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Beefster wrote:
(most FHEs suck because it’s done by the same two people every week)
Every one I’ve been to was basically “let’s speed-read the high points of this Ensign article in five minutes or less, then spend the rest of the evening on fantasy football.”
Quote:I think we can all agree that the Brethren are out of touch and are answering with standard PR non-answers to difficult questions.
Some of them could become answers, if there was a serious push all the way down the chain of command to make it happen.
Beefster wrote:Point is, most of the people that are part of the singles stigma are out of touch with 21st century dating.
The one improvement I’ve seen was putting the Single Adults program (mostly) into the hands of single adults. When I joined, our stake single adults reps were an elderly couple who’d been married since a couple months after he got back from his mission. Stake single adults activities looked like night out at the nursing home, with maybe 15 people, nearly all of whom were 70+. Aside from one socially – and hygienically – inept fellow, I was the only person there who hadn’t been sealed to anyone, so even had I been in the market for a cougar with a senior discount, nobody was looking.
About a year later, (and apparently long after the word had come down from Salt Lake to stop that) a single sister in her 50s was called as stake SA rep. It took her a while to convince the SP that monthly potluck/fireside meetings really should have speakers and topics of direct relevance to singles, (And maybe 10 firesides a year about Emma Smith was…well, dumb. If it hadn’t been for Christmas and Easter, we might never have had a break from his odd obsession.) but once that happened, things started picking up. Now, even the monthly stake activities have 20-40 singles show up with a pretty good mix of ages. The stake is also part of a multi-stake group that shares out larger annual events, and we’ve had a couple hundred turn up for one of the full-day multi-stake activities. In fact, we lost the SA rep for the next ward over when she married a guy she met at the first multi-stake activity we’d hosted, and last I heard, another that vanished unexpectedly was engaged to someone from the other side of the area.
Beefster wrote:Marriage for retention is just another slap on the face to me. It’s no surprise that singles leave the church more often than married couples when the church (perhaps unintentionally or indirectly) marginalize singles.
IMO, Church
culturemarginalizes singles, and encourages many members to do the same. Church leadership at some levels speaks out against it, but in broad terms, not outlining specific steps for how local leadership and individual members need to act to actually stop doing it. Personal example; midsingle magnet ward, where the host ward puts the singles back in the overflow seating, out of the way of the “good” people. Singles Sunday School classes are in a spare classroom used mostly for storage because its HVAC ducts have some sort of problem, requiring fans in the doorway to keep it tolerable during class, even though there are perfectly functional empty classrooms of sufficient size available.
Another’s personal example;
“Thank you for this post. I can recall being almost 30 and attending the temple to do baptisms for the dead. I hadn’t yet received my endowment and the Brother at the recommend desk told the “youth” to stand aside while he took care of the “adults.” By that time in my life, I was graduated from law school and the “adult” that I had to step aside for was a pregnant 21 year old. It was at that point I realized that no matter how much I accomplished, I wouldn’t fully be an adult to many members of the church until I found a husband. It hurt a lot at the time and is still a sore spot. Thank you for letting me know I’m not alone in those feelings.”And another:
“I’m a single in my early 50’s. I used to sit in the chapel, but found that no one would sit on the same row. In a few cases, if I sat on the end of a row partially occupied by a family, they would get up and move. And I shower every day! Now I sit in the foyer, and it’s a lot quieter than the chapel.I have noticed that when being greeted in a group of other adults, it goes like this, “Hello Brother Smith, Sister Jones, Mark, Brother Brown”. I’m referred to as though I was still a little boy.
A couple of weeks ago one of the older men in my ward (he’s known me for several years) asked why I never brought my wife to church. It was easier for him to assume I had a non-member spouse than that I had never married.”
squarepeg wrote:
NightSG wrote:Pretty much the same as it has been for singles all along; talk about how valuable the singles are, and how none of us is meant to be alone, but then that reminder is strangely absent when a single member dies, still alone. And of course, the “value” of the adult singles isn’t seen on Sunday mornings in any of the wards I’ve visited.
I feel like this is particularly a problem for single women,
Try being a single adult man, not fulfilling the manly responsibility by marrying whatever 4’8″ 350lb bearded “sister” will take the ring first.
Divorced is even worse; if you didn’t get the kids then obviously everything wrong with the marriage was your fault, and if you did, it was still all your fault and you tormented her more by taking the kids.
