Just_A_Guy

Agreed. I would just note that “what updates or revisions would God want for His Church” can include revisions that react (or anticipate) the effect we have in our broader society and/or the way society reacts to us. I would venture to guess that in the end the Lord doesn’t care all that much, in the abstract, about whether we put a golden statue of Him on every temple, or every chapel, or every street corner. But I suspect He is at least *somewhat* interested in the ways we reach out to others in order to facilitate good will and create opportunities to share our message . . . or unnecessarily slam the door shut on such opportunities through our own obstinate tone-deafness. 🙂

1) I doubt it. We all know we don’t pray to, or do anything that smacks of worshipping, Moroni; whereas we *do* worship Christ (or, to be pedantic, we worship the Father in the name of Christ whom we revere as Creator, Lord and Savior). These things are perhaps squishy by nature; but it *feels* like erecting a statue of someone who is actually the object of our devotion crosses a sort of cultural line about idolatry. 2) Until very recently, nearly all the people outside the LDS Church who knew we existed at all were either a) Catholics and Orthodox Christians, who have no problem with statues in a devotional context; or b) Protestants, who frown on statues of anyone in a devotional context. Replacing statues of Moroni with statues of Christ isn’t going to win us any friends in the Christian world.

John is the last of the Gospel writers, and throughout his account he is addressing various nonsense theories about Christ that had spring up in the first century—one of which being that Jesus wasn’t really God, but just a man who God’s “essence” could jump in or out of at will. (Note too that John, the only Gospel writer who actually saw Christ praying and suffering at Gethsemane, doesn’t mention Christ’s suffering there at all. He just makes it look like “they went there after dinner, and suddenly Judas showed up”. Perhaps the account of Jesus’s suffering in Gethsemane was already common knowledge when John wrote—or perhaps it was just too tender for him, the eyewitness, to discuss in any detail.) Bear that in mind as you look at John 18:5-6. And note that when the account has Jesus saying “I am he”, “he” is in italics—it’s not in the original Greek text; the King James translators added it for clarity. In the original account Jesus asks who they’re looking for, the soldiers reply “Jesus of Nazareth”, and Jesus simply replies “I AM”—the Tetragrammaton—the name of God that no one in Israel dares utter except the high priest, and him only once a year on the Day of Atonement. Jesus is, in effect, proclaiming Himself to be one and the same as Jehovah; which fits into John’s overarching theme. John is subtly saying “see? Even the guys who KILLED Jesus sensed they were dealing with a god made flesh, and understood that this gnostic in-and-out-stuff is nonsense!” What Jesus has said is shocking enough, but then we remember Luke’s account of the sweating blood. Jesus, drenched in blood and his clothing stained accordingly, is asked “where’s Jesus of Nazareth”; and His reply is basically “oh, you mean, Jehovah? I’m right here.” If you aren’t backing away from Him because of respect the horrific majesty of it all, you’re backing away because of the apparent unhingedness/ insanity of the guy who’s talking.

I bought a house in 2012 with 4 kids and a wife who didn’t work at all, on $60K per year with no military/VA benefits. I don’t want to downplay how tough it is out there. But I think it’s worth noting that (as I recall, and please feel free to disprove me if I’m misremembering) several eastern European countries of late have tailored their social safety nets for the specific purpose of making it easier to raise additional children; and the affect on fertility rates in those countries have been effectively zero. Child-bearing and child-rearing is enormously costly not only in simple dollars and cents, but in terms of physical labor and emotional investment and self-sacrifice and delayed gratification. If you have those attributes and you prioritize child-rearing, poverty in and of itself is unlikely to really stop you from procreating; and if you don’t have those attributes/priorities—money itself seems unlikely to change the calculus all that much.

That’s not true! 😁

Well, I’m aware that there’s a long-standing discussion about whether men and women can/should ever really be “just friends” with each other, and the notion that because of the way the male libido usually works the man in such friendships almost always—almost always, even if just subconsciously—is considering the female a potential sexual partner. I have never felt a powerful urge to weigh in on that debate; but I imagine that if there is some accuracy to it—that would probably apply to gay man/straight man relationships. Regardless of whether that’s true—one of the regrettable things about the rise of the LGBTQ movement is the associated decline in the cultural idea that men can have deep, intimate, emotional, non-sexual friendships.

