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Our YW did a bike trip a few years back. It was a nice trip, nearly 20 miles. – – – – –
DW reports that they talked about the “porn epidemic” during RS. I wasn’t in RS obviously so this is second hand but apparently a stat of 90% of men view porn was shared. One part of the message was that it’s not the end of the world if your husband views porn but I think the 90% comment might have an unintended consequence of making sisters suspicious of their husbands and sons. A mother sitting between her husband and her son while the sacrament is being passed next week at church:
:think: :problem: Although this is second hand this doesn’t surprise me. A few years back the BP did the rounds in the PH quorums to talk about porn. He presented a similar statistic (I think it was a little lower than 90% though, perhaps we’ve gotten worse) and said something to the effect of “only X number of people in this quorum have been by my office to talk about viewing porn, that means statistically there are a lot more of you that should be coming by my office.” Meanwhile everyone in the quorum is sitting there like a statue lest an involuntary blink or shifting their weight to try to get comfortable in those awful metal folding chairs gets misconstrued as cracking under the pressure and an admission of guilt. But wait, what if sitting there like a statue gets misconstrued! Han Solo: I don’t know, sit casual.
I do believe he has the best of intentions, he really wants to help people, but I could do without the implication that every male in church is viewing/addicted to porn and dangling that “X number of people have come to me” out there. It feels like a breach of confidence to the people that went to see the BP, even though no names were mentioned. I think it also steers people’s thoughts towards “I wonder who it was” for the rest of the class.
I would buy the idea that 90% of all males at some point in their lives looked at porn at least once. I do not buy that 90% of men regularly view porn or have done so more than few times (probably as teenagers). With the increase in availability of porn, I might buy that a significant percentage of young men (teenagers) have seen more porn and more explicit porn than previous generations. The idea that 90% of men ought to be in the bishop’s office is absurd, and in a ward like mine 90% would have to include at least one member of the bishopric as well as quorum leaders, YMP members, etc. And it should be noted that some women also look at porn. As a side note, it would appear that there is little wookie porn since they don’t seem to wear clothes very often. Maybe God should have created us in their image.
😆 What DJ said – and let’s not derail this thread and make it a long thread about porn. Two weeks ago we had a speaker get sick. Today he gave his talk. Ironically it was Elder Patrick Kearon’s talk on helping the refugee’s. I hadn’t seen the news yet, but the speaker referenced without details the events in Orlando. Today’s talk was so moving because the speaker connected refugee’s to all parts of life. There wasn’t a dry eye in the building. I wanted to go today as a family. But my son got sick, and we could not leave him alone, so my wife went alone to do her calling. Can’t seem to get traction in returning to church due to various circumstances…
In PH today our Bishop talked about his family members who came to Church today with a same sex couple. His family member asked:
Quote:will members of your ward be open & tolerant of them coming to church?
His response was: I wouldn’t expect them to be anything but open & tolerant to all people who came to worship with us.
He then said to the PH, I never thought I would ever feel like I would have to say anything like that to our membership.
He said: I expect us all, to always make anyone feel welcome to our meetings. Regardless of their circumstances.
I am proud that he said that.
I pretty much only go to sacrament right now and have no real ward since I’ve moved like 5 times in the past year. Right now I’m just bouncing around to different wards depending on when I feel like waking up and stuff. Easy to do when there is a building every 2 miles. The talks were solely focused on eternal marriage and families which was a little depressing. Couldn’t help but cringe at a few of the things the youth speaker said but I won’t hold it against her.
Church was a little weird. In RS we were on the “True Greatness” lesson. This resulted in mainly discussing how elders weren’t respected by the youth anymore and making fun of celebrities who try to step into politics. As one of the “youth” who happens to have some respect for celebrities who do something with their fame (to an extent, there are some crazies out there), this was a really uncomfortable lesson.
SnowEyes wrote:Church was a little weird. In RS we were on the “True Greatness” lesson. This resulted in mainly discussing how elders weren’t respected by the youth anymore
I think every generation says this. Not sure it’s anything new.
Unbelievable, SnowEyes. Our “True Greatness” lesson was wonderful: A discussion of people the class members knew who exemplified greatness by doing little things regularly that wouldn’t be seen as great by most people. One example was a “faithful woman” who had to divorce her temple-married husband because of “some really bad stuff” (including serious abuse) and how she was a champion for her kids and served others despite her situation.
HPG lesson on “True Greatness” was basically LGBQ are terrible and the ONLY way to measure greatness is “belief in church”. I wasn’t in a mood to even try and interact as I could tell I would get into it with the teacher. But I had my rainbow tie clip on! Second week and nobody has mentioned it. It was a tough Sunday for one reason. When I was headed home I saw a member in the hallway crying and being consoled by someone. I know the family and I can guess what was going on. Their spouse recently decided to quit attending church for reasons that we’re all too familiar with. My heart really breaks for them, I can feel the pain on both sides. I didn’t get an opportunity to speak to them, even if I did I wouldn’t know what to say. 😥 It was a wake up call for me to be more kind to people no matter what they treasure in life.
SM was nothing to crow about, the best speaker was actually the youth speaker, although the last guy didn’t get a fair shake because the in-between babbled on for over 25 minutes (and I have no idea what her talk was about). We’re behind in HPG, we had the lesson on tithing. Honestly I wasn’t in the greatest or most spiritual mood so I didn’t speak up but it was a full 30 minutes of prosperity gospel. I thought about chiming in with paying tithing (and keeping other commandments which it spread out to) because we love God or just want to instead of expecting some reward but wasn’t up to it.
We had the lesson in HPG on Reading the scriptures. What jumped out to me that is in the Section that talked about scriptures other that the Bible that we ought to be reading, it only mentioned the BofM and D&C. There was 3-4 paragraphs on each explaining why they were important. Nothing was mentioned on the PofGP. So I thumbed through the whole lesson, and found the PofGP only mentioned once in the intro where Hunter listed all the scriptures. Nothing else. Slowly it is fading away. Sheldon wrote:We had the lesson in HPG on Reading the scriptures. What jumped out to me that is in the Section that talked about scriptures other that the Bible that we ought to be reading, it only mentioned the BofM and D&C. There was 3-4 paragraphs on each explaining why they were important. Nothing was mentioned on the PofGP. So I thumbed through the whole lesson, and found the PofGP only mentioned once in the intro where Hunter listed all the scriptures. Nothing else. Slowly it is fading away.
Yep — and its stuff like this that convinces me I’m on the right path with my own agnostic approach to Mormonism. Shouldn’t a true religion like ours be up front about the truth, and let the outcomes materialize — “Do what is right, let the consequence follow”…??? Or is that simply for the Sunday cameras?
If we were not making “only true church” claims, I probably wouldn’t hold them to this standard. I would see this as the evolution of our understanding in the murky waters of religion. But if it is truly inspired, if the PoGP was inspired by prophets and translated by JS then how can we just slowly move it out of our canon?
Perhaps this is one isolated incidence of de-emphasis, but taken with the low-key way they released the essays,I can’t say confidently that it isn’t.
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