Dear @LDSChurch, come let us reason together

[The @LDSChurch has released a public statement about a book of scriptural text canonized in the Church in 1880. The full text of the statement may be read here.]

Dear @LDSChurch,

You released a public statement about the Book of Abraham. I’m going to paraphrase for you how every body outside of the Church Office Building reads that release:

We assert this book’s contents are holy and accurate descriptions of the spirit world, human history, and the mind of Gods.

We have no idea where the text came from.

Scholars have an undeniable case that the Egyptian characters in the facsimiles have nothing to do with the canonized text.

This literally came out of Joseph Smith’s mind.

We know this book and its contents are true.
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Can you see why the circular logic is maddening? Please work with me here, good folks at @LDSChurch. I believe in you.

Facsimile 2 caught my religious imagination as a boy, in large part because of the movie Stargate. To this day, without regard for my intellectual rejection of canonizing the Book of Abraham, the text has shaped and framed my spirituality and personal sense of life purpose in a way that I can’t easily dismantle. It’s ingrained deeply.

And is that necessarily a bad thing?

You can still maintain the spiritual power and electricity generated by a narrative without the slow tip-toe away from the bogus claims of Abraham being an ancient text. It’s not. We know it’s not. Now let’s move on. That’s not the same thing as renouncing the truth discovered by this little detour through the mind of Joseph Smith.

It’s eye-opening to know that other Mormon sects do not acknowledge the Book of Abraham as scripture. The Community of Christ does not accept the Book of Abraham with scriptural authority. The Strangites do not accept the Book of Abraham with scriptural authority (and they are really weird). The other Mormon sect of note that accepts the Book of Abraham with scriptural authority is the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And they be cray.

I beg for more straight talk and less spin, @LDSChurch. It’s really frustrating and hard to take you that seriously otherwise.