Kirk Rollins for and against John Dehlin

After making lots of interesting posts, Kirk decides he agrees with Dehlin on his interpretation of Church history.

Then Kirk claims there is nothing inaccurate in his post and cites the Gospel Topics Essays as evidence. But the Gospel Topics Essays were written to accommodate Dehlin in the first place and are not doctrine.

Kirk Rollins

@RealKirkRollins

I’ll say what a Mormon can’t. John Dehlin is complete trash. There is something obscene about making a career out of people at the exact moment their faith is breaking. Dehlin didn’t stumble onto the spiritual crises of mormons. He built a machine on top of them, turned the worst night of someone’s interior life into an episode, a download, a recurring donation. And a man whose audience grows every time someone walks away is not a neutral physician at the bedside. He has a stake in the disease. Follow the money, a steady harvest of the wounded, dressed up as liberation.

Kirk Rollins

@RealKirkRollins

Dear John Dehlin, I owe you an apology. I was wrong about you. You were right about the history. The Book of Mormon is not a history of anyone. There is no steel, no horse, no chariot, no wheat, no Nephite city, no Lamanite gene, not one shard in the ground after two centuries of digging. The Church knew the evidence was not coming, so it changed the story. It rewrote the introduction, demoted the Lamanites from principal ancestors to a rumor, and published an essay teaching members to expect nothing. That is not faith. That is a retreat with footnotes. The Book of Abraham is a burial text for a dead priest named Hor. Joseph looked at it and dictated a prophet's autobiography. The Church's own essay admits the characters do not match a single word, and the Church still prints it as scripture. Joseph produced the Book of Mormon with his face in a hat, reading words off a rock he had once charged farmers to find buried treasure with, while the plates sat under a cloth or were not in the room. The Church knew. It commissioned painting after painting of a prophet with his finger on golden pages anyway. You were right about the First Vision. The earliest account, in Joseph's own hand, is from 1832, describes one being, and does not match the version every missionary memorizes. Someone cut those pages out of his letterbook, and the Church kept them in a vault until 1965. You were right about polygamy. Joseph took between thirty and forty wives. The first was a teenage girl living in his home, and his own second in command called it a dirty, nasty, filthy affair. About ten already had husbands. One was fourteen, and she wrote that she was told her family's salvation depended on her saying yes. When Emma objected, Joseph produced a revelation threatening her with destruction, and that threat is still canonized in Doctrine and Covenants 132. A month before he died he stood before the Saints and swore he had one wife. When a newspaper printed the truth, he had the press destroyed, and that is why he was in Carthage. The Church's essay concedes all of it. You were right about the system. The recommend interview asks whether you pay a full tithe. It does not ask whether you have fed anyone. A general authority taught from the pulpit that the destitute should pay tithing before they eat. Your own child's wedding is held behind a door that costs ten percent. And the church collecting that ten percent sits on a fund north of one hundred billion dollars that it hid behind thirteen shell companies for twenty years, with the approval of the First Presidency, because it feared what members would do if they saw the number. The SEC caught them in 2023. They paid the fine and blamed the lawyers. This is not a church that stumbled into secrecy. It bought documents it believed were damaging from a forger in the 1980s and locked them away. It ran a committee that kept files on its own members and named it Strengthening Church Members. So people find the truth at two in the morning on a laptop, alone, and then walk into church and are told they are the problem. Their bishop has a script for them. Their family has a label for them. I’m sorry.

https://x.com/RealKirkRollins/status/2116413697828487393?a=n-AxTYYGV4S1k9EqU3c&s=20

Kirk Rollins

@RealKirkRollins

·

9h

Yeah, there is nothing historically inaccurate about the post. I spent hours making sure it was factually accurate and have been studying Mormonism for 20 years.

the Book of Mormon & truth

 

Kirk Rollins

@RealKirkRollins

·

Oct 29

the Book of Mormon & truth I was outside playing with my son when two LDS missionaries rode by on their bikes, saw my tesla, and stopped to chat. Somehow the conversation turned into a question. Did I believe the Book of Mormon is true? I asked them what they meant by true. They looked a little perplexed, so I kept going. True in the sense that it can reach a man at the bottom of a bottle. He has lost jobs. He has lied to his wife and missed his daughter's birthdays. It can pull him out and dry him out. It can set him back at the head of his own table, where his children reach for his hand when he says the blessing on the food. True in the sense that it can find a woman who wandered so far that her own kids stopped waiting up for her. It can bring her home. It can make her into the kind of mother who is up before dawn packing lunches. She knows every teacher by name. Her children run to her first when they are hurt or afraid. True in the sense that it can send a man across the street with a plate of food for a neighbor who has cursed him for years. It can send him back the next week, and the week after that. He asks nothing in return. He keeps going until the hard old man across the street learns, late in life, what it feels like to be cared for. True in the sense that it draws us closer to Jesus Christ. A tired man can open it at the kitchen table at midnight, with the house asleep and nothing left in him. He can get up from that chair knowing that he is seen. He is known. Christ has not given up on him. Absolutely. But true in the sense of history, of whether there were actually Nephites and Lamanites? I don't know. And does it really matter? The two of them reacted very differently. The younger one was bothered. I could see it on his face. The senior companion, near the end of his two years, actually liked the thought. I could tell it landed somewhere in him. So this is what I keep telling the Mormons. You have to be open to a different epistemology. Truth is larger than a scientific inquiry.

https://x.com/RealKirkRollins/status/2115933635316727897?a=Zbckz65sM-zd8727abI&s=20

creedal christian

 

Kirk Rollins

@RealKirkRollins

Why is "creedal christian" offensive and incredibly dumb? 1. The word "creedal christian" shows you do not know what the creed is. The creed is not a denomination or a school of thought. It is the baptismal confession of the whole Christian Church, the summary of what the apostles taught about the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, fixed in writing to stop Arius from turning Christ into a creature. The Church did not become creedal at Nicaea. Paul hands the Corinthians a creed he says he himself received, within living memory of the resurrection, and Irenaeus was reciting a rule of faith around 180. 2. Christianity has never been defined by the creeds alone. It is defined by Christ, by baptism, by the Eucharist, by the apostles and the men they laid hands on, by the martyrs, by the Scriptures the Church gathered and kept. 3. Catholics, Orthodox, and nearly every Protestant alive hold the faith of Nicaea, whether they recite the creed on Sunday or not. THAT IS 98 PERCENT of the Christians on earth, and it has been the confession of the Church for seventeen centuries. So creedal Christian does not name a kind of Christian. It renames Christians, so that the two percent standing outside can look like a second option instead of an exception. That is why it is a pejorative in every sense. The word as you are using it came out of Latter day Saint apologetics, and it exists for one job, to answer the sting of being told by nearly the whole Christian world that you are not Christian by giving the whole Christian world a sectarian name. Notice the word chosen, too. Not Trinitarian, not Nicene, which would admit the quarrel is about the nature of God. "Creedal", because it means man made. it's an insult to my ancestors who got fed to lions

https://x.com/RealKirkRollins/status/2115994548409356295?a=DqlGDuoObiRZky2nHJM&s=20