Just_A_Guy

(Parenthetical here, but, @The Folk Prophet, I *do* get what you meant, but wanted to give an idea of how sometimes there is nuance where we didn’t previously think there was or ought to be any. Often those who reject the Church do so because they feel some bright-line has been crossed, and they get stuck into a sort of binary thinking where they won’t entertain the saving nuance-based arguments offered by apologists. I want to hold to the revelations I’ve received; but I also recognize that my beliefs are a sort of ongoing dance between my actual revelations versus intellectual extrapolations from my revelations. For me, it’s not always easy to recognize or maintain the distinction between revelation and extrapolation; and anytime the Church goes in a direction I didn’t foresee I have tried to keep a sense of humility as I consider the difference between what I think and what I know. )

I’m still not quite sure I understand the question. We all exist in a society, both us as individuals and the Church as an institution. As-worded, your question seems to me like asking “how much water can a fish drink before it’s not a true fish anymore?”. I feel like there’s an implicit assumption in your question, to the effect that that electroshock aversion therapy is contrary to the principles of “The Gospel”. But it’s hard for me to engage with that assumption at this point because as near as I can tell, you haven’t really articulated the specific reasons for that assumption yet.

You lead with an interesting example; because there are Church members who would argue that we don’t worship Jesus Christ—we worship the Father, in Jesus’s name. There are so many semantical arguments and sneaky ways to justify crossing over any one of the red lines that you cite (even if only in extreme circumstances), that ultimately—beyond a vanishingly small number of contingencies, I’m not sure I’m smart enough to know for sure what will or won’t happen. I have some pretty strong ideas, naturally; but I’m not ready to say “never”.

There’s a new one?

Given that the Church leadership serves on the board of BYU, I think it’s inescapable to conclude that they were aware that the therapy was going on and chose not to stop it; which is certainly a form of condoning it. I’m not sure why you (seem to) think electroshock aversion therapy is something the Church leadership ought to have opposed (other than the obvious-now-but-not-obvious-then conclusion that, when it comes to changing sexual orientation, it just plain doesn’t work). Can you help me to understand your concerns a little better? Is it the duty of the Church leadership to foresee the results of every unsuccessful academic practice or experiment that might be done in a Church-owned university, and to use that seership to prevent the practice/experiment from ever happening at all?

My understanding is that electroshock aversion therapy is still used today; just not for the purpose of trying to change sexual orientation. BYU was one of numerous college campuses, both religious and secular, that experimented with this practice throughout the 50s and up into the 80s. Even in that less-enlightened era, there were academically-imposed ethical constraints regarding the voluntariness of those who were subjected to the treatment.

Some years ago, as an exercise in rhetoric/argument and in an effort to explore the ramifications of my thoughts on this issue, I tried to draft a theoretical PR news statement for the church that would change its position on homosexuality while persuasively defending its leaders’ credibility to prospectively speak on behalf of God on other moral issues. I spent half a day on it, and the final result was trash. Like @Vort, I never want to box myself into the corner of seeing that “if the church leadership does x, I will leave.” I always want to leave an opening for receiving further light and knowledge through personal revelation. But at the same time, I will freely admit: I don’t know how to square that circle. The church has entrenched itself on the issue of gay marriage far more deeply, and in a way that leaves far less room for future reversal, than it ever did on other issues like polygamy or the priesthood/temple ban on black people. The old standbys of “well, they always said that might change later“ or “well, it was only one prophet who said that; it wasn’t the united voice of the Q15 speaking in an official capacity and other prophets and apostles were saying this instead“ are not available to us here. I think, if I stayed at all in such a contingency, the “natural JAG” would be far less willing to inconvenience myself for the church’s sake. I’d have a hard time teaching; if I slept in on a Sunday If have a hard time hustling to get to church on time (or at all); I’d be sorely tempted to suspend tithing until some other financial priorities had been met. So . . . yeah.

The adult OMH was a medal work around the neck, no? (I technically did earn mine—finished the interview and everything—but we never actually ordered the physical award or did a recognition ceremony, so it never felt right adding the knot to my uniform. It was just one of those things I figured we’d get around to doing sooner or later . . .)

