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The lack of centralization of most Protestant churches as well as some other denominations makes for a very different history. Do you just document since the specific group started the be considered “open” or do you trace back to Luther and others, then down through the Catholic Church back to Christ? Then there’s the fact one could go to the library and find pretty detailed histories of Catholic and Protestant faiths in general. Iirc, some of the Catholics here have reported part of the catechism of investigators in the Catholic Church is teaching the history. That’s quite accessible and open history (assuming it’s accurate and somewhat detailed, but that’s a lot to cover, so I assume some stuff gets left out unless asked about) imo if my memory is correct.

PS. For the most part, although I find a few of his interpretations to be a stretch, I like the thesis. It makes sense more than anything else I know of. This is currently my recommendation as an introduction to the apocrypha. Happy to consider others.

What's the alternative? Wait another 10, 20, 30 years for academia to sort this out fully peer reviewed? No thanks. I've been looking for something like this for close to two decades. We shouldn't have to sort out 19 volumes of Nibley and decades of academic symposia/journals to get half of this, or wait until we are almost dead. I don't care if it's not perfect, if we later find some portion of it to be incorrect, or if we later find one of the references to be invalid. Excessive caution about critics finding some fault would not have been justification for witholding this thesis (however imperfect it might possibly be). Thank you Jonah. I've had more fun studying the OT this year than ever before. I feel like it's finally coming into focus. Again, I don't care if the focus is imperfect or even wrong. I deserve to be at least a spectator of the focusing process without being buried in academia.

She does feel kind of wasted in the role.

The Devil's Mouth It's free on prime or hulu or netflix...can't remember which one we saw it on. It's a very typical 'college kids' exotic vacation goes bad when something maneating appears where it's not supposed to be' tale. The director does not try to surprise anyone, the trope plays out exactly how you are expecting it to. You might hate the characters more than usually though because they are even more dumb than usual. I watched this with my 12 year old because it looked like a fun, mindless and harmless, scary movie and that's exactly what it was. I wouldn't want to spend any money on it but if you or your kids like nature monster movies then it could be a fun way to bond for an hour and half.

I think other posters have already said this, but most other churches don't believe they are the 'only true and living church'. They almost all believe that Creedal Christianity is the only true belief system, but that is different than what we claim. Many don't have leaders that claim to speak for God either. They claim inspiration and authority from God to lead (either through an extension of papal authority--if I understand that right--or through the priesthood of all believers and feeling called to lead), but that is another thing that is very different from what we claim. I don't know that we are more open about our history than most, maybe. Most Christian religions have the luxury of much older history for sure, and that does blunt its impact a lot. But our unique claims of authority and revelation mean that our history can hit differently, depending how someone interprets those claims. We just can't remove the obstacles that our history can present to people by pointing to other Christian churches. That's a chapter in the discussion but it's not the whole discussion.

It's not a bounty. It's a private right of action.

Pew's numbers only measure active cultural self-identification. A Pew survey simply asks a respondent, "What is your present religion, if any?" If someone grew up LDS, stops going, but never formally wrote a letter to resign their membership, they may tell Pew they are either "Nothing" or "Protestant", yet they choose to remain on the Church’s administrative rolls. Therefore, the gap between the books and self-identifying adults isn't some secret cover-up or an uncounted exodus. The Pew data highlights that childhood retention dropped in U.S. But framing it as uniquely devastating misses the broader national picture. Every major traditional Christian denomination has experienced sharp declines in youth retention and rising rates of disaffiliation as Gen Y and Gen Z moved into adulthood. The same Pew data note that LDS retention rates in the U.S. still hover near or above the averages for many major Christian groups, and active-participation retention remains comparatively high among those who do stay. So, what the data actually shows is that secularization is happening in the West. The Church in the United States and Europe is highly secularized and experiencing slow or flat growth. While our new missions are heavily concentrated in the Global South. Thousands are joining internationally every month, and thousands of new missionaries have been stepping forward to serve.

Every time I think of this verse it causes me to remember a time when my wife and I were staying at my in-laws on their farm property while helping my father-in-law recover from an injury. They had a rooster named "Darkly", and he used to come up to the glass sliding door that opened out to the back patio to let us know that the chickens needed to be fed. And I would say, "For now we see through a glass, Darkly".

