Just_A_Guy

Just like you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette, sometimes you have to break a few line cooks to create one decent chef.

I'm a latecomer here, and the discussion is too extensive for me to use the mutli-quote function; but I'd like to respond to a couple of what I understand to be @JohnsonJones's points/allegations: The Church isn't protecting children as much as the BSA because, inter alia, it doesn't subject those working with youth to background checks and it doesn't require as-frequent renewal of Youth Protection Training. In addition to the question that the FAIR article addresses as to what would even show up on a background check (commercially-available checks in the US would be limited to criminal history; often just criminal convictions. I can assure you that they won't include CPS history--at least, not in the State of Utah)--I think one dynamic that gets missed here is that in the Church, if you waltz into a new ward and say "I want to work with the children. Please do not give me any calling unless it puts me in close proximity to the children"--that's a red flag; because we have a strong ethic of not aspiring to any calling and instead, as @LDSGator eloquently relates, serving where we are asked to serve. By contrast, in the BSA everyone is there because they want to work with kids; and such statements don't trigger any "creepy alarms". So it's entirely appropriate that BSA "volunteers" should be subjected to a more rigorous vetting process than LDS (pardon the term) "conscripts". Another dynamic that gets missed is that the burden of proof for getting a notation put on your LDS membership record, is lower than the burden of proof for getting a conviction put on your criminal record. The new LDS youth program is toothless because, inter alia, youth are not excluded for failure to comply with the terms of the program; and especially failure to live moral standards/failure to hold temple recommends/failure to attend the temple. Well, yeah. The BSA is fundamentally a social club and can exclude anyone it wants to with no spiritual/eternal ramifications. The Church doesn't have that luxury; we can't kick kids out of the youth program (whatever it may be) just because they wouldn't buy the uniforms or badges or manuals or camping gear or whatnot. And I suspect that if the Church did start kicking out youth who couldn't qualify for a temple recommend, the hue and cry of protest would arise from many quarters of the Church--possibly even including my good friend, JohnsonJones. LDS youth protections are inferior because the BSA will immediately kick out violators of, eg, the "two deep policy", whereas the LDS Church won't. I have a couple of family members involved in non-LDS BSA troops (not in Utah), and they are desperately strapped for adult leadership. Barring additional creepiness, an adult violator of the two-deep policy would not be immediately kicked out; (s)he would be counseled and given a couple of warnings. BSA national may talk a tough game in order to give themselves legal cover (and of course, BSA national is not exactly known for their honesty, which is one reason the LDS Church bailed on them). But while the LDS policy recommending two-deep leadership may sound softer, it more honestly reflects what's realistically attainable at the grass-roots level. The LDS policy requiring those working with youth to report disclosures of abuse is toothless because there is no universal proscribed punishment for those who fail to comply with it. Such as . . . what? It's not enough that we instruct our people to render unto Caesar; we now have to do Caesar's work for him by launching inquisitions as to which Church members have failed to obey the policy and then revoke their temple covenants as punishment? The Church's inferior youth protection policies are what will render it more vulnerable to future litigation than the BSA. I think that's dubious. It is the Church's publicly-known, vastly deeper pockets that render it a more attractive target. If you look at most of the publicized LDS sex abuse litigation over the past ten years, precious little of it comes from two-deep leadership violations by bishops or youth leaders who perped on children themselves. Rather, the claims come from a) children who were victimized by a family acquaintance who happened to hold an LDS priesthood office, which tort lawyers then seized upon to try to establish respondeat superior; or b) bishops who heard a disclosure of abuse by a perpetrator or victim in a confessional context and encouraged the member to make a confession/report to law enforcement but felt unauthorized to make their own independent report. Additionally, right now there's sort of a blood-in-the-water mentality because of what happened to the BSA. Also, I think there's been an assumption that we basically did what the Catholics had done--assumed for theological reasons that our clergy were not subject to civil law, and deliberately shuffled pedophiles around and put them in new positions of authority from which they could strike again. But the majority of the high-profile cases lately have ended in legal victories for the Church; and I think the personal injury bar is finally starting to realize that the Church's approach was not nearly so outrageous. A college employee's professional associations with college students is an appropriate model of the desirable dynamic to be established within the LDS Church. Strongly disagree. The Church is specifically trying to build a trust-based, Zion society. That may or may not be attainable as broader secular socio-political conditions evolve; but I don't think the ideal should be thrown overboard just because our critics (many of whom resent the Church for providing a socio-theological framework