A Burnt Child has arrived for purchase at book sellers.
https://www.amazon.ca/Burnt-Child-Love-Hate-Truth/dp/1489738444/
Thursday, November 18, 2021
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
An Introduction
A Burnt Child is a book formally written over the course of six years, but which was being compiled and carefully incubated in the mind and heart of it's author for at least 40. Unbeknownst to it's author at the time, signs of it's presence manifested themselves over 25 years ago, while sure markers of it's immanent maturity began to show in 2002. Finally, in 2011, things came to a head and it became clear that something had to be done. The ever reluctant, ever loyal boy, man, father and lifelong Mormon, became the disenchanted member and the disinclined author.
I, Jason Draper, am that author.
I am a veteran of a half life long tour of duty in the LDS Church. Like a veteran suffering from PTSD, I have came home but I am less often now not fully present, never really able to leave it all behind. I always thought I was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in every way. Yet strangely, in my research, I had to come to the painful discovery that I was never really a member of that Church any more than oil and water ever truly mix together.
I owed it to my wife and eight children to get this right. I didn't write this book as a way to get out of the LDS Church - I wrote it to stay in. After all, my eternal salvation and the salvation of myself and my entire family is at stake! Or is it not?
As I researched and wrote I discovered that much of what was roted in my mind and heart over my entire life by the LDS Church turned out to be rotten. Despite one disappointing setback after another, I kept digging and unearthing new things and rediscovering old things I had forgotten, or chosen to forget, or even promised I would never allow myself to think about. I spent nearly two years attempting to find some logic or reason to the made-in-heaven madness known as the Mormon Church.
Unbelievably, for me, it was the Orwellian altering of a conference talk in 1984 by a man named R.E. Poelman. Then it was robbing the poor. Then tithing. Then City Creek and the "Word of Wisdom". Then Kinderhook, the Book of Mormon, (or was it Nephi?). The First Vision(s), the "Book of Abraham", the Greek Psalter and the Book of Commandments. Then there was correlation, succession, outward appearances, the Blacks and the Priesthood, and "one Lord, one faith, but two baptisms". Prophets and priesthood power gave way to polygamy, polyandry, and persecution, but that was nothing compared to blood oaths and blood atonement, and if this was not turned on the heads of the wicked by the hand of God Himself, then why not by the hand of His servants themselves?
After all, are there not souls to save? Are we not all wanted, dead or alive? Is there anything God cannot do? Or is there anything his "servants" would not do?
It seems not.
The LDS Church teaches that they are God's elect. They believe that they alone hold the map to the gate and the key to that celestial portal through which all the pre and post mortem members must pass to live (literally). In short, they teach that nobody here gets out alive unless you first die in the right place at the right time at the right hand of the right man.
But dyin' ain't much of a living for any true believer in Christ. Ever trying to duplicate what cannot be copied, man has been fooling himself by attempting to build a stairway to heaven on a terrestrial planet rotating at break neck speed. Yet the higher he builds, the colder he gets, the flimsier his position, and the further he is from having his feet on solid ground. And of course, having once ascended to the heights and found nothing but thinner and thinner air, there is only one way down, and although the descension takes your breath away, it is really the rapid stopping at the bottom that is the real problem.
If you are a faithful true believing Mormon, or that of any other similar sect, can you take the heat? If you are a former member, or an active non-believer forbidden to choose and held in limbo between what you know to be true and what you have and are being taught, there is help in these pages. If you are in a family or marriage where you are not permitted to choose lest you lose everything you value. If you are being persecuted, not by a mob in painted faces, but by those who are supposed to love you unconditionally, whose allegiance is lost in a mandatory membership motion required by those whose honor is lost in the pursuit and enthronement of the useful truths they perpetuate, rest assured that these will in fact will be shown to be nothing but useful lies.
It is my hope that this book, A Burnt Child, may be the catalyst for the preservation or retrieval of the lost and failing faith of the disenchanted, who sadly, upon leaving the LDS Church or any other high-control group, are often so scorched they end up believing in nothing, having faith in nothing and believing in no-one.
I, Jason Draper, am that author.
I am a veteran of a half life long tour of duty in the LDS Church. Like a veteran suffering from PTSD, I have came home but I am less often now not fully present, never really able to leave it all behind. I always thought I was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in every way. Yet strangely, in my research, I had to come to the painful discovery that I was never really a member of that Church any more than oil and water ever truly mix together.
I owed it to my wife and eight children to get this right. I didn't write this book as a way to get out of the LDS Church - I wrote it to stay in. After all, my eternal salvation and the salvation of myself and my entire family is at stake! Or is it not?
As I researched and wrote I discovered that much of what was roted in my mind and heart over my entire life by the LDS Church turned out to be rotten. Despite one disappointing setback after another, I kept digging and unearthing new things and rediscovering old things I had forgotten, or chosen to forget, or even promised I would never allow myself to think about. I spent nearly two years attempting to find some logic or reason to the made-in-heaven madness known as the Mormon Church.
