Obolus

You can ask any member over 60 about what it would be like. If they didn't attend BYU, they spent their YSA years as part of normal wards. Instead of the YSA system they had singles activities on the stake and multi-stake level. It was apparently pretty successful at marrying plenty of them off. Plus they got all the benefits of being members of a normal religious community. Those YSAs enjoyed the best of both worlds. It's too bad that program wasn't preserved. The current program treats the entire USA as if it were Provo.

All sin is perpetrated by either technique or technology. Because technology is growing at an exponential rate, the effect of those who use it for sin is also growing in both reach and speed at an exponential rate. What this means for us now is that things can get a lot worse a lot faster. There used to be a paradigm shift in people when technological breakthroughs would occur. The wheel, the wagon, the telegraph, the automobile, the harnessing of electricity, and the power of flight all changed people's world views, and the speed of these events allowed them the buffer time to grasp what each step meant. But these arrived much more slowly than our current technological breakthroughs. Where we are now is a period when technological breakthroughs happen far too fast for the paradigm shifts to even occur in our consciousness. We are no longer able to process them quick enough to be ready for the next thing. They happen now whether we are ready or not. It is a runaway train, and we are all disoriented and on board. I understand that certain events must occur according to prophecy. But at this point the world can essentially get "bad enough" at the drop of a hat.

Well, I feel like we've trained many singles to think of Church as primarily a social apparatus. It's easy for Christ to become the subtext when all the members of the opposite sex in Sacrament meeting are potential mates. That's what happens when you remove the married people and teens from view on Sundays. Instead of the natural man being checked at the door, he is invited to participate.

Kayne, thanks for responding. I agree with many of your points. It seems that some outside of the "Mormon corridor" (Idaho, Utah, Arizona, and California) tend to have good experiences in their singles wards like yourself. But the high YSA population centers can be very alienating. The church should be about making people feel like they belong to Christ. Fragmenting the sheep into separate folds does not really help in that department.

It'd be nice. But in truth, many Mormons don't yet have a testimony of it.

This isn't just a porn addiction. This is a pattern of abusive behavior from one spouse to another, and thereby to the entire family. Lies, deceit, multiple extramarital contacts, refusal to attend counseling sessions, and most egregious: the expectation that texasmom7 should help conceal the behavior from the kids & also that she should just expect the behavior to continue. You cannot hurt your wife in these ways without eventually doing damage to all of the relationships in the household. It will eventually come out. This man should, at the very least, happily attend marriage counseling and a sexaholics anonymous group (every stake has a chapter) to help him honor the covenant. After all the abuse, he has to show that he is willing to be a team player. Saying that you are deleting videos on your smart phone is also a shady conceit when you consider the fact that they can be downloaded again immediately and that the device is dominantly in his possession. To show that he wants her trust back, he should be willing to give up the phone with the media plan for something that wont enable his addiction. At least for a contract or two.

The other thing a stern warning doesn't do is address the issue at hand, which for many curious people in the church means that they will conduct a private exploration of the occult that is mediated by magicians, diviners, and occult enthusiasts instead of people with a testimony of the Gospel. Talks like Faust's are perfect for members who were never curious about it in the first place, but for those like myself it simply adds wood to the fire. Without explaining specifics, I will say that a helpful thing to tell members who are curious about the occult is that the use of magic, tarot, astrology, alchemy and other such practices rose to prominence during the Apostasy. All of them are concerned, on one level or another, with aligning yourself with nature, the cosmos, and the mysteries of God... which makes sense when you realize that the Apostasy was the period when the temple (and the authority to preside over the ordinances therein) were taken from the earth. The Catholics and the other Christian sects all abandoned temple worship because the authority was gone and the rites (though extant in some forms in the masonic tradition) were corrupted and unreliable. But this abandonment didn't stop common people from attempting to replace the temple with other mysteries which all basically have the same goal in mind: a connection to mysterious powers beyond the veil. Consequently, all of the supposed powers gained from these traditions mimic the gifts of God: Astrology mimics the temple's concern with the cosmos and the meaning of the human being within it. Tarot mimics personal revelation and prophecy. Alchemy serves as an allegory that mimics the first principles and ordinances of the Gospel (turning lead to gold eschews perfection through an atonement), magic/wicca mimics the Priesthood. Yes, all of them are counterfeits. But for some kids, specifically those who may become curious because of an association with something from popular culture like Harry Potter, a simple "don't go near it" isn't going really address their questions. To say as much merely applies a band-aid to a curiosity that can potentially take someone's life over. So depending on the individual, you may want to have a healthy discussion that explains why these things got popular in the first place. All of it is related to power, and the power that you want your kids to tap into is that offered by the Gospel, the Holy Ghost and the Lord. If I had had someone in my life who had a spine with regards to discussing these things I would have spent a lot less time exploring them myself. An excellent article that helped me understand the occult and stop giving so much energy to it was One Eternal Round: The Hermetic Version by Hugh Nibley. Amazingly enough, this article is widely available in his book Temple and the Cosmos.

