[Limhah]

DarkJedi wrote:

Like the flu shot I am willing to get the third shot and even do it annually if necessary (COVID, flu and the common cold are variants of the same virus). My workplace requires vaccination or weekly testing.

IIRC, common cold is a rhinovirus rather than a coronavirus but I’m not a doctor

Given that even ‘vaccinated’ people can contract the virus and transmit it (though in smaller quantities than unvaccinated) it would be wise to require weekly testing of both vaccinated and unvaccinated people. Of course both groups should continue to mask up for the foreseeable future. Essentially, both unvaccinated and vaccinated should be taking all the same precautions as before the ‘vaccine’ was available.

I’ve heard from several friends already who are vaccinated and later tested positive.

[Limhah]

First off those are fantastic questions! Well worth anyone’s time to contemplate. I mean, if I were church Prez I’d have them put in the Endowment: (Ceiling voice) Brethren, contemplate for a moment if ye knoweth who ye are, and if ye knoweth what hath happened unto ye, and, verily, if ye would suffereth to continue in suchlike fashion. That will do. (Gotta get ye olde lingo right so people’ll pay attention)

1 I don’t know if I know who I am. All I can think of are a bunch of labels and descriptions and that sounds so arbitrary. Who would I be if I forgot everything?

2 I don’t think I understand what happened to me. I miss me!

3 I sure don’t want to continue in this fashion, but I feel that things are constantly changing and evolving one way or the other so maybe I won’t have to.

[Limhah]

I’ve always had the impression that the church is more tolerant (if that’s the word) of certain marginal sexualities and less tolerant of single people in general, or anything that smacks of pro-sexuality in general. This was certainly my experience in my church days and one of the factors that led to my disaffection. I certainly see the culture changing somewhat, but not to an extent where I’d feel comfortable returning even casually.

I plan to attend a couple of temple Open Houses in the near future (really looking forward to the reopening of the SLC temple in ’24 fwiw) and hopefully may be able to engage in some conversation with volunteers there to try to get a sense of where the church is at these days in terms of lifestyle openness.

[Limhah]

hawkgrrrl wrote:

OK, see if you agree with this revision. Black lives matter, but only so long as white property rights are preserved (that’s related to Nelson’s remarks that used much stronger language to condemn property damage from looting than to protest the slaughter of black people by the police). And the narratives we listen to are always from a white perspective. The black people who live like white Christians are going to be heard more than the rest.

Property rights are people’s rights. Property is meaningless or nonexistent without people. Believe it or not, even black people like to preserve their property rights.

[Limhah]

hawkgrrrl wrote:

To put it another way, I think Oaks (like Bedar) is saying that black lives don’t matter, just Christian lives do. And oh, BTW, he’s really just thinking of white Christian churches. Bednar basically said there are no “gay” Church members, just Church members. Well, FYI, there *are* gay Church members, and I’ll believe they are really talking about inclusion and love when we quit preferencing white, cishetero, middle-class, Christian, Utahns, men first.

There’s always going to be conflict between ‘unity’ and ‘diversity.’ People will habitually project what they themselves see themselves as into the future, into some ‘heaven’ state or however they imagine it, with no basis for it other than wishful thinking. And there’s always that dichotomy between inclusion and people’s natural inclination to be around others who ‘look like themselves’ / think like themselves. It’s very difficult to handle both sides of the dichotomy.

[Limhah]

I know I wouldn’t feel comfortable having large group meetings these days. Very few people have had their second or third booster vaccination for one thing and the effectiveness diminishes over a period of months. I suspect a lot of folks think that one shot is sufficient and are getting lax about safety.

[Limhah]

DarkJedi wrote:

Hmmm. The mask mandate was lifted here a few weeks ago, hence no masks in stores although unvaccinated people are encouraged to wear masks. Seeing a mask in the store is rare. Likewise, when the mandate was lifted church went maskless with no request the unvaccinated wear one. Full services resumed then, complete with singing. I thought it was pretty much this way everywhere in the US now.

Different in different places it seems. I always mask inside stores etc. though I see a lot of people not masking so much anymore. It is recommended that vaccinated people continue to wear masks and social distance from what I heard.

[Limhah]

I’m seeing a lot of people in stores and so forth not even wearing masks anymore. I don’t know when the church will have in person meetings again but it is important that masking is maintained even for vaccinated people.

[Limhah]

This topic is one of the stickiest of all wickets, right up there with free will vs. determinism (with which it dovetails to large extent.)

I think most folks outside of strict Calvinists might admit that your future fate / realm / state is largely determined by what you do, personally, right now in this life. And it usually goes with the idea that if you’re not sure, as no one really is, what the truth is, you err on the side of caution by being ‘good’ and keeping your nose clean (as it were) just to be on the safe side. IMO it’s all questionable and I’d put it under the label of that great recent internet neologism, ‘copium.’ (hope / coping / opium.)

