Just_A_Guy

My wife made that same point once. I replied by telling her that she was being irrational and that she needed to calm down.

1. I agree Coltrin was a good man; though IIRC his testimony (quite understandably) evolved somewhat as the decades passed. 2. You’re right, I was misremembering. I believe it was Meg Stout who hypothesized that this was actually an offer of plural marriage, since Joseph is not known to have undergone an adoption ordinance with anyone in his lifetime and James was remembering the story fifty years later. But this is speculative. (And even if true, there was quite a bit of drama going on between Joseph and Emma and this offer may have been Emma advancing a sort of campaign of anti-polygamy-brinksmanship rather than a sincere desire that Jane become a plural wife. {“Joseph said I could pick his next wife, but he surely won’t accept this one, and if he doesn’t, then I can tell him that since he wouldn’t accept the wife I found for him then he has no reason to seek any other woman.”}) At any rate, with adoption being a temple ordinance (and precursor to parent-child sealing)—if it *was* truly a proposed adoptive sealing and if Joseph Smith knew Emma was offering it, then it would seem that he was not planning for an *absolute* ban on black people receiving temple ordinances.

On the *limited* issue of whether the ban originated with Joseph Smith or not, the following strike me as fair observations: 1. Smith believed God had, on multiple occasions, created several racial castes to distinguish the posterity of “blessed” individuals from posterity of “cursed” ones. 2. Roughly-contemporaneous evidence suggests that Smith seemed to believe that African Americans were subject to some kind of unspecified cursing, but that he also was not altogether comfortable with slavery as practiced in the antebellum USA. 3. Smith approved the ordination of Elijah Abel. Whether he knew at the time of Abel’s AA ancestry is unknown. 4. Even after Joseph Smith’s death, Brigham Young didn’t see any basis for a race-based priesthood ban; as evidenced by his exchanged with William McCary in 1846. 5. Recollections of JS stating that whatever “curse” may have applied to AAs specifically banned their priesthood ordination, tend to be very late. That doesn’t make them wrong, necessarily—a staggering amount of our documentation about JS’s life and teachings comes from folks who recorded their recollections many decades after his death. But it does mean that we can take less for granted about this topic than we think we can. If we take Coltrin and Smoot (who was a slaveowner and therefore not exactly impartial) at face value, then we also have to take the very-noticeably-AA Jane Manning at face value; and she recalled that JS was willing to take her as a plural wife in the new and everlasting covenant of marriage—suggesting that JS had no problem with blacks receiving temple ordinances. 6. Even if the ban didn’t explicitly come from JS—or, even if the reasons given for the ban turned out to be incorrect or doctrinally unsound—that doesn’t make the ban itself wrong. A number of doctrines and practices that we hold very dear in the church were implemented and accepted as logical extensions of Joseph Smith’s teachings but were never clearly articulated by him. And other church leaders (especially President Oaks) have spoken about the dangers of assuming the “why” when all revelation has really given us is the “what”. I’ve hinted at this before, but . . . I happen to think (and this is all speculative, of course) that if McCary had been able to plausibly and publicly allege an LDS priesthood ordination, he could have created a Black Mormonism that would have rejected the authority of the 12 and could have created real problems for the Church as it tried to expand into the American South and, decades later, into the African continent. As it was, his movement grew like wildfire in Cincinnati for a couple of months. (I also think that without the priesthood ban the Church would have joined the colonial scramble for Africa of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—distracting from fruitful efforts elsewhere, depleting much-needed resources, and potentially creating a 21st-century legacy of bad feelings in Africa that would be much worse than anything it currently faces there. Church critics often perseverate on the ban because they’re hoping the Church will send them a fat reparations check . . . forgetting that if we had spent our first 150 years propping up a large membership in the economic South, we’d have no resources left from which to allocate those coveted reparations payments.)