Many in the church avoid doubters and questioners because they themselves have doubts and questions that they would rather ignore than face. You're just a bad reminder to these folks. Why don't we rally around RMs that come home early or gays or pregnant girls? Perhaps because "goodness" is too often projected onto these individuals inappropriately. So when they fail in their personal lives, those who project such nonsense are let down. A perfect example. High school graduation, state championships, scholastic accomplishments, and being an Eagle scout do not make these kids heroes. They should be treated as individuals with potential, but individuals who for the most part still don't know a Ward Council meeting from a hole in the ground. They should be encouraged as they go on missions, but instead we lionize them. It is antithetical to project myths onto imperfect teenagers, but this is a common practice in our culture because we are not truly into Christ. We are into hype. When missionaries come home early, they should still be treated like individuals with great potential: to serve in the church, to marry in the temple, to be excellent parents, Etc. But most people in the church will never do this, so it remains a duty of those few who have the empathy to recognize the situation and be appropriately loving. So, congratulations. You've been blessed with eyes to see. The responsibility for loving normal people has been placed at your feet, and probably by the Lord. The failures of others can only have bearing upon your belief if your faith has been placed in people. Elder Maxwell stated that church is a "hospital for the sick, not a museum of saints", and I think this is the best way of looking at the Church. Your faith will be on much more stable ground (and more frequently rewarded) if it is only placed upon Jesus Christ and his principles. Avoid hyping up "amazing individuals", General Authorities, your parents, Cleon Skousen, Hugh Nibley, your uncle the "scriptorian", Etc., and you will find your faith to be much more like a rock and much less like the waves of the sea.

If people are allowed in, then the natural man is allowed in. The natural man is the adversary's servant, and some people entertain them in the temple. So yes, he gets into the temple all of the time. The prayer that the temple president gives at the beginning of each day essentially rededicates the temple on a daily basis. The temple's entire approach to the adversary seems to address this issue very effectively, though. We are trained to send him away so that we can perform the Lord's holy work. We are instructed on how to deal with him.

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I take it as an affirmation. We ignite anger and hatred because the principle of opposition in all things is in full effect.

It kind of blows me away that the Lord revealed it, Smith did it, and we only utilize chunks of it. The guy wanted to publish the JST and the BoM together in one volume, and we bury it in the footnotes and appendices like it's an embarrassment. Our fear of appearing "kooky" might grease the wheels for some cultural baptisms, but that sort of bait and switch is a strange conceit when you think about it. I think the truth is a) the mainstream church was at odds with the holders of the copyright (RLDS) for over 100 years, and b) that our culture is still acutely desperate to fit in with the rest of the Christian world. The other problem it creates is that our current scriptures are more than a little confusing to many of our youth. When you gift a quad to a 12-year-old, how can they not be overwhelmed by all the Talmage footnotes and cross references? The JST merely serves as an added confusion to many of our teens. Why can't we just give them a cheap, clear, unapologetic version of the scriptures with no footnotes that they can easily read until they are ready for more scholarship? If you want to see miracles, try giving young people a version that has a blank space at the bottom for them to make their own footnotes. Tons of kids would make great use of such an opportunity.

If your faith is in people, it will fall one way or another because people are fallible and will eventually let you down. If your faith is in Christ and his true principles, you will never be let down. Too many individuals have their faith placed on Church leaders and/or family members. When these individuals attempt to tackle anti-mormon material, they are ill-equipped because they have such individuals as Brigham Young placed upon a pedestal. All anti-mormon propaganda always attacks prominent Mormons because Christ and his principles are unassailable. To approach that material, your faith must be correctly placed. However, you must realize that learning how to combat that material will transform you, and not likely in a way that you'd want. I have found that it is much more worthwhile to develop faith and the relationship with Christ that the Gospel encourages than to jump into the yard filled with angry dogs. Christ is not found in that arena.

I think it helps to realize that in any relationship where your desire for each other is strong, lust will masquerade as love and encourage you to push the envelope all the time. Even when you are vertical. So lust must be observed and identified as an impostor and separate from love, which only wants to ennoble the other individual. Love does not want to profane their temple. When you become cognizant of being aroused, switch out your desire to arouse him with a desire for him to have the ability to stand in holy places. Ask him to do the same. That is the definition of love. To want someone to be able to stand before Christ.