(I could’ve written ‘the life that is apparently currently presenting itself,’ instead of ‘this life,’ but why make this wicket any stickier than it already is)

If I think about this life, I have to admit I don’t know or can’t remember how or why I got here, born in one particular place in one particular time. If it was by some previous efforts or actions of whatever I now call ‘myself,’ how can I learn from past mistakes if I don’t remember them? If it’s totally arbitrary, I feel even more lost. So if you extrapolate that forward I have to confess I don’t know how to do to prepare for a possible future that’s a total unknown.

I like to think no energy or effort is wasted but appears later in some different manifestation. My other great study besides Mormonism is the Asian philosophies with which I’ve become well acquainted over the years. The basic dharmic idea is that psychic (mental) energy preserves itself and creates ‘ripples’ in this fashion, good or bad or mixed, in all directions.

I’ve always envisioned the telestial / terrestrial / celestial realms as realms that one could go up and down or back and forth on over time depending on where one best fit at a given time. You can’t go into a higher level than the one you’re at (just like we can’t conceive of ideas that are way beyond us until we learn to, or why an animal can’t be expected to read or comprehend physics, etc.) I never believed any were a one-time-for-all scheme. Some might do it more quickly or with less suffering than others.

(You might go downwards just because no one is perfect (‘completed,’ in the NT sense, perhaps implying some sort of mystical/occult endowment rite) yet and makes mistakes (hamartia.)

The Buddha said that the number of incarnations (into some realm or other) it could take to attain complete ‘enlightenment’ could be compared to a mountain as high as Everest; once every aeon, a bird flies over the peak carrying a fine silken handkerchief in its beak, lightly brushing the mountain just enough to knock loose a few infinitesimal particles. The amount of time it would take to wear that mountain down to dust would be roughly the number of lifetimes one might expect to have to experience before ‘enlightenment.’ So, a bunch.

I’ve also always felt that there must be many subdivisions within the three major kingdoms, and that the three only represent the broad categories. My readings of Swedenborg (possible influence on JS) also confirm that the ‘celestial sphere’ is much more complex and intuitive than commonly taught.

The irony of the dharmic view of ‘universal salvation’ or enlightenment (terms vary a lot) is that in many forms it does not require any deity as such. Everything just goes along based on cause and effect and natural laws of energy. So no god is ever ‘punishing’ or ‘rewarding’ someone or sending anyone anywhere; it’s all based on your own particular nature.

But that nature can change, so that’s kinda cool. You don’t have to be stuck in some hell-realm for a gazillion years with devils poking your butt with tridents, because there’s an opportunity to evolve out of it.

The downside of the idea of universal salvation in this dharmic view is that if you don’t make any efforts, you don’t get anywhere and no god or even buddha will be able to do anything for you except maybe encourage you (via the scriptures or priests) to get off your derriere.

[Limhah]

Roy wrote:

Anti-polygamy laws are to protect men? As in protect men from a lack of available women? I do know that there are some harmful effects to society when there are not enough young women for the young men. China ran into this problem with the one child per couple rule that they had. Couples would prioritize having a male child as a family heir and it ended up with a lopsided demographic. The poorer young men had a hard time finding spouses and tended to get into more trouble and engage in more risky behavior than their married counterparts.

That’s definitely one good example of the bad things that can happen when plural marriage becomes dysfunctional or imbalances a given ecosystem. It’s also connected with how the sex balance among humans & other creatures with two sexes is almost always 50/50 or very close to it, and attempts to skew the sex balance artificially never work in the long run. (Ridley used a lot of examples from selective breeding attempts with cattle, birds, certain sexed plants, etc. but the same principle applies.) It always leads to the ‘better bet’ being for genes to reproduce more of the rarer sex, until the balance evens out again. Otherwise you end up with a lot of violence among excess men and warfare, which might kill off enough of them to balance the scales.

Quote:

I’m not sure this is particularly relevant to the Utah prosecutions. I feel that the LDS church took a hard stand against polygamy in 1910 and started excommunications for polygamists in earnest. The church and the state of Utah at that point both had something to prove to the rest of the country and world that polygamy was no longer being tolerated.

True, and tbh, the book doesn’t get into that much detail about polygamy in Utah, it’s mainly just one example among many of the seemingly endless cultural manifestations of sex and control of reproduction. (The author goes way back, too, speculating that early Australopithecus, a couple of million years ago, was naturally polygamous, with males possessing ‘harems’ of females, based on questionable fossil data that shows the male was much larger physically than the female.)

In the case of Utah, of course, the persecutors / enforcers of the anti-polygamy law were naturally themselves monogamists, and in the peculiar position (leading to a plague of conflicts of interest) of being part of the same religious and cultural background, the polygamists being basically disaffected members of the same church that most law enforcement and judicial authorities in the state belonged to. No doubt that officials came under pressure from both the federal government and their local priesthood leaders to crack down on this particular problem, while conveniently overlooking other areas such as corruption within their own ranks or dubious church-state coziness which had by the 20th cent. become endemic.