that reinforces the choice of many LDS youth to be remain chaste and otherwise immune from critics' advances, exploitation, or other influence) make unquantified accusations about how harmful it supposedly is to children. This quote: There may have been individual leaders and congregational cultures that, reflecting (along with the BSA) the broader culture in which they found themselves, preferred to seek resolutions "in house" (I find it ironic that under the standards of the time in question, by documenting the identities and complaints against the perpetrators and then drumming the perps out of the organization, the BSA was actually doing *more* to combat child abuse than many other groups; but then those same records resulted in their being publicly pilloried for failure to protect children). But I'd be very surprised if you were able to point to a single directive from Church leadership in SLC urging a general policy of concealment of child sex abuse from the legal authorities. And as for the hotline: the phone number for that hotline was actually concealed from lay Church members until the last ten years or so. It was not something that existed to help the Church bigwigs identify and hush up allegations of abuse. It was intended as a resource for lay clergy. I've corresponded with you before about legal issues, JohnsonJones; and you are savvy enough to know what clerical privilege is, who holds it, and that the circumstances under which it can be waived vary from state to state. The FAIR article cited by @mordorbund offers inaccurate numbers. For example, it wrongly "extrapolates" a 30% figure. It sounds like maybe you didn't read the article very carefully, and went into it wanting to reject the optimistic picture it presented. The 30% figure comes from the fact that the Church paid 30% of the settlement pot; and the article then goes on to reject any suggestion that because the Church paid 30% of the fund it was the origin for 30% of the abuse cases. You then retreat into a sort of factual nihilism by claiming that "numbers vary depending on the source", but the numbers in the FAIR article--and the methodology--seem clear: the authors went into the LA Times database of the Ineligible Volunteer files (which spanned the last 80 years), threw out the cases where no religious affiliation of a troop could be identified, and then isolated the remaining cases where there was demonstrable affiliation with the LDS Church (a process that would result in the Church's being over-represented). And even so, only 5.16% of the abusers were LDS-affiliated. You link to an article quoting one of the victim attorneys in the BSA bankruptcy, Tim Kosnoff, claiming that the figure was more like 15-20%; but Kosnoff had the same data the FAIR authors had. The simple fact is: Kosnoff lied. (If you've been following the bankruptcy or the ScouterForum discussions, Kosnoff was determined to drag the Church into the proceeding and milk it for everything it had. He had a novel theory that since the Church had delegates at BSA National, BSA National's policies were the Church's fault and that all victims, LDS or not, ought to be able to hold the Church jointly and severally liable. Even a number of the victims ultimately concluded that Kosnoff was something of a snake.) One can muddy the waters about how many LDS Scouts, and troops there were over the last 8 decades, but the simple fact is that no one in this discussion has offered any basis for claiming that LDS abusers or LDS troops were over-represented in the documented BSA sex abuse cases--not in the total number of cases, not in any decade, not in any one year. Nor has any statistical basis been offered to contest the claim that, troop for troop, a scout was statistically safer in a random LDS unit than he was pretty much anywhere else in the BSA. The Church's current youth program is vague and being applied inconsistently and, in most cases, poorly. We would have been better off sticking with the BSA. I agree with the first part. I thought we'd have something much more structured and robust ready to go when we left the BSA--or, within a couple of years. I do see my son getting socialization and leadership experience and some outdoor activity in his deacon's quorum. Then again, it was surprising and disappointing when I took the Teachers' Quorum sailing a couple of weeks ago and asked one of them to tie a square not on a reefing line, and none of them knew how to do it. Then again--Gospel teaching was a much bigger priority on our sailing outing than in any BSA outdoor activity I'd ever done. The leaders did it in a way that was very inspirational, natural, and unobtrusive to the activity that we were doing. And that, in the end, is what's going to save my boy. As far as the Church goes: The BSA had its purpose. Then circumstances changed. The BSA may still be a good choice for individual families, but it is not a good choice for the Church. Its national leadership got taken over by people who bold-faced lied about where they planned to take the organization, and then shut the Church's representatives out of the decision-making process by subterfuge at a pivotal moment. It slowly became more sympathetic to social activists who want to pull the organization in direction where the Church cannot follow. Its financial demands on both individual boys and the chartering orgs were increasing by leaps and bounds and it insisted on treating the Church as a cash cow, even as it steadfastly refused to get its own fiscal house in order--and in hindsight, the Church extricated itself from the BSA just in time to avoid getting caught up in the collapse. I regret the Church's leaving the BSA, just like Lot regretted leaving Sodom and Gomorrah. But there are costs to spending too much time looking backwards . . .

