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Actually, HSAB, if you haven’t eaten it in times of winter . . . 
Shawn wrote:It appears that the counsel regarding mild barley drinks and meat being used sparingly carry the same weight in section 89. So how about this: I challenge anyone who justifies drinking beer to also abstain from eating meat unless it’s winter or there’s a famine.
🙂
I guess since my wife & I have cut meat down to a monthly treat, or to the times we are guests in someone’s home, we should start applying the same frequency and rules to mild drinks.Sent from my GT-I9100M using Tapatalk 2
Oh no! I didn’t think about vegetarians. Old-Timer wrote:Actually, HSAB, if you haven’t eaten it in times of winter . . .
Well Ray, I live in Orange County, California…a place where there is no such thing as winter…or famine😆 The ban on beer has been particularly good for me recently. It’s a little hard to explain, but I really need to avoid it. If you drink oatmeal beer you wont get a Temple recommend but you can eat the steak you want! SamBee wrote:The ban on beer has been particularly good for me recently. It’s a little hard to explain, but I really need to avoid it.
I get this. While I no longer consider it inherently evil (just a drink) or drinking it to besome grave sin, that misused it can cause harm. My answers when praying about it recently are “its bad for
you“. Meaning specifically me. So I can adhere to that until it changes. I honestly think I’ll have a drink again at some point in my life but now is not the time… But this understanding has helped me be more accepting of others who do drink and made me happier in general. I come from a culture where we traditionally drink beer until we fall over, get kicked out or start vomiting. If you drink slowly, you get told to hurry up, and buy the next round. You’re continually keeping pace with others. It’s difficult to drink it in moderation because of that. I did try doing so, but in general it’s difficult. Years later I still get people badgering me about why I don’t drink it. I usually tell them I’m driving (on one occasion some stranger asked me why I didn’t get a taxi – I had to point out I lived twenty miles away!) Beer’s also gone up by a third in price since I stopped. People here, men especially, are so emotionally repressed that they have to drink heavily to force themselves to have fun. That only lasts a short while. Later they start arguments, fights, sing sports songs aggressively and make passes at whichever woman comes along the street.
So apart from my own feelings and craving, I really need to stay away from this. It’s nearly all beer this (some cider too) not spirits. It makes it very hard to be a moderate drinker.
Fortunately that’s not the culture here in Utah. Although binge drinking is becoming a big problem with young people because they’re so repressed that when they get a taste of freedom they explode. I know because I was there. The only times I ever passed out were my first year at college away from home. I got so sick the last time that the smell of alcohol would make me vomit and it took 2 years before I could tolerate just being around it. I’m also pretty sure some stuff happened that night I wouldn’t be proud of if I remembered all of it. It was an all around horrible experience. Not to mention 2 days of hangover and feeling like I vomited out half my organs. So yeah, it took a long time to get over that. …and then I went to Vegas for my 21st birthday.
Unfortunately it’s only a little over an hour to Nevada where my love of beer (and whisky) have combined with a love of gambling to cost me entirely too much money. Both of those are things that I really don’t feel like going back to right now because I simply can’t fund those particular habits. Even if I made a million dollars I doubt I could afford them. Not to mention my wife would not approve. I know the church says to put God even before my wife, but he doesn’t seem to be around to scold me as much as she is.
Interestingly both of those things (drinking/gambling) are discouraged by the church. So maybe the church is more inspired than I give it credit for sometimes…
I think it’s really a coping mechanism for me to say I’m going to drink in the future. Whenever I say I’m never going to do something I instantly feel like doing it. When I say “someday I’ll drink but not today” I’m fine. It was the same way on my mission. When I felt like going home I’d tell myself I could go home whenever I wanted but just not today. I made the whole 2 years.
So we’ll see.
As for the original topic, I remember I was on a trip to Europe with family and specifically was in France. I’d been out with an uncle drinking wine and some brandy and my dad pulled out the WoW in the hotel and started reading it to me to scold me. He also found the “not by way of commandment” part to be quite interesting.
I think how we teach the WoW is an example of how the church cherry-picks scriptures in general–even our own.
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