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Roy wrote:Quote:
In a 1988 interview Elder Oaks was asked about the priesthood restriction and how the sudden reversal seems to confuse some members.
Elder Oaks said, “If you read the scriptures with this question in mind, “Why did the Lord Command this or why did the Lord command that?” you find that in less than one in a hundred commands was any reason given. It’s not the pattern of the Lord to give reasons. We can put reason to revelation. We can put reasons to commandments. When we do we are on our own. Some people put reasons to the one we’re talking about here, and they turned out to be spectacularly wrong. There is a lesson in that. The lesson I’ve drawn is that I decided a long time ago that I had faith in the command and I had no faith in the reasons that had been suggested for it.”
When asked if the reasons he was talking about include reasons given by GA’s, Elder Oaks responded in part, “The reasons turn out to be man-made to a great extent.”A) Elder Oaks seem to be discouraging this form of moral reasoning after the fact and rather solely supports “divine will” moral reasoning.
Church in general tends to put forward obedience without knowing why as a virtue. When even formulating apologetic reasoning behind God’s commands can get you into trouble – then the safest route for the faithful member is to obey without question.C) Now that the new Headings express the priesthood ban as an unispired policy. Doesn’t this throw us back in the conundrum of basing our moral reasoning solely on divine will only later to discover that God might have had nothing to do with it and we were [to use Elder Oaks’ phrasing] “spectacularly wrong?”
I think all of these things are quite troubling, precisely because of point C. Follow divine will — but since we don’t even know how to discern divine will, it’s entirely possible that what you are taught is divine will has nothing to do with it.
As you point out, even formulating apologetic reasoning behind God’s commands is not fool-proof…I don’t want to use that old phrase cynically, but “when the Prophet has spoken, the [moral] thinking is done.”
There was a conversation in the ‘nacle several years ago asking if people would store jars of mud in their basement if the prophet asked. It was to illustrate that it was a virtue to do so without it making any sense, and eventually, the divine will would be shown (somehow the mud jars would protect the house from destruction or something like that). It’s an interesting glimpse into the psyche of a Mormon. I wouldn’t store jars of mud without a better explanation. It’s not a simple request. Also I live on the 30th floor and the security guards would get suspicious. 
Andrew S / subversiveasset, thanks for the thoughtful responses. I understand better what the original article is getting at and I’m pretty sure I agree with you about the important parts. The whole notion of the leaders do the thinking and we’re blessed when we obey – even if leaders are misguided – is troublesome and even dangerous to me.
To me moral reasoning is an exercise in logic. If the commandment / guidance / counsel produces inconsistent or hurtful results, then the source probably isn’t divine. I learned in my political economics courses that benevolent dictators are not particularly effective. Many Mormons do often seem to have an affinity towards prophet-kings.
One minor point I want to noodle on is where weak moral reasoning comes from. I see it all around me in many denominations. I don’t know enough to have an educated opinion.
Roy wrote:
This talk also gets honorable mention for quoting Governor Reagan, for use of the word orgasm, and for suggesting that pornography leads to homosexuality. But at least now I know that the face card thing was mentioned over the pulpit in GC.
And no link? Dude, throw a dog a bone!
mackay11 wrote:Roy wrote:
This talk also gets honorable mention for quoting Governor Reagan, for use of the word orgasm, and for suggesting that pornography leads to homosexuality. But at least now I know that the face card thing was mentioned over the pulpit in GC.
And no link? Dude, throw a dog a bone!
https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1974/10/god-will-not-be-mocked?lang=eng Roy wrote:mackay11 wrote:Roy wrote:
This talk also gets honorable mention for quoting Governor Reagan, for use of the word orgasm, and for suggesting that pornography leads to homosexuality. But at least now I know that the face card thing was mentioned over the pulpit in GC.
And no link? Dude, throw a dog a bone!
https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1974/10/god-will-not-be-mocked?lang=eng Wow:
Quote:
We hope that our parents and leaders will not tolerate pornography. It is really garbage, but today is peddled as normal and satisfactory food. Many writers seem to take delight in polluting the atmosphere with it. Seemingly, it cannot be stopped by legislation. There is a link between pornography and the low, sexual drives and perversions. We live in a culture which venerates the orgasm, streaking, trading wives, and similar crazes. How low can humans plunge! We pray with our Lord that we may be kept from being in the world. It is sad that decent people are thrown into a filthy area of mental and spiritual pollution. We call upon all of our people to do all in their power to offset this ugly revolution.
