DiscussMormonism.com

Marrying underage girls isn’t just an individual anomaly that could in principle be separated from institutional polygamy as such. It keeps happening in polygamous groups because it’s the only way to get the extra women.

A group with 100 men and 100 women and 40 men had two wives leaves 20 women for the 60 men. In a booming population with a broad demographic pyramid, 40 of each of the 100 men and women may be over 25, 40 are between 15 and 25, and 20 are between 13 and 15. Children under 13 are not counted. Men ma...

Mormon polygamy wasn't a few enthusiastically consenting polyamorous relationships. It was an officially promoted social norm that pushed all girls toward early marriages with older men who would then keep on marrying more young girls as the first ones aged. As I've explained, the large age discrepa...

So Mormonism sees the ongoing re-transmission of lost volumes of Scripture—their restoration, in fact—as an important feature of the general Restoration. When we say it like that, I have to admit that it clearly makes sense. If we're having a Restoration, in a religious tradition that is quite into ...

Look, the president of the LDS Church and all the apostles are prophets, seers, and revelators. The seer part comes directly from Joseph Smith’s use of the seer stone. Actually, I've always wondered about the "seer" title, because it just seems redundant. I mean, I can accept "revelator" as a sligh...

Reading through the article to which Tim was responding would take more time than I can afford to devote to this particular rabbit hole, I'm afraid. But in general a "but for" argument isn't necessarily reversible. "The accused might have walked free, but for the smoking gun." That doesn't mean that...

OTOH, the fact there are no Corn Flakes in the bag may also indicate the person who did the shopping saw there was enough on hand to not need include it in their grocery shopping. So we could see the absense of Corn Flakes in the shopping bag as a significant indication that you did the shopping on...

The often-stated reason for Utah Mormon polygamy was to accelerate population growth. Polygamy itself, however, cannot possibly do that—and it is obvious that it cannot. Polygamy does not increase the number of mothers, but only reduces the number of fathers. In a population that is not rapidly grow...

Concerning the selfish motives that I attribute to Smith, I acknowledge that in his office as Prophet he did plenty of the same kind of work that I do myself, writing and teaching. If he enjoyed the privilege of taking days off whenever he chose, that's also a privilege shared by plenty of driven ex...

However probable or not any afterlife may be, the scenario in which we simply go on existing forever just as we are now seems like an exceptionally unlikely afterlife case. Who in the year 1500 could have imagined how the world was going to be in 2000? Who at age five could imagine life at age fifty...