True Christianity

I have a pretty quick thought for this week.  It starts with this scripture in the book of Moses: "And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it became pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make her wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and also gave unto her husband with her, and he did eat." - Moses 4:12 Eve didn't make this decision in ignorance.  That's one of the most unique things our church teaches about the fall.  She didn't know everything, and there was certainly deception involved (we can trust she was being honest when she said that the serpent beguiled her), but through modern revelation, it's clear that she knew what she was giving up, and more importantly, what she gaining. Many religions teach that Eve's decision was an act of selfishness.  Of course, we teach differently, however I don't think I'd realized how big that sacrifice was for her.  She knowingly broke the law of Eden, ...

I've never understood the details of the Creation.  As members of the Church of Jesus Christ, we don't just have one account of the Creation of the earth in our canon, we have four.  And, like most things that Scripture repeats often, there are fairly obvious differences in each account. The problem for me is that nearly every account has a different chronology.  The order in which things happen don't seem to agree.  I don't know why I get hung up on the chronology; it really isn't the focus of the story.  But that doesn't stop me from spending a good 15 minutes every time I read one of the accounts wondering how it really happened. Then, this week I saw on my class schedule that my religion teacher was going to talk about the Creation.  I respect this teacher a lot, and he's helped illuminate a lot of things that were confusing to me before, so I was excited to hear his interpretation and hopefully get things cleared up. But, my teacher is wiser tha...

I have a really hard time motivating myself to write. Most of you can probably identify with me.  Even people who love writing sometimes avoid starting out a project like the plague.  I also like writing, but I can't help but feel like there's a dementor behind me sapping out all the hope and happiness of life when I sit down to start writing something. So next time you procrastinate, just blame blog dementors. I'm taking a religion class from my favorite professor this year.  One of his assignments is to write someone (or multiple people) explaining what we learned in class/in our studies every week.  I decided to take advantage of this opportunity to force myself to keep writing in this blog.  I hope I'll get into the habit enough that I won't stop once the semester ends. So, I'm going to start writing weekly.  I'll aim to make the posts shorter and simpler, that way they won't feel so daunting to me as the blog dementor is slowly sucking out ...