Simple Utah Mormon Politics

Can life on earth have been created by some being higher than ourselves, yet continue on as a process of evolution? Sure. I think so. I don't think that God is some debauched Zeus atop a mythical Olympus. Nor do I imagine God as some mystical ethereal unquantifiable essence, as many religionists do. The God I imagine is a perfected human being who, because he is perfect, lives by natural law.

At the behest of a facebook friend, I am currently reading the book Finding Darwin's God . Besides being a delightfully written book, I enjoy the fact that the author, Kenneth R. Miller, as someone who believes in God, is not threatened by evolution. It's a stance that far too few of us take.

Many people revere Jesus Christ as the Savior of mankind, as well as the Son of God. Do you think it's easier for us today, than for those that lived during the time of Christ's mortal ministry, to recognize him as the Savior of the world?

The more I participate in ordinances for the dead in temples of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the more I develop an ulterior motive for doing so; nowhere do important truths impress themselves more clearly upon my mind than in the temple.

How is it that secularists and even atheists can live more moral lives than many adherents of the various religions? First, because many religionists misunderstand why we have religion in the first place. Second, because, despite whether someone believes in God, they are still enlightened by the spirit of God. We don't need to believe in God in order to be good.  Rather, we are good, because it is in our natures to do so.

We often talk of having faith in Christ to help us accomplish things that we can't do by ourselves. The real essence of faith in Christ, however, is to ask him to accomplish things for us that we can't do at all.

Many people think that LDS Apostle Boyd K. Packer's talk in October 2010 LDS General Conference was hateful toward homosexuals or that it encouraged hatred toward homosexuals. I don't. However, Elder Packer could have helped a lot of people if, in his talk, he had said "it".What, then, is "it"? "It" is this...

The question posed in the title of this article is one that was asked by Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion . To the religious person, at first glance, the question might seem preposterous.  But the more I think about the eternal nature of eternity, the more I think Dawkins is onto something.

Here is a list of ten things that I resolve to be better at as a result of what I have learned and felt while participating in the October 2010 General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

It's important to be able to recognize and choose the good.  While it's okay to choose good because God wants us to, ultimately, we can't aim to please God or anyone else with our choices.  We've got to become able to choose good simply because we want to .

Has the universe always existed?  Rather, did it have its beginning in a big bang?  Or did God create it?  Interestingly, no matter what your opinion is on the matter, it cannot be scientifically proven.  Every finite human opinion about the origin and purpose of the universe must rest on faith.

A staple of the Christian religious tradition is that hell is a physical place where the guilty are tormented by unending fire. Interestingly, the Islamic concept of hell is very similar. Both Christianity and Islam seem to imply that hordes of the dead will occupy this inferno. Where did we get these ideas? Are they true?

Other than the declaration that "Adam was the first man of all men", very little has been revealed to LDS Prophets about whether or not the theory of evolution is correct.  It has been promised that such truth will come in due time.  Latter-day Saints are encouraged, however, to accept truth from wherever it may come.  In that spirit, allow me to wantonly speculate on how religious and scientific truths may one day come into harmony. Feel free to speculate along with me. Updated May 10, 2010: Might there have been death before the fall?  YES! There might have...

If we could just get all the people who believe in Evolution to believe in God, and vice versa, we'd be in pretty good shape.  Maybe we could then agree that, through the evolution of mankind, our possibilities are essentially limitless. Evolution is all around us.  But so also are majestic creations.  It makes perfect sense to me that if things (and people) continue to evolve over the eons, that eventually at least one of them would reach perfection.  Evolution and creation can work together for our benefit.

I suspect most believers in God think that "atheist" is a dirty word. But is it really? Think of a world without atheists. Would we be better off? Absolutely not. A world without atheists would be a pretty scary place. Some of the most intelligent people in the world are atheists. They are often atheists because they are diligent seekers after truth. In the October 2009 General Conference of the LDS Church, Elder Robert D. Hales make the following statement : ...we live in a time when the darkness of secularism is deepening around us. Belief in God is widely questioned and even attacked in the name of political, social, and even religious causes. Atheism, or the doctrine that there is no God, is fast spreading across the world. Does that indicate that Elder Hales thinks that atheists are bad people? I don't think so. I think it indicates simply that believes that they are misinformed. It's not hard, however, it today's world to be misinformed, what with ther...

