The future is almost here.

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_Droopy
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Re: The future is almost here.

Post by _Droopy »

In fact, the Church already has distanced itself from fundamental doctrines, e.g., "As man is, God once was."


CFR

Prior to the priesthood ban being lifted, LDS leaders taught that during the war in heaven, some of the spirits were sort of neutral or "less valiant" than the ones who really wanted Jesus to win. These spirits are born to black (Negro) parents who are "cursed" with a dark skin as an outward sign of their lukewarm attitude during the war in heaven. I've posted examples of LDS leaders teaching this doctrine here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=13385&p=330724&hilit=negro#p330724


Too bad this was never official Church doctrine and never binding on the Saints as such. How long people such as yourself will be recycling the same threadbare shibboleths is actually far more interesting than how long it will be before the Church accepts Gay marriage.

"Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" seems to be the framework for much that passes for anti-Mormon "thought".

When the priesthood ban was lifted, the Church did not repudiate these teachings, and still has not done so.


It doesn't have to, as they were never more than the theological speculations of various apostles. They were never settled, "orthodox" doctrine and never taught by the Brethren unitedly (The Church) as such.

Even so, the idea that there were many different levels of faith, obedience and individual progression in the preexistence is quite well established in the Church, and follows necessarily from the vast variation of personalities and the existence of free agency in that sphere. The same differences and variations appear here in mortality as well, and will exist in the eternities following this life.

Given this, there is no reason, in LDS theology, why an individual's specific level of valiance, obedience to eternal law, and individual characteristics in the premortal state might not imply a mortal experience within a certain linage or ethnic group. Indeed, the very existence of morphological variation among human beings would seem to assume, in an LDS context, some meaning or purpose behind their existence transcending mortal boundaries.

This would include all ethnic types, however, and include time and place of birth, beyond mere morphology.

Anyway, the core doctrine didn't change. Neither did the "less valiant" doctrine;


Was it a "doctrine"? How do you know?

But I'm glad we're fleshing this out, because I think the racial doctrines imbroglio gives us a good model to predict the Church's future stance on homosexuality.


No, it patently doesn't, because skin color, or other morphological attributes, are purely biological in nature, and have more moral or philosophical relevance, in and of themselves.

Homosexuality is a behavioral syndrome, a lifestyle, and a culture, and is utterly incompatible with the plan of salvation and the boundaries, conditions and perimeters of human sexuality the Lord as established for his children and only through observance of which can they become like him.

The question of homosexual marriage is so far removed, as to conceptual relevance, from the black civil rights movement as to leave one wide eyed and open mouthed at the prospect of any attempt to logically unite them.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us

- President Ezra Taft Benson


I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

- Thomas Sowell
_The Nehor
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Re: The future is almost here.

Post by _The Nehor »

harmony wrote:A short history lesson: Prior to the formation of society, there was no marriage.


I assume you mean prior to the written word in which case you'd have no idea what they did.

Only with the advent of the concepts of property, inheritance, and blood lines was it necessary for marriage to be invented.


Wait, your argument that it showed up in the last few hundred years meant that before the last few hundred years there was no royalty, property, or inheritances? What the......????

The Catholic Church was a bit late on the timeline, but they did finally get around to declaring marriage a sacrament:


Are you trying to suggest that the Catholics invented marriage?

The Catholic Church got involved around 1215 and defined marriage as a sacrament. Even then, though, the rules of the church were fuzzy because folks used the "private consent" option, which created problems in the ecclesiastical courts.


from http://marriage.about.com/cs/history/a/ ... rriage.htm

Then the Protestants got involved:


So your argument is marriage didn't exist until it became a Catholic sacrament?

So Protestants required that marriage would no longer be a private institution. It became one that was done publicly with a ceremony, priest, witnesses, and parental consent. They also started registering births, deaths and marriages.


Finally, the government got involved:

In the 1500's, different governments and nation-states started controlling the legality of marriage.


Okay, I'm really confused now. You are saying that marriage didn't exist until the government got involved with legalizing marriages. This is looney. While the nobility of feudal Europe or the lower classes of Rome or the Chinese peasants in the warring states period may not have had their marriages written in a legal book they were real. There was almost always a ceremony and the law covered inheritances and how widows were to deal with their dowry. That means they are marriages. It doesn't have to fit into our modern concept of legality. When a serf married his bride it was accepted that they were married, their oldest son would inherit, etc. without a document of marriage.

In the early history of this country, a couple just had to say they were married:

Common law marriage was the norm in most of the U.S. in its early history


Yeah. It was still marriage.

Then the reformers woke up (I wonder if Brigham and company had anything to do with this?):

In the 1870's this created a lot of concern and a marriage reform movement began. They called for publicity, formal ceremonies, licensing, and registration.


