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mackay11 wrote:
You can set standards that will help you stay pure.
(Quoting Richard G. Scott), “Firmly establish personal standards… Decide what you will do and what you will not do to express feelings.”
Pray and ask Heavenly Father about the standards you have set for yourself.
I really like these messages.
I find it difficult to think how a social group can function if everything is left to individual views. So to be practical, it seems the church feels compelled to take it to the next level and teach us all that our personal standards should align to the inspired teachings of the priesthood leaders (FSOY).
It would be nice if we all could behave with the same sensible standards, but since we can’t, it seems the church group wants to have a collective agreement on the guard rails for the good of the group. We sacrifice personal interpretations for security within the group. It then becomes sin, and sin has consequences.
The tricky part is enforcing the guardrails. Each bishop can be different on it.
This quote I’m skeptical of:
Quote:Don’t let what happened in the past define your future. If you have strayed from the path, you can return.
It seems, that you can return, but don’t expect the prodigal son to be treated the same as the faithful son who never wandered. We have raised the bar for missionaries, by the way, so you can return, but you can’t serve a mission, or you really can’t be called to the same callings as the laborers in the vineyard that labored all day. That wouldn’t be fair.
:think: hawkgrrrl wrote:Quote:“I remember HawkGrrrl talking about women at Rick’s College (Now BYUI) that would do oral and other things with a clear conscience because it wasn’t specifically prohibited in the temple.”
Actually that was at Provo BYU. On the upside, nobody ever got preggers from a blow job.
We just had a 70 here for conference and he stated that the reason more marriages are failing these days is due to oral sex.
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Some people are wrong – and flat out ignorant about some things. Simple as that.
Meh Mormon wrote:We just had a 70 here for conference and he stated that the reason more marriages are failing these days is due to oral sex.
Wha?? I bet everyone perked up in conference when he said that.😯 But I thought the answer was: pornography. They keep changing their answer on this.
Perhaps he meant it is due to not enough of it in marriage, or its not done right??
:shifty: (rhetorical question…no need for responses)OK…I go with Ray’s comment.
Quote:Perhaps he meant it is due to not enough of it in marriage, or its not done right??
Wow, I completely missed that reading of it. Looks like a quote that I need to save to use whenever someone in church talks about the evil nature of oral sex.
😆 Quote:
One last point: For years I have tried to understand why some people refuse to play card games with face cards. I have never heard a GA preach against them. A fair number of members do play with face cards and this doesn’t appear to be a problem. Just yesterday I thought about this restriction as a “guardrail.” If I want to set up a personal boundary against gambling and I want the world of poker and blackjack to be so foreign to me that even playing with face cards would make me feel uncomfortable – then that would be a reasonable guardrail for me to impose upon myself. As long as I understood that it was a personal choice/standard and the reasons for its imposition and others are in no way inferior for not having a similar conviction – then it could be an effective guardrail to help me avoid even dabbling my big toe into gambling.Bruce R McConkie discouraged the practice because it is a waste of time…I remember reading it in Mormon Doctrine, which I know is not actual Mormon Doctrine.
Nonetheless, I like the idea of different boundaries for different folks. For me, I have a weight problem. I gain weight simply by looking at food and had to lose 85 pounds a while ago. I am roughly normal weight now. But for a period, it was “wrong” for me to be in situations that had food that was off my weight loss program. That was my guardrail. But for someone with a fast metabolism, that guardrail was unnecessary. I have to put up my guardrails occasionally when I gain more weight than I would like.
I learn something new every day 
I had never thought that card games were in a issue. We have been on a church camping trip, including Bishop and other families. On a wet night we played snap, fish, 7’s and other kids games, nothing was said and I don’t think anyone in the room even knew that it was supposed to be wrong. It was a memorable fun evening that entertained across the age groups.
My husband and I always have a deck of cards and a crib board on trips with us. It is a cheap, fun activity for the down times.
I look at my non member family that love coming together to play cards. Better that activity than what the men (and some women) usually do – scarper off to the pub and get drunk.
Sometimes (a lot of the time) I just don’t get this church.
conflicted testimony wrote:I learn something new every day
I had never thought that card games were in a issue.
There also used to be counsel away from playing pool or billiards. The talks in the 1930s and 1940s would warn against alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, cards and billiards.If you want to read an interesting thread of Wheat and Tares.org, there was a thread a few weeks ago you can find here:
http://www.wheatandtares.org/12477/mormon-doctrine-face-cards/ ” class=”bbcode_url”> http://www.wheatandtares.org/12477/mormon-doctrine-face-cards/ Slowly the cards and billiards thing faded to the background…probably similar to how caffeinated soda could slowly fade and our children may not remember that was ever an issue in the church.
Chastity, however, seems to have always been part of the major sin category. Although it seems contraception was once looked at as very unnatural and was discouraged in my parent’s generation, and now is left more up to the individual married couples to decide.
