentin L. Cook

Um...isn't it kind of your job to understand that sort of thing?  If you're just here to share some individual beliefs and some doctrinal guesswork, what's the point of claiming to be an apostle of the Lord with the spirit of revelation?  If your personal trainer offered you a new protein shake and said that it has nutritional implications that we do not fully understand, wouldn't you be a little wary of following his advice to drink it?



And that's all, folks.  Another edifying and uplifting General Conference has come and gone.  It was interesting and kind of sad to see subtitles on Monson's addresses to compensate for his slightly slurred speech.  And it was a little creepy the way so many of the general authorities began their talks by expressing love for, gratitude for, and prayers on behalf of the aging prophet.

I really wish they'd let that poor man become an emeritus church president.