The Mormonverse

According to the internet, Joseph Smith once said, “The inhabitants of the moon are more of a uniform size than the inhabitants of the earth, being about 6 feet in height. They dress very much like the Quaker style and are quite general in style or the one fashion of dress. They live to be very old; coming generally, near a thousand years.” Or rather, Philo Dibble told Oliver Huntington that Joseph Smith had said that. Super legit. “But wait!” the detractors will cry. “It was published by the church. Checkmate. Your church is false.” While this quote was published in the *pauses and puts on glasses to read the well-known title that everyone will recognize* Young Women’s Journal of 1897¸ it has never really been corroborated by anyone else or in any other publications. And the Young Women’s Journal is not typically (ever) cited for its doctrinal relevance. “Ah ha! But you fail to mention all the other quotes from Joseph Smith saying more or less the same thing.” Okay...

I am a huge fan of cryptozoology, which is the pseudoscientific study of legendary creatures. Every time a new cryptid is blurrily photographed with a camera from 1973, I get excited. A post I saw on Facebook about Bigfoot sightings in Utah and the request of a friend of mine to address the issue led me to dedicate a post to cryptozoology. This week I debated posting about Bigfoot and moon men together as a longer post about Mormon cryptozoology, but I decided that each topic could merit a post on its own, so I went with Bigfoot this week. Stay tuned for my moon men post next week. In the book Miracle of Forgiveness , Spencer W. Kimball relates a story from David W. Patten's biography by Lycurgus Wilson which contained a letter from Abraham O. Smoot that contained a story that he remembered from a meeting he had with David W. Patten. If that isn’t already a red flag, then I would suggest playing a game of telephone. This fourth-hand information has become the very ten...

Just to give a little background for this, I was asked this question on my mission. It took me a few days to figure out the answer, but I got there eventually. Persistently searching for answers in the scriptures will yield more meaningful results than a Google search. Google offers no challenge, imagination, or faith. It is obviously still a great tool, but you'd be amazed by what you can learn without it. Without further ado, here we go!  If Joseph married an Egyptian how could Ephraim and Manasseh (and by extension their descendants) qualify for the priesthood? In the Book of Abraham, we learn that the Egyptians in the time of Abraham did not qualify for the priesthood due to Ham's unrighteousness ( Abraham 1:25-27 ). Ham married outside of the covenant and because of that, his posterity lost the opportunity to receive the priesthood. While this may seem unfair, it is not unprecedented (or rather unsubsequented since this happened first. And I know unsubsequente...

  Translation, the process by which a mortal is made immortal without being resurrected, is typically done so that a prophet can remain on the Earth without needing to die and be resurrected. Moses and Elijah (sometimes Elias) were translated in their respective eras so that they could appear on the Mount of Transfiguration and pass priesthood keys by the laying on of hands. A spirit could not do this and Jesus Christ was the first person to be resurrected so they would not have been resurrected by the time they needed to fulfill their mission. So far so good. Except that in 1918, Joseph F. Smith had a vision of the spirit world as it existed just before the death and resurrection of Christ. Section 138 of D&C explains the state of the spirits that existed there. Among the spirits listed in this section are Moses and Elijah , the two prophets that never died. What were these two translated beings doing in the spirit world? I am sure that a lot of people...

Did the powers that be of Jerusalem collude to keep an invaluable sacred text out of the hands of the people? Critics of the Book of Mormon like to attack the concept of a bound set of plates being used in ancient Jerusalem. Aside from this being an absence of evidence is evidence of absence fallacy and the fact that  plates dating back to that time have been discovered , these critics failed to consider one major component of the Mormon faith that explains this problem, the belief in prophets. Prophets can see things that other people cannot. Before Noah, arks did not exist. Before Moses, tabernacles did not exist. Before Isaiah, lengthy and confusing analogies did not exist. The list goes on and on. What if plates never existed in Ancient Israel? Would that prevent a prophet from being shown a new form of record keeping? No. God can command and instruct as He sees fit. Case closed. Except it wasn’t for me. This "problem" got me thinking about plates. The fi...

I was once invited to attend a Mormon scholarship conference. As a lifelong member of the church, a returned missionary and a teaching assistant for a religion professor at BYU, I eagerly looked forward to the event. My barely contained excitement was quashed, however, when I discovered just how boring Mormon scholarship is. The speakers droned on about semantics and primary sources and peer reviews and all manner of other topics in which I had no interest. In short, these very intelligent people used whatever the opposite of imagination is to talk about all of the mindbendingly incredible things there are to discuss within Mormondom.  I'm sick of it. I know that scholarship, research, sources, blah, blah and blah are important, but I have started looking at Mormonism as more than a history to be studied or a faith to be followed. It is a massive universe filled with adventures, prophecies, heroes and villains. The way a person may look at Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings or...