the narrator

A God who cares that much what others think of Him/Her/It isn't worthy of worship, IMO. One of my biggest fears is dying and discovering that God as described by most Mormons (or the cosmic reality he is bound by) is real--though I have much of that same fear of dying and discovering there is an infinite and unending afterlife. Truly, the most horrifying of cosmic horrors.

Keep fighting those strawmen, I guess. Best of luck to you.

My teens were a perfect time for me to learn how to play Dungeons and Dragons, and that was taken from me. Now I'm too old to learn.

Yes, she did. She wasn't just a passive observer along for a ride. She advised her son and was key in getting Marks's support. Emma was also the literary agent of some of Joseph's writings, including the New Translation of the Bible, which she provided to the Reorganization. (I have spent over two decades in Mormon Studies and have overseen the publication of top biographies and histories of this period, including biographies of William Smith and William Marks.)

Emma played a strong role in the reorganization. It would not have happened without her.

Emma didn't want Marks as a successor. Rather, under Emma's advice, Joseph Smith III sought out Marks's support to reorganize the church because she trusted him, he rejected polygamy, and he had been the stake president of Nauvoo--making him the leading ecclesiastical authority following Joseph and Hyrum's death.

Can we please, for the love of all that is holy, put your strawmen down? I did not say a single thing about the "RLDS movement." In Joseph's often-secretive Nauvoo updates to the priesthood, primarily through the new temple rites, Emma was given far more authority and power than people tend to recognize. Brigham Young, who hated and despised Emma even more than she did him, was aware of this. While the succession crisis tends to focus on Young, Rigdon, Strang, and eventually the RLDS movement, there was much more going on behind the scenes between Young and Emma. The latter staked her voice on her priestly role in the so-called "anointed quorum," and the former based his claim on a likely fabricated--yes, fabricated--so-called "last charge" where Joseph reportedly secretively and completely changed the authority of the 12 from being over the missions outside of the stakes of the church to being over the entire church itself. That event was supposed to have occurred during a meeting of the council of fifty on March 26, 1844--and yet, something so important was not recorded in the Cof50 minutes. (As multiple JSPP historians have told me, the absence of this in the minutes was the biggest revelation of the published minutes--though for obvious reasons a great deal has not been publicly made of this by those in the CHD. Likewise, 50 years later, Wilford Woodruff would say of this day: Seems like a pretty remarkable event that the consummate diarist would have made a note of that day, but instead Woodruff had this to report of the day:

Thanks for the correction.

Note that this is precisely the committment that we see at the Waters of Mormon in Mosiah 18: The primary act that they are asked to commit to is to be "willing to bear one another’s burdens, that they may be light." They are called to confront the material sins of the world, and it should then come as no surprise that a people who makes this commitment together find "the burdens which were laid upon [them] were made light" (Mosiah 24:15).

By recognizing sin as a material harm/injustice/etc, the Atonement is no longer an act of Christ suffering to appease a vindictive deity, to pay off a powerful Satan, or magically cleanse nonsensical cosmic taints for violating religious codes. Instead, the Atonement is the culmination of Christ's revelation of God on earth and the archetype of what it means to be divine and to become a vehicle for salvation--that is to confront and seek to eliminate these sins. For much of Christianity and Mormonism, the importance of Jesus has been relegated to his death--to the point where we should ask why God didn't simply have Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds simply throw the baby Jesus off a cliff after he was born. This is why the the proposition by Ignacio Ellacuria (who was murdered by the US-backed Salvadoran military for his ministry for the poor), which I misattributed to his colleague Jon Sobrino above, is so important--that is, instead of asking why Jesus died, we should instead ask why they killed him. The former question treats Jesus's death in a vacuum, resulting in awful and nonsensical atonement theories and largely detaches Jesus from the world and human experience and leads to a theology that becomes more concerned with a 14 year old boy masturbating than children across the globe starving. The latter returns Jesus and his mission to his material historical reality and reinstates what it means for Jesus to be the revelation of God--that is, Jesus through his life, ministry, and death shows us what it means to be God. This was the message of the beatitudes opening Jesus's sermon on the mount in Matthew 5--where he announces good news to the poor (v. 3), distraught (v. 4), powerless (v. 5), and starving (v. 6) who find relief in the material, immanent, and earthy kingdom of heaven by those who provide mercy (v. 7), for the right reason (v. 8), without violence (v. 9), and while risking violence to themselves (v. 10). Here, Jesus is announcing the good news to those who are the victims of the sins of the world (vv. 3-6) and how that salvation shall be achieved (vv. 7-9), all of which are exemplified in Christ as the revelation of God. Hope that makes some sense.

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.