Question about the Race/Lineage ban.

[_Drifting]

There is no doctrinal notion that people with black skin are inherently inferior.

You're joking, right?

Book of Mormon, skin of blackness vs white and delightsomeness....

2 Nephi 5:21
"And the Lord had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them."

[_DarkHelmet]

There is no doctrinal notion that people with black skin are inherently inferior.

You're joking, right?

Book of Mormon, skin of blackness vs white and delightsomeness....

BC Space would claim the KKK was not a racist organizations if he had to.

[_Sethbag]

So you agree that the Khoisan appear to be a distinct lineage from the Bantu, but you assert that it's likely that somewhere along the line, Bantu and Khoisan must have hooked up, so that all living Khoisan prior to 1978 had a high probability of relation to Bantu going back however many generations? So the Khoisan would have been "guilty" via a "one drop" type of doctrine?

How do you know that if you go back a thousand generations, you don't have any Bantu in your family tree?

Anyhow, who said the Bantu were of the lineage of Cain? On what basis does this claim rest?

That's the whole problem here. There are actual, real lineages of people in Africa, and then we have this made-up BS about the "lineage of Cain", and Egyptus, and Ham the son of Noah, and somehow the made-up BS became applicable to all Africans, regardless of what actual genetic lineage they descend from.

In order to avoid problems, you'd really have to A) delineate all of the African genetic lineages, B) specify which lineages descended from Cain, and C) offer up some kind of proof that this is true. But the church never did this. They simply banned all black Africans. Apparently the church believed that all black Africans descended from Cain. We can infer this from the historical fact that blackness and Africanness were all it took to be banned from the priesthood.

This is scientifically unjustifiable even if you assume that the LDS scriptural description of a lineage of Cain and a justifiable lineage-based priesthood ban were actually accepted as fact.

Trying to map the church's scriptural claims to the real world of genetics and lineages just doesn't make any sense at all, when in fact the actual behavior of the church seems to have been based on false notions of race and the idea of Africans not as the progenitors of the entire human race (the current scientific notion), but as just an offshoot branch of humanity descended from one of Noah's son's after the Flood.

No matter how you slice it, the actions of the church were laughably unscientific, superstitious, based on premises we now know to be false, and racist. Try as you might, the church simply cannot wriggle over, under, around, or through the evidence and come out clean on the other side of this one.

[_Drifting]

So you agree that the Khoisan appear to be a distinct lineage from the Bantu, but you assert that it's likely that somewhere along the line, Bantu and Khoisan must have hooked up, so that all living Khoisan prior to 1978 had a high probability of relation to Bantu going back however many generations? So the Khoisan would have been "guilty" via a "one drop" type of doctrine?

How do you know that if you go back a thousand generations, you don't have any Bantu in your family tree?

Anyhow, who said the Bantu were of the lineage of Cain? On what basis does this claim rest?

That's the whole problem here. There are actual, real lineages of people in Africa, and then we have this made-up b***s*** about the "lineage of Cain", and Egyptus, and Ham the son of Noah, and somehow the made-up b***s*** became applicable to all Africans, regardless of what actual genetic lineage they descend from.

In order to avoid problems, you'd really have to A) delineate all of the African genetic lineages, B) specify which lineages descended from Cain, and C) offer up some kind of proof that this is true. But the church never did this. They simply banned all black Africans. Apparently the church believed that all black Africans descended from Cain. We can infer this from the historical fact that blackness and Africanness were all it took to be banned from the priesthood.

This is scientifically unjustifiable even if you assume that the LDS scriptural description of a lineage of Cain and a justifiable lineage-based priesthood ban were actually accepted as fact.

Trying to map the church's scriptural claims to the real world of genetics and lineages just doesn't make any sense at all, when in fact the actual behavior of the church seems to have been based on false notions of race and the idea of Africans not as the progenitors of the entire human race (the current scientific notion), but as just an offshoot branch of humanity descended from one of Noah's son's after the Flood.

No matter how you slice it, the actions of the church were laughably unscientific, superstitious, based on premises we now know to be false, and racist. Try as you might, the church simply cannot wriggle over, under, around, or through the evidence and come out clean on the other side of this one.

