the narrator

Those tribes weren't "lost." Biblical tradition is that 10 were lost while Ephraim and Judah remained. To the totality of the tribes of Israel Missouri, where the Garden of Eden originally was and before Noah's flood split the continents. At least this is what I was taught as a kid, but I think few LDSaints believe that anymore. For the most part, the "Latter-day" aspect of Mormonism lost its immanence and is now relegated to a permanent state of soon-but-not-that-soon.

I'm not saying that the concern for temporal welfare is non-existent. However, Church leaders regularly place that concern on a much lower tier than that of the afterlife--which stands in stark contrast to the inseparable, one-and-the-same level of concern that the early Church did. And this reason has been made explicit to philanthropist groups, like the Bountiful Children's Foundation, for why the Church does not do more with its vast wealth to feed hungry LDS children.

My view of God in relation to the world is best described in liberation theology. It's been a while since I've written or presented on it, but it was my focus for some years in the now-defunct Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology. A good summary can be found in this Sunstone article of mine, which I had completely forgotten about: “WHICH THING I HAD NEVER SUPPOSED: THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND THE PROBLEM OF MAN". From the end: And here are a few more of my thoughts on the matter: On sin, atonement, and liberation “'What's Ragged Should Be Left Ragged': God's Problem of Evil" "Christianity's Perversion" Zizek and Latin American Liberation Theology" (this was written for a grad school course, using Mel Gibsons' Braveheart and Passion of the Christ to discuss liberation theology without any Mormon context) "'Would God That All The Lord's People Were Prophets': Liberation Theology and Scholars As Prophets For The Oppressed" I haven't used scribd in a very long time, so I don't know how accessible they are now, so please let me know if the links do not work for you.

The main reason is regularly given by church leaders when they repeatedly say that the Church's concern is for the afterlife and not the present one.

Well, I don't want to debate your personal theological and religious interpretations. I was just referring to the scriptures, where Moses, Samuel, and Nephi all received their prophetic calling outside of any institutional authority or apparatus. In fact, for Moses and Nephi the religious institutions that they led didn't even exist when they received their prophetic callings.

My point is that Jesus's ministry was very political. He didn't just share aphorisms about loving neighbors, and even those instances (such as his parable of the good samaritan) were directly criticizing the priestly class and those in power. The very act that the Gospels say directly led to his execution was a political act: His protest at the temple, where he explicitly emulated Jeremiah and accused the priests of turning the temple into a den of thieves was about as political as one could get at the time, and the stated reason for his execution placed above his head was explicitly political. I am not saying that the Church is completely ignoring Jesus's mortal ministry; rather, that by repeatedly emphasizing his death as the thing that really mattered about his life but not acknowledged the reason of his death, his life has become that of a shallow and inconsequential dispenser of aphorisms that few if any would have followed. To paraphrase the the theologian and priest Jon Sobrino, to understand who Jesus was we need to stop asking why did he die and instead ask why they killed him.

Those were exceptions were hardly the rule. For most of Israelite history, the prophet, priest, and king were distinct roles, with the former almost always called from outside any institutional authority to criticize the ruling classes of priest and king. In fact, this prophetic role was precisely the one Jesus was filling when he appealed to and shared the role of Jeremiah criticizing the temple priests for turning the temple into a den of thieves.

This is what I meant with individual salvation with a nuclear family twist. Joseph's notion of establishing a kingdom of heaven on earth that would collectively attain celestial glory has been replaced individual families being saved and exalted. It's essentially individualistic salvation extended to traditional nuclear families (or polygamist ones for Oaks and others who believe in that)

What I mean is that in contemporary LDS discourse, the importance and value of Jesus is that he was born to die. Thus, discussions about the life of Jesus are largely limited to him being born, baptized, suffering in Gethsemane, dying on the cross, and being resurrected. The material focus of his ministry and the reasons he gained a following--and was executed--are largely ignored. And his words that are most emphasized are those dealing with his death. As a result we get claims from LDS leaders like: "[Jesus's] focus was not on the political challenges of the day; it was on the perfection of the saints," as if he was executed by the state for offering hippie aphorisms.

John Hick's notion of epistemic distance is another apologetic response that LDS theologians have latched onto, but that still leaves the problem of miracles alive and begs the question of why God didn't seem to care about keeping himself hidden in biblical times.

Your repeated claim of a church/religion/etc requiring a prophet at the lead is absurd given the primary role of prophets in the Bible and Book of Mormon, where prophets usually exist outside of the institution and have a role in criticizing the institution and are criticized for not having institutional authority.

