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Old-Timer wrote:
The handbook says that such discussions should not happen between church leaders and youth – especially in youth interviews. It’s not worded clearly enough, imo – but it’s there.
I hope this is made clear soon to correct lifetimes worth of contrary practice. I remember a combined Pr/RS meeting just 4 or 5 years ago where our bishop got up and said “I want to be very clear about what happens in our youth interviews – we talk to the youth about masturbation.” I guess some parents had a problem with it and that’s why he wanted it to not be a surprise. I remember the question when I turned 12 and had my first youth interview before being ordained a deacon. I didn’t know what the word meant, and really had no ability to fully understand it at the time.
… doug wrote:I figured that the wording was changed to bring 19th century usage in line with the modern vernacular. Or was it really the case that technically anything was fair game except ‘the act’?
I know someone that believes that. He told me that his temple covenants only restricted intercourse and that everything else was ok. I was unfamiliar with the 19th century use of the word. It would seem that the word ‘molestation’ has had a similar morph in meaning.
behappy wrote:We teach our youth that girls are damaged goods if they fool around with a boy or that boys are damaged goods if they look at porn or masturbate. I rarely hear anyone talk about self respect or that one can be forgiven for their mistakes. The message is don’t do this because others will not accept you if you do.
I think this has wider application than just the law of chastity. Not much talk on forgiveness. We are all damaged goods and no amount of seminary graduation, mission service, and temple marriage is going to change that. I do think that the current emphasis on chastity keeps some kids out of painful situations. There are both risks and rewards.
I also think that there is some truth to “others will not accept you if you do.” I am reminded of a visit to another church and the youth pastor was doing an object lesson on labels and the baggage we carry. He was wearing a white T-shirt with labels (like stupid and klutz) as well as sin words (like lust and pornography). He also had the youth load him with piles of luggage to represent the weight. In a description of the words on his shirt he briefly mentioned that he had struggled with pornography. The overall lesson was how the atonement frees us of our burdens and allows us to break free from the labels. I couldn’t help but wonder how this would work in the LDS church. If the scout master or youth Sunday school teacher bore testimony of how the atonement has helped them through struggles with pornography, how would that be received? It would certainly be counter-cultural.
I think the issue is larger than chastity, but that it just becomes more acute with “sexual sin.”
Quote:how do you view the church’s law of chastity ?
As castration.
wow ! some interesting discussion here ! and what has been said needed to be said. that is one problem with being an active member – that you can’t have open discussions about things like this, it seems, anywhere at church. a number of years ago i decided to go into a yahoo chat room. it was anti-mormon, but i was interested to see what the nature of the language was going to be. i may have been active at the time. there was a group in there talking and someone said something about “the collective”. i knew the individual who brought it up was using the
Star Trek: The New Generationanalogy of the “Cyborg” or “the collective”. as i listened i felt very demeaned and left. but as the years have gone by i have thought of this reference to “the collective” and in a very real sense we, as active members, are plugged into a “collective”, a form of collective consciousness of a system or society of religious worship and it doesn’t necessarily just happen to Mormons but other religious societies as well (Catholics, Jehovah Witnesses, Scientologists, Wiccans etc.). In a smaller sense you could say a “clique” at work(or at church, or school) is a form of “collective”. i bring this up because how some active members who view the LoC, may be part of that collective thinking I mentioned above, who wholeheartedly accept the LoC lock, stock and barrel, or any other “cultural practice” related to church (e.g. importance of a mission for mission-age men, only date return missionary, the wrongness of masturbation, etc). I’m not preaching against the church per say but that we need to be aware of that aspect of our Mormon culture. A good case in point was Brigham Young’s teachings about blacks and the priesthood. General membership just went along with it at the time and no one opposed or challenged Young at the time, but as the years have gone by, common sense ruled and the church finally changed it’s policy on allowing blacks to have the priesthood (many, many years later).
mercyngrace wrote:…Regarding the fornication next to murder doctrine – I also agree this is dangerous. This comes from Alma’s discussion with Corianton and seems to be misunderstood.
Corianton didn’tjustfollow after a harlot, he was a hypocrite and led people away because his actions were incongruous with his preaching. The reason this doctrine is so dangerous is that it ranks sins, creating a hierarchy of self-righteousness and judgmentalism. Kids who’ve broken the law of chastity and try to repent, may never feel truly clean… Old-Timer wrote:Yeah, the idea that fornication is next to murder is one of my pet peeves.
