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My bishopric suggested that going on a date was an appropriate way to minister to the ladies. I respectfully disagree, mostly due to my experience dating a home teachee at one point. That can go south quickly. This change will be nice for singles wards because we’ll probably just do stuff together instead of the formal visits.
It’s still assigned friendship at the end of the day, so I don’t expect it to be perfect.
SilentDawning wrote:
I think there was a lot of confusion at ours. They didn’t address the new leadership, as one wasn’t yet called. They did pass out the assignments….I think everyone is getting used to how to do this. See what happens when you create a culture where everyone is told what to do? give them freedom and they are lost.
40 years of correlation will do that to you.😆 I’m happy to see more autonomy. These changes may help to rebuild lost trust by giving more trust to the local level to be autonomous.
We just re-sustained our EQP and moved on to talk about ministering. That’s a singles ward for you. 😆 I was very vocal in my support of the changes.
I was also talking about this with my friend yesterday (he visited from out of town) and he explained that he doesn’t really believe the Holy Ghost is literally omnipresent and always busy whispering into everyone’s souls, but that he was more of a foreman over revelatory processes. I like that concept and it is compatible with a humanoid Holy Ghost. Maybe that role is filled by Heavenly Mother. Certainly possible.
I think that’s a good point. Why would God inspire his spiritual leaders with medical or health information when he can get the same, or better, done by leading researchers to discover those things? In the OT it makes sense, since the Israelites wandered in the wilderness in isolation, but in JS’s day, it sorta makes sense that it would only be a very basic concept. It’s also a lot more complicated than this. I read the article linked in some other thread (I forget which one) and discovered that BY actually did believe it should be treated as a commandment, but he did not change any policies and he actually focused more on the meat aspect than on the tobacco and alcohol parts. Heber J Grant was the one responsible for making the modern application of the WoW a TR requirement. He was a hardline supporter of Prohibition, but he didn’t really give a crap about anything else in the WoW. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that the shift to making the WoW a TR requirement was revelation; it was merely the hardline opinion of HJG.
LookingHard wrote:
dande48 – I get the parallels of the analogy, but it sure seems to me like innocent victims are being PUSHED onto the tracks a bit more than just the church leadership deciding which portion of people get hurt. They could be doing MUCH better than leaking character assassinations of the MTC victim that included confessionals. To me they are taking action.I do think your trolley example is applicable to the top leaders of the church deciding “how much history to we admit was wrong?”. I think Bushman has it right when he says:
Quote:I think that for the Church to remain strong it has to reconstruct its narrative. The dominant narrative is not true; it can’t be sustained. The Church has to absorb all this new information or it will be on very shaky grounds and that’s what it is trying to do and it will be a strain for a lot of people, older people especially. But I think it has to change.
In a matter of weeks they could have a website up that comes clean on the major issues covered up in church history and communicate to the church membership they should read this. I assume they don’t want to do this as they will cause many to leave.Plus there are people leaving now because the church is too anti-LGBQ AND there are people leaving the church and going to splinter groups (such as following Denver Snuffer). This has been going on since the church started. I just feel I was taught, “do what is right let the consequence follow” and I guess I believed it. There is that saying that some people leave the church not because they don’t believe enough, but they believe too much. Maybe that is me – I bought what the church leaders told me. But that is victim blaming. I give that the finger now.
There is actually a variant of the trolley scenario where the trolley is barreling down the tracks without working brakes and you can push a fat guy off a bridge onto the tracks to slow down the train just enough to save the lives of the people on the trolley car. Most people, understandably, are not willing to push the fat guy onto the tracks even though it saves lives.My friend tells me that character assassinations of the victim are common practice for lawyers. That doesn’t make it right and such a justification would be an appeal to normalcy. It says something about the practice of law as a whole and it still speaks badly on the church to not stand firm against something so unethical, no matter how common it is.
I think all sexual abuse accusations should be taken seriously and that the overwhelming majority of them are legitimate, especially the first accusation when there are many. Something can be said about people confusing regret for rape and people chiming in with false accusations to get attention, but both are probably less common than conservatives make them out to be.