And what system was that?

It wasn't clear at all, which is why Brigham and pals likely fabricated the so-called "final charge" to make a claim of succession that wasn't at all clear. (And I would argue that the most crucial succession debate wasn't between Young and Rigdon (or even Strang) but rather between Young and Emma Smith.

Fully agree with you here, at least in how Joseph Smith proposed salvation as a communal project rather than an individual one. Unfortunately though, this view of salvation was abandoned long ago in contemporary Mormonism, which has largely adopted a protestant soteriology of individual salvation (with a nuclear family twist).

This is precisely why I have argued elsewhere that most responses to the problem of evil are actually defending the existence of evil rather than the existence of God. If one decides to forego critical thought and instead fully embrace a shallow and simplistic view of God in relation to the world, then the need to counter and prevent evil becomes an unnecessary labor.

This is what I have to ask for Jesus in much of contemporary Mormonism, where his death seems to be the only thing ever discussed anymore, with his mortal ministry an "auxiliary" thing that seems to be increasingly ignored (except where he is interpreted to be speaking in relation to his death).

I did. Sorry. Thanks for clarifying things for me, though I should have read your reply more closely.

If you truly believe this, then you should go to nurseries and just kill every baby and child you see. If they die, they go to the celestial kingdom and you do more to ensure that God's children are saved than any missionary possibly could. If God wants them to not die, then He'll make sure that doesn't happen, I guess.

If you believe that the Holocaust, Palestinian genocide, children dying of malnutrition by the thousands across the globe, malaria, thousands of children being abused each day resulting in trauma that harms them for the rest of their lives, countless rapes, murders, etc. are all for the greater good... then I have nothing to say.

The freewill defense proposed by Alvin Plantinga (and latched onto by Mormon theologians) is largely smoke and mirrors for the reasons you give. Plantinga plays around with supposed logical possibility while ignoring the grounded reality of suffering--so much so that his explanation as to why God doesn't stop natural evils (earthquakes, floods, fires, disease, etc) is because it's possible that those are caused by demons and angels who have agency that God doesn't want to disrupt. The big problem though with the "God respects agency" argument is that we ALL reject the underlying premise. If I saw a child about to be kidnapped and didn't do anything about it because I respected the predator's agency, you would all find that absolutely horrendous. Our (well, I hope this is true for everyone) moral duty frequently requires us to stop someone and prevent them from acting, and not a single person here (though I wouldn't be surprised here if teddyaware proves to be an outlier) would think it wrong to prevent someone from committing a morally heinous act out of a respect for their agency to do evil. To the contrary, we would all find it morally disgusting.

Because if God can split the Red Sea, raise the dead, cause soaking bushels of wood on fire, send bears to kill children for mocking a balding prophet, kill every first born son in a region, turn water into wine just to please Mary, feed thousands with just a little bit of food, cure leprosy, STOP THE SUN FROM MOVING, help people find their car keys, etc., then He should be able to prevent a young child from being brutally raped and murdered. The claim that Paulsen and others make that God doesn't stop children from dying of malnutrition because he is not all powerful falls pretty flat if you also accept that Jesus turned water into wine to not ruin the fun for wedding guests.

Paulsen and all other LDS theologians' attempts to appeal to agency or limited divine powers suffer from the problem of miracles--that is, the religious and scriptural tradition that their notions of God derive from are replete with narratives of God doing precisely that which they are now arguing God is unable to do. If they want to be consistent and say that the many miracles by God attested to in the scriptures are not factually or historically true but instead merely religious narratives and myths about God, then perhaps their arguments can be taken seriously, but I have yet to see any of them make such a claim.

I have my issues with some things Nelson did, but he was genuinely interested in increasing the roles of women in the Church. I recently learned that there were also some MAJOR updates to the temple in that regard that he wanted to implement (and were even filmed), but unfortunately others in leadership were not as excited about them, and they have been dropped for the moment. Who knows if future leaders will soon take them up again.

If you want to quibble over precise language, he said that empathy "is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage." I'm not here to litigate Kirk's career of racism, sexism, hate, and promoting violence though. I think Coates does a fine job here.

Kirk should not have been killed. That was evil and wrong. Unfortunately, what you said is precisely what Robinson thought, and it is looking more and more like he saw Kirk as the symbolic, if not actual, vehicle of hate that drove a wedge between he and his father. Besides wishing more empathy for himself and other LGBT persons (an empathy that Kirk saw as evil), Robinson seemed to maintain most of the conservative and gun-loving ways he was raised.