Either way, you get stuck with all the callings that aren’t really important enough to waste married men on, and of course, you still get treated like a child, because even if you were married and raising kids, you’re clearly not a real adult yet or you’d still be married. (Even past 40.)
dande48 wrote:Hypnosis is an induction to a state of consciousness which leaves the subject susceptible to suggestion or direction. And it happens a lot more often than you might think. Take a simple prayer (not a deep prolonged one). They bows their head and closes their eyes, on “command”. They turn their focus inwards, and concentrate on the inner feelings of the Spirit. They let the words resonate through them, and attempt to instill in themselves the change they desire. Looks like light hypnosis to me.
More to the point, there’s really no such thing as a non-suggestible state, and the spectrum is pretty much continuous from end to end; any good salesman knows how to plant suggestions while you’re in a far less suggestible state than even light meditative prayer.
dande48 wrote:
nibbler wrote:
Nelson also said that there’s a place for them in the church. I’ll extend this to members that have nuanced or differing views as well. I wish Nelson would have elaborated here. It’s one thing to tell someone they’re welcome, it’s quite another to help them feel welcome. What place is there? What does it look like? That’s a question that I don’t think I could answer.
That’s what I want to know. I’m afraid that many of these answers were more talk than action.
Pretty much the same as it has been for singles all along; talk about how valuable the singles are, and how none of us is meant to be alone, but then that reminder is strangely absent when a single member dies, still alone. And of course, the “value” of the adult singles isn’t seen on Sunday mornings in any of the wards I’ve visited.
DarkJedi wrote:But Nelson is a very healthy and vigorous 93-year-old. Most I know that age are in a nursing home or should be.
Right, but even the most vigorous ones don’t tend to live indefinitely; they just flop over dead one day without the downhill slide of most of the others.
Old Timer wrote:I have no assumptions about the announcement – except that it will not be an announcement of someone else becoming the President of the Church.
“Brethren, the Lord keeps telling us that we should have President Monson stuffed and keep him in his chair, because even full of sawdust he’d be a better Prophet than any of us.”
Old Timer wrote:“Brainwashing” and “hypnosis” are great examples. They mean something specific, and over-applying them outside their actual definitions is highly problematic – just as over-applying charges of racism or sexism causes serious issues, even though many views and actions are racist and sexist even if many people don’t recognize them as such.
However, it’s important to recognize that even light trance – what most people would refer to as a guided meditation or wide awake hypnosis when it’s assisted by another person – is pretty close to traditional deep trance hypnosis, and can be used in much the same way. Again, it also happens unintentionally when we hyper-focus on certain things, and many people don’t recognize it at all when it’s done without the formal trappings of a hypnosis or guided meditation session. That can make it far more dangerous, as the subject won’t even realize they’ve been suggested. It’s even possible to convert it directly to deep trance hypnosis, and from there hypnoamnesia to prevent conscious memory of the deep trance is trivial…if not automatic.
This is why I generally recommend treating any person known or suspected to be particularly unethical with constant suspicion; there are people who can and will lull you to a light trance state without your knowledge or consent, and use it to condition you without the normal resistance that critical thinking provides, even to repetitive and/or skilled persuasion methods. If you find yourself focusing more than typical whenever a person starts talking, you need to redirect that focus to critical consideration of everything they say in order to make sure it doesn’t become blind acceptance.
Quote:To be hypnosis, there must be a “sleep-like state”. Without such a condition, we have suggestions, conditioning, subliminal messaging, etc., but we aren’t dealing with hypnosis.
At the point where direct conditioning becomes possible, it’s really splitting hairs; it doesn’t matter which process is used when the result is identical. Light trance with full conscious control is basically the only meaningful exception; the subject still has the conscious ability to reject any suggestion directly at all times, so it’s barely more than a normal focus state. It’s also rare without specifically creating that state, since it’s typically (Always? Never heard of another way to get there.) a modification of an existing light trance state, rather than one the subject can be guided directly to.
Quote:There is nothing in standard LDS missionary work that fits the classic definition of either brainwashing or hypnosis, and I would say the vast majority of LDS members never come close to hypnosis through prayer.
Normal prayer, no, but a focused, extended session, entirely possible. The standard “day of fasting and prayer” might get there on occasion. Actually using it productively without recognizing he phenomenon is highly unlikely, though.
Roy wrote:Why do we use consecrated oil for blessings of healing?
Consecrated grease is too hard to wash out of the hair later.
James 5:14-15 is probably the closest thing in the Bible to the current practice.
dande48 wrote:Here’s my few cents on the subject:
1. Hypnosis can never cause someone to do something they don’t want to do. The mind would reject it and fight back. If a hypnosis were to suggest handing over a wallet, personal information (passwords, SSN), or solicit sex, the subject would break from it. That being said, there are many things a person could want that could be exploited.
