Light and Truth

From the earliest of years, I have had a deep interest in mathematics and astronomy. Although I have a very limited memory of my life before the age of 12, I believe that my math interest originated in elementary school. My best assumption is that this was at least in part brought about by some internal frustration with some problems on assignments in other subjects getting marked wrong without any explanation of why they were wrong. For example, some teachers would simply mark an answer of mine to a question on a reading assignment wrong without any reason of why it was incorrect. Other times they would provide an explanation, but not one that was convincing enough of why their personal interpretation was right instead of mine. On math assignments, however, there was always a way to show why my answer was wrong and why the correct answer was truly the only one. This aspect of mathematics where everything is provable and completely void of opinion was, and has remained to this day, the...

From a young age, I anticipated the time when I would serve as a full-time missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. With many close family members and friends having previously served as full-time missionaries, I had many opportunities to prepare for my own experience. Among the many aspects of this preparation was a desire to know what the hard questions might be, and how to answer them. Listening to many stories from returned missionaries, combined with pretty simple reasoning, I concluded that religious questions (both sincere and intentionally-confounding) were unavoidable as a missionary. One of the most common intentionally-confounding questions involved in the stories shared by my fellow returned missionaries was how any of The Church's modern-day scripture (and particularly The Book of Mormon) could remain valid within the presence of the warning at the very end of the Bible, Revelation 22:18-19. "For I testify unto every man that heareth th...