IMO, to suggest that temples are somehow superfluous to covenant is to misunderstand what the world is. Every building you see is a temple. Every home, school, store, and laundromat. Every grove of trees, every "place". A covenant and an endowment of power occurs in each one. In a school the endowments are the classes, the teaching is the performance and the consequence is that anyone who enters the school is permanently transformed by the knowledge they obtain therein (regardless of the quality). That an education ends with a ceremony, robes, and miters on the heads of the graduates merely drives home the point. In a hospital it is healing. In a stadium it's a game. In a venue it's a concert. Always there are individuals gathering up into congregations to view a performance & receive instruction. There is a certain garb for every given activity. Always people walk out of buildings different from when they entered. This is why we love shopping, browsing the net, exploring, working, schmoozing, partying, searching for holy grail collectibles, going to concerts, and decorating our homes. This is why people love cars. This is why local bars become "sacred space" for all the regular patrons. This is why online communities have rules of conduct. Every place is a temple because people make them so. Jesus stated that his body was a temple, and Paul clarified that all of us are temples "bought with a price". But everyone, Christian or no, understands on an implicit level that there is something sacred about people, and that sanctity causes us to want to sanctify our homes and the places that we frequent. That sanctity also makes it easy for us to profane ourselves. What happens after you see a really good movie in a theater? You walk out of the building energized and altered. Oftentimes you even feel it in your spine or in your flesh. It is as if the theater is a womb and we are reborn from it. This is why so many people treat film as if it were something sacred, and why millions of teenagers will memorize and repeat lines from dozens of movies (and song lyrics... and sports stats...) as if it is holy writ but give you a blank stare when asked about their world history class or a gospel principle. Actors and rock stars are messiahs, and seeing films and concerts are essentially sacraments. The Lord's temple is a lens with which the rest of the world can be properly viewed for what it is: a massive collection of temples with sacred texts, deities and hierarchies of priesthoods. The Lord's basic message is to prioritize his temples over all the others so that you can be free from temporal enslavement. And when the Lord returns, what will the world become? A massive temple where his ordinances will be performed everywhere 24/7 for a thousand years. Until then, the world is dominated by the Adversary who leads us to profane this planet that is destined to become a great Urim & Thummim (section 130).

Along with Richard Bushman, I would suggest Terryl Givens, John Tvedtnes, Denver Snuffer & Jeffrey M. Bradshaw. You can also find some great stuff from the old days by looking up books by Hyrum L. Andrus and John A. Widtsoe.

I think you make a good point. I definitely share the opinion that one should not be linked up with exes once you are married. There is no need whatsoever to even cause your spouse to wonder. Proper usage of any tool requires training, and there is sadly no training given with this particular tool. All FB & Twitter users, for instance, should take a basic public relations class to coincide with their use because these are also tools of public broadcast. Sadly, most users learn PR the hard way as they participate.

The word "techne" is Greek, the root for our words technology & technique. It means "craftsmanship" or "artifice", and generally "a kind of knowledge associated with people who were bound to necessity". It refers to anything that is utilized by human beings to alter/change/transform the world they live in. So a shovel is technology. So are whips, paint brushes, & language. All tools endow the user with power. With a shovel, you can more effectively dig. With a whip, you can more effectively enslave. With language, you can more effectively communicate. All of these can also be done using only the body, but it is less effective. Thus, all tools represent power. The question becomes: Where did we get our techne? In my opinion, we received our first technology when God spoke to us in the pre-existence. This was followed by the endowment of language within the Garden. All subsequent tools were also received from the Lord: the technology of publication, flight, warfare, and telecommunication. All of them have been used for good and ill. There is not a single tool or technology that has not been used for sin. Hence the existence of unrighteous dominion. Does the existence of UD mean that Priesthood authority didn't come from God? No. The adversary does not reveal technology or power to us. He simply appeals to the natural man within all of us to misuse that technology to glorify ourselves... the very thing that he himself wanted to do with God's mantle of Glory and godhood. If you ever venture to peruse the Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey, you will discover an instructional on how to establish a personal religion where you insert yourself into the place of the idol. All worship is then directed towards the glory of the self. The prayer offered by the Zoramites on the Rameumptum in Alma 31 is a fine summation of the contents of that book. But the technique for idol worship was not introduced by Lucifer. Worship was introduced by the Lord, idol worship is the misuse of the technique suggested by Satan. Facebook is merely another tool in the tool shed. When Elder Uchdorf encourages us to testify via such technology as text messaging, the precedent is the Liahona. That's right, the Lord sent the first text message to what was essentially a GPS navigational device. In summation, Spiderman was right in his conclusions about power. The onus is on all who are married to fight the natural man off in order to honor the covenant. Availability of cheating partners does not cause cheating. The test merely reveals the character of the individual, and that test is coming to all whether they are involved in social media or not.