So marriages needed more forms....still not a new concept.

Since serfs in feudal Europe were property. Serfs/slaves had no rights, weren't considered human, did not marry, and were sold and traded like...well... horses. And the further back in history you go, the fewer marriages there were.


Okay.....you're nuts. Serfs had a few basic rights. Have you read up on the medieval period at all. They did marry. I can prove it. The lord of the land had to give permission for a serf to marry someone on another lord's land. If there was no marriage amongst serfs, no need for the law.

The rich, the nobles, the merchants... they married. And they married with as much pomp and circumstance as they could afford, which usually was religious and always was legal. As the influence of the Catholic church grew, the rich tended to follow. But for the average guy, the serf, the slave, the freeman laborer... there was no marriage. It was too expensive and not needed. If you go back far enough, you find that only those who had a legal reason married (inheritance, property rights).


There was marriage. Are you equating marriage with having some legal person write something down in a book? People (even the lowest) paired off in the eyes of society and (usually) their god/gods. There was a general expectation of fidelity and the expectation that they would raise any children. They also almost always had their first son inherit. It was a marriage. Marriage is at least as old as recorded history and is general in every society and every layer of every society.
"Surely he knows that DCP, The Nehor, Lamanite, and other key apologists..." -Scratch clarifying my status in apologetics
"I admit it; I'm a petty, petty man." -Some Schmo
_The Nehor
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Re: The future is almost here.

Post by _The Nehor »

schreech wrote:
The Nehor wrote:People on this very board have suggested that LDS should lose their tax-exempt status. They're idiots but they're doing it.


Lets see, you actually said - "No. I'm asserting that attempts to silence religions on political matters are wrong. Threatening them with taxation to get them to shut up is scary."

To which i responded - "When has this happened? I have heard that the govt threatened to remove the LDS tax exempt status if they continued to practice institutionalized racism by denying blacks the priesthood but i have never heard of any situation in which a religion was threatened "with taxation to get them to shut up"" - i eeven suggested that the 1st amendment would protect the LDS church from being "shut up"

So apparently you can't even be expected to remember what you said just a few posts up as you are NOW saying that ANYONE that suggests that the LDS church should lose their tax exempt status is an "idiot"...Your blind, unthinking devotion to all things LDS is kinda sad as you don't seem to see that the LDS persecution card has been played out....I also love how you have to immediately resort to name calling...so cute...


I guess you don't understand that trying to exercise compulsion about what a religion teaches even if you dislike it (Priesthood Ban) is problematic.

Okay, you're one of them. You idiot.

So why are you suggesting no one wants this to happen?

I think you're confused.


I guess reading comprehension issues accompany unthinking devotion to the LDS church considering my reasons for the LDS church losing their tax exempt status has nothing to with getting them to "shut up" (as you originally suggested) and everything to do with their discriminatory/racist practices...Please feel free to pull your head out of your butt, reread what i wrote and respond accordingly...

Yes, i am confused by your inability to carry on a rational conversation...again, not something unexpected from blind devotee to the morg but occasionally i get hopeful...I love when children don't have the words to adequately express themselves and have to resort to name calling...


It's so cute when you insult me at the beginning of this and then piously suggest that you are above name calling while I'd down in the mud doing it alone.

Once again proving that you are an idiot.
"Surely he knows that DCP, The Nehor, Lamanite, and other key apologists..." -Scratch clarifying my status in apologetics
"I admit it; I'm a petty, petty man." -Some Schmo
_Droopy
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Re: The future is almost here.

Post by _Droopy »

If we could ever cross harmony with Kevin Graham we'd have a a match for the entire Toho pantheon as well as most of Harryhausen's critters.

Does harmony have any idea what she's talking about?

No.

Does it matter to her?

No.

Should it matter to her?

Yes, it really, really should. Nehor is exactly correct here. Medieval serfs got married. Ancient Japanese peasants got married. Ancient Chines peasants got married. Ancient Romans got married. Ancient Israelites got married. Was marriage always exactly of the same form and and emphasis as it is now? No. Need it be to make the argument Nehor is making? No.

What's really interesting here is for all the long years of vitriolic wailing from harmony about how if she can't be in the Celestial kingdom with the one she loves here on earth, she would rather lose her soul than go their without him, it appears that she is really not at all that concerned about marriage qua marriage at all, preferring to see it as nothing more than an epiphenomena of human social evolution, and in strictly naturalistic terms.

One rationalization builds upon another which builds upon another and another and another.

The bitter - and proliferating - fruits of apostasy indeed.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us

- President Ezra Taft Benson


I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

- Thomas Sowell
_EAllusion
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Re: The future is almost here.

