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Eternity4me wrote:
While DJ may not see this life or the PH as a test, just because God knows what we will do doesn’t mean we do, and that we shouldn’t be given the choices. I didn’t suggest the test was for God to see what we do, it is to see how we deal with the authority. It is about what WE learn from it, and how we use it to bless others. Or, if we choose to allow it to bless our lives.
I see the disagreement between DJ and E4me. There is plenty of room for differing opinions here. However I wonder if the disagreement would largely disappear if this was phrased as an opportunity for growth rather than a test. Are we really testing a pre-existing condition to determine how strong we are at the core – or are we placed into an earthly experience that is generally designed to give us opportunities to develop strength that we did not have before.
I am more agnostic about the specifics of what we are to learn from a particular hardship or responsibility (holding the “priesthood” in this case), but on more of a macro level I believe in God providing us an earthly opportunity for growth.
I’m actually pretty agnostic about it myself, Roy. But if one believes that God is omnipotent, the Alpha and Omega, then I see no way He could not see the end from the beginning regardless of what we humans do. Just saying. My actual view is that God has little interest in us. Sometimes, Stan, I think there is learning by reviewing the assumptions behind our questions, and try to see things from a new perspective that help us move forward. I’ve used this quote many times on this site, but will quote CS Lewis again…
Quote:If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellant; for it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellant which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know … the truth we need most is hidden precisely in the doctrines you least like and least understand.
Authority and Truth claims from the church can be good topics to dig into, and as I’ve done that over the years, have come to appreciate other religions with far greater respect.stan wrote:This goes back to what I mentioned earlier, which is that I can see how authority is beneficial to an earthly institution claiming to have it. So I suppose that if God is interested in the advancement of that institution he might lend his power and authority to it. But wouldn’t you expect that institution to be the most effective one if God was going to put all His eggs in that one basket?
The allegory of the tame and wild olive trees is a good one to think about. Because it seems to teach that even if one tree was tame and produced good fruit…it actually cannot survive on its own without grafting in wild tree branches from time to time, to provide a strength needed in order to produce any fruit at all.
Another good scriptural allegory is looking at the Brother of Jared, because I like the story that God recognizes the problem of light in the boats, and allows the Brother of Jared to figure out a way to work around the problem. Not because there is only one way to solve the problem, but that any decent idea by a fallible mortal is fine for God to work with and still accomplish His work…sometimes despite the mortal involvement.
Perhaps the authority the Church claims does not conflict with the idea God is working with all His children in ways that still accomplish His work. If we take that perspective and then dig into questions of why bother having authority at all, or what are the limits of the authority, or other logical questions, we might better understand the purpose of the church and it’s truth and authority claims.
Have you studied to origins of the priesthood and how we have what we have today? It wasn’t clean…like an angel didn’t just reveal it to Joseph and now we have it just the way the angel revealed it. It didn’t work simple and clean. It developed as it needed to, until we have what we have today.
Perhaps God doesn’t have his eggs in one basket, even if us mormons like to think that we are on the right team. Perhaps God wants us to really learn what truth and authority really are. (PS-I am sincerely trying to view things differently, so these are my views…I hope I don’t come across condescending or that I have figured something out…I’m still just doing my best with what I have. Thanks for letting me share my thoughts. Your questions are good ones.)
I always thought God knows our choices before we make them but since He is perfect He has to let it play out for good or bad, or there would wiggle room for his honor and fairness to be questioned. Eg: Cain was a liar and murderer from the “beginning” but he would certainly question God’s judgment if he was punished by God before he actually killed Abel. This BoM verse sums up why I think He has to let it play out even though He knows there endgame results:
“Every nation, kindred, tongue, and people shall see eye to eye and shall confess before God that his judgments are just” (Mosiah 16:1).
Anyway this is an interesting thread
And I’m glad we have agency even though I’ve not done so great with mine. I guess we would all be some characters in a Sims game with the devil at the controller if his plan was chosen instead of Christ’s. After watching my daughter play this game, that is a scary thought. If any of her sims showed independence or refused to obey she would simply kill them off. Quote:DJ said:
My actual view is that God has little interest in us.
I admit that I am pretty much there myself. It’s not that I don’t think God loves me, but that He will let life play out, and there is little hope that He will step in and change things for me when I pray for such a thing. I believe He lets life happen. As for the “test” issue, perhaps the word opportunity is better. I believe God lets us figure out things on our own, much like the Brother of Jared, and that there are myriad ways of handling things. I want to believe He has interest in me, I just don’t want to hang my hat on it. This feeling has definitely affected my desire to pray. Why pray to a God that won’t/doesn’t intervene anyway? I honestly miss the faith I used to have, but at the same time I seemed to pray for decades and nothing seemed to change. Quite the conundrum. Now, I pray more out of habit than intent.