Cooles, your breakdown of Skousen's dogma and subtle misinterpretations is erudite. Thanks for the blog.

I agree that the beard rule is ridiculous. I highly doubt that the big surprise of the second coming will be a clean shaven Savior in a suit from Men's Warehouse.

If you gave all that service for free, you have no claim on calling "foul". If instead there was a price attached to those acts of service, you need to re-read the manual.

In July I moved into my current ward. Instead of waiting for a calling, I went straight to the clerks office and requested a ward list. I then took that ward list to the Relief Society president and went through it with her to determine who was active, inactive, and unknown. I then took that list to the ward mission leader & bishop to verify what had been determined by the RS president. The results were that over half of the ward list were unknowns. I was then immediately called as a ward missionary. We began a systematic search for all of the unknowns in our ward. The high priests and elders wanted in, so we divided the work thus. We have since found 80+ move-outs and invited about 50 others to come back to church, informing them of the new meeting time. One lady that we visited came to church on Christmas and afterward had a positive meeting with our bishop. To leave the 99 and go after the 1, you have to be brave enough to actually knock on someone's door. But once you get past that, anyone can do much to serve their ward.

Prophets won't lead us astray when it comes to the core principles & ordinances of the gospel. But they can be deceived into misinterpretations of scripture and incorrect courses of action and policies. If Brigham Young was wrong on this issue, he was still correct on a dozen other issues that still preserved the Priesthood & ordinances on the earth and helped the saints survive their exile from Illinois and establish themselves in Utah. If you're God, you probably don't knock off your prophet in this critical time just because he holds a racist view on the Priesthood. The Lord did the best he could with fallible people. The issue with all the prophets that followed BY is the issue of inheritance. They inherited the policy, and that absolves them of part of the responsibility. It is difficult to change policies that are inherited because it usually requires a unanimous vote by the Twelve and the FP. My opinion is that Brigham Young got it mostly right, but not on this issue. The prophets after him inherited the policy. McKay was the first to claim that it was a "policy" and not a "doctrine", and he even suggested that the Nigerians be given the Aaronic Priesthood so they could baptize their own and preside over their own meetings. Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold B. Lee opposed him on it, so it didn't happen then. It took forward thinkers (Kimball) in a different time (a decade later) to provide the opportunity for the revelation to come that would correct our course. Was the Church waiting on the Lord, or was it the other way around? Neither Smith nor Lee, the prophets between McKay and Kimball, served for very long. Read into those short stints what you will. Access to revelation does not mean that all of the Lord's messages always make it through. Does he allow prophets to fail in some things? Well, why wouldn't he? Are prophets not here to learn also? The Lord isn't running a puppet show. It is carnal security to assume that he is. Thus, faith should not be placed in people (prophets, spouses, parents, Etc.). Faith should be placed in Christ & in his correct principles so that when people fail you... which they inevitably will... it doesn't shatter your faith.

I agree with Slamjet in that you should put your children first. In the long term, what you decide here and now will have a far reaching impact on their lives and decisions. If you decide to leave your bf now for a chance at something eternal, it will be difficult for you but will forever communicate to them how important those eternal blessings are to you. When Alma the younger faced the crisis of losing his soul, he thought back to his father's words about Christ. The combination of his father's words and example caused Alma to reach out to Christ, and thus literally saved him. Alma the younger's conversion had immense consequences for untold numbers of people. Similarly, your children have comparable trials waiting for them in their adult lives. What will they choose? Who will they turn to in that moment? Your example and priorities will mean the most because of who you are in their lives.

My advice: If you can get a job in Utah, So CA or AZ, take a deep breath and make the move. There are thousands of singles in their late 20s/early 30s in these scenes, and you don't have to attend a singles ward to meet them. I have had a lot of success just using ldssingles dot com. I just attend & serve in my local ward here in SLC. That said, there are plenty of activities to attend and network in. Anyone who is proactive in the main corridors of these states will make plenty of LDS single friends. You will not be pressed into the SA Ward as you stated. Rather, someone might suggest it, but the local wards here are just as happy to utilize willing participants of any marital status. Where you are living now is social Siberia as far as your demographic is concerned. It behooves you to be proactive in your approach.