Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
When my gay married coworker came out to me, I realized I could no longer stand by the church on the issue. Not long after (maybe it was before? I don’t remember), Josh Weed’s divorce was my tipping point when I decided that the church was 100% wrong about gay people and was wrong all those years lobbying against them. TBF, it never totally felt right to me to legislate against gay marriage at the time either, but I stood by the stance that gay is bad until somewhat recently. I wish the best of luck to you in making things work. The church truly has beauty and truth in it and is a great place for many people.
I can tell you that when I first found out that NOMs were a thing, I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around the idea of someone who didn’t believe but stayed active anyway. Now I’m a lot more empathetic to it, especially when it comes to mixed-faith marriages- something that tends to happen more often than not (AFAICT) when doubts arise. Most TBMs are dismissive of doubts in my experience. The church would do well to create an open forum for doubters and train the believers to not be dismissive of other people’s doubts. Sure, horses and steel in the BoM might not be a big deal to some people, but they are to others.
Transparency would fix a lot of the problems with people leaving the church. A true church should not need to hide the truth about its history or finances to ensure that people stay in it. Those who rely on censorship have no leg to stand on.
I sorta don’t either, but that’s more because I don’t think it’s accurate to lump in the T with the LGB. Sexual orientation is a totally separate concept from gender identity. I think it’s unhelpful to slap a label on “not cisgender and/or not straight” folks even if it is in the name of calling attention to marginalization/discrimination and bringing about positive social change. One of my sad observations about human nature is that labels tend to be more prescriptive than descriptive. I think when people slap labels on themselves, they run the risk of the label defining them rather than the label describing a trait of theirs. They often fall prey to groupthink as a result and then identity politics (which is really just a fancy name for tribalism, now that I think of it) happen. For example, conservative gay people tend to be quite rare.
I’d much rather avoid labels altogether and simply think of them as people who happen to be attracted to their own sex.
Simple: It’s a bad policy from a flawed organization run by flawed people. I don’t expect there to be gay sealings, but not labeling them as sinners/apostates and robbing them of their temple recommends wouldn’t be too much to ask. The policies have gotten better over the years (mostly), but the thing is that celibacy will never be satisfying as long as it is forced upon the individual by the organization’s expectations. Gay members will forever feel left out. The church obsesses over marriage and families and guess what gay people will never have if they remain celibate? When the very essence of what it means to be a good Mormon is robbed from you by the very institution that gave it, there will be serious issues. While the church might work for a select few gay people, most of them are better off without it IMO.
SamBee wrote:
Beefster wrote:I guess I’m the poster child for “Curiosity Killed the Cat”
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it also invented nuclear physics. It’s a double edged sword I’ll take any day.
Nuclear physics kills cats too. Remember Schrödinger.
That’s quantum mechanics.I’ve always felt like a misfit. I was lucky enough to go to a nerdy high school, so I had plenty of friends growing up, but I’ve never been interested in being popular. Conformity just isn’t my thing. I’ve always been a very curious person. When I was 4 or so, I wanted to figure out how our camcorder tape adapter worked and ended up breaking it instead. I am fascinated by all things engineering, whether software or hardware. I wondered how video games worked as a kid and to this day I still speculate on implementation details of everything. Weird gotchas in programming are fascinating to me and I love learning about programming languages.
I guess I’m the poster child for “Curiosity Killed the Cat”
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it also invented nuclear physics. It’s a double edged sword I’ll take any day.
Social norms have never made sense to me. They always seemed like arbitrary rules. I’m not talking about things like privacy, but more like “don’t burp or fart in front of people” (even though it’s a normal bodily function) or “fork on the left.” Or manners that vary from country to country because they really are just arbitrary rules that nobles made up to distinguish them from peasants.
So yeah. I’m definitely a misfit and I question everything.
dande48 wrote:
nibbler wrote:
I still want to start my own religion.
I’ve thought about this before. I think if my wife wouldn’t be so intensely opposed, I’d open up one of Comte’s “Temple for Humanity”. We’d have hymns and sacraments, and baptisms, and wonderful sermons… only God wouldn’t have much to do with it.