I think the monogamist enforcers of the law had to be partly motivated by concern about the future prospects of their own sons and daughters, if polygamy ever became more widespread than it had, in a very skewed competitive scenario for their offspring.

[Limhah]

I don’t know about what the laws should be in any given situation especially since I know next to nothing about SA cultural background. There are probably several different takes on the subject. I used to be very interested in this topic but only within the Mormon and/or LDS context and in the U.S., Mexico and Canada mainly.

I’ve been doing a lot of study lately on sociobiology and the evolution of cultural institutions like marriage and sexuality and recently read a really in-depth book, The Red Queen by Matt Ridley. It explores the possible origins of sex and how this might manifest in different cultural forms such as marriage. I get from it that the conclusion seems to be that humans don’t have one particular but use whatever makes the most sense in a given situation.

Sex is looked at from the p.o.v. of game theory, where each gender makes decisions based on presumptions about the other and what might be the most benefit in terms of offspring. A key point is: “If females do better by choosing monogamous males, monogamy will result, unless men can coerce them. If females do no worse by choosing already-mated males, polygyny will result, unless already-mated females can prevent their males from mating again, in which case monogamy will result.”

You mentioned jealously, and males are certainly biologically programmed to be jealous and possessive to a greater degree than females (who will usually favor their offspring over their mate in almost any situation.) But I imagine this would vary from individual to individual and I wouldn’t prejudge a specific situation out of the blue.

Ridley makes some interesting points, e.g, the idea that anti-polygamy laws and their enforcement are more to protect men, or protect the overall society from an excess of unmarried men, than they are to protect women. This seems to throw light on why, for instance, in Utah anti-polygamy laws were so vigorously enforced and prosecuted for many years.

That said, if they’re going to allow polygyny they might as well allow polyandry as well, and let individuals themselves decide what works best for them. Different individuals will have different needs at different times in their life. The only thing that needs to be enforced of course is age of consent and insuring that actual consent is given in each case, as well as consanguinity laws.

[Limhah]

That’s an interesting spiritual journey you’re on and it sounds like you’re in the earlier stages of an ongoing and possibly lengthy exploration that no one can say in advance where it will lead. It’s good that you’ve worked some of the major points out clearly for your own understanding. I do a lot of that too, setting out points and outlines and summaries of where I stand on various beliefs or philosophies and what have you.

I’m reluctant to offer specific advice as so much depends on your unique circumstances, family & friends, and the environment of your local church. It’s easy to counsel someone to be ‘true’ to oneself and speak one’s own truth but in practice this is very difficult to do right. Looking back on my own long journey my only regrets are that I compromised maybe a little too much to preserve other people’s sensibilities and wish I had been more forthright earlier on. But who can say?

It helps to have at least one other friend (IRL not online) that understands your situation and is willing to work with you and support you at least partway. I never had that in the church. I had friends outside of it though, but they couldn’t understand the nuances involved.

[Limhah]

I wish they’d stop inquiring into people’s private lives in general and think that would go a long way to resolving many of the issues raised. There are plenty of things in my life I like to keep private or restricted to certain in-groups by choice and don’t care to discuss with, say, a bishop or any putative authority.

[Limhah]

DarkJedi wrote:

I guess I never thought about him being that supernatural. In fact, I was always taught (and taught as a missionary) that he could only be in one place at a time and likewise the Holy Ghost, however the Holy Ghost’s influence could be felt everywhere, with the comparison being made to the sun (the sun is in one place but we can all receive it’s light and warmth at the same time). If indeed God and Jesus do “bodies of flesh and bone” as we’re taught I don’t see how they could be in more than one place at the seam time.

Perhaps, but given that, another possibility is, if the time of the appearances doesn’t have to be precisely the same, i.e. if there’s at least a few minutes wiggle room, he could just dislocate temporally and appear at each required spot, not violating simultaneity. (It accomplishes the same thing but still works if you happen to only have one body)

Quote:

All that said, I think the story is much more like a parable/fable/myth – something that didn’t really happen but is meant to illustrate the point – or an example of a “faith promoting story.”

I suspect something along these lines for most of the narratives in scripture

[Limhah]

Surprised to hear that tithing requirement re: CoC. I had once been interested in them and visited a couple of meetings years ago (might’ve been in Independence, when I was also looking into the Restoration Branches too right about the time of some split.) Hadn’t learned or been told of anything like that. They might be willing to let go of many if not most relics of Mormonism and the early church, but I guess there are limits 🙂

Since it mentions net worth as the basis for the calculation, technically if you owe more in debt, such as a mortgage, than you have in assets you would have a net worth as zero (or less, an unsettling thought for most of us in that position)

I doubt if they actually check up on it though or make you show tax returns, etc. so someone could probably fudge it if necessary. I did that for a while, when involved with the LDS, but it doesn’t always work on a savvy bishop (maybe it would’ve helped if I hadn’t given him an exaggerated wink when I responded to the question)

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