Most SA is; and I have no reason to believe the schools are any better. 😞

Marvin Perkins has argued—he thinks, convincingly—that BoM references to “black” or “white” have nothing to do with skin color.

I appreciate your experience and hope I’m not seen as dismissing the experience of the victims or excusing anyone within the church who deliberately put suspected predators into positions where they could predate again. At the same time, based on my understanding of the statistical percentage of predators amongst US Catholic clerics versus that amongst US public schoolteachers: it might be a closer call, but I still think I’d pick the Catholics. If for no other reason than that public schools have sovereign immunity, whereas my local diocese doesn’t.

I generally agree with you here; though I would note that in a LDS context “bishops” are often people we’ve known for 10-20+ years before they became bishops and who we trust, in large part, because of that previous association. I would ask, though: Would you leave your child alone with a teacher or a psychologist or an LCSW? What about (assuming you were a widow or divorced) a romantic partner? I’m all on board with “trust but verify”. What I’m not on board with, is the notion that church leaders (especially LDS ones, who have not actively sought the positions they hold) are particularly suspect compared to other trusted adults in a child’s orbit. A staggering proportion of child sex abuse is perpetrated by a parent’s new flame. My parents are teachers; so other teachers were a big part of our family’s social circle. And as you know, I work with psychologists and counselor/therapists and LCSWs multiple times per week (and MDs several times per month) and have gotten to know quite a few of them reputationally and personally. “Education” and “certification” don’t necessarily translate as “trustworthiness” or even “general decency” or “good intent”. Not-uncommonly, the reverse is actually true. Again, I’ll reiterate my support for “trust, but verify”. But I will also unabashedly say that if we are unable to verify and must resort to comparing the traits of “trustworthiness”, “general decency”, and “good intention” (and heck, I’ll also throw in “sexual restraint”) as between a random professional and a random LDS bishop—I’d pick the random LDS bishop every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

But that’s just it. They *should be*, because—outliers aside—they were *intended to be*. Churches have traditionally advanced ethical frameworks around, inter alia, marriage and sexuality; which tended to prevent women from being used for transactionalized sex, empowered them to turn down undesireable suitors, disincentivized husbands who might otherwise later be tempted to abandon their wives, reinforced family ties that designated the father as the primary protector of the women in his household against physical and sexual and economic abuse, and stigmatized men who failed to live up to their obligations under this system. The fact that some—perhaps even many—men abused their various roles within these structures, doesn’t make the structure inferior to the calculatedly systematic exploitation of women and children (or the just-plain-anarchy) that prevailed in various earlier societies. (And, let’s be honest here: your average Reddit guy may gloat in feigned horror over the SBC sex scandal—but in his heart of hearts, he’s really just remembering all those church girls who wouldn’t get drunk and sleep with him and other guys whose motivations matched his own. These girls, statistically, are a much larger sample than those who were unfortunately victimized by their own ecclesiastical leaders. Our Reddit guy knows that for all their problems, these churches have actually deterred the exploitation of their female members that he would have committed if he could. That’s why he hates them so much. You’ll note that our Reddit guy doesn’t hate or talk about the mainline liberal churches who also have occasional bad guys in the pastoral ranks but who were already openly telling their youth that sexual promiscuity was part of normal adolescence/ is inoffensive to God/ is not something for which one ought to have any degree of accountability). Schools, too, are theoretically supposed to (among other things) empower kids with knowledge that makes them more resistant to exploitation by charlatans and schemers. Whether they acruelly accomplish that, is certainly a fair question. But then, it’s overwhelmingly not conservatives who are administering and staffing the public schools these days; it’s not conservatives who are forcing kids to attend those schools with the threat of imprisoning their parents if they don’t; and it’s not conservatives offering the schools full legal immunity for any outrages perpetrated by their staffs or on their campuses. If leftists want to pooh-pooh public education as sort of a child grooming operation, I guess I won’t push back too hard so long—so long as I’m allowed to point out that the “groomers” here are overwhelmingly their allies, not mine.