So is wanting (or only venerating) an orgasm as bad as wife swapping?!
This is a perfect example of giving members the moral tick-list, with sometimes disastrous consequences. Can you imagine a husband getting home from gen conf and telling his wife. “Sorry love, wanting an orgasm is next to murder… well… wife swapping… which is next to murder.”
Forgive me while I go and hide behind:
http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/commentary/approaching-mormon-doctrine Quote:Not every statement made by a Church leader, past or present, necessarily constitutes doctrine. A single statement made by a single leader on a single occasion often represents a personal, though well-considered, opinion, but is not meant to be officially binding for the whole Church. With divine inspiration, the First Presidency (the prophet and his two counselors) and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (the second-highest governing body of the Church) counsel together to establish doctrine that is consistently proclaimed in official Church publications. This doctrine resides in the four “standard works” of scripture (the Holy Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price), official declarations and proclamations, and the Articles of Faith. Isolated statements are often taken out of context, leaving their original meaning distorted.
Phew… Now I feel better.
Quote:So is wanting (or only venerating) an orgasm as bad as wife swapping?!
You know one thing I liked about the Larry King interview (which I wasn’t that keen on otherwise) was when King asked about sex and GBH replied, “we believe in it”l
Not a rant about little factories, fornie/adultery, p*rn or homosexuality, just a positive affirmation of it.
True modern media has overplayed the subject and abused it, but the idea that “we believe in it”, means it is God’s gift, which includes venerating the big O. Sometimes we go on about celestial marriage and families in the church, forgetting that physical pleasure pays a part in the first and produces the second. And there’s nothing wrong with it in that context.
Amen, Sam. A-freaking-men. Streaking is a trend? Maybe in 1977! And college pranks are hardly on par with wife trading, which sounds suspiciously like horse trading. So the wife is property being traded unlike husband swapping which would just be silly. The streaking made me laugh. Most Streakers are hideous too. Very seventies/eighties. Having said that, we had a streaker in the ward this very year. Mind you, he was only two or three. He started chasing the sister missionaries around!
Oh, the horror!*
[img]http://theblokeshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/jesusstreaker.jpg [/img] * That UK bobby never wore that particular helmet again and it’s now in a museum. Maybe American cops should start wearing them too. You know, just in case.
Roy wrote:mom3 wrote:Roy – I don’t have a link to this, but President Spencer W. Kimball preached against face cards in a lengthy talk in April 1976 or 1978 – Entitled “God Will Not Be Mocked”.
The list of concerns was long. In my local area the face card admonition became one of the big pick-ups from the talk.It was re-iterated again and again. Thanks for directing me to this, Mom3. The list of concerns was indeed long – the whole talk seemed to be a laundry list against the ills of modern society. The face card moment is one sentence long…This talk also gets honorable mention for quoting Governor Reagan, for use of the word orgasm, and for suggesting that pornography leads to homosexuality. But
at least now I know that the face card thing was mentioned over the pulpit in GC.It sounds like this talk was actually originally given in 1974. Just when I start to think I have already heard everything there is about the Church something new comes up. I had heard the idea that face cards are supposedly evil but I didn’t know that this point was specifically emphasized in Genearal Conference by the actual Church President at the time. I already thought the Miracle of Forgiveness was bad and hard to believe but this talk as a whole is right up there with the Fourteen Fundamentals when it comes to directly promoting blatantly false doctrines in my opinion.
Personally I don’t know what could be more of a mockery than having people that claim to speak for God preaching so many highly questionable ideas like this and making promises and threats about supposed consequences that could easily never materialize in most cases as far as we really know for sure. It’s not like Church members and investigators can’t directly test these theories and easily find out for themselves that many of these suggestions will never make them feel truly happy or fulfilled and that avoiding many of these supposed “sins” is often not nearly as serious or important as Church leaders act like it is. Look at the following vision of what life should be like according to this talk.
