How I hate faith promoting stories

[_Rambo]

It's always around the holidays I am thrown back into dumb Mormon talk. This time it was at my cousins house for dinner and they had the missionaries over. The missionaries shared their spiritual thought with us before they left. One of the missionaries went on about how he had an amazing spirtual experience.

He said that he was really down and not to happy because he wasn't having much luck as a missionary. One night when he came home he was brushing his teeth and he was thinking about how the mission can be tough. While he was thinking of this he suddenly felt a really strong feeling of peace and he was happy again. When he came out from brushing his teeth he saw that his companion was praying. After his companion was done he asked what he was praying about and his companion said that he was praying for him.

So this missionary takes this as a sign from god that this was the "spirit" and my whole family believes it as well. Kind of just wants to make me throw up. I'm always tempted to ask questions like how often would his companion pray for him? Does his companion usually pray while he is brushing his teeth? Is he sure it's not his thoughts that gave him this peaceful feeling?

To me this is not a miricle at all and this is the type of crap that kept me in the church for so long. I was just too naïve at the time and I took people for there word when they told a story. I am postive that people leave out key points of a story just to make it sound like it was a miriacle.

Sometimes councidences just happen as well. Like one night I dreamt I got a speeding ticket and then the next day I got one.

Is anyone else bothered by these so called mircles as much as me?

[_Buffalo]

My wife had a very stereotypical "lost keys" miracle a few weeks back. I love her, but that drives me crazy.

[_Polygamy-Porter]

Mormons are constantly on the hunt for confirmation of their biases.

[_Stormy Waters]

One of my favorites is when people use accounts of sleep paralysis as faith promoting stories. Telling stories about how they woke up in the middle of the night and the devil was choking them. Having experienced sleep paralysis myself I can see how someone might attribute it to the supernatural if they weren't aware that it is a commonly experienced event.

[_DarkHelmet]

You need to counter with a story of your own. Tell them how once you were on your mission, when you came across a guy that was spewing anti-mormon garbage. So you asked God to bring down a curse upon him, and he turned into a Native American.

[_Jonah]

When I was a kid there was a guy in our ward who used to relate a "miracle" story every fast and testimony meeting. My all-time favorite was about the time he was on a family vacation and fell asleep at the wheel. He drove his car off of a cliff, but thanks to the hand of god, the car landed on a palm tree that gently bent down and lowered the car to the ground so they could continue on their journey. He had another one about his kid crawling out of a four story window, landing on his head, but being O.K.. Since the kid (then an adult) was a little weird, nobody really questioned the story.

I do miss the days of making up a good Three Nephites faith promoting story though.

[_Fence Sitter]

There is an LDS made movie out about the Willie Handcart company. It is sort of a docudrama. It is called 17 Miracles. It is the epitome of faith promoting stories at its worst. Throughout the movie, where people were suffering horribly, they kept showing these cameo stories how someone would be saved or blessed in some minor way. Even though the company suffered a 50% mortality rate, somehow the experience was presented as a series of miracles. After the show I turned to my home teacher who had invited me to the stake center to see it and remarked, "the movie should have been called "50 Really Bad Decisions." He immediately agreed.

The bizarre aspect of faith promoting stories, to me at least, is they usually rely on something bad happening first. If God can make a good thing come out of a bad one, why not just eliminate the bad one to begin with? Like the fact that all the LDS missionaries in Japan survived last years earthquake was reported as a faith promoting event is just mind numbing.

[_bcspace]

All the same complaints could apply to exit stories.

[_Infymus]

http://mormoncurtain.com/topic_fpr.html

Bunch there.

Ug, I recall reading a whole bunch of Duane Crowther http://www.duanescrowther.com/ when I was TBM. One in particular was his book "The Prophecies of Joseph Smith" where he rambled on and on about hundreds of so-called prophecies Joseph made that came true. One that sticks in my mind was something about Joseph cursing someone and the guy ends up dying - and his flesh fell off his bones - or the other guy that got a bullet in the stomach, got a blessing, threw up the bullet and was fine.

Of course there are the big ones, where Mormon Apostles stand up in front of GC pretending they're holding a Book of Mormon and lying about the authenticity of it. How many Mormons watching just gushed that they knew the cult was true? Meh.

My "go on a 10 year temple mission" great grandparents back in the early 90's would tell me this goofy tale about Jesus visiting the Jordan River temple. How the temple prez would wake up in the middle of the night just knowing something was up, and when he got dressed to leave - Spencer Kimball called him and told him not to come, that Jesus was there. Like the prez would just go back to bed right?

It's all just to create feelings to help reaffirm that they're not really in a cult. It's when I started to realize you could generate those feelings any time, easily. TBM or apostate, it didn't matter.

[_Polygamy-Porter]

My "go on a 10 year temple mission" great grandparents back in the early 90's would tell me this goofy tale about Jesus visiting the Jordan River temple. How the temple prez would wake up in the middle of the night just knowing something was up, and when he got dressed to leave - Spencer Kimball called him and told him not to come, that Jesus was there. Like the prez would just go back to bed right?

Classic! I can see Jesus in his red bath robe at the temple on the big white phone, "No No no Spence! I got it! I was here anyway taking a bath in the baptjismal font.."