Yup, they built a 32-story commercial high rise nearby. The city seems to have been kinder to the Church than SLC has been, perhaps because—unlike SLC—they haven’t gotten to the point where they can take the Church’s perpetual presence and ongoing community development efforts for granted. I happened to be at a child welfare conference in Philly during the temple’s open house around 2016; so I went over to see it and missed the bus from the temple area back to my hotel afterwards. I started walking back, took a wrong turn or two, and pretty soon it became obvious that I was in Philadelphia’s equivalent of a gay district. Interesting trip . . .

Philadelphia is lovely, and very well situated—the Church couldn’t have asked for a better site there. There are so many Utah temples under construction, I wonder if the GAs are waiting for a few of those to come online before re-assessing the need for any additional temples in the area. (Utah County has three under construction, with the original Provo temple slated to close soon for renovations.) On the other hand: Indonesia has fewer than 8,000 members in the whole country, and they’re getting a temple.

I thought that, at least 20 years ago, same-gender-attracted folks were considered honorably excused from missionary service even if they had 100% complied with the law of chastity. I’m wondering when, or if, that policy has formally changed. Certainly we hear a lot of out-gays talk about their missionary service, but I’m not sure that they had “come out” prior to their calls. The funny thing is that Boyd K. Packer gave a talk thirty years ago that the LGBTQ lobby interprets as endorsing violence against gays—but in context, he was talking about an anecdote where a straight missionary had woken up to find himself being molested by his gay companion (the missionary had, as I recall, given the perp a swift punch in the face and then felt guilty about it; whereas Elder Packer suggested that it was well-deserved). So, yes; I think scenarios like you describe are inevitably going to be an issue; especially as LGBTQ advocacy progresses into what I think is the inexorable next step (and which I understand is already happening with male-to-female transgender folk demanding acceptance within the lesbian community): that refusing the sexual advances of an LGBTQ suitor is per se bigotry. But to your question: I think pairing self-identified gay elders with self-identified lesbian sisters creates its own set of issues—sisters wondering if the elder is *really* gay (and the fact that sexual orientation is often more of a spectrum than a binary) (and, what about bisexuals?); and many women (LDS or not) are just plain intimidated/threatened by the idea of living with men generally, regardless of orientation. And frankly, LDS missionaries are (by design) highly visible and since outsiders who see them wouldn’t necessarily know that they’re LGBTQ and would just see an unmarried couple living together—it becomes sort of an image, “Caesar’s wife must be above reproach” sort of thing.

I just re-skimmed the relevant parts of President Oaks's biography. He was released as president of BYU in 1980 and nominated to the Utah Supreme Court in November of 1980. (He had acquired something of a reputation as a conservative, both for his handling of BYU and also because when he was a professor at the University of Chicago he had been involved with the university council that disciplined some hippie rioters/vandals.) He was also chairman of the board of PBS at this point and was in Washington DC fairly often. When Reagan was inaugurated there was talk of offering Oaks a job relatively high up in the Attorney General's Office, and a January 1981 article from the Washington Post also mentions him as a potential candidate for Secretary of Education. Oaks's biography says he told the Reagan administration that he wasn't interested in another administrative job and was happy on the Utah Supreme Court; but when an AG Office executive asked if he'd be interested in the Solicitor General spot Oaks replied in the affirmative. He flew out to DC in March of 1980 to meet with several judiciary officials, senators, etc., but later that month he received a spiritual impression to withdraw his name from consideration. He was nevertheless called out to DC again for another round of interviews regarding the SG job, which he did half-heartedly; and the slot ultimately went to Rex E. Lee instead. Oaks's name was bandied around in 1981 after Potter Stewart resigned from SCOTUS, but he never really pushed for the job and it went to Sandra Day O'Connor instead. Right after that Reagan admin officials reached out to him to see if he was interested in a slot on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, and he replied that due to other constraints he wasn't interested at that point but might be interested in the future. By late 1983/early 1984 Oaks let the Reagan admin know that he was ready to accept a position if it were offered; and then in April he was called to the Q12. It's impossible to disprove such speculation, of course. But, this struck me as an extremely Christ-centered conference (off the top of my head, I'm not sure I can remember a single reference to Joseph Smith). My initial reaction was something like yours--disappointment at not hearing something more original from President Oaks's keen mind. But the impression very clearly came to me that intellectually, I'm playing checkers and he's playing three-dimensional chess. I will be reviewing the written text of his talk very closely.