Spencer W. Kimball wrote:…
We look forward to the day when, in all of our communities…there would be a universal, continued movement to clean and repair and paint barns and sheds, build sidewalks, clean ditch banks, and make our properties a thing of beauty to behold…We call upon all of you to keep the Sabbath holy and make no Sunday purchases…We hope faithful Latter-day Saints will not use the playing cards…either with or without the gambling…Some have become casual about keeping up their year’s supply of commodities…even many farmers buy their milk from dairies and home owners buy their garden vegetables from the store… We believe in work…and we are not sure that the rapidly decreasing work week is beneficial to mankind…It would seem that we are play-conscious, travel-conscious, and our economy seems to be providing for the traveling public and the gaming public and the drinking public… We live in a culture which venerates the orgasm…and similar crazes…How low can humans plunge!…Ours is a comfort-loving society. We equate comfort with civilization. Thanks to our Heavenly Father and his Son that the program is austere…There is no halfway…May we repeat: Sex perversions of men and women can never replenish the earth and are definitely sin without excuse…We are aghast at the reports of young people going to surgery to limit their families… Have we accepted the easy way and veered off from the “strait and narrow” way to the easy and comfortable wayand the broad way which leads to sorrowful ends?… Don’t most people already have enough to worry about without trying to add all of this to their plate? Is this what the scriptures were trying to say when they talk about calling evil good and calling good evil (Isaiah 5:20, 2 Nephi 15:20), or is it the other way around? Apparently almost everything that is easy, convenient, comfortable, popular, fun, etc. is supposedly bad and bad for you and many things that seem like an unnecessary pain are actually so good and important that they are precisely the kind of things we should be spending every waking hour working on and obsessing about. I guess it’s not enough to just do your job and fulfill your basic responsibilities because we should supposedly spend our free time endlessly tidying up our houses and yards, stocking up on food storage, etc. instead of enjoying any real leisure time too much.
Frankly, the underlying concept in that talk (stripped down to the core only) is not a bad one – but, as often is the case, when someone goes beyond the mark and starts planting hedges about the law (moving past teaching principles and not letting people govern themselves), things get dicey and quickly plunge into the deep end. I really loved Pres. Kimball, for a lot of reasons, but he was a lot like Pres. Packer when it came to sexual morality. He saw those things in clearly defined, black-and-white terms – and he used them as a springboard into other issues he saw as moral in nature without any distinction or clear lines.
I made be way off base on this thought, but one thing that comes to mind is to look at the era the talk was given in. 1970 was a grey a)rea season or the beginning of grey area era’s. Previously (thinking 1950, 1960), lives were fairly clearly demarcated. Traditional value people looked a certain way. Appearance of property, etc. told a lot about the nature of the persons thoughts or ideology. The 1960’s really blew the lid off of the traditional but it still was clear what kind of “person” you were by appearance’s and interests. 1970 became a blended era. Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radical’s” advocated dressing like the establishment in order to promote your agenda. Kind of go with the flow. This created a challenge for people who used obvious outer appearances to set things clear. My guess is talks like this one were a way to create a strong line of separation. It seems archaic now, but it was probably an attempt to hit a pitch that maybe shouldn’t have been swung so hard at. Just my own thoughts.
Exactly, and there was also a blending of the two. Hippies sold out, bikers became bankers, longer hair and rock and roll was normalized, and smoking marijuana began to become, well, an ordinary rite of passage. Sex outside marriage became common. The Cold War improved, the Soviets lightened up, and the US and Soviet space craft docked, Nixon even did a deal with Mao, Africa gained freedom and American blacks gained massive concessions… but Vietnam also ended badly for the USA, the UK was in a state of collapse, people were massacred at the Olympics, Latin America was a mess, and you had apartheid and Watergate. So the whole time is riddled wih contradiction.
As for playing cards, how many other ordinary objects have been used for divination? Animals, plant stalks, stars, clouds, fire, water, jewelry, numbers, letters, hands, stones, tea leaves… only the last one sticks out. There’s no complaint about the rest unless you’re consciously using them for divination… so why complain about innocent card games?
Also I beg to differ about Pres. Kimball and Packer seeing sex as black and white. More like black and dark black.
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