He’s talking about the priesthood ban, not the priesthood.

I haven’t seen the movie you cite and I suspect you and I would notice and tend to perseverate on different applications/manifestations of this principle; but I think it’s a staggeringly true general principle. IMHO a lot of (certainly not all) “patriarchy” was men recognizing other men’s baser natures and implementing structures that would protect physically-weaker women from exploitation by the worst sort of men. And a lot of the deconstruction of “patriarchy” entails making women more available for the same kind of exploitation by the worst sort of men, but also convincing women (at least in the short term) that the exploitation is actually harmless and pleasurable and empowering.

I think a lot of times we miss the point of the Book of Job. I suspect there was a real person named Job; but the story of Job is merely an envelope—a tortilla shell for the meaty taco that is the book’s philosophical meditations and arguments. When you really dig into it—after the first chapter or two, Job is neither patient nor uncomplaining. Ironically, while He doesn’t question God’s righteousness (as he understands the term “righteousness”), Job sort of does suggest that maybe God isn’t quite omniscient—that God must have gotten His facts messed up to be punishing him, Job, for sins that Job is sure he didn’t commit. Basically, Job & Co are coming from the mindset that “God always rewards the innocent and punishes the guilty; and if someone is having a hard time, it’s because they sinned”. Job’s friends jump to the position that “you must have sinned”. Job himself basically maintains that “yes, that’s how it’s supposed to work; but I’m quite sure I didn’t sin and I’m sure God’s motives are righteous; God has just made a factual mistake about my righteousness, and if He would just talk to me we could sort this all out”. God basically comes in and says “Job is right that he hasn’t sinned and is right to stand by My righteousness. But none of you drips know anything about how My punishment or My justice work, and your puny minds wouldn’t understand it if I explained it to you.” Scholars who accept a later date for the current text of Job often see it as a subversive book; pushing back against Deutero-Isaiah’s concept of God’s immediate and unvarying rewards for the righteous and punishment for the sinful.

I suppose I’m open to the possibility that it’s symbolic/allegorical, or at least significantly embellished in some ways. But a lot of better men than me, take it as historical. Moroni seems to take it as historical. I frankly don’t know how to say that Moroni’s account of the Brother of Jared is allegorical or mythologized when it talks about why the BoJ left the old world, but then jerk back and straight-facedly say that it is historical when it describes the BoJ’s interactions with the antemortal Christ. I can understand and to some extent agree with the argument that the BoM doesn’t necessarily prove Genesis narratives about—say—a literal Eden or a global Flood, because the authors’ allusions to those events would have been washed through the filter of how their culture had trained them to read the Torah. But with the Jaredite narrative, Moroni’s primary source isn’t the Torah; it’s the Jaredite record itself. And that record seems to have confirmed that there really was a tower and there really was a confusion of the languages (or, at least, a credible threat thereof).

@mirkwood, if I can entrap @LDSGator into coming into your jurisdiction, can you please arrest him for me?

Thanks, folks. 🙂

The quote should be read in the context of his entire talk. As @Maverick mentions: McConkie maintained the ban was of divine origin, maintained that the gospel goes to different people at different times, and even speculated that African saints’ place in that sequence had to do with the faith shown in the pre mortal life(!). And this is after OD-2. So he clearly didn’t see any of that as being “contrary to the present revelation”.

Prince’s “David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism”. It cites 2-3 different people who said McKay told them he had received an explicit “no”.

It’s worth pointing out that in those days, we didn’t talk a lot about the possibility that some members (especially women) would remain single for their entire lives. It was just sort of assumed that women would get to the temple eventually, and that there might not be a need to rush the process. The endowment is theologically deeply tied to the LDS concept of marriage (and was even more explicitly so, before some stylistic changed made around 2019). I do remember being taught at BYU (1998) that the endowment is a significant covenant and that those who received it are held to a heightened standard of accountability; and that the Church would have preferred to not even administer it to 19-year-old boys except that it was judged necessary for them to be effective missionaries. One other historical tidbit that may play into some of the attitudes about single women getting their endowment is that for a long time (possibly as late as the 1970s, IIRC) the Church wouldn’t let women married to non-members receive their endowment, unless those husbands expressly agreed to their wives doing it.