Heber13 wrote:conflicted testimony wrote:I learn something new every day
I had never thought that card games were in a issue.
There also used to be counsel away from playing pool or billiards. The talks in the 1930s and 1940s would warn against alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, cards and billiards.If you want to read an interesting thread of Wheat and Tares.org, there was a thread a few weeks ago you can find here:
http://www.wheatandtares.org/12477/mormon-doctrine-face-cards/ ” class=”bbcode_url”> http://www.wheatandtares.org/12477/mormon-doctrine-face-cards/ Slowly the cards and billiards thing faded to the background…probably similar to how caffeinated soda could slowly fade and our children may not remember that was ever an issue in the church.
Chastity, however, seems to have always been part of the major sin category. Although it seems contraception was once looked at as very unnatural and was discouraged in my parent’s generation, and now is left more up to the individual married couples to decide.
Yes, I’ve read a few old talks (Joseph Fielding and F.) that condemned “cards”. More recently GBH specifically condemned poker. The one from Joseph F. went into more detail about how even under the best of circumstances (matchstick gambling), it was still a waste of time. I have no idea how this came to be a prohibition of face cards. My inlaws play all their card games with “Rook” cards. For them that seems to make it kosher.
I wish.wish.wish there was more room for personal standards in the church. [Channeling Uchdorf] It seems that someone gets a good idea, and then it becomes an expectation and somewhere along the way the Gospel gets lost in the maze of good ideas.
It’s called building hedges about the law. 😡 I understand the concern over poker, given the recent explosion of interest from the televising of the World Series of Poker events and the wreckage gambling leaves in its wake for too many people. I live in Nevada; I see way too much of its effects all around me to not understand the concern.
The broad condemnation of face cards, however, is classic hedge planting. My wife and I play games for a few minutes most nights before she leaves for work (night shift at a nursing home, God bless her), and it is a good way for us to relax and talk while having a good time. Also, if we start earlier than normal, and if we tweak the games slightly, we can end up in a situation where the title question of this post becomes relevant – and I don’t mind that, either.
:thumbup: Old-Timer wrote:It’s called building hedges about the law.
😡 I understand the concern over poker, given the recent explosion of interest from the televising of the World Series of Poker events and the wreckage gambling leaves in its wake for too many people. I live in Nevada; I see way too much of its effects all around me to not understand the concern.
The broad condemnation of face cards, however, is classic hedge planting. My wife and I play games for a few minutes most nights before she leaves for work (night shift at a nursing home, God bless her), and it is a good way for us to relax and talk while having a good time. Also, if we start earlier than normal, and if we tweak the games slightly, we can end up in a situation where the title question of this post becomes relevant – and I don’t mind that, either.
:thumbup: Naughty boy
😮 :thumbup: Sometimes hedges get planted by church leaders, and local leaders or individuals on their own put fences far from the hedge until the result is families teaching kids things so far from the intent it can be a bit weird. Would seem reasonable warnings should be then to avoid betting money, not playing rook cards instead of face cards. Shrug. I understand why people do it. It can just be strange when you step back and look at it.
What consenting adults do in their home seems like it should be something left up to them. Sex, alcohol, porn, cards, pool tables…seems like none of these really fall in the realm of sin if it brings the couple closer in their relationship. It seems more dangerous to the individual doing it on the side or in social settings when the problems seem to warrant hedging.
I grew up playing face cards (but not gambling) and had no idea that some members didn’t until I was away from home at BYU. They were always impressed with my ability to shuffle and deal from years and years of practice. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that one of my good friends was a bishop in West Valley. They did a poll of the youth in their stake to see if they understood the severity of different sins. They were chagrined to find that the youth in their stake thought profanity was worse than sexual sin!
We always played poker or bingo for candy or peanuts. Grandpa was a bishop and always joined in. As for chastity I think we should encourage waiting until marriage. As for Hawkgirl’s stories about BYU… My DW attended Rick’s and she knew full well some of roomies were having sex and attending the temple. The fact is we really should have good moral sexual standards. There needs to be a balance. You can set general standards and let people govern themselves and would probably get a lot more accomplished in the way of promoting healthy, moral behavior and better mental/sexual health in the member’s lives. Right now it seems we just confused, sexually un-healthy, and mentally repressed individuals. Or we have a bunch of people hiding in the shadows really not caring and causing all kinds of problems. Furthermore the overly strict and sometimes oppressive standards simply help to hide infidelity, abuse, rape etc.
I hope I’m not coming off as negative or trying to slam the church. I’m really not. I just think that as an organization a well balanced, healthy approach to standards and sexuality within healthy limits would improve the Church by leaps and bounds.
I grew up with the idea that face cards are taboo. I know others that will not play with dice. I have known some of the older generation that had such an aversion to face cards they could not sleep well at night if they knew a deck of face cards was in the house. …They could feel the evil emanating from the deck!
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