I love all the commie soyboys wanting to know when their paid paternity leave will come through. Whether the PRC or the USA—once you’ve cultivated a nation of mooches whose first question is “what can my country do for me?”, it’s pretty hard to walk that back and inculcate any sustainable idea of self-sacrifice, civic virtue, and/or planning for the future.

She was also, let us note, married to a man. I still think it unhealthy for her to emphasize her “identity” as a LGBTQ woman; but to her credit she has at least indicated a commitment to the law of chastity. Easton hasn’t, and his public squealing last year when the CES announced that, yes, gay PDA is a violation of the Honor Code; suggests that chastity is not a burden he thinks ought to be borne.

Sure, it depends on how you dissect it; same as it would for a kid who had publicly “come out” as experiencing any of the other conditions/predilections I enumerated.

Sorry, I’m riffing off the old saw that “hit birds, flutter”—Elder Holland’s remarks are causing umbrage amongst people who know themselves to be guilty of the behavior he speaks of. As to 2)—it doesn’t take a particularly smart person to understand that at a church school, a speech about “I am proud to be be a pedophilic son of God” or “I am proud to be a kleptomaniac son of God” or “I am proud to be sociopathic son of God” isn’t going to go over well—even if it is indeed rooted in personal accounts drawn from the speaker’s life experiences, and even if the speaker feels he is being “authentic”. As to 1)—I have no idea if Easton is telling the truth as to who authorized what; but I think the point Holland was trying to make was that that event belonged to the students, and Easton made it about himself by highlighting his affinity for a divisive (and let’s be blunt—sinful) practice at a university that strives for unity and righteousness. In that sense, the student body’s event was “commandeered” even if the administration was fully complicit in the commandeering.

Agreed. I’m not saying it’s not a liberty/conscience violation. I’m just saying that I don’t think we help the cause of Zion by telling the public that our religion prohibits us from doing something that multiple members of our highest leadership councils have very publicly and enthusiastically done.

Lotsa fluttering by hit birds today, methinks . . .

I can understand Latter-day Saints saying they have a conscience-based objection to the vaccine. Given President Nelson’s statements, I don’t think a Latter-day Saint has a strong grounds for claiming a religious-based objection to the vaccine. The best we can do in that vein is a broad “my religious notions of ‘personal revelation’ mean I get to do whatever the heck I want” type of argument. It’s a cute argument, to be sure; and the law and the courts, in the short term, may play along with that kind of bootstrapping. But over the longer haul our increasingly secular society and the politicians they will continue to elect will see this as an example of why “religious liberty” is basically a pretext for people becoming a law unto themselves, and will use it to crack down on tolerance of honest-to-gosh religious-based differences. IMHO, conservative Christians will find themselves better-protected in the long term if they reserve their religious-liberty exemptions for cases that are truly a matter of religious liberty.

I dunno about the DTG medallions, but I have been known to use the other three medals (I earned all of them as a kid) as part of a Halloween costume a few years back when my wife and I were “Zombie Anna and Elsa’s Parents”. But the less said about that year, the better . . .

Oh, I completely agree. I just worry when this mentality leads us to passively accept, or even actively and deliberately perpetuate, situations that God had been expecting us—and indeed, gave us the means—to change. At the risk of invoking the good Dr. Godwin here: We hear Holocaust survivors talk about the things they learned about human nature in the camps. That doesn’t mean Eisenhower was wrong for liberating the camps, or that Hitler was inspired for creating them in the first place. I guess it goes back to AA’s serenity prayer—serenity to accept what we can’t change, courage to change what we can, and wisdom to know the difference.