So where does the PH stand in all of this? If God let’s life happen, or He doesn’t have much interest in us, what benefit is it to us to get PH blessings? If you need the PH to motivate you to serve others, I suppose that is a laudable thing, but women don’t have the PH and we have plenty of opportunities to serve others, mostly involving food preparation
😆 . (Yes, I know that was a sexist remark.) Maybe, just maybe, God gave men the PH so they would have an increased desire to serve their fellow man. (I didn’t want to get in trouble by straying off topic, so I thought I better bring it back to the OP🙂 )Eternity4me wrote:Quote:DJ said:
My actual view is that God has little interest in us.
I admit that I am pretty much there myself. It’s not that I don’t think God loves me, but that He will let life play out, and there is little hope that He will step in and change things for me when I pray for such a thing. I believe He lets life happen. As for the “test” issue, perhaps the word opportunity is better. I believe God lets us figure out things on our own, much like the Brother of Jared, and that there are myriad ways of handling things. I want to believe He has interest in me, I just don’t want to hang my hat on it. This feeling has definitely affected my desire to pray. Why pray to a God that won’t/doesn’t intervene anyway? I honestly miss the faith I used to have, but at the same time I seemed to pray for decades and nothing seemed to change. Quite the conundrum. Now, I pray more out of habit than intent.
So where does the PH stand in all of this? If God let’s life happen, or He doesn’t have much interest in us, what benefit is it to us to get PH blessings? If you need the PH to motivate you to serve others, I suppose that is a laudable thing, but women don’t have the PH and we have plenty of opportunities to serve others, mostly involving food preparation
😆 . (Yes, I know that was a sexist remark.) Maybe, just maybe, God gave men the PH so they would have an increased desire to serve their fellow man. (I didn’t want to get in trouble by straying off topic, so I thought I better bring it back to the OP🙂 )I do believe God loves us as in “God loves us so he sent his Son.” Like you, I think he just lets life happen and lets us (and maybe wants us to) figure stuff out for ourselves. Prayer is an issue for me as well, I seldom pray privately and I avoid doing so publicly (no eye contact with the one conducting generally works – thank you phone). For me or my family I don’t ask for anything, and if I do end up in a public prayer situation I keep it very general (ask for the Spirit, etc.). Kind of a funny story: my daughter in grad school is visiting for the holidays and as we walked in to church on Sunday a counselor in the bishopric (who was conducting) asked he if she knew anyone who’d like to say the opening prayer. She named her friend, who she knew was there but not in the foyer. He asked her again and she named her brother. We went into the chapel and sat down. TBM wife asked DD why she didn’t offer to say the prayer. DD replied: “He didn’t ask me, he asked if I knew someone who would. If he wanted me to say the prayer he should have just asked.”
😆 I hope someone learned from the situation.
And I’m with you on the priesthood as well. I’m not sure the priesthood holds any actual power, and I’m not sure it’s necessary to our eternal salvation or exaltation. Last month I did the lesson on the work of women in the church. Indeed, despite my best efforts to keep it out of that realm, there were a couple comments about the role of women to be nurturers and caregivers, doing the cooking, etc. FWIW, I do most of the cooking in my home (mostly because of our schedules, but I don’t mind cooking) and our HPG has a couple widowers and a couple never marrieds who seem to manage cooking and caring for themselves. Anyway, I’m not sure men need the priesthood to serve and I think it’d be great of we didn’t – but I do think it provides opportunities to serve, mostly through home teaching. In answer to the OP, I don’t know why God would give men the priesthood, and I don’t know that He did. In my TBM days I thought I did know, but things are so much more gray now.
rachael wrote:I always thought God knows our choices before we make them but since He is perfect He has to let it play out for good or bad, or there would wiggle room for his honor and fairness to be questioned.
I am not sure if He really knows all our choices, or just knows us to know what we would likely choose. But he has to let it play out for us to know who we are.This strikes me as a sunday school answer, but it seems if you accept the premise that this life is a test to learn, grow, and develop, that it’s the perfect place to try a bit of godly power. In theory we’ll all be gods someday, right, so we might as well try it with training wheels. This next piece is *not* meant to justify women not having the priesthood. In addition to given men the priesthood, he also gave them the power to create life (along with women of course). In a practical temporal sense, to me it seems that bearing children is a much greater responsibility than the priesthood. So a 12 year old can pass the sacrament and a bishop can excommunicate, but humans have the power to create life, destroy life, and make life happy or miserable.
To me the priesthood goes hand in hand with a wise stewardship of everything we have already and is mostly symbolic. Other powers are very real and immediately tangible and – for me – priesthood doesn’t top the list of powers that God would have to think carefully about giving to humans.
Roadrunner wrote:Other powers are very real and immediately tangible and – for me – priesthood doesn’t top the list of powers that God would have to think carefully about giving to humans.
I agree. Especially when things can all be worked out in the next life to compensate for failures or lack of opportunities in this life.