Post by _EAllusion »

The concept of race is inseparable from cultural categories that are not cleaved in biology. Racial categories are not determined merely by physical traits or shared genealogy. Further, what physical traits that seem to matter for being a member of a racial category change over time. They're somewhat biologically arbitrary. The Irish and Jews were folded into the concept of "whites" over the course of last century not because of any biological changes. People arbitrarily classified as part of the same "race" are often mistakenly presumed to share ethnic heritage.

Case in point, the priesthood ban was supposed to be on people of African descent, but that would include everyone alive. Practically it was on blacks, but what "blacks" are is not a static concept or determined by mere skin color. For instance, there were/are lighter skinned "blacks" because of recent descent from African-American slaves and darker skinned nonblacks descended from Southern India.
_EAllusion
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Re: The future is almost here.

Post by _EAllusion »

Medieval serfs got married. Ancient Japanese peasants got married. Ancient Chines peasants got married. Ancient Romans got married. Ancient Israelites got married.


Gays got married.

droopy wrote:begs the question

You're begging the question.
_The Nehor
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Re: The future is almost here.

Post by _The Nehor »

EAllusion wrote:Gays got married.


A mad Roman emperor married his favorite horse, Incitatus, to the mare Penelope after Incitatus was admitted into the Senate in keeping with Senate marriage laws. I don't take this rare incident to suggest that horse marriage is as valid as ubiquitous heterosexual marriage practiced by the majority of humanity that lived to sexual maturity.
"Surely he knows that DCP, The Nehor, Lamanite, and other key apologists..." -Scratch clarifying my status in apologetics
"I admit it; I'm a petty, petty man." -Some Schmo
_EAllusion
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Re: The future is almost here.

Post by _EAllusion »

The Nehor wrote:
EAllusion wrote:Gays got married.
I don't take this rare incident to suggest that horse marriage is as valid as ubiquitous heterosexual marriage practiced by the majority of humanity that lived to sexual maturity.

Gay marriage was accepted in some historic cultures and not in others. It parallels interracial marriage in this respect. The problem here is stemming from a fabled "traditional marriage" that never existed as marriage standards have varied in time and place. Harmony tried to take on this gambit by pointing out that traditional civil marriage that our laws evolved out of had to do with the joining of prominent families for property purposes. Dowries and extreme lack of divorce options are as much "traditional marriage" as anything. You reply by pointing out more informal marriage traditions from different times and places. But as I point out, that then includes gay marriage just the same. I guess you could fall back to saying marriage involves one man and one or more women by definition, which in this case would just beg the question.
_The Nehor
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Re: The future is almost here.

Post by _The Nehor »

EAllusion wrote:Gay marriage was accepted in some historic cultures and not in others. It parallels interracial marriage in this respect. The problem here is stemming from a fabled "traditional marriage" that never existed as marriage standards have varied in time and place. Harmony tried to take on this gambit by pointing out that traditional civil marriage that our laws evolved out of had to do with the joining of prominent families for property purposes. Dowries and extreme lack of divorce options are as much "traditional marriage" as anything. You reply by pointing out more informal marriage traditions from different times and places. But as I point out, that then includes gay marriage just the same. I guess you could fall back to saying marriage involves one man and one or more women by definition, which in this case would just beg the question.


I have to disagree. Gay Marriage was rare, limited to a few cultures (offhand I remember Greek, early Roman, one small province in China, and a few barbarian tribes in Europe).

If we are going to say that gay marriage is ratified and is in the same class as heterosexual marriage should we also add polygamy, Greek pederasty, bestiality marriages, monkey and tree marriage (still around in India), and any other wacky idea that happened a few times in history?
"Surely he knows that DCP, The Nehor, Lamanite, and other key apologists..." -Scratch clarifying my status in apologetics
"I admit it; I'm a petty, petty man." -Some Schmo
_EAllusion
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Re: The future is almost here.

Post by _EAllusion »

I don't define marriage in terms of arbitrary historical prevalence of different pairings, so your question doesn't make much sense for what I think Nehor. I don't compare the relative prevalence of Mormon and non-Mormon marriage in history to determine if the former counts. Interracial/interclass marriages have long histories of being taboo and are comparatively rare, but I don't think that makes them more dubious as marriages and don't see what this has to do with the point of modern civil marriages. Heck, marriages where women aren't treated as quasi-property are rare in historical terms, but you won't see me bringing that point up to defend laws that make marriage a valid defense against rape.

You wrote a post that pointed to the diversity of informal marriage practices in time and place to respond to Harmony talking about the development of marriage law in Europe. I simply added that gay marriage is included in that.
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