As I mined for that one gold nugget, all I ever found was one fool's gold after another. I found Church history had been obfuscated and modified. Doctrine had been changed. Scriptures had been altered. God's voice that once spoke so clearly from the heavens was lost in a din of muffled confusion over what He really meant us to hear (whomever you believe "He" is).
At some point in 2013, the betrayal became unbearable. From the bottom of a very dark and deep pit, dirty, exhausted, sweaty, and loyally lonely, I heard the mantel high above my head, where I had been stacking these incongruities I had been digging up, finally snap in half all at once under the weight of the lies. The pieces of the religion I called my own since my childhood adoption exploded into flame and came crashing down, stabbing fiery splinters into my believing heart as they fell all around me. The smoke choking me and stinging my eyes to tears, the embers singeing my hair, burning my clothes and scorching my skin, each one seemingly mocking me and taunting me.
At some point in 2013, the betrayal became unbearable. From the bottom of a very dark and deep pit, dirty, exhausted, sweaty, and loyally lonely, I heard the mantel high above my head, where I had been stacking these incongruities I had been digging up, finally snap in half all at once under the weight of the lies. The pieces of the religion I called my own since my childhood adoption exploded into flame and came crashing down, stabbing fiery splinters into my believing heart as they fell all around me. The smoke choking me and stinging my eyes to tears, the embers singeing my hair, burning my clothes and scorching my skin, each one seemingly mocking me and taunting me.
Unbelievably, for me, it was the Orwellian altering of a conference talk in 1984 by a man named R.E. Poelman. Then it was robbing the poor. Then tithing. Then City Creek and the "Word of Wisdom". Then Kinderhook, the Book of Mormon, (or was it Nephi?). The First Vision(s), the "Book of Abraham", the Greek Psalter and the Book of Commandments. Then there was correlation, succession, outward appearances, the Blacks and the Priesthood, and "one Lord, one faith, but two baptisms". Prophets and priesthood power gave way to polygamy, polyandry, and persecution, but that was nothing compared to blood oaths and blood atonement, and if this was not turned on the heads of the wicked by the hand of God Himself, then why not by the hand of His servants themselves?
After all, are there not souls to save? Are we not all wanted, dead or alive? Is there anything God cannot do? Or is there anything his "servants" would not do?
It seems not.
The LDS Church teaches that they are God's elect. They believe that they alone hold the map to the gate and the key to that celestial portal through which all the pre and post mortem members must pass to live (literally). In short, they teach that nobody here gets out alive unless you first die in the right place at the right time at the right hand of the right man.
But dyin' ain't much of a living for any true believer in Christ. Ever trying to duplicate what cannot be copied, man has been fooling himself by attempting to build a stairway to heaven on a terrestrial planet rotating at break neck speed. Yet the higher he builds, the colder he gets, the flimsier his position, and the further he is from having his feet on solid ground. And of course, having once ascended to the heights and found nothing but thinner and thinner air, there is only one way down, and although the descension takes your breath away, it is really the rapid stopping at the bottom that is the real problem.
If you are a faithful true believing Mormon, or that of any other similar sect, can you take the heat? If you are a former member, or an active non-believer forbidden to choose and held in limbo between what you know to be true and what you have and are being taught, there is help in these pages. If you are in a family or marriage where you are not permitted to choose lest you lose everything you value. If you are being persecuted, not by a mob in painted faces, but by those who are supposed to love you unconditionally, whose allegiance is lost in a mandatory membership motion required by those whose honor is lost in the pursuit and enthronement of the useful truths they perpetuate, rest assured that these will in fact will be shown to be nothing but useful lies.
For you all, there is solace in these pages.
This book is about one religion and one man's experience in it. Whether anyone is in or out of the Mormons, the Moonies, or any other high control group, government, or organization that seeks to acquire and maintain power over people, the tactics are always the same. Lessons taught but never learned is as the child who plays with fire is always burned.
This book is about one religion and one man's experience in it. Whether anyone is in or out of the Mormons, the Moonies, or any other high control group, government, or organization that seeks to acquire and maintain power over people, the tactics are always the same. Lessons taught but never learned is as the child who plays with fire is always burned.
It is unlikely that the human who reads A Burnt Child will ever be the same again, for while the burning never stops, there is a way to stop getting burnt. For some, the blaze will get hotter, marriages will burn down and families will be scorched. For others, it will rescue them by illuminating the exit sign and it's door of refuge. Who chooses that door and who does not is not for me to say, for it is not I who created the smoke or fanned the embers to flame.
It is my hope that this book, A Burnt Child, may be the catalyst for the preservation or retrieval of the lost and failing faith of the disenchanted, who sadly, upon leaving the LDS Church or any other high-control group, are often so scorched they end up believing in nothing, having faith in nothing and believing in no-one.
Having been burnt once, twice, and even more, does not a burnt child dread the fire?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)