Not easily, at least directly. OTOH, altering perception could achieve most of these; handing over a wallet or personal information could be achieved by creating the perception that the recipient is someone with the authority to demand it, or simply someone otherwise entitled to it, for example. (Loan officer at the bank needs your SSN to process your application, etc.)
The direct approach would be changing what the person actually wants, which could vary from quite simple (“Well, I guess I don’t want tacos for dinner, then.”) to an in-depth process taking months of repetitions. Then there’s the consideration of what the actual want is; does the person actually not want to have sex, or do they want it but suppress that desire due to their perception of the consequences? Again, we’re way out of any ethical use of hypnosis or persuasion in general, but it’s important to understand the difference between “I don’t want to” and “I don’t want the consequences I perceive to be likely or inescapable.”
Old Timer wrote:Memory recovery is far trickier, much more susceptible to manipulation, and very difficult to do objectively.
Right, and IMO, shouldn’t be done directly in any case where the memory can’t be directly verified and/or there are consequences to it being unintentionally altered. (i.e. it would be acceptable as an attempt to find a forgotten password or lock combination, but not to gather information for an accusation) Even if it’s necessary to pull out such information for the therapist to address it as part of a treatment, I’d much prefer to see it done in such a way that the client has no conscious recall of anything gained during the session.
Intentionally attempting to alter a memory – even to fix a provably incorrect one – is well into extremely unethical territory. I could see it as an acceptable emergency tactic for a truly suicidal client if nothing else was working, but that’s about it.
Roy wrote:I do believe that people are sometimes open to suggestion to varying degrees. I also understand that memories can be malleable and that some things can be suggested and then remembered.
Right, but that doesn’t require hypnosis; just sit down and watch a movie with your friends. After a few hours, start talking about a scene in the movie, with some modifications and see how many of them will “remember” what you’re describing rather than what they actually saw.
Some things don’t even have to be suggested; I worked in safety and security for a few years, and the differences in witness statements taken minutes after an incident were, to say the least, disturbing. Even when we had wide angle video of the entire area, people with no connection to the incident other than eyewitness would clearly remember large things that just weren’t there. Even an 18 wheeler that wasn’t involved in any way, but the witness was sure it had been right there within 20 feet of the incident, so the driver must have seen exactly what happened: only problem was we monitored that yard and there hadn’t been a truck in it all morning, unless it could launch itself straight up over an 8′ chain link fence to avoid the cameras and guards at both gates. (And yes, I did go check the undisturbed soft ground and the still-rusted-shut lock on the one unguarded gate.) The witness, completely unprompted, (others were specifically instructed not to ask about details of the incident other than checking for injury or immediate danger before we got our initial statements) could “remember” the color of truck and trailer, logo on the truck and a rough description of the driver of a giant vehicle that just plain didn’t exist.
For that matter, I have occasionally had memories I now know to have been false, including some that were inherently obvious even at the time. On the other hand, they’re not memories anyone would have any reason to have “planted” through hypnosis or any other method, and in one case that comes to mind, no one alive would have known any of the other details of the context in which that memory exists. It’s closely emotionally connected (to me) to a very traumatic event, (my father was murdered when I was 10) and the memory is of a brief conversation we had several months before that. No one else, including my mother (they divorced when I was 7) would have known the details of that evening, but I have a clear yet false memory of us talking about events that I now realize hadn’t yet happened. Given the content, the false memory must have formed sometime after I was 12-13. However, after examining the false memory, I have been able to recall enough of the actual conversation that even though I can still remember the nonexistent parts, they’re clearly marked in my mind as imagined rather than real. How and why does it exist? I can’t say for sure, though in truth, it is a conversation I would have wanted to have with him, had he still been alive. Most likely, I imagined or even dreamt a conversation I wished I could have with him, and for whatever reason, my brain edited it into one that did happen, as a coping mechanism. As I said, no one else would have the reason or the knowledge to create it, and no one but early-teen me would ever have seen even a small benefit from its creation.
Quote:I read a book by Hugh Nibley’s daughter in which she made some horrifying but also strange and uncorroborated accusations against him.
I see plenty of articles here where people are doing the same thing to various Church and political leaders.
Quote:I suppose it might be prudent to tread with caution before intentionally opening yourself to another’s suggestion.
Yes, but we do exactly that any time we fail to apply substantial critical thinking to everything we’re told.
SamBee wrote:Injury, death and PTSD are a lot less likely on a mission.
Military death rate, all causes: 82/100,000
Missionary death rate: 525/447,969 = 117/100,000 (Unfortunately, the Church, in all its openness, hasn’t given these numbers since 1989, so this is a bit out of date.)
I’m curious what happens if you receive an injury causing lifelong disability on a mission. Somehow I doubt it’s anywhere near as much as military service-connected disability benefits.