The only religion I’m interested in starting is a fictional one in a fictional universe because worldbuilding is cool. I’m personally done with organized religion if I can’t make my LDS membership work.I could see myself starting a “church” of secular humanism, but it would really just be a place for discussing TED talks and scientific discoveries, how to improve oneself, and how to improve the world around us. So SM and EQ/RS essentially, just without the religious baggage.
The world building perk of exaltation is one of the few things I still find alluring about Mormonism. At this point, I’m not sure all the stuff I don’t like is worth it just to create worlds.
Roy wrote:
I did not need or want a God that needed to test my resolve and my loyalty. I needed a God that would love me and hold me in my brokenness.
:clap: Beautifully said. I think I might put this in my signature.
It says I’m a good fit for Liberal Quakerism… Second place was Secular Humanist. I’d rather be that. Unitarian Universalism is pretty cool too. I just don’t think Hitler will be getting rewarded in the end.
Secular Humanism
88%
Unitarian Universalism
85%
Liberal Christian Protestantism
77%
Taoism
67%
Reformed Judaism
66%
Orthodox Quakerism
63%
Mahayana Buddhism
61%
Atheism
61%
Neo-Paganism
57%
New Age
52%
Scientology
52%
Jainism
48%
Church of Christ, Scientist
48%
New Thought
48%
Sikhism
45%
Theravada Buddhism
44%
Bahá’í Faith
43%
Conservative Christian Protestant
43%
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
37%
Seventh-day Adventists
29%
Islam
28%
Orthodox Judaism
24%
Roman Catholicism
23%
Eastern Orthodox Christianity
20%
Jehovah’s Witnesses
18%
Hinduism
18%
I’m apparently more Bahá’í than LDS.
I suspect Joseph Smith had sex with most of his wives who were not married to other men. There were 8 potential children of Joseph that all give DNA evidence that he was not the father, so going off pure chance (and poor intuition) would suggest that he did not have sex with them around their ovulations or he used some form of 19th century birth control. The easiest thing would be to say that he probably didn’t have sex with all of his wives, especially the polyandrous ones. But then running the numbers indicates that monthly sex (assuming 100% 1-shot fertility of both partners) with each wife gives him a roughly 75% chance of not fathering any of those 8 children. Good timing and primitive birth control can easily reduce that chance, especially when 8-11 of his wives are having sex with other men.
He probably had less sex than that, so his chances of not fathering children except with Emma are higher than you might intuitively expect.
I chucked it out as nonliteral a long time ago anyway. It has some interesting symbolic parallels to the Atonement of Christ, but aside from that, it’s a terrible situation to be in. Still doesn’t reflect well on Abraham or Yahweh, as characters in a story. Like I said, it looks like a mafia loyalty test.
I never said anything about the other marriages. 😆 Lucy Walker’s in particular is reprehensible given the circumstances.SD: Ha. It’s going to take a while before I can open up to my bishop, if I ever do. I can tell he truly cares, but I’m not totally sure I can trust him yet. Yesterday was 1 step forward, 2 steps back. Step forward: reading FAIRLDS and discovering that there is no evidence that Joseph’s polyandry was sexual in nature. Points for Joseph Smith.
2 Steps back: the church has taken down a few statistical websites:
https://ldschurchtemples.org/statistics/units/https://ldschurchtemples.org/statistics/units/” class=”bbcode_url”> http://ldsunitgrowth.blogspot.com/http://ldsunitgrowth.blogspot.com/” class=”bbcode_url”> LDS_Scoutmaster wrote:
Roy wrote:
I imagine in 20 or 30 years the church will point to the essays and say – “This information was not hidden, we put it all out there decades ago.”As a side note, the essays have no author or revision date. Therefore new information could be added today (or 20 years from now) with the perception that the information was there all along.
That’s an interesting side point, I’m sure there will be ‘snapshots’ of what the essays say today and if there are changes there will be a change log of sorts to follow, not necessarily from the church.
archive.org’s wayback machine will do that job quite nicely. So long as the URL stays consistent and the page doesn’t rely too heavily on Javascript.
