All testimonies great and small

Conference is a wonderful time of contradictions, like this one.

Easy, Dieter! You might want to review major Church headlines from the past six months. I'm pretty sure I can direct you to a few kinds of testimonies the LDS Church apparently doesn't have room for. And it's not hard to think of others.

So what are you talking about? Are you trying to tell Russy B. something?

Maybe what you mean is that the Church doesn't care as much about members' testimonies as member behavior. "Believe what you want, brothers and sisters, but keep it to yourself if We don't like it."

Heavenly fatherliness #35 - Unconditional love

According to popular wisdom, a good father shows unconditional love.

Oh man, Heavenly Father loves us so much! He loves us unconditionally and has shown us that love through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, which saves us from an otherwise inevitable damnation. It's so easy to see that he's a great dad!

Except in Mormonism we have to deal with the whole sticky issue of God's full blessings being entirely predicated upon a long series of conditions called commandments. If we're even lukewarm about things God will find us disgusting. If we oppose his One True Church and willfully sin against him, he'll count us as enemies and royally fuck us up.

Just look at Satan and his followers. Does God ever mention loving them after their rebellion? If he still loves them, why hasn't he forgiven them? It seems to me that God's love is by definition conditional.

*These attributes represent the popular thoughts of Ask Men’s Jullian Marcus, examiner.com’s Tanya Tringali, and Open Talk Magazine’s Glenn Silvestre as per their respective articles on what makes a good father.

You're out!

Excommunication is a funny thing. The Church is supposedly for everyone - as in EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING EVER BORN OR TO BE BORN ON EARTH NEEDS BOTH THE GOSPEL AND THE ORDINANCES FOUND ONLY IN THE LDS CHURCH - and yet there are those times when you just have to take your neighbor aside and say:

"Hey, Jesus loves you and died for you, but you can't be in his church anymore because we say so!"

Everyone's supposed to fit in, but apparently we need to kick some people out anyway. This is kind of the way Jesus wants it.

Let's be practical here. You can't let that new convert dude keep standing up and flipping off the first councilor whenever he takes the stand, can you? And I know there's room for the lady who likes to teach that dinosaur fossils were placed on the earth by the Devil to deceive the hearts of man, but can we honestly sit by and let a Sunday School teacher admit that she thinks green tea is harmless and that the Church should change its policy about tea drinking?

What are the limits of heterodoxy and heteropraxy? What are the Church's limits? Who's out? We can't all be in.