I’ll have to look it up; but I think it was the O’Connor seat.

It was the Reagan administration that had Oaks on the shortlist for (IIRC) either SCOTUS or the DC Circuit. President Oaks’s biography mentions some correspondence he had with (I think) then-AG Ed Meese with the administration probing about whether or not Oaks would accept such a nomination. At U. Chicago, Oaks was also good friends with Robert Bork.

This is the danger of retconning twenty-first century western mindsets and (translated) linguistic patterns, into centuries- or millennia-old documents created by wholly separate cultures. OT passages stressing the unity of God, are made in the context of the people of God being a minority in the midst of pagan cultures that were more politically powerful, economically prosperous, culturally pervasive, and technologically advanced than the monotheistic Hebrew rubes; and who attributed their material success to their devotion to a chaotic pantheon of competing and sometimes-warring gods. The BoM authors were the product of that mentality, and there are textual clues that paganism continued to be an issue in the broader cultures that surrounded the Nephite nation. I would venture to guess that if you had to spend all day, every day combating rumors that your marriage was in the rocks, you would reply in ever-escalating rhetoric about how you and your wife were in perfect harmony and unity. You might even describe yourselves as being “of one mind” (even though you (presumably!) don’t actually have a Borg-like shared consciousness) or of “one heart” (even though the two of you do not, as a matter of anatomy, share a single heart or even a combined circulatory system). So it was throughout Biblical times. Early Christians, as you probably know, struggled with how to maintain the by-then “respectability” and order of Jewish monotheism, while reconciling that with an apparent plurality of gods suggested by veneration of a god who was the son of the Jewish god (and this nebulous thing called the “Holy Spirit” being thrown in for good measure, adding to the chaos). After a couple of centuries the debate was ended by imperial fiat through the development of a couple of creeds that basically said “Three. But one. And three. And one. And yet not three. But three. And yet not one. But one. Mystery, and tiny human brains, and blah, blah, blah”; with physical violence and torture (or the threat thereof) deployed against those who asked too many questions. I don’t think you’ll find a place in the BoM that explicitly comes out and rejects trinitarianism. The BoM continues to speak of the unity of God, though it also (like the Bible) has instances where the Son and the Father (or Holy Ghost) are seen as distinct entities. Joseph Smith’s 1838 account of his 1820 “first vision” clearly depicts (like Stephen’s vision) the Father and the Son standing next to each other—ie, separate corporeal entities—though some of his earlier accounts of that vision suggest he had not initially understood the full theological ramifications of what he had seen. And the Lectures on Faith (released under Smith’s imprimatur in 1835, though a significant portion of them may have been ghost-written by a former Campbellite preacher) contain a description of the Holy Ghost that was superseded by later teachings of Smith.

I like this very much, doc. Very much indeed.

I see he also finally moved to that commune in Washington State he keeps mentioning. Living in a yurt, no doubt.

Well played, sir.

It seems like the common explanation is that it was a “war of words”. The scriptural accounts feel like there was more to it than that; but it’s hard to say what, exactly, that may have been. But your quote above made me think. Revelation 12:11 makes it seem like “death” (or some analogue of it) was a real possibility for those who engaged against Satan and his followers. If we *do* take the “war of words” paradigm - one possible result of engaging in reasoned discussion/debate with an adversary, is that you may wind up being convinced to their point of view. Circling back to my first paragraph: how, physically, does one expel a spiritual being from a (presumably) physical location? If it can be done merely through invoking the name of the Son, then why was it such a struggle and why did it take armies of the faithful to do it? If it was merely a debating contest during a period at which hearts and minds might have been changed: how did God decide to say “enough”—to say that those who get bodies versus those who don’t will be determined by where people stand now as opposed to where they stood half an hour ago or where they will stand three hours in the future? Did God cast the rebels out, or did they choose to leave once they got to a point where they found His presence intolerable? And if the latter, might the function of Adam and his armies actually have been to engage Lucifer and the other avowed rebels one by one, and annoy/ goad them into choosing to leave? A sort of celestial “whittling and whistling brigade”?