This assumes that the poor generally can’t help being poor; and that a poor person who begins attending LDS services and otherwise applying LDS teachings to the person’s life is nonetheless likely to remain poor indefinitely. The Church devotes considerable resources to ensuring that the opposite takes place—to empowering the poor to move, over years and decades, into the middle and upper-middle class. I think the statistical data cited in the OP shows the fruits of that effort.

I don’t know if this is happening elsewhere, but our temple president (Saratoga Springs) had apparently asked stake presidents to have their wards quit organizing youth temple trips—they’re tying up all the reservation slots and blocking families from attending together.

I certainly agree with the principle that the more we needlessly share (or otherwise trivialize/sensationalize) our revelations, the fewer such revelations we are likely to get in the future. But it seems odd to me that we would be admonished to go into the temple specifically for the purpose of getting revelation to navigate the vicissitudes of day-to-day living, but would then be expected never to share the insights gained from those revelations with those with whom we share our lives and over whom the patriarchal order gives us some degree of stewardship

This seems to contradict what @laronius says above. Are you talking about proxy work, or living ordinances specifically?

I am gravitating to the position that it is the covenants associated with the ordinances, not the physical act of the ordinances, that have eternal significance. The ritual, I suspect, is primarily a pedagogical tool that God implements to ensure that the covenants are memorable and lead us to give the covenants their due weight. In the Church we put a lot of emphasis on getting those rituals mechanically right—the right words, the right motions, doing everything in the right sequence, etc—but I am inclined to think that this is more of a token by which we show our allegiance to that God who gave us the underlying covenants, than because the rituals themselves have some mystical value that is erased if we inadvertently do them the wrong way. It is certainly tremendously important for us to follow the patterns prescribed by God and get our ordinances as nearly perfectly right as we are able, every time. But if God feels that in a particular case a person needs to make the covenants associated with the initiatory before making those associated with baptism—I don’t think there’s any eternal order that prevents Him from doing so. I tend to look a bit skeptically at writers who take a particular scriptural episode and says “oh yeah, here’s where Nephi is getting his endowment; and here’s where John the Revelator gets his endowment; and here’s where the apostles get their initiatories; and here’s where Nephi son of Helaman gets his second anointing”. The Gospel is saturated with a number of core principles that rear their heads again and again in a variety of theological, liturgical, instructional, and everyday-living contexts—divine love, creation, atonement, redemption and purification, mutual aid among the believers, obedience, sacrifice, holy living, chastity, consecration, priestly kingship/queenship over posterity, victory over/reversal of Adam’s fall, return to the presence of God, etc; and one could certainly find ways to relate each of those concepts to any and all of the priesthood ordinances we do in the Church today. But that doesn’t mean that a scriptural account of a vision or dream or coronation or anointing should be interpreted as being “basically the same thing” as any of our modern temple ordinances.

Doesn’t Royal Skousen argue that the BoM English is closest to 15th-16th century? I seem to recall him speculating that perhaps Tyndale or some of the King James translators, in the spirit world, had a role in generating the English text; which was then passed on to Joseph Smith.

I believe Don Bradley suggests as much in his book on the 116 lost pages. As I recall Bradley suggests that there was a massive apostasy during the reign of Mosiah I, and that the experience of Aminadi in interpreting writing on the wall of the temple (Alma 10:2) had something to do with it.