I live in gilbert az area and we have ton of drivers here in SUVs with blonde hair and a pile of kids. All in a hurry to get to the three schools five different kids attend. Smoking red lights, tailgating, cutting people off and generally recklessly occupying the road. Driving here just before and just after school should come with combat pay. Ohhh and lots of em are from Utah lol.

I don't think there is any theological view that is free from problems to be solved. I look forward to the day when we can come face to face with God and get all of our questions answered. "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (1 Corinthians 13:12)

Maybe so InCognitis. I don't claim that my position is without any problems to be solved.

Good thing that’s not what ur saying. he ran a red light and wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. given he has a track record of recording while driving and not wearing a belt I imagine the crappy Utah drivers had little to do with his demise.

Yes, eventually it all gets down to “it just is” whether it’s God alone or all eternally existent beings and a material something they exist within.

Hi calm. I don't want to reduce anything to total understanding. We have mystery. So do you. The main thing I was saying is that BlipBlap was presenting a syllogism that was based on a faulty presupposition that nobody pretends to defend...a complete strawman.

I agree, to a point. Where creation ex-nihilo creates problems (out of nothing?) in my opinion, is that it introduces a total separation between God and man, one that I think contradicts Paul's teachings in Acts 17:28-29. In doing so it distorts God's relationship to mankind and introduces a boat load of theological problems, such as exacerbating the problems of evil. It also changes the ideas about monotheism (as I just posted in a separate thread).

I thought I would provide some links to the sources where some of this comes from. First, for Michael Heiser: Michael Heiser, Monotheism, Polytheism, Monolatry, or Henotheism? Toward an Assessment of Divine Plurality in the Hebrew Bible, Liberty University, 2008. Michael Heiser, Should the Plural אלהים of Psalm 82 Be Understood as Men or Divine Beings?, Annual Meeting, Evangelical Theological Society, 2010. Michael Heiser, Jesus’ Quotation of Psalm 82:6 in John 10:34: A Different View of John‘s Theological Strategy, 2012 SBL regional. And I'll add this one, because I think it is very important to the background of all of this: Peter Hayman, "Monotheism-- A Misused Word in Jewish Studies?", as found in Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol. XLII, No 1 (Spring 1991), pp. 1-15. Peter Hayman's article is important to me because I read it back in the 90's not long after it was published, and it influenced me to dig deeper into this topic. But the thing that really puzzled me (at first) about Hayman's article is that early on in his article he brought up the development of the doctrine of creation ex-nihilo. Hayman quotes Sefer Yesira (2:6), which the Sefaria Library website describes as follows: "Composed: c.200 BCE – c.200 CE. Sefer Yetzirah (the 'Book of Creation') is the title of the earliest extant book of Jewish esotericism." He says, "The Sefer Yesira has in [2:6] the following statement about how God created the world: 'He formed substance from chaos and made it with fire and it exists, and he hewed out great columns from intangible air'". Hayman continues: "This statement is entirely congruous with what we find in Bereshit Rabba: 'R. Huna said, in the name of Bar Qappara: 'If it were not written explicitly in Scripture, it would not be possible to say it: God created the heaven and the earth. From what? From the earth was chaos (תֹהוּ), etc.'" (Hayman, p. 2, italics in the original). The quote above is from Bereshit Rabba 1:5. The Sefaria Library website describes Bereshit Rabba as follows: "Composed: Talmudic Israel, 400 CE. Bereshit Rabbah is a talmudic-era midrash on the book of Genesis." Hayman continues, "The position represented here by Sefer Yesira and Rab Huna represents no advance whatsoever on Genesis chapter one. God creates order out of a pre-existing chaos; he does not create from nothing. Nearly all recent studies on the origin of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo have come to the conclusion that this doctrine is not native to Judaism, is nowhere attested in the Hebrew Bible, and probably arose in Christianity in the second century C.E. in the course of its fierce battle with Gnosticism." He notes that the idea of creation ex-nihilo "came into Judaism from Christianity and Islam at the beginning of the Middle Ages and that even then it never really succeeded in establishing itself as the accepted Jewish doctrine on creation" (Hayman, p. 3). As I said above, it was puzzling to me at first what any of this had to do with the development of monotheism. But I have since learned that the late second century AD development of the doctrine of creation ex-nihilo (in Christian circles and later introduced into Judaism and Islam) has everything to do with the development of monotheism. The development of the doctrine of creation ex-nihilo led to the idea that God "is so completely other in character"[1], making the journey to monotheism more complete. Footnote [1] Hayman quoting from T. C. Vriezen on page 1 of his article. Other studies have been published on the development of the doctrine of creation ex-nihilo since Hayman's article was published (the one by Gerhard May predated Hayman's article by over a decade, but it wasn't translated into English until 1994). The scholarly consensus today is that the doctrine of creation ex-nihilo was first introduced at around 177 AD by Tatian and Theophilus of Antioch. And this teaching is contrary to the earliest teachings from Christians (and Jews) that matter is eternal and that God created all things from unformed matter. In addition , the development of the doctrine of creation ex-nihilo flips the biblical teaching that all humans are the same "kind" of being as God (Acts 17:28-29) on its head, because if humans are truly the “offspring [génos] of God” then the notion that there are other gods that coexist with God is evident, and the modern idea of monotheism can't be true in that environment. And this is why modern Christian commentaries on Acts 17:28-29 try to come up with creative ways (no pun intended) to get around the true meaning of the text by claiming that Paul was only talking about God creating humans in those verses, and they never address what the text actually says.

