There seems to be a lot of LDS Junk mail that goes around these days.
Here is the latest.
As most of you know, our beloved prophet, Gordon B. Hinckley passed away at the age of 97. His funeral will be on Saturday, February 2nd.
I was thinking of how I could honor his legacy and I came up with an idea. My friend and I have created a challenge for those willing to accept it: Read the Book of Mormon in 97 days. We are trying to get everyone to start on the same day. Here are the details:
o Goto www.hinckleychallenge.com and create an account (free, of course). o On Feb 4, 2008 (the Monday following the funeral) have an FHE lesson on the Book of Mormon and begin your reading. o Each day you read, record what page number you are on by going to www.hinckleychallenge.com.
We would like this challenge to be heard all around the world! Please forward this message to everyone you know. We would love to see over 1 million pages of the Book of Mormon read by the time this challenge has ended.
Do you want to show your support? Do you want to follow the prophet? Do you want to get rid of all of your excuses for not reading and become a warrior? Then join me in this challenge!!!
We are going to spread this throughout the news media (TV and radio) and we've already contacted Fox news, KSL, CBS, and ABC. But we cannot get the word out to everyone without your help! Please forward this on to EVERYONE in your address book. Time is of the essence!! This will be the one forwarded message that everyone will be happy to get :).
I guess it was not enough to have a Prophet of God telling everybody to read the Book of Mormon in one year. We now have some stranger trying to get everybody to read it in 97 days.
It will be interesting to see how many of the people that signed up (by giving them your name, address, etc.) actually did it.
This just proves how boring the Book of Mormon is. 97 days for a 600 page book? Where is the spirit of Parley P Pratt and Vincenzo who read the whole thing in a couple of days, "eating and sleep" becoming a "burden"?
Who are the TBMs that were claiming being Mormon is hard?
A few years ago I took the challenge issued by GBH himself to read the Book of Mormon by the end of the year. I think that was in September. He promised that if you read it you would have a strengthened testimony and feel closer to your father in heaven. I read it twice in that time. Right after that I started really studying history and doctrine. As a result I left the church.
"Walk in the big parade, learn just what to say, they will all try to fool you" _ KINGS X
personage wrote:A few years ago I took the challenge issued by GBH himself to read the Book of Mormon by the end of the year. I think that was in September. He promised that if you read it you would have a strengthened testimony and feel closer to your father in heaven. I read it twice in that time. Right after that I started really studying history and doctrine. As a result I left the church.
Yep, me too. that was my last ditch effort at salvaging my testimony. I promised my wife I would read the Book of Mormon one more time, so I took hinckley up on his challenge. All it did was re-inforce my 'testimony' that the book was not true. isttitnojc, amen.
WK: "Joseph Smith asserted that the Book of Mormon peoples were the original inhabitants of the americas"
Will Schryver: "No, he didn’t." 3/19/08
Still waiting for Will to back this up...
personage wrote:A few years ago I took the challenge issued by GBH himself to read the Book of Mormon by the end of the year. I think that was in September. He promised that if you read it you would have a strengthened testimony and feel closer to your father in heaven. I read it twice in that time. Right after that I started really studying history and doctrine. As a result I left the church.
Yep, me too. that was my last ditch effort at salvaging my testimony. I promised my wife I would read the Book of Mormon one more time, so I took hinckley up on his challenge. All it did was re-inforce my 'testimony' that the book was not true. isttitnojc, amen.
That would be me, too. I finished the Book of Mormon a few days after Christmas, and then I took a long walk in a wilderness park. I sat on a bench under a large oak and pondered and prayed. My rereading of the book had cemented in my mind that it was not true, but I poured out my soul in prayer. The answer I got was something like this: "You're free. You know it's not true, and you don't have to pretend it is."
I'm not saying it was God who told me that, but I knew then that I couldn't force myself to go back.
Wow, I thought I was the only one who'd had that experience. At the time of Hinckley's challenge, I had read the book at least 12-13 times. I'd spent the previous couple of years fighting off serious doubts about the existence of God, with decreasing success. We were still having daily family scripture study, but my personal reading was mostly jumping around to different passages. I decided that another thorough reading of the Book of Mormon was just what I needed, but as I progressed through it, it seemed more and more man-made to me. A significant milestone was reading Alma 32 again and seeing how fallacious the his 'experiment' was. It kept going downhill from there, but I still finished the book. Actually, I finished it a couple of days into January, so I didn't technically meet the conditions of Hinckley's promise. That must have been the problem.
"Every post you can hitch your faith on is a pie in the sky, chock full of lies, a tool we devise to make sinking stones fly"
The Shins - A Comet Appears