Some Thoughts On Shame

It's been a tumultuous couple of weeks in the world (especially if you live in Paris, Beirut, Japan, Mexico, or Baghdad, or if you are LDS) and after a couple of weeks of watching my Facebook News Feed, I have a some advice:

The Pit of Despair

The Princess Bride is easily one of the best movies of all time. This is not an opinion; this is fact. For any plebs who haven't seen it yet, it is a love story that makes Romeo & Juliet look like common street trash (I never liked that play anyway. Why didn't we read Much Ado About Nothing in high school instead?).

Oversimplified plot: Wesley, the hero of the story, must fight to save the love of his life, Buttercup, from her engagement to a snobby prince. More detail is necessary to state my point, but we're far past the statute of limitations on spoilers here, so...

After a daring rescue, Wesley and Buttercup face terrors together only to have Buttercup end up back in the clutches of Prince Humperdink. Buttercup makes the prince promise that Wesley will be returned safely to his ship, to which request Humperdink swears his life. Little does she know that Humperdink is not nearly as forgiving as she had assumed, and the prince's right hand man, Count Rugen, instead knocks Wesley out and takes him into the forest to his deranged laboratory: The Pit of Despair.

10 Ways to Feel Better About the LDS Church Being Terrible to Gay Families

Well, by now you're probably heard: The LDS Church really, really dislikes gay families. So much that they won't allow children who live with gay parents to be blessed or baptized. Sorry, joint-custody families, your kids are now officially ostracized on your behalf. Some people--both the faithful and the faithless--are arguing that this move is actually good for children, because it protects them from being indoctrinated and confused by either their gay family or the church.

This, of course, is hogwash: regardless of your opinion about the church, the fact that other "sinful" family behavior (bar polygamy) isn't similarly punished indicates that the goal here is boundary maintenance on the church's part, plain and simple. And trust me, the message has been received loud and clear--people I care about are genuinely hurting over this. So, to my friends who are struggling with the church's decision, I've come up with a short list of things you can do to feel better this weekend:

This guy got away with top tens every night for decades, so I don't feel bad about doing two in a week.

10 Lessons About History I Learned From Comments on Posts About the CES Letter.

Recently, a few bloggers who are smarter than I am have undertaken to write about the Letter to a CES Director, a document that collects and sums up dozens of thorny historical and theological questions facing Mormonism today.

I don't really care to weigh in on the CES letter in much detail, except to say that the problems it outlines are perfectly valid for discussion, and are, well, exactly as important as your perspective on Mormonism demands them to be.

Who am I to argue with Tim and Bradley?

Instead, I'm more interested in the comments posts like those tend to attract, particularly from the disaffected/ex-mormon side. While I don't think those comments are necessarily representative of exmormonism as a whole, I think I've spent enough time writing about my issues with certain faithful Mormons to shift gears and talk about...