[Tangent] I understand that one of the upper floors of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building has been converted for use by the Q15 in their weekly Thursday prayer circle meetings; a coworker of mine is friends with one of the subcontractors involved in the conversion. Not sure if there’s a similar space specifically dedicated for gatherings of the entire Q15/70; but I imagine Temple Square has several spaces that could do in a pinch (the JSMB’s Legacy Theater or the chapel in the old ballroom, for example).

One analogy may be the idea of a box that seems “full” of bowling balls, but then it is still perfectly capable of accommodating large quantities of a “finer” material such as sand.

This is something I haven’t contemplated a lot, but it just occurred to me: Would they, though? Does Satan really love suffering and despair and violence and brutality and hopelessness? Or does he just love the sorts of behaviors and mindsets (narcissism, shortsightedness, power) that inevitably yield those results, and then he dissociates between cause and effect when the chickens come home to roost? If the latter, it may well be that he has never shown his “true colors” more visibly or accurately than he is doing right now—and his acolytes are legion.

I very much agree. I’m a bit of a traditionalist; and I think that dressing well is a way of conveying respect (and while I recognize that conventions are loosening, I do think there’s a point at which someone’s clothing is pretty obviously calculated to convey an “expletive-you-all-and-the-horse-you-rode-in-on” mentality). At work: On court days I stick to a two-piece suit, but I also usually walk from my office to court and in cold weather will wear a knee-length wool overcoat and fedora (fedoras/traditional hats are *very* underrated for cold weather) and black leather gloves that my secretary gave me for Christmas a couple years ago. Since I’m in a suit most weekdays, I like to do something a little extra to preserve some meaningful notion of “Sunday best”. So like @Vort’s son I typically wear a three-piece suit to church with handkerchief in my jacket and a pocket watch that my kids gave me in my waistcoat; I also wear a French-cuffed shirt with cufflinks to church (if I’ve had time to iron it). But I rarely wear an overcoat/ gloves/ hat to church in cold weather, because combined with everything else it just feels like a bit much—immodest, even. (Even though, for an old fat guy, I look pretty good in it all.)

Many revelations in the D&C represent Joseph Smith’s attempt to frame the will of God into a Voice of God, first-person declaratory statement, but they are still “after the manner of [his] language” (D&C 1:24) and Joseph always considered them subject to further refinement/editing. D&C 138 doesn’t even presume to use God’s direct voice; rather, President Joseph F. Smith is using his own perspective to try to interpret for the reader the vision that he was able to experience. His account is naturally going to be filtered at minimum by his vocabulary, and probably to some degree by his worldview. I think most Saints in any age would recognize that humankind is incapable of paying for their own sins to any degree; that salvation and redemption from sin comes only in and through the merits of Jesus Christ as part of a covenant relationship in which we consecrate ourselves to Him. At the same time, early LDS discourse (and indeed, scripture generally) is full of statements about punishment, “work out your salvation with fear and trembling”, the wrath of God suffered by the impenitent in the spirit world until they are purged of their sins, etc. That was just the rhetorical/linguistic water President Smith swam in; and we don’t need to be too worried if it shows up in his written accounts of the revelations he received. The scriptures are canon, but they are not a legal code in which one word always means the same single thing and in which a particular concept is always conveyed through one (and only one) specific word or phrase.

I do not know the native language(e) of Uganda, I am unfamiliar with either the legal history or the legislative process of Uganda, and on this topic—the number of people/media outlets I trust to accurately interpret and explain it all to me is precisely 0.

“Under capitalism, the wealthy grow powerful. Under socialism, the powerful grow wealthy.”

Well, yes. That’s why Rittenhouse had to be prosecuted. You’ll note that relatively few asked why any of his three separate attackers had the temerity to be out in public wielding weapons on a riot night. It was only (presumably) Republican Rittenhouse whose mere presence was a dead giveaway that the guy was obviously “looking for trouble”. The prosecutor almost gave the game away when he told the jury “everybody takes a beating sometimes, right?” What he meant, of course, was “Republicans—and merely normal people who challenge our rule—ought to take a beating sometimes, right?”