Heber: “I am not sure if He really knows all our choices, or just knows us to know what we would likely choose. But he has to let it play out for us to know who we are” I hope you’re right since it would give agency more meaning, the concept that life is a test line more authenticity, and things still have odds, variables, and wild cards in the hand we are dealt in this game of life. OTOH, it takes away a portion of God,’s omnipotence and that is not very comforting either.
Heber13 wrote:I am not sure if He really knows all our choices, or just knows us to know what we would likely choose. But he has to let it play out for us to know who we are.
This is going to sound dumb, but it’s not like that’s stopped me from posting before. Do
wereally know all our choices or do we know what we would likely choose in any given situation? Would knowledge of a decision (outcomes aside) influence the decision making process? Does that answer change when we have knowledge of a decision we make vs. knowledge of a decision someone else makes? It seems like a choice in isolation becomes a bit of trivia. Perhaps it isn’t knowledge of a choice but knowledge of the outcome that would have the greater influence. To tie things back into the discussion, if we define god as being omniscient I lean toward this life being for our benefit. What do we derive out of life? We aren’t proving ourselves to god – he knows everything, we are proving ourselves to ourselves.
Getting back to the OP, why should god give men the priesthood? I’ve got a range of thoughts on the priesthood.
Women perform ordinances in the temple. They are never ordained to the priesthood. How can they perform ordinances without being ordained at some point? Maybe they are, but one thing that comes to mind is that maybe they are born with it (maybe it’s maybelline, sorry had to). If women are born with it then perhaps men are as well. Perhaps everyone on the planet is born with the priesthood. So, why all this business of the one true church with a focus on ordinations performed by someone with the proper authority to act on god’s behalf?
In that train of thought maybe the priesthood is just meant to calm peoples fears, give people that extra sense of security that what they’re doing is actually recognized by god, otherwise there’s this lingering doubt. God could have meant for it to be that way. The priesthood really wasn’t needed, but some people are struggling to feel accepted, so here you go. A faith aid provided by god surrogates. It might also be a subconcious invention of man for those same reasons, to calm disquiet.
In other cases it might have been an invention meant to control or, more innocently, establish societal order. The most primitive form of government. Again I see how this can be driven by deity or driven entirely by man.
I also view the priesthood as being a confidence builder. It’s like Dumbo’s feather, you aren’t doing anything that you couldn’t have done on your own but you were able to use the priesthood as a crutch of sorts to give you the faith to do something that you thought you couldn’t do. I don’t see that as being a human construct, does a placebo work when you know it’s a placebo? If that’s an aspect of the priesthood that would likely come from god.
None of those things should be specific to males. Women should benefit from the blessings of holding the priesthood and I think the temple says that they will. It’s becomes a question of timing. This is going to sound harsher than I intend it to sound, it’s hard to communicate through a soulless medium, but one natural aspect of attaining any “power” is that you don’t want to share it because that would threaten your power. The rich get richer for a reason. It’s human nature. Why would the natural man share power. It’s one of the things pointed out in RSR, JS shared power… which is in many ways prophetic.
This is also going to sound harsh but I don’t mean it to be. Did god give men the priesthood or did men take it? Men may have just up and decided one day that they have the priesthood. God had nothing to do with it. If that’s the case women will probably need to follow a similar path.
I think Stan early on acknowledged he was intending the thread to be about why God would give “mankind” or mortals priesthood at all, and less about gender. rachael wrote:I hope you’re right since it would give agency more meaning, the concept that life is a test line more authenticity, and things still have odds, variables, and wild cards in the hand we are dealt in this game of life. OTOH, it takes away a portion of God,’s omnipotence and that is not very comforting either.
I’m not sure it takes away any omnipotence. I like to think of life as an experience, not a test. Yes, God will see if we will do all things he commands, but he doesn’t need to know every choice we’ll make if all choices lead to experience for us to gain. It is less about right answers, or him knowing every choice, and more about growing and progressing, no matter what we choose or don’t. His omnipotence is, “Peace, be still. And know that I am God.”I’m not sure about priesthood power (directly from God) either. I’m an endowed, single woman of 25, but the ordinances unraveled for me when I coupled them with agency and the idea of things being worked out in the next life. For example, if a couple got married in the temple in this life, but deep down were unhappy, and in the next life they don’t want to be married, as far as I understand it, they don’t have to be married to each other. By fact of agency. I took that thinking and applied it to different scenarios, and concluded that what the Church calls essential and saving ordinances don’t carry the same weight for me. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think they’re beautiful or carry deep symbolic meaning, but I don’t think of them literally at all anymore.
I agree with nibbler when he talked about man needing it to feel justified. I know plenty of people that don’t feel comfortable with their decisions unless they have enough people or enough authority to back it up. That’s fine by me, but I won’t be in the same party.
To answer the question directly, I’m not sure that humans do have a conferred priesthood power. I think all the power we need already lies inside each of us, and it’s just waiting to be discovered.
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