Federal courts may do things differently; but in state court (my jurisdiction, anyways) dismissal without prejudice is not uncommon and could be due to any number of factors.

https://askgramps.org/how-can-i-reconcile-the-message-of-gods-perfect-love-with-accounts-of-wrath-and-brutality/

The movie by the same name is well worth watching.

I’m not sure I follow you here. You’re saying that Christ can, while physically present, show someone a vision or “scene” of the future; except that He can’t show a particular scene from the future if Christ Himself is in that scene? (IE, to use a crass example: Dumbledore can show Harry scenes in penseive, except that the process doesn’t work if Dumbledore himself was in the scene that he wants to show Harry?) I’m not sure the scriptures rule that out. (I suppose I can’t think of a precedent for it happening, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s impossible). I’ve been watching, over the past week or so, a debate play out amongst LDS members about whether God exists “outside of time”. I do agree that God experiences time (He has, from His own perspective, a past and present and future). But I suspect that He experiences it in a vastly different way than we do—on a different “linear plane”, if you will, where many of the conundrums and paradoxes about time travel that we humans conjure up don’t apply as we think they might. Phrases like “one eternal round”, “one eternal now”, and the Lord’s manifestation and words to the Brother of Jared may be Christ attempting to “dumb down” those principles to something approaching what our puny minds can begin to comprehend; and the scenario @laronius posits of BoJ interacting with [from his own perspective] “future Christ”, intrigues me.

Erm . . . I’m white, and I trace my Israelitish ancestry through Ephraim, and I’ve *never* demanded the Lord apologize for His earlier policy of giving the priesthood to Levites and withholding it from my people. I’ve never expected Orthodox Jews to apologize for it, either.

How does this play into my earlier post about President McKay, who *wanted* to end the ban, being expressly denied permission to do so? Interestingly, in that same talk McConkie continues to embrace the ban itself as having been part of the Lord’s plan that the Gospel goes forth to different people at different times.

Some of them very much do; as evidenced by the perennial demands that the Church apologize for the policy and suggestions that its more recent statements (including the Gospel Topics essay) “don’t go far enough”.

We don’t know that. Many assume that, because they just can’t fathom the idea of God acting in a way that they’ve been culturally groomed to believe is universally unjustifiable. David O. McKay was ready, willing, and able to remove the ban in the 1950s. He prayed about it requesting permission multiple times, and was repeatedly told “no”; there are multiple accounts of people who heard him tell about this. Once we admit that the continuation of the ban past 1951 was at God’s instruction, it becomes awfully difficult to argue that the implementation of the ban could not have been at His instruction. Especially when there is both past and modern precedent for lineage/ethnic/“race”-based bans on priesthood ordination and/or temple blessings. (Even today, the Church won’t do proxy temple work for Jews in the spirit world except under very rare circumstances. Is that an error, or a temporary concession that God allowed His servants to make so that other facets of His work could go forward? We don’t like to think about the work of salvation or the Church’s mission including any kind of cold calculus that advances the work of salvation in one field at the expense of delaying the salvation of other individuals—especially when those individuals are statistical minorities or perceived “outsiders” or victims oof historical oppression—but it absolutely does.) When modern Church leadership says “we don’t know the ‘why’, and it’s best not to speculate”, they don’t mean “LDS progressives get to make all kinds of inferences and accusations and extrapolate links to modern-day issues, and LDS conservatives are bound not to offer any pushback”. They mean “we don’t know the ‘why’, and it’s best not to speculate”.