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Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome is another confounding phenomenon. I once heard someone say “God wouldn’t allow anyone to be born in a body of the wrong sex.” Nice wish for someone who doesn’t care to find out what really happens on this earth.
Ok, so if sexuality, sex, gender etc. etc. is not as eternal as so many like to think, and if the sexual aspect of marriage is a mortal thing as well, then why should the Church give an inch towards recognizing the validity of gay marriage? I imagine some would say: if it turns out that gender is so malleable or temporary, then why not let two people marry no matter what their gender?
It is unfashionable to talk about gender differences in terms of personality, but maybe another reason to stick with marriage between male and female (besides to control procreation) is to hold two opposites together in a state of tension that is necessary for development, and that a marriage between two of the same sex or gender would be too comfortable to afford that? The culture of the Church has really bought into the romantic ideal of marrying someone who you’re madly in love with and so on, but the attitude that you must find the one who you agree with and are most gratified to be with is what causes people to approach relationships with a kind of “enlightened” selfishness that must be hard to keep from sliding towards an adolescent selfishness. Mary Woolstonecraft wrote some good stuff on the nature of romantic love and its unsuitability as a foundation for marriage.
There are plenty of ways that someone can be born with conditions that would deprive them of reaching the norm of man-woman marriage, and not all of them have to do with sexuality or sexual orientation. And I know it’s popular among Mormons to believe that Jesus must have been married, but maybe we should focus more on Him as a freak: someone who had such a unique job to do that He couldn’t live the normal life we hold up as the standard. So if the Savior of the world was a freak, then maybe everyone else who lives a life unsuitable for the norm of marriage and family similarly has some kind of special job?
Is the promise that those who don’t get to marry (and by implication find true love) in this life will get to in the eternities just a nice wish too?
More unpopular thoughts: what about those whom God has made sociopaths?
Oh they’re definitely a turnoff and a detriment, and although the Church may not have said straight out in words “we believe that sexuality exists solely or primarily for the purpose of procreation,” the requirement to wear the Temple garment night and day is something that sends a distinct message: the Law of Chastity and the Temple covenants are indifferent if not hostile to the pursuit of sexual satisfaction. Take that along with Jacob’s talking about polygamy in terms of “raising up seed” and Alma the younger’s warning to Corianton to cross himself, it would be much simpler and more consistent if the Church were to come flat out and, if not take that procreation only/primarily stand, at least admit that hostility towards sexual fulfillment. Stop pretending that marriage is an avenue for letting people satisfy their sex drives, let alone anything near an equal opportunity one. SamBee wrote:For one, I think it’s about time that the “thou = respect” myth got knocked on the head. I hear people coming out with that all the time.
Oh, dude! I hate that one. And even when people get it right and say “thou” is more intimate that still doesn’t change the fact that nobody uses Early Modern English regularly except for Shakespearean actors and Renfaire folk. People who have been members all their lives still can’t conjugate verbs for “thou” or decline it properly – they can’t conjugate verbs in EME at all!
Sure, plenty of other languages have the informal/intimate 2P singular pronoun. That’s great, let ’em use it; they don’t have to hear that bunk about respect. But either stop asking English speakers to hold onto a long-outdated speech convention or start giving regular EME grammar lessons as part of Primary. It sure would help people understand the King James Bible a lot better at least.
Shoot, maybe the Church should put on its own Renfaire-type events where everyone speaks in dialect. It could help us do better Christmas pageants. And think of the missionary possibilities. The cleavage could be a problem though.
Ok sorry for the rant. Dang it, maybe next time I get asked to give a talk I’ll give the whole thing in Early Modern.
Quote:I feel the books on the Teachings of the Presidents are horribly sanitised. Can’t we hear about any of these prophets getting something wrong, and/or making up for it occassionally? At least they admit that Joseph lost over a hundred pages…
Someone somewhere mentioned George Albert’s problems with depression and how the manual committee missed a chance to include that. And didn’t GBH once write about getting his mouth washed out with soap for using a racial slur? That was great.
I remember a meeting of BYU’s feminist group about 12 years ago when Gene spoke, and how the room erupted in applause when, after concluding his talk (and the meeting was supposed to have ended), he said something like: by the way, I believe that polygamy is not a Celestial thing: we will notbe practicing it in the next life! It was precisely what everyone wanted to hear.
A-ha. Must be more of that mainstream Christian baggage, I guess. But you sure could have fooled me: all that talk about “the sacred powers of procreation” — unless that was just prudishness, not wanting to utter the three-letter S word in General Conference. Old-Timer wrote:and if sexual orientation (not maleness and femaleness) and sexual activity (not intimacy) are only mortal constructs, the entire paradigm and discussion change fundamentally
If that were the case I think a lot of women would be quite relieved. I know I would.
Old-Timer wrote:The Church’s current stance is very obvious in its rejection of the purpose of sex being only the creation of children.
Yes, and as I intimated in the other thread, that’s going to keep causing nothing but problems for the leadership. Because they haven’t set out a clear picture of the limits since shattering it wide open by giving up that idea. If they had known that the gay marriage thing was going to get so big I wonder if they’d have stuck to their guns.
Grrrr, I just spent too much time crafting a response only to have lost it, and now I’m not willing to let it drop. So this post will probably be hasty and garbled. I’m replying here even though this bears on the polygamy and chastity threads.
It is inconsistent and unprincipled to oppose polygamy and support gay marriage. But I would love to be proved wrong in my perception that there still are many who do just that.