It’s just NOT consistent with what Corianton actually did and what Alma actually said about it. It’s just a bad reading / interpretation of the passage in question– and there is NO other passage in all of our scriptures that makes that claim…Maybe I’ll break out my parser’s pen and write a post about that passage at some point.
I’d really like to hear your interpretation of Alma 39:3-5 Ray because it seems like the correlation committee, Boyd K. Packer, etc. have mostly taken this to mean that any sex outside of marriage is literally the most “abominable” sin to God other than murder and denying the Holy Ghost. This idea has become so ridiculous and unrealistic nowadays that I doubt that any of these Church leaders would have ever thought of it on their own without reading these scriptures.
Actually I don’t have a problem with the idea of ranking sins in general. For example, I definitely believe that cold-blooded murder is worse than lying or stealing a candy bar. However, the problem with ranking fornication so high on the list of no-nos is that it is so common and often results in no apparent harm to anyone. Basically, some Church leaders and publications are saying that the majority of adults in the US and probably the majority in the Church as well if you count all the inactive members have been guilty of a sin that is allegedly almost as bad as murder. This hurts the Church’s credibility and makes us look like extreme fanatics.
There’s a reason why things like armed robbery and aggravated assault and battery are against the law but sex between consenting adults is not. Most people don’t need a prophet to tell them that something that results in understandable harm and injustice for real victims is clearly worse than something that often results in little or no harm to anyone involved. Even if what Jimmy Swaggert did was worse than average because he was knowingly breaking the law and it probably disappointed people that trusted him and caused some to lose faith is that really worse than attempted murder or almost any other felonies?
DevilsAdvocate wrote:However, the problem with ranking fornication so high on the list of no-nos is that it so common and often results in no apparent harm to anyone. Basically, some Church leaders and publications are saying that the majority of adults in the US and probably the majority in the Church as well if you count all the inactive members have been guilty of a sin that is allegedly almost as bad as murder. This hurts the Church’s credibility and makes us look like extreme fanatics.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to minimize something like sexual immorality because it’s common. And I don’t think it makes us look like fanatics or hurts the Church’s credibility. Some things are wrong and hedging on that is what makes you not look credible, not the other way around. How it’s ranked is up to God and what anyone else thinks about it is their opinion and no more than that.
GBSmith wrote:DevilsAdvocate wrote:However, the problem with ranking fornication so high on the list of no-nos is that it so common and often results in no apparent harm to anyone. Basically, some Church leaders and publications are saying that the majority of adults in the US and probably the majority in the Church as well if you count all the inactive members have been guilty of a sin that is allegedly almost as bad as murder. This hurts the Church’s credibility and makes us look like extreme fanatics.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to minimize something like sexual immorality because it’s common. And I don’t think it makes us look like fanatics or hurts the Church’s credibility.
Some things are wrong and hedging on that is what makes you not look credible, not the other way around. How it’s ranked is up to God and what anyone else thinks about it is their opinion and no more than that.They could have used the same basic reasoning to defend the racial discrimination and polygamy and insist that God decides what is right or wrong not us and that not standing up for these principles would hurt their credibility by contradicting Brigham Young, Joseph Smith, etc. Instead, it looks like the effects of these changes have been completely positive. The truth is that opinions matter and make a difference. I don’t care if they want to continue to preach that fornication is wrong and that marriage would typically be better; what I don’t agree with at all is the idea that it is almost as bad as murder. As far as I’m concerned there is no way that is remotely accurate and exaggerating the seriousness of it will not really prevent it either, it’s just as likely to result in excessive and unnecessary guilt after the fact or alienate an increasing number of members that already don’t believe it’s half that bad based on their own experience.
Good discussion. I have lots to say on the subject but I can’t right now. Keep talking!!! CG
DevilsAdvocate wrote:I don’t care if they want to continue to preach that fornication is wrong and that marriage would typically be better; what I don’t agree with at all is the idea that it is almost as bad as murder.
No argument there but to be honest I’ve not heard anyone preach that or write about that for as long as I can remember. I think it’s part of mormonism’s collective memory but as I say I don’t think it’s an issue.
Quote:As far as I’m concerned there is no way that is remotely accurate and exaggerating the seriousness of it will not really prevent it either, it’s just as likely to result in excessive and unnecessary guilt after the fact or alienate an increasing number of members that already don’t believe it’s half that bad based on their own experience.
Guilt is not bad if it moves a person to change but not feeling guilty and not changing because a person’s experience that fornication is not so bad is a problem. Expecting people to be chaste in the temple covenant sense of the word is just a standard. You live it or you don’t but I don’t think you can rationalize your way out of it. And as I said before expecting sexual morality and fidelity has a lot of positives and the opposite really doesn’t. That’s why I have no problem with the churches stance.
