There's something incredibly Mormon-coded about going through the trouble of adding unnecessary words to sentences and phrases, but not going through the trouble of spell-checking.
There’s something about the incredibly impersonal effect of the form letter that really exemplifies life in the LDS church.
Can you imagine an afterlife that is this similarly bureaucratic and dull?
I would wish I could kill myself to escape Mormon heaven.
So the assumption is that you stopped attending Church because you chose to be offended by someone. Good grief. The ‘Dear Brother and/or Sister’ makes it completely impersonal. They do not know to whom they are writing. So how do they know that the recipients had smiling faces when they attended, and had a good knowledge of the gospel?
But the biggest problem is that the letter is only from the Bishopric and The Elders Quorum Presidency. It’s from the menfolk. The Relief Society Presidency are excluded.
Premise 1. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.
Premise 2. The best evidence for the Book of Mormon is eyewitness testimony.
Conclusion. Therefore, the best evidence for the Book of Mormon is notoriously unreliable.
If you haven't been in 15 years, the current bishopric and elders' quorum presidency were not the issue. They weren't in those offices then. Even if the then bishopric and elders' quorum presidency did cause offense and that led to the inactivity, why are the current ones apologizing for themselves?
"There will come a time when the rich own all the media, and it will be impossible for the public to make an informed opinion." Albert Einstein, ~1949 "It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." Voltaire
There's something incredibly Mormon-coded about going through the trouble of adding unnecessary words to sentences and phrases, but not going through the trouble of spell-checking.
Yeah, “a guide with which we are to use”, confusing “council” and “counsel”, and worshipping “diety”. It’s all trying to sound formal, but not trying hard enough to succeed.
Maybe I’m just being snobbish, but I like to think I’d be less critical of a more down-to-earth letter. Is this letter’s style really typically Mormon? “I don’t need spellcheck because I’m a bishop”?
The op letter really goes overboard in bad grammar, but, I'd still have to say that yes, it's what a Mormon bishop might proffer.
I am telling on myself a bit with this, but my father was a bishop my entire youth, and also during that time, he completed his doctorate. Years later, he 'gifted' me the rough drafts and notes, I suppose for history's sake. I started looking through them, and realized that it was my mother, a SAHM who typed every word of his dissertation, who rendered his work presentable. I recall her spending hours daily typing (yes, on a typewriter, NOT a PC or even a word processor), and now I had the evidence showing how she took his execrable spelling, his abominable grammar, his inability to write a coherent paragraph let alone a meaningful sentence, combined with his utterly boring style, and turned it into an extremely well written dissertation, absolutely worthy of a Ph.D. She even cleaned up his data presentation somehow.
My mother deserved that Ph.D.. My mother, who didn't go to college because at the time, Mormon women married young, had many children, didn't work, and used their abilities and brains to make their husbands look good. Later in life, my mom stopped rewriting his stuff (maybe out of sheer exhaustion-I don't know for sure, she passed away decades ago), but he continued to think he wrote well! Go figure.
Clearly, the bishop who write the op didn't have the foresight to marry well enough that he could exploit a woman so that he didn't look like such an idiot. On a somewhat related note, my father has recently expressed his disappointment in me. Not that I didn't succeed academically and in my career (I am a professor at an Ivy League, for god's sake!!!), but because I no longer praise his work, his religion, nor his 'piousness' any more. He chalks it up to me succumbing to satan's influence and leaving his church, because he is positive he is still god's gift to this planet. No mere woman, not even the one with the brains her mother gave her, is going to shake his lds faith in that.
Last edited by Marcus on Tue Jul 29, 2025 11:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them." Psalm 139:16 ESV
The op letter really goes overboard in bad grammar, but, I'd still have to say that yes, it's what a Mormon bishop might proffer.
I am telling on myself a bit with this, but my father was a bishop my entire youth, and also during that time, he completed his doctorate. Years later, he 'gifted' me the rough drafts and notes, I suppose for history's sake. I started looking through them, and realized that it was my mother, a SAHM who typed every word of his dissertation, who rendered his work presentable. I recall her spending hours daily typing (yes, on a typewriter, NOT a PC or even a word processor), and now I had the evidence showing how she took his execrable spelling, his abominable grammar, his inability to write a coherent paragraph let alone a meaningful sentence, combined with his utterly boring style, and turned it into an extremely well written dissertation, absolutely worthy of a Ph.D. She even cleaned up his data presentation somehow.
My mother deserved that Ph.D.. My mother, who didn't go to college because at the time, Mormon women married young, had many children, didn't work, and used their abilities and brains to make their husbands look good. Later in life, my mom stopped rewriting his stuff (maybe out of sheer exhaustion-I don't know for sure, she passed away decades ago), but he continued to think he wrote well! Go figure.
Clearly, the bishop who write the op didn't have the foresight to marry well enough that he could exploit a woman so that he didn't look like such an idiot. On a somewhat related note, my father has recently expressed his disappointment in me. Not that I didn't succeed academically and in my career (I am a professor at an Ivy League, for god's sake!!!), but because I no longer praise his work, his religion, nor his 'piousness' any more. He chalks it up to me succumbing to satan's influence and leaving his church, because he is positive he is still god's gift to this planet. No mere woman, not even the one with the brains her mother gave her, is going to shake his LDS faith in that.
The SLC LDS Church contains a higher concentration of male, misogynistic, pompous, arrogant, condescending, jerks than any other walk of life that I’ve come across. It certainly facilitates and rewards men who want to act that way.
Premise 1. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.
Premise 2. The best evidence for the Book of Mormon is eyewitness testimony.
Conclusion. Therefore, the best evidence for the Book of Mormon is notoriously unreliable.