I posted a question previously that went along the lines of 'what questions in a TR interview prior to 1978 did Bishops ask black people that they didn't ask white people?' if they didn't ask anything different then exclusion must have only been made on the basis of skin colour.

[_Sethbag]

Members like me will often become extremely disturbed by the fact that the LDS worldview posits a history of humanity that has been blown out of the water by modern science. Apologists and other appeasers will then say that hey, none of that is pertinent to our eternal salvation, and just doesn't matter.

But here we have an actual situation where the worldview of the church lead to real-world actions, which in light of modern science were entirely unjustified. They didn't merely believe false teachings, but acted on them too in ways that had very large consequences for people.

Here's what I'm talking about. The church has long taught that:

1) Adam and Eve were the first human beings on Earth, and were white.
2) Cain killed Abel, was cursed for it, and either the curse, or else the mark of the curse (because that changes everything...) included his skin, and the skin of all of his descendants, being turned black.
3) Noah's flood was real, and global in scope, and killed all human beings on the face of the planet, save for those who were aboard the ark.
4) Because Noah was a white guy, and presumably his wife too, the black "race" would have disappeared from the Earth with the flood, except that Ham, one of Noah's sons, married a black woman named Egyptus, and thus preserved the black race through the Flood.
5) The African peoples all descend from Egyptus, and inherit the curse of being banned from the priesthood, and the mark of the curse, which is the black skin.
6) Historically, all it took to be banned from the priesthood in the LDS church, prior to 1978, was to be black and descended from Africans, or even look white but have known African ancestors who were black.
7) 6) was justified by LDS by reference to the scriptures underpinning 1) through 5), and vague hand-waving exercises appealing to "revelation" which, surprisingly, nobody can actually document as having really taken place.

Now we know that:
1) The human race apparently originated in Africa, and moved out from Africa into the rest of the world.
2) There was no global flood which bottlenecked the human race just 4 or 5k years ago.
3) There was apparently no "Egyptus" who was the mother of all Africans, who lived 4 or 5k years ago.
4) There are distinct African lineages going back many thousands, even tens of thousands of years. I used the example of the Khoisan, because I find it striking that the Khoisan are further genetically related to the black Africans commonly brought over to the US as slaves than white Europeans are, which makes the whole concept of them as inheritors of Cain's curse laughable.
5) The simple attribution of "lineage of Cain" on the basis of being black and of African descent, or knowledge of any black Africans in one's ancestry, is risible in light of 1) through 4).

I'd say that the real-world vs. the Mormon fantasy version of the world played a pretty frickin huge role in this priesthood ban debacle. Let nobody claim that the issues of Noah's Flood, Adam and Eve, and so forth have no relevance to the LDS Church's truth claims. That's just pure, unadulterated BS. They are intimately connected to the LDS Church's past practices, as well as intertwined in LDS scriptures, which LDS claim are inspired directly by God as his word to humanity. They cannot escape it.

[_Buffalo]

Members like me will often become extremely disturbed by the fact that the LDS worldview posits a history of humanity that has been blown out of the water by modern science. Apologists and other appeasers will then say that hey, none of that is pertinent to our eternal salvation, and just doesn't matter.

But here we have an actual situation where the worldview of the church lead to real-world actions, which in light of modern science were entirely unjustified. They didn't merely believe false teachings, but acted on them too in ways that had very large consequences for people.

Here's what I'm talking about. The church has long taught that:

1) Adam and Eve were the first human beings on Earth, and were white.
2) Cain killed Abel, was cursed for it, and either the curse, or else the mark of the curse (because that changes everything...) included his skin, and the skin of all of his descendants, being turned black.
3) Noah's flood was real, and global in scope, and killed all human beings on the face of the planet, save for those who were aboard the ark.
4) Because Noah was a white guy, and presumably his wife too, the black "race" would have disappeared from the Earth with the flood, except that Ham, one of Noah's sons, married a black woman named Egyptus, and thus preserved the black race through the Flood.
5) The African peoples all descend from Egyptus, and inherit the curse of being banned from the priesthood, and the mark of the curse, which is the black skin.
6) Historically, all it took to be banned from the priesthood in the LDS church, prior to 1978, was to be black and descended from Africans, or even look white but have known African ancestors who were black.
7) 6) was justified by LDS by reference to the scriptures underpinning 1) through 5), and vague hand-waving exercises appealing to "revelation" which, surprisingly, nobody can actually document as having really taken place.