I suspect that Satan thought some combination of a) Father hadn’t *really* wanted to redeem His children at all; and/or b) any redemptive process the Father instituted wouldn’t really be powerful enough to be effective, because the Father wouldn’t be able/willing to make the sort of sacrifice it would take for a plan of redemption to work. In short: I think Satan underestimated how much the Father loved His children. Additionally: from the temple drama, I think there’s a dimension of Satan trying to supplant God by setting himself up as the munificent provider of secret knowledge and progression that the Father was hoarding for Himself. And again, I think Satan miscalculated how far God was willing to go to reconcile Adam and Eve to Himself; as well as the ultimate almost-irresistible nature of divine love and grace and the residual “homing instinct” that the Light of Christ would leave in the human spirit. Satan assumed that Adam and Eve and their posterity, in their fallen state, would be as incorrigibly jaded and cynical and faithless as he himself was.

My recollection of that is that Pence made a lot of points and policy arguments with which Harris mostly chose not to disengage, instead resorting to a combination of cackling or false accusations; and then a fly landed in Pence’s hair on-camera, and all we ever heard from the press after that was “Even insects know Pence is full of crap. SQUEEEEEE!!!”

I’m not saying there’s no value to your comment—RINOS and falling in love with power and just plain getting bogged down, have been inherent struggles for the GOP. But . . . I don’t think Trump fundamentally brought about a sea change in which Republicans started winning. I don’t think Obama, as the first black Dem nominee, was beatable; so I don’t really blame McCain or Romney for those losses. By contrast I think nearly any mainstream GOP nominee could have beaten Hillary in 2016. When it came to working with the Republican-led 115th Congress to advance conservative legislation, Trump’s White House was shockingly impotent. The “victories” at the SCOTUS level come primarily from Mitch McConnell (as much a “swamp thing” as anyone Trump has condemned) bottling up Merrick Garland’s confirmation at the end of Obama’s administration.

I’m of two minds on the op. On the one hand: the VFW seems to be suggesting that one can never accomplish as much for one’s country in the civilian sphere as one can in the military sphere. As much as I respect our veterans: I disagree with this assertion; and would also add that in hindsight—while the motives of our soldiers are entirely honorable—it doesn’t seem like the expeditionary deployments of our fighting forces in the 21st century have accomplished much of anything at all. On the other hand: the Presidential Medal of Freedom has a suspicious way of getting awarded to people who have championed the pet social causes of the sitting president’s political party. In practice, if not in theory, the PMOF is not equal to the CMOH; and while I might disagree with the way the VFW expressed it—it was right for someone to point that out that there is a difference. With Trump it’s a particularly tender spot, because he already has a history of making (or being alleged to have made, by fairly high-ranking military folks who one presumes wouldn’t make this kind of thing up) some deeply insensitive statements about folks who have been maimed or killed in military service. After eight years in the public sphere and basically having come down on every side of every issue at some point in that time period, I don’t think there’s much Trump can do to alienate his base at this point. I’m not heavily into military culture, but I suspect that because it’s so meritocratic Waltz’s issues and Harris’s means of getting her earlier jobs aren’t going to make her terribly appealing. As for the rest of the country: I’m not sure the cultural mystique about US military or veterans, continues to be what it was twenty or even ten years ago; and I’m not sure the rising generation is prepared to reject an otherwise-preferable presidential candidate based on that candidate’s having said out loud stuff about military service that everyone else thought, but didn’t dare express, if/whenever they considered entering military service themselves.

I agree that religious/conservative communities have often been inexcusably slow to root out predators in their midst. But I think it bears repeating that it’s ludicrous on its face to suggest that children are in anything like as much danger in a community that condemns and suppresses fetishism, kink, and the flouting of sexual boundaries as those children are in a community that lionizes those traits. Additionally, while the etiology of gender dysphoria is not well understood (and may well differ in male —> female versus female —> male cases, or even between individual cases), the overwhelmingly common presence of an autogynephilia element among male —> female transgenders has been long established. Frankly: a high proportion of them are fetishists and exhibitionists and/or enjoy transgresiveness more for its inherently transgressive nature than because of any fundamental underlying sexual orientation or preference; and people like that shouldn’t be trusted around kids.

I’m still NeverTrump; and continue to believe that if we take D&C 98:10 and Isaiah 8 seriously, eventually the Lord will prepare the way for a candidate who meets those criteria. In the meantime: I wrote in President Nelson in 2020 and am likely to do so again this year.