BOILING THE FROG

BOILING THE FROG

BY MAX CRAPO

There is an oft-quoted cautionary tale used in Mormon upbringing.  The claim is made that if you drop a frog into a pan of boiling water that it will jump out so quickly that it will be unharmed.  The story further claims that if you put the frog in water of a comfortable temperature and then heat it up slowly that the frog will, all unnoticed, be boiled alive.

Recently I read that this was debunked, that when the temperature gets to be too much for the frog, it hops out of the water and goes on its merry way.

The point of this story, of course, is to warn us of the danger in being exposed to sin.  We get all comfortable in our sin and soon we are also boiled alive…or, in other words, the devil has come to collect our soul.

As a metaphor for sin, now that it has been debunked, it’s pretty useless.  There is another situation though, which I think it fits quite well.

In 2006, the mental shelf which I was carrying was beginning to sag.  You know the shelf I’m talking about, it is the one where we place all our “questions”, the ones which don’t seem to have an answer that fit within the Mormon mold.  Personally I think the most accurate term is “our shelf of cognitive dissonance.”  We place those questions there to compartmentalize our belief from our unbelief so we don’t have to look at or deal with the dissonance.

It is really an unproductive method of dealing with those questions because, over time, the weight keeps increasing as the questions pile up.  Eventually, the weight becomes too much and our shelf breaks.  Instead of one question to deal with, now we have hundreds and we now have to deal with them all at the same time. 

Or to switch back to our original metaphor, the water gets too hot and the frog jumps out.

It has been an interesting experience to look back over the last (nearly) ten years and observe the changes in the organization I once loved, and even more so, to observe the changes in the people I also love in regards to their belief in the church.  These are changes, I’m sad to say, which have not been for the better. 

When I finally worked up the courage to give voice to my questions and found the resolve to look beyond the church’s “approved” sources, what I found was more than shocking.  It was heart-rending, devastating, painful, and confusing. Suddenly I was seeing historically documented evidence which showed that my beloved prophet and founder of Mormonism was not what the church had spent decades claiming him to be.  My shelf broke, the water was too hot, and this frog jumped out. 

I’m often asked, “Why do you care?  What does it matter? You’re no longer part of this group and these people enjoy the (metaphorical) temperature.  Why don’t you just go away and let them be happy?” 

So let me respond.  “Why do we have weather forecasters?  What good does it do to know when a hurricane is coming?  Why should we care?  They’re happy in their homes.”

When I looked back at the pot, I realized that there were literally millions of frogs slowly getting cooked. I can't ignore it because these are our family, our friends, and our community.

Strangely, though, when I tried to point out the historical, documented evidence of Joseph Smith’s misdeeds beginning with his polygamy, I was called a liar and an apostate, accused of being the devil’s merchant. I was accused of “tearing down treasured beliefs” and slandering a “good man.”  





What value is there in holding Iron pyrite and claiming it as “gold?”  For beliefs to mean something, shouldn’t they be based in fact rather than deceit?  Don’t we have laws which offer punishment and retribution for those who use deceit to get gain? 

Over and over I was told that I was just repeating “anti-Mormon lies.”  Beginning in 2013, the church started to release essays on the “troublesome” issues of Mormonism.  One of these essays acknowledged Joseph Smith’s polygamy, even going so far as to describe his marriage to Helen Mar Kimball as a marriage to a young woman “a few months away from her 15^th birthday.  I guess that sounds better than “married a 14 year old.” 








What stunned me most though, was how suddenly, quite literally overnight, members went from saying “You’re a liar” to “We’ve always known that. I don’t understand why you are trying to make this such a big deal.” I guess for them, the water still isn’t hot enough to see how the beliefs are warping their perceptions.






The church has released essay after essay, acknowledging for the first time since the church started the doctrinal Correlation Committee in the early 1960’s, that Joseph Smith did in fact use a seer stone in a hat to translate the Book of Mormon, that he did NOT in fact “translate” the Egyptian Papyrus to create the Book of Abraham, even admitted that women at one time were ordained with the priesthood and were actively involved in giving blessings. 

I’ve watched in dumbfounded amazement as the members continue to absorb, accept, and even acknowledge that the history they were taught was sanitized and whitewashed to make it more faith promoting…and then they excuse it all with a mere Jedi hand wave and say “The prophets and apostles are/were not the perfect men you are looking for.”

How hot does the water have to get before you begin to feel the burn of deception?

Thursday, November 5^th 2015, the church modified its handbook to deliberately harm the children of Gay couples…and within hours, members yet again justified it all as “love,” even “protection of the gay couple’s children.” Tell me again, how does isolation of these children equal love?  How does requiring a child to disavow their gay parent’s lifestyle form closer family bonds?  How does requiring them to separate from their gay parent’s household in any way create a loving atmosphere? 









It is a policy not designed for family.  It is a policy intended to separate families. It is a policy of “SHUNNING.”  








So why do we have weather forecasters and hurricane warnings?  Should we care when ISIS murders innocent civilians?  Should we care when a company defrauds their employees of their retirement money? Should we care when a religion uses fraud to obtain wealth?  Should we care if a church poisons the community against a minority group, just because they can? What does it matter? After all, the members are happy in their beliefs. 

The answer is "empathy." That's why we get involved and that's why we care. 

Is the water getting hot yet?