Where was fornication called the sin next to murder? Do we know its origins? I know Spencer W Kimball used it in the Miracle of Forgiveness, but I don’t know if he was the original source. I’ve been watching this thread and have been trying to formulate a coherent post but it just isn’t coming fast enough with the way the thread has moved so I’ll just jump in. I think the Law of Chastity as defined in the Temple Endowment is the standard. As such I have no problem with it but then I have been married 36 years and am no longer a young man with raging hormones. If I was a young unmarried man with raging hormones and looking for a wife I might feel differently about it.
Where I disagree is how the Law of Chastity is taught, it is not taught the same across the LDS Church. Look at For the Strength of Youth, Principles of the Gospel, the various “garbage” that is taught at the BYUs, especially what I saw about Ricks (probably on NOM). No sexual intercourse except within marriage, OK, but no passionate kissing, lying next to each other, no back rubs, the big M, etc. I feel that the LDS Church has produced and continues to produce sexually immature and dysfunctional people, often resulting in bad situations such as incompatibilty at the best and probably abuse at the worse.
This is a really, really difficult topic for me. My daughter, now age 28, was sailing through high school here in Salt Lake, planning to serve a mission and then marry in the temple. On school holidays, she and her girlfriends would go downtown and do baptisms for the dead or a similar activity. She attended Seminary, went to girls’ camp and EFY and attended all of her church meetings regularly. Enter “the boyfriend.” 😈 I didn’t like him from the minute he introduced himself, but she fell head over heels for him (probably because he came from money and absolutely showered her with extravagant gifts, etc. and took her to places most kids her age would never think of being able to afford). She told me he was LDS and that his parents were married in the temple. What she didn’t tell me was that he had no use for the church and his parents’ marriage was on the rocks. Anyway, she was about 16 or 17 when they started dating. I was always polite to him and never spoke badly of him to her, but I’m pretty sure she knew how I felt. Anyway, she stopped going to church because she was always invited to go to a movie and out to dinner with him, boating or some other activity with him on Sunday. I’d fought over church attendance with her brother and had lost. I figured she knew how I felt and she knew where she was supposed to be on Sundays. Well one thing led to another and of course, she ended up starting to sleep with him. She didn’t get pregnant; at least they had the good sense to use birth control.Actually, after sleeping with him for the first time, she was so overcome with guilt that she immediately made an appointment with our bishop to confess what she’d done. (The bishop knew long before I did.) Well, I wasn’t there with them, but judging from what she told me later on, I guess he absolutely came unglued. He tried to get her to tell him her boyfriend’s name (he was in another ward) so that he could inform his bishop. She refused, saying it wasn’t her place. He also insisted that they break up. She told him it wasn’t going to happen. Well, after a very long time in his office, she left to come home. She was completely devastated by his reaction and complete lack of compassion for how she felt. He told her he wanted to meet with her one night the following week so that he could help her begin “the repentance process.” She spent the entire week stressed out over the meeting, only to find out when she went over to the ward to meet with him that he’d completely spaced it and never showed up. He never said another word to her about it. By the time I confronted her a few months later and asked her if she and “the boyfriend”
😈 had been sleeping together, she admitted it, but my efforts to talk to her about it went very poorly. About all I could get out of her was that she had committed a sin that was so bad that it could never be forgiven. Honestly, I don’t know where she ever got that, but she insisted that that’s what she’d been told in Seminary. By then, she was pretty much resigned to the fact that there was murder and then there was what she’d done and that the line between the two was so fine as to hardly be distinguishable. There was nothing I could say to make a difference. She ended up marrying “the boyfriend.”😈 I know almost for sure that by the time she did, she wasn’t so much in love as she was resigned to the fact that she was “damaged goods” and that nobody with any standards would want her. The marriage lasted 4 1/2 miserable years, during which time he constantly verbally abused and/or completely ignored her. He was controlling, superficial and manipulative.After 4 1/2 years of being miserable, she began to have an affair with a man 20 years her senior. Her husband found out and filed for divorce. It was an ugly divorce but at least there were no children. She has been with “the lover”
SilentDawning wrote:Where was fornication called the sin next to murder? Do we know its origins? I know Spencer W Kimball used it in the Miracle of Forgiveness, but I don’t know if he was the original source.
Alma 39. He doesn’t specifically say sex = murder, but it is implied, listed in the heading and taken by most to mean that.
I think what Katzpur just told us is more common than than any of us, especially the leaders, want to believe.
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