Ludd wrote:
There was a guy in the stake I grew up in who was supposedly one of the most doctrinally knowledgeable people ever to walk the earth (Patriarch, Mission Pres, Stake Pres). I asked him about this men/women ratio problem in the CK. He said that all the males who died before 8 would be angels-only in the CK, but that the females would be resurrected with "a full set of equipment under the hood" in order to "bear the souls of men" (and women also, I presume). He said the only men who would procreate in the CK had to have been married in mortality and sealed to his wife and all that jazz. I don't remember if he said it was good enough to get the sealing via proxy after you were dead. I seem to remember it that you actually had to have been married and sealed while on the earth "by the Priesthood".
I think this justification is probably close to what Joseph Smith and BY would have declared, to tell the truth. In fact, I think they would have gone further. Since the real purpose of polygyny was to increase the offspring of the alpha males, they simply wouldn't care if there was a surplus of males in the CK or not. Nor would they have cared if their practice of polygyny left LDS males without mates, either, during their lifetimes. It was about the alpha males getting all the wives they wanted, and the less worthy males (ie, the ones with lesser callings in the church) could just remain mateless in this life or the next. They could be ministering angels. They just had to get out of the way of the alpha males.
Of course, I'm speculating, but I think it's a justified speculation, given BY's other comments. He said that a woman could leave her husband without a divorce if she preferred a man "higher in authority." He also said that men who weren't willing to practice polygyny in the next life would lose the one wife they had to other men who embraced polygyny. I understand that the modern LDS church no longer practices or teaches these things, but these type of statements are why I think BY, and, by extension given his behavior, Joseph Smith didn't really care if other men were left without wives due to their own hoarding of wives.
LDS men who seem to almost fantasize about having more than one wife in the CK need to realize that the cost of polygyny may be their one wife, given to an alpha male in the CK. If BY's vision of the next life is accurate, it's the alpha males who will get as many wives as they want, no matter the cost to others. LDS men will be victims of this practice as surely as LDS women will be. There's only one winner in this scenario: alpha males, or, In other words, men with the highest callings in the LDS church.
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