Where did the Fire Go?

Have been thinking about this. My conclusion is:

Modernity sucks in a lot of ways. I don’t care. I respect Christ. I admire and trust him. And when He comes back, He’s going to have something cooked up better than I expect. I am not going to stop doing weird stuff or thinking weird thoughts, aimed in that direction, until either I die or He comes back.

Mormon missionaries right? One of them may have encountered me, where I showed him how I think Alma 9 had Jesus establishing the communion with wine but you guys use water, and other contradictions between the BOM and M practice or the BOM itself, and then they responded by pulling out their Secret Mormon Missionary Manual (no secret to Mormon males I suppose but not supposed to be shown to non-Mormons) and started reading off a list of Bible contradictions to attack the Bible because I had disproved the BOM. I saw what was going down and said “Let me see that book.” One of the 2 actually handed it to me. I perused the TOC of the Secret Mormon Missionary Manual, and I saw the whole list of contradictions the Mormon Church tells its missionaries the Bible is riddled with. And I said to them “So you guys told me that the Book of Mormon is another testament of Jesus Christ just like the Bible…yet you don’t even believe in the Bible?” One of them started weeping uncontrollably and they immediately left. You must have seen them after I disproved their false religion. I imagine they wouldn’t have as much fire in their belly for their embarassing cult after being caught like that.

Dear sir,
I believe you have misunderstood. We do not worship the Bible or any other scripture. We worship the Father and the Son. If there are imperfections, real or perceived, then we should not be shocked. Of course there are shortcomings in the text. So what?

If you are not receiving personal revelation daily, are you ready for what is coming? I am concerned you are not and you need to humble yourself before God immediately.

Because God, in his infinite wisdom, predestined them to be thus before the world was made.

I was a hot-shot football player in high-school. (Have I told you the stories?)

After graduation, I got married, had kids …. and they sucked the life out of me.

This is why I wonder whether a bonfire of faith is better than a hearth-fire. The bonfire is big and attention-getting and impressive to onlookers, but the hearth-fire, well-tended, nourishes body and soul. It takes constant care, though, to keep it going, and that’s not exciting.

@EC, wonderful analogy! The daily utility versus the special event.

The difference is that salient to me, is being a greenhouse orchid vs a stubborn tree you have tried to kill for years, but just keeps on growing back. I love greenhouses, but to properly grow, we have to do it out in the elements.

You might be a sports car out in the mission field, but what do you do when you don’t have the rules and structure? When you really can do whatever you want?

Perhaps for some, a particular phase of life is just ideal for them. Everything about them is just suited to that time, be it the mission, school, career, or having a family.

The disheartening thing then would be coming to terms that you just aren’t going to hit your stride quite like that again. You have to struggle and be out of sync, remembering something that was much better.

But we need the experiences of all the phases of life, even if they aren’t all our time to shine.

Jacob G.,

That is wisdom

There have been times in my life when my faith was like a river in the desert; underground most of the time.

@dave sora

I suspect your comment might be satire, but assuming you are serious: One way to counter an argument is to show that an unacceptable conclusion follows from its premises. This is supposed to make you question the premises (in your case, that a book cannot be inspired scripture if it contradicts itself or the present practice of its adherents), not to be taken as an argument in favor of the unacceptable conclusion (that the Bible is false).

Jesus often used this same technique. When the Pharisees accused him of breaking the Sabbath, he said, in effect, “But David did the same thing, and so do the priests in the Temple.”

I suppose a dave sora in the audience might have replied, “So you claim to be the Messiah, the Son of David, and yet you don’t even respect David? You claim to be the Lord’s Anointed, and yet you slander his anointed priests?”

I do not believe dave’s comment should be taken seriously. I believe his reference to a Secret Mormon Missionary Manual (note the capitalization in the original comment) is essentially antimormon scaremongering.

I don’t think there ever was a Secret Mormon Missionary Manual. I can imagine some misunderstanding regarding what materials would be intended for which audiences. But I do not believe that anything was ever provided to missionaries that contained information that was supposed to be secret. Is this the tell of antimormonism that I believe it to be, or am I missing something? Does anyone else know what is meant by the Secret Mormon Missionary Manual?

No, that was sheer lunacy and fiction. Might as well called it, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”.

My copy of the Secret Mormon Missionary Manual was handlettered on vellum by Secret Mormon Monks.

Over the years, there have been handfuls of informal pamphlets/booklets published by church members such as “23 signs of the true church.” And I’ve seen a few things passed around that I thought of as ammunition for “Bible-bashing.”

So yes, various lists of biblical contradictions have been floating around in LDS circles for decades.

I had a bookshelf dedicated to such things, picked up from ebay and Amazon, which is now packed away somewhere in a pile of 30 boxes of books.

Before the formal missionary lessons were standardized, there were even more mission prep books published by Deseret, but not under the church’s imprimature.

My mission pres in the 80’s treated Alvin Dyer’s “The Testifying and Challenging missionary” as standard issue, and pert-near Standard Operating Procedure. It did not have official Missionary Dept blessing, but was widely used as a “help.”

But, none of the above was official from the Missionary Dept’s point of view.

Hence, it is an exageration and a stretch to call any of that a capitalized “Secret Missionary Manual”, but it would not be too extreme of a stretch. They made the rounds as unofficial “helps.”

As Bookslinger says, informal “secret missionary manuals” are commonplace, or were when I was a missionary. I had a little booklet, prepared by my father, which listed biblical “refutations” of various anti-Mormon talking points, and many of these were of the “tu quoque” variety described by dave. If they bring up polygamy, here’s a list of references to righteous polygamists in the Bible; if they bring up racial restrictions on the priesthood, here’s a list of references to racial restrictions on the Levitical priesthood; that kind of thing. So I don’t really doubt that part of dave’s story. The bit that makes me roll my eyes is the ending, where the missionaries, having been completely demolished with Facts and Logic, burst into tears and retreat with their tails between their legs. All that’s really missing is: “The investigator’s name? Albert Einstein.”

That missionary’s name? Vladimir Putin

I didn’t know the Secret Mormon Monks ever worked on vellum. I thought they preferred to pass their wisdom by hand lettering yellow dinnerware.

Well, I had the unfortunate experience of a mission president who said “hey, this guy is a hard worker; let’s give him the most slacker, apostate missionaries as companions so he can teach them to work hard.”

Instead, it just frustrated and depressed me. I had no social or leadership skills, and I was unaware of this policy towards me until days before I went home.

I did not see myself as better than others, but I certainly came away feeling everyone was terrible and I must be a garbage person because “if you have a problem with one or two companions, it might be them, but if you have a problem with all of them, it’s you.”

So, I spent two years depressed over the fact I was a garbage person working with garbage people who hated me.

If it weren’t for a stray comment from an AP that I followed up on, I would have had no idea. At least that saved me from total depression. Finally realizing it really wasn’t just me, and it really was all of them was very liberating.

But I still spent two years very depressed. I will never be able to say my mission was the best two years of my life.

IAW – I had a similar experience, but I knew that I was specifically given slackers to make them work. It just left me exhausted from being unequally yoked.