Now we know that:
1) The human race apparently originated in Africa, and moved out from Africa into the rest of the world.
2) There was no global flood which bottlenecked the human race just 4 or 5k years ago.
3) There was apparently no "Egyptus" who was the mother of all Africans, who lived 4 or 5k years ago.
4) There are distinct African lineages going back many thousands, even tens of thousands of years. I used the example of the Khoisan, because I find it striking that the Khoisan are further genetically related to the black Africans commonly brought over to the US as slaves than white Europeans are, which makes the whole concept of them as inheritors of Cain's curse laughable.
5) The simple attribution of "lineage of Cain" on the basis of being black and of African descent, or knowledge of any black Africans in one's ancestry, is risible in light of 1) through 4).

I'd say that the real-world vs. the Mormon fantasy version of the world played a pretty frickin huge role in this priesthood ban debacle. Let nobody claim that the issues of Noah's Flood, Adam and Eve, and so forth have no relevance to the LDS Church's truth claims. That's just pure, unadulterated b***s***. They are intimately connected to the LDS Church's past practices, as well as intertwined in LDS scriptures, which LDS claim are inspired directly by God as his word to humanity. They cannot escape it.

If I could fit this entire quote in my sig, I would. Bravo!

[_bcspace]

Yes. Abraham 1. The Church was merely following what God thought.

Another-words racist.

How so? The ban was based on descent.

It's based on the false protestant notion that the entire black race are descended from Canaanites (they're not). Now what?

How do you know it's false? And what about cultural mixing (leavening)?

There is no doctrinal notion that people with black skin are inherently inferior.

You're joking, right?

Not at all. In your scriptural quotation, you forgot to mention that the Book of Mormon also says that, through their own choices, they can reverse the effects of the curse.

BC Space would claim the KKK was not a racist organizations if he had to.

No. But I would note that historically, Utah was very diligent and successful in stopping that organization.

So you agree that the Khoisan appear to be a distinct lineage from the Bantu, but you assert that it's likely that somewhere along the line, Bantu and Khoisan must have hooked up

The Wikipedia article on Khoisan expressly says they did.

In order to avoid problems, you'd really have to A) delineate all of the African genetic lineages, B) specify which lineages descended from Cain, and C) offer up some kind of proof that this is true. But the church never did this. They simply banned all black Africans. Apparently the church believed that all black Africans descended from Cain. We can infer this from the historical fact that blackness and Africanness were all it took to be banned from the priesthood.

Have I ever denied this? Did I ever claim the determination of descent was not flawed?

This is scientifically unjustifiable even if you assume that the LDS scriptural description of a lineage of Cain and a justifiable lineage-based priesthood ban were actually accepted as fact.

I agree.

No matter how you slice it, the actions of the church were laughably unscientific, superstitious, based on premises we now know to be false, and racist.

"False" is not proven by a long shot. The "racist" can't stick because there is nothing in the doctrine about blacks being inherently inferior.

I posted a question previously that went along the lines of 'what questions in a TR interview prior to 1978 did Bishops ask black people that they didn't ask white people?'

Did they ask black people any TR questions at all?

if they didn't ask anything different then exclusion must have only been made on the basis of skin colour.

Not possible considering the scriptures and the doctrine. The reason for the ban has never been because of skin color.

[_Themis]

How so? The ban was based on descent.

Race is based on descent. The ban restricted a certain group by race. It was therefore by definition racist. I know you know this and are just trolling or more accurately lying here.

[_bcspace]

How so? The ban was based on descent.

Race is based on descent. The ban restricted a certain group by race. It was therefore by definition racist

Doesn't meet the definition of racism which implies some sort of inherent inferiority being taught or assumed.

[_Themis]

Doesn't meet the definition of racism which implies some sort of inherent inferiority being taught or assumed.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/racist

Look at number 2. Again you are proven wrong. Must be embarrassing.