The church can rebuild trust by trusting us with challenging information, including history and financial audits. They can trust us by giving wards and stakes more autonomy (which would help with international relations). They can show they trust us by listening to our ideas and objections instead of flippantly dismissing them because they’re “led by revelation” and “when the prophet speaks, the debate is over.” If it really is the “one true church”, they should have no fear over difficult information; there is no lie to be caught in. Abinadi, Alma&Amulek, and other prophets were brought before lawyers trying to get them to cross their words, yet they never could because they had a truth that was logically consistent. It’s only when you have no leg to stand on when you start having to avoid the lawyers and hard questions. And yet that’s what I see: church leaders avoiding hard questions and making concerted efforts for targeted PR.
The new ministering program is a step in the right direction. So were the Joseph Smith Papers and the gospel topics essays. The problem with these is that it is doing too little too late. It might help to inoculate from future disaffection, but only in small part.
I think the same can be said about replacing coke/mountain dew with coffee. More caffeine, but way less sugar. Even if you drink diet soda, the artificial sweeteners are in some ways worse than real sugar and there is still something to be said about the carbonation. My boss drinks over 2 liters of diet coke every day and I shudder thinking what that is doing to his body. He’s not a member, so he drinks coffee too, but I have my bets on which is going to kill him faster.
Maybe those simple things ARE the core essence of what God expects of us. What if we aren’t here on earth to be tested on our faith and obedience? What if the only test is whether we give or withhold unconditional love and everything else is an appendage to that?
Maybe it doesn’t really matter what you believe.
Individual adaptation is a thing, but there seems to be a semi-widespread consensus (if you could call it that – it might just be a fad) that grains are actually not all that good for you. They’re just cheap and were plentiful in the 19th century. Point is, there are a lot of diets that work well for some but not others, with low-fat diets tending to be the least effective for losing weight and reducing cholesterol levels. (mostly because the fat tends to get replaced by sugar- something much worse for you because our bodies were not evolved to process it in the quantities we find today) I suspect people losing weight on diets has more to do with the mentality of dieting making you more conscientious of what you eat rather than the food actually eaten.
I go with Occam’s Razor on this one. There is strong evidence that death has always been around and a literal belief in Adam and Eve leads to an insane amount of mental gymnastics I’m not willing to do. This leads me to conclude that the story is purely metaphorical, and the only way it can reasonably be literal is death was temporarily turned off for the Garden of Eden. Adam was probably just the first spiritually aware human being if he was a literal person, but I suspect religion formed more organically and gradually than that The manual is being misleading with that statement. BY was not the one to make the WoW into a TR requirement. That came later, during Prohibition. This is why I don’t like the lesson manuals. They’re insanely whitewashed and jump to conclusions not supported by the scriptures or actual history even when it’s innocuous, as in this case. How do you expect people to develop a robust testimony if you aren’t giving them factual history? It’s exactly this disconnect that makes people have historical struggles in the first place.
dande48 wrote:
Special note for Beefster:9/10 men get the WORST deal out of a divorce. I’m saying this from a completely secular standpoint. Women far too often get the kids, the house, the wealth… they have many resources to lean on, both socially, psychologically, and financially. Men will almost always end up paying alimony, even if the wife works. Depression for men skyrockets, and so does suicide. It’s a raw deal for men. For your sake, I’d rather see you “living in sin”, than in a marriage with the intent to divorce.
I have no intent to marry with the intent to divorce for that very reason. I’m just saying maybe there is something worth reconsidering for society at large. I think monogamous marriage is absolutely critical for raising children in the healthiest way possible (so marriage when there are kids at home should be kept together at all costs, so long as it isn’t abusive), but outside that role it only has minor societal benefits such as lower rates of STDs and deeper emotional connections (which are really more of personal benefits). Making marriage last as long as possible is the way to go, but accepting divorce as a real possibility and in some cases the best option is a healthier way to look at it IMO than insisting that every married couple suffer trying to make it work. Yes, many marriages can and should be saved, but some shouldn’t and that’s okay. I think people should go into marriage recognizing that it might end in a divorce, but at the same time not treat it as the easy way out, realizing that if it comes to that, it doesn’t make them bad people or failures.Humans didn’t really evolve to be lifelong monogamous. In fact, it’s a very rare trait in the animal kingdom (though it’s not uncommon for animals to be monogamous while raising their young). It’s honestly impressive it has worked as well as it has.
