[Beefster]

Sorry, I kind of skipped over the rest of the discussion. Hopefully I’m not being redundant or anything.

NotYourMollyMormon wrote:

I had been living in Utah for 3 years and decided I couldn’t take it anymore

I know the feeling. Utah is a strange place full of strange people with funny, judgmental, and self-righteous ideas. I’d rather raise my future family in a literal war zone than in Utah.

I can also relate to leaving the singles ward. I’ve been going with my parents to my family ward lately since the singles ward is so bad. It annoys me how church gets turned into a meat market.

Your thoughts on the WoW are intriguing to me. It reminded me of an elderly, inactive former bishop I regularly visited on my mission. His wife would drink coffee for health reasons (she had a condition which was helped by caffeine and coffee was the most straightforward way to get it.) He believed that the WoW should have never been made into a TR question. While I’ve never really had an issue with it personally, I can see where he was coming from and sort of agree. It may have been pragmatic when it was implemented, but it often acts as a barrier to entry for new members and a point of judgement to returning members.

I definitely agree that it is wildly open to interpretation. I also find it weird how it’s cherry-picked when it comes to TR interviews. The MTC serves way more than “sparingly” amount of meat in the cafeteria, but we don’t see that revoking any TRs. It’s odd that we’ve pretty much conflated WoW to mean “don’t smoke, drink alcohol, coffee, or tea, or do drugs” when that makes up so little of the actual content of D&C 89, which was not a commandment in the first place.

[Beefster]

I flat-out don’t think there is much truth to the idea that repentance is harder in the spirit world. It’s one of those “telephone” doctrines that nobody can pin down to a specific source and confirm from multiple witnesses or any canonized scripture.

I’ve come to believe pretty much the opposite.

I suspect that repentance is no harder in the spirit world than it is here- it’s just the people who reject the gospel here probably won’t repent quite so readily. We know from the Book of Mormon that you’re the same person after you die. I interpret that to mean that whatever trajectory you have in this life will carry on to the next. i.e. if you’re unrepentant here, you’ll still be unrepentant there. You can still change, but it usually takes something big to change an attitude like that.

I don’t subscribe to the idea that there are “cutoff dates” for repentance other than judgement day itself. I believe there is always hope (at least theoretically) for every last person who has ever or will ever exist to return to live with Heavenly Father in the Celestial Kingdom. The people who won’t go there are just the ones who refuse to accept Christ and change. The only reason the sons of perdition go to outer darkness is because they knowingly decided to disown God and want nothing to do with him- and as such, they will never change no matter how many opportunities are extended to them to do so.

[Author]

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