There are some pretty wacky things in the Bible. That's why I'm glad that my Church teaches that "we believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly." The other night we were reading about the exploits of the steroidally strong Samson in the Old Testament. He fell in love with some floozy from another country, and she got him to reveal a secret, which ultimately ticked him off as only Samson could be ticked off. In the last verse of Judges chapter 14 he dumps his wife out of spite. And you know... That's the first time in my entire life that I realized that before the tart named Delilah came along, there was another bimbo. And how are these stories of a muscular, oversexed monster supposed to be spiritually uplifting? In his book, The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins points out some the more bizarre entries in the Old Testament. Dawkins chortles: To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as yo...

Might the leaders of Western countries have known just how damaging World War I would be to Christianity, to Islam, to the West, and to the Middle East? Sadly, the Great War was fought for nothing but irrepressible pride. In retrospect, it is probable to imagine that, had WWI never been fought, a cataclysmic attack on American soil, such as the one that happened on September 11, 2001, would have never occurred. But even without retrospect, it would have been, nearly one hundred years ago, elementary to predict such an eventual backlash. From the perspective of malice toward Islam, it is easy in retrospect to see how Western encroachment into Muslim lands would have triggered a vicious backlash against Christians in Asia Minor and the Levant. A more Who would have imagined a century ago, that the pride of dictators, oligarchs, and gun runners would effect a needless world war, which would in turn lead to the fall of the Twin Towers? The exact target would have been hard to foretell,...

Apart from claiming unique authority to act in God's name on the earth, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints encourages its members to seek truth, even if a significant part of the truth we find is not from a study of standard church doctrine. To the best of my knowledge, no other religious denomination is so confident in its teachings and principles that it encourages its adherents to look into every field, under every rock, and in every nook and cranny to discover what is true. Unfortunately, not enough members of the LDS Church realize this enormous blessing and challenge. In many ways, many members of the Church are just like members of other denominations--limited by their creeds, superstitions, and ignorance. Joseph Smith taught that: ...the most prominent difference in sentiment between Latter-day Saints and sectarians was, that the [sectarians] were all circumscribed by some peculiar creed, which deprived the members the privilege of believing anything not co...

Yes, it is--but not nearly as often as we been taught here in the 21st century. On the subject of when it's morally permissible to go to war, George W. Bush and many of his predecessors could learn a great lesson from an ancient American military commander. We shouldn't talk about political issues in Sunday School class, but I've got to get some things off my chest...so I'll talk about them here instead. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, although it is politically neutral, encourages its members to be politically active. However, that political activism is prohibited from occurring in In modern-day parlance, "just war" means that even a half-baked idea is reason enough for the world's only superpower to dominate yet another nation, because the United States only wants what's best for everyone else. So did Stalin. So did Hitler. LDS meetinghouses. You may imagine, then, how difficult it was for me to bite my tongue to prevent it from...

The entire two-month saga of captivity and abuse of members of the FLDS Church at Eldorado, Texas at the hands of Texas authorities didn't ever have to be, I've said several times in these pages . Finally, the Texas Third District Court of Appeals agrees. It's about time. I hope that these families, molested by their government on unsubstantiated charges of molesting each other--can put their lives back together, healthy and whole. I don't like what the Fundamentalist LDS Church teaches. I don't appreciate the fact that they use my I don't like what the Fundamentalist LDS Church teaches. But I can't believe how many people cheered as the FLDS had their rights trampled in the mud and excrement. That kind of abuse is something that anyone, regardless of religion, should stand up against. Book of Mormon in claiming that theirs is the only true Church of Jesus Christ when they've never even been a part of our church. But I can't believe how many p...