I'm not committed to any particular doctrine of how creation happened, or is happening (maybe it's not over yet?), but as a thought exercise: Suppose God exists in a realm where thoughts are, or can be, energy. From there, it's not a huge leap to envision a sufficiently advanced "celestial technology" (for lack of a better term) converting this energy into matter; in fact, down here in the physical we even have an equation describing how much physical-world energy it takes to create matter: E/C^2 = M Now down here in the physical world we have conservation of matter and energy, such that the total sum of the two remains constant in the physical universe, but maybe that is not the case for the non-physical universe. For instance suppose you become filled with the pure love of Christ. Is there now less of the pure love of Christ somewhere else in the universe(s)? I don't think so; I think you have actually increased the net amount of the pure love of Christ in the universe(s). I'm not saying the above two paragraphs are descriptive of how creation happened; what I'm really saying is, I think it's a good idea to keep an open mind. If one's paradigm is correct, it will survive open-minded encounters with other paradigms. And if one's paradigm is incorrect, it will be corrected by open-minded encounters with other paradigms (assuming one of those is more correct). Imo this is a topic where there is vastly more we don't know than what little we do "know".

I think he served a small part of his mission in Louisiana. The highest car insurance rates in the country. Worst roads too. They can't drive when it rains.

I very much agree with this. There might be some frustration and sorrow with what some have inferred from this belief, including what follows from God being the only one who existed before he created. For example, If it leads some to deny we are his literal children and we actually are. (which belief comes first and which follows?) God is the only one who has always existed or God created everything else out of nothing). So…..the only thing God could exist within would be God. Hmmm…

In the sense of reason yes, in the sense of being able to visualize or comprehend it…nope. The closest I get to it is thinking how I create by first visualizing in my head what I want and then I take what is required to create it. But if I understand correctly, you are saying God simply thinking (or what he does in this process) of something is enough for it to take form. Nothing else shifts in any way, material or immaterial. The creation just is.

By the way, https://fullerconsideration.com/DeseretDemographer/ is a pretty interesting site that tries to graph out the changes in membership over time. It includes both disaffected members, less active (but still believing), moderate active, and full active, children under 8, and "lost deceased" (people who are still on the church records but have died and will stay there till they are 110 or discovered earlier). The methodology seems pretty impressive and it does incorporate Pew Research as well as others.

I'm guessing that the ChatGPT is talking about is actually https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/12/15/why-do-some-americans-leave-their-religion-while-others-stay/ or something like that. Because the report you linked to only has a single line about LDS and it is the percentage change over each year (1% on 2025, 2024, 2023, then 2% on 2022, and back to 1% on 2021). I'm not seeing anything in the pdf you linked to that has anything like what chatgpt is talking about. It is a 4 page report that is mostly talking about how frequently people go to church.

Hi calm. Ex nihilo literally means "ex" out, as in going out of Egypt. Exodus. Nihilo means literaly..."nothing". We profess and believe that God created the world, without any antecedent matter, or spirit, "out" of nothing. No greater accomplishment is conceivable. That is our faith. It doesn't seem like a loving Father should be too upset with us for overestimating His powers...if we have done so. Does that make any sense? We approach these ideas from vastly different paradigms. God love you. 3DOP

I found the numbers ChatGPT referred to. Maybe you could tell me which numbers in the report you could't find and I will try and look for them.