People sometimes ask what was the thing that lead me out of the church. I’d have to say it was this quote by Bruce R. McConkie:
“True religion is found only where men worship the true and living God. False religion always results from the worship of false gods. Eternal life itself, which is the greatest of all the gifts of God, is available to those and those only who know God and Jesus Christ whom he hath sent.”
You see, I was studying my scriptures trying to know God, and find falsehood when I started to notice discrepancies and to actually go back to source data. I would find something like “Helen Mar Kimball” and see that it implied that either God was okay with Joseph abusing his power to marry young women, or that God ordered such a thing. In either case I could clearly say “God is not good”.
And since we only have God’s word for it that He isn’t a liar, this seemed to indicate that he did lie, or that the Mormon God was not a god deserving of worship.
I’m writing a novel about Mormon missionaries that takes place in 1979. I’m trying to find out what exactly the content of the discussions was back then. I guess they were called the “Rainbow Discussions” because they were color-coded. They were part of A Uniform System for Teaching Families.” Any ideas on how I could get a copy of the Rainbow Discussions or at least the content of the discussions. I want to be historically accurate.
Thanks for your help
— john
This link has the official names of each of the discussions throughout each era:
https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/pdf/138-28-46.pdf
The discussion is pretty good, and I’d recommend at least browsing it. According to the article the discussions were called “The Uniform System for Teaching Families” between 1973 and 1986.
According to this link: http://www.worldcat.org/title/uniform-system-for-teaching-families/oclc/361245191?ht=edition&referer=di, you can check them out of the Harold B. Lee library in Provo. They have not been scanned into Google books yet because they are copyrighted.
You can see a single page of the 1973 “Rainbow” version in this slideshow: http://svu.edu/pdf/speeches/lee-donaldson-presentation.pdf