Is Fether trying to convince others that he’s right? Or just trying to work out a space in which he can continue to hold to his opinion after it has been challenged? I know that often my posts to this forum fall more into the second category. Cambry Kaylor is the wife of YouTube personality Zack Nelson (of “Jerry Rig Everything”). She’s a paraplegic as a result of an equine gymnastics accident from when she was a teenager. She has a very beautiful video on the Church’s YouTube channel, in which she basically says she is so reconciled to her situation that she wouldn’t change the day she had her accident even if it were possible. It’s a lovely thought, and she seems a very well-adjusted young lady. But I continue to pray that my kids never have to cope with a broken spine; and I don’t think I’m a degenerate or improperly dismissive of Sister Kaylor’s experience for doing so. I do think, however, that this notion of focusing on the positive aspects of a physical/cognitive (for lack of a better word) “abnormality”, while refusing to acknowledge the existence or significance of the negative aspects, has laid a lot of the groundwork for the “God-made-me-who-I-an-and-I-never-need-to-become-anything-else” mentality that justifies much of the LGBTQ movement. None of us know for sure what aspects of our personalities or abilities are and aren’t supposed to be eternal; so I think the best thing to do is to focus on Christ and not get too attached to any aspect of our so-called “identities”. (Oh, and I’m red-green color blind and have two nephews on the spectrum. I’d *love* to be healed; there is zero upside to my condition. One of my nephews is a whiz at Legos and has an amazing deadpan sense of humor, and the other is something of a savant on the piano; but neither of them will ever be financially self-sufficient or capable of having a family, and one of them is so bad with physical boundaries that he can’t be left alone with his younger female cousins. I love my nephews—but yes, as to their particular manifestations of autism they are absolutely “disabled”. I look forward to their being healed in a way that preserves the unique divine qualities each of them possess while also adding upon them the capabilities that, at this moment, they are undeniably lacking.)

Yep. I think I’m less worried about any particular instance of “following the prophet” (or not) getting brought up on judgment day, than about how the kind of person that my action in that instance has led me to become. When it comes to the prophets, I want to be the kind of person who defaults to trust unless the Lord guides me to suspicion; rather than the reverse. I want to be a person who looks for reasons to obey. I want to be a person who chooses to trust. I don’t want to be a person who says “This Magog fellow is actually making some really good points, and my scientific questions haven’t been answered yet, and we all know that Michael is only an archangel when he is acting as such, so . . .” So yeah, I don’t think the vaccine issue (or perhaps any other specific charge) will be listed on one’s heavenly indictment; but how I handle the vaccine issue may be an indicator of where I am now, and a (significant?) step in the direction of where I will wind up. (In skimming through this thread yesterday, I thought I saw some other poster making more or less the same point; but I can’t seem to find that post now. Apologies if I have inadvertently plagiarized anybody else!)

Probably not; though for some of us, whether or not we get the COVID vaccine may influence just how soon judgment day comes. On the PR issue: there’s certainly a benefit to being seen as good citizens, “good soldiers” in a time of crisis, etc. But that doesn’t mean that President Nelson saying “please do x” is implicitly followed by a wink and an unspoken “but, not really”. Even if the value of the statement is primarily PR, the PR value comes from the fact that people expect the Saints to actually do what the prophet has said. As the article I linked to earlier suggests—sometimes Church leaders just plain ask us to do things that are to our material detriment, or even just plain get us killed. The fact that we believe a prophet’s counsel may be detrimental to our material prospects in mortality, is ultimately no reason not to follow it.

I’m starting to see photos from the Kabul airport, as well as photos of transports full of Afghanis; and the question that just occurred to me is: Where are the women and children? Crowd photos from the airport show the refugees to be nearly all relatively young men. The Daily Mail just ran a photo apparently taken from within a C-17 full of Afghanis sitting on the floor; 4/5 or more of them are men. These men have mothers. Sisters. Wives. Daughters. And we know—we know—that the Taliban are requiring local imams to provide them the names of every unmarried female from 15-40 years old in the villages that they take. As horrendous as these men’s situation is and as gut-wrenching as their choices must be—it appears substantial numbers of them have pulled a King Noah, abandoning their wives and daughters to the barbarians in order to save their own skins. I hope I’m wrong. But if I’m not—that is illuminative. Where are the women and children?

What on earth do you mean? Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

Then again, as someone on Twitter observed: ”From the look of things, I guess you don’t really need the F-15s or nukes to take on the US Government, after all.”

Just as long as you plead with me. You have to plead with me. On second thought—nay, you need to implore me!

Hard for me to articulate, other that in tone it feels a little more absolutist than I’m comfortable with at this moment in my life. 😕