If homosexual activity really is against the purposes of human sexuality as the CHI states, then it sure would be helpful to have a definitive systematic breakdown of just what the **** those purposes are, instead of a patchwork interpretation of scattered scriptures that amounts to a vague “for reproduction – but not only that, also for emotional bonding between husband and wife.”
If the main purpose of sex is for reproduction, then things are simple, and any sexual enjoyment anyone manages to get within the Law of Chastity is gravy for the lucky few.
If the purposes of human sexuality include a Divine intent for expression, fulfillment, satisfaction, then the Law of Chastity is an unjust restriction and should be abandoned.
If the purpose of human sexuality is for emotional bonding between committed partners then the institution of marriage needs to be radically restructured ASAP to accommodate as many polyamorous permutations as people can possibly commit to – and there may be more of these than we can even imagine right now.
The second proposition obviously appeals to the affluent post-industrial world, but that doesn’t automatically make it right. The first entails much suffering for those whose other human needs are met, but that doesn’t automatically make it wrong.
And the third is how I have heard some speculate that the Celestial Kingdom really will be. (If so, we should all cut Brother Joseph a lot more slack.)
Right. His treatment of the trinity vs. quaternity archetypes is very thought-provoking. But you’re right, SamBee, about that one omission. Ha – when I was young and prudish it was inconceivable to me that God could have naughty bits and I envisioned him as a de-sexed man. Hasn’t there been some discussion about this elsewhere here? Yes, some important points sometimes hide in plain sight and seem to only get picked up by fine-toothed combs. For example the part of Moses 4:32 that says “they are true even as I will.” Old-Timer wrote:
2) We baptize people who are married civilly and, we assume, having sex. There is no “repentance” necessary as part of the process to be baptized – and it is not asked in any way in the baptismal interview. In fact, if a couple who are having sex while living together and unmarried want to be baptized, all they have to do is get married civilly in order to be baptized – and they don’t have to be celibate between their marriage and their baptism. They can be having sex right up to their marriage and then be baptized at any time thereafter. In practical terms, getting married civilly is considered to be repentance enough.
Well dang it, I wish I’d known that on my mission so I wouldn’t have felt like I had to ask couples if they had abstained before getting married civilly as part of the baptism interview.
SamBee wrote:I don’t know how some people would go with that. The truth is that in a lot of our discussions, the answers are there beforehand. I don’t think our education should be regurgitation. That’s for elementary school
I agree whole-heartedly. My suggestion was hastily expressed and maybe ill-formed to begin with, but still if there are three or four of you that are bored, it seems like the bunch could at least resolve to take leading roles in steering discussions in a useful direction.
What, I thought that all the unmarried sisters got to have a line of war casualties from the ages paraded before them in the afterlife and take their pick. Have hope, sisters: hunky ghosts in shining armor await you! Alan Manning, a Linguistics prof at BYU, wrote a scifi novel in which he proposed a scenario where the post-mortal life had too many alternate realities for two souls to stay together who weren’t joined somehow . . . I forget the details and should probably mention this over in book recommendations but it was an interesting concept, even if pure speculation.
“Idealized model” is a good way of putting it. The part of Section 121 that talks about men losing their authority if they exercise unrighteous dominion lends a good scriptural recommendation to your belief. I dimly recall an episode from my childhood: overhearing someone relate a story about a man who got to the spirit world and was told that since he’d been a bad husband his wife would get to go with someone worthy. So this concept of God’s ability to override any earthly sealing: I imagine that it’s fairly commonly held among the membership. You’d have to be really convinced of God’s cruelty and rigidity — and more to the point, our power over God’s — to hold to the notion that everything we enact ritually here is unalterably fixed in the eternities.
More speculation: there will be millions of “worthy” faithful sealed male souls in the spirit world suddenly left to their own devices as their wives say “so long, sucka!” after realizing they don’t have to put up with an eternity of chauvinistic treatment. Maybe there will be epic quests by these men to restore their trustworthiness as eternal mates: cosmic, galactic love stories to put our best mortal literature to shame . . .
I think I’d be ok with someone calling me unorthodox but I don’t think of myself as disaffected either. “Atypical” is probably too vague? To my anarchist mind, questions like this should be looked at in connection with the Church’s history and the nature of Mammon’s different avatars around the world. I’m pretty ignorant about the status of the average Church member in Peru, the Phillipines, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Ghana, etc. but I have a hard time imagining that many of them are going to be faced with plentiful opportunities such as what SilentDawning mentioned. I know there are a lot of folks in the Church who are into microcredit for third world countries, and I would hope that Church members would feel free to avail themselves of that kind of thing, but again, my ignorance in that sphere is mammoth. Since the leaders of the Church don’t have the nerve to speak out against the immorality of charging interest, much of the talk I’ve heard against debt goes along the lines of “interest: either you’re smart and let it work for you, or you’re not so smart and it works against you.” I never like to hear this because it sounds like “there are winners and losers in this system, so let’s get on the winning side” and that offends my egalitarian sensibilities. We get on the winning side and what – screw the losers? Or get to feel good about ourselves for helping them out of our individual kindness?
The underlying principle of “self-reliance” I believe in with the important qualification that true and sustainable self-reliance has to be communal or at least convivial and not a Rugged Individualist thing. But this is another thing I have to keep to myself mostly, since Mormon culture in the US worships wealthy capitalists so fervently.
