Brethren knew reasons for priesthood ban in 1940s ....

[_nc47]

The Church cannot issue a formal apology right now. It needs the people still attached to those racist statements and posting them on the internet to die first. Apologizing now would factionalize the Church.

[_Chap]

The Church cannot issue a formal apology right now. It needs the people still attached to those racist statements and posting them on the internet to die first. ...

Where are the Danites when you need them?

[_nc47]

The Church cannot issue a formal apology right now. It needs the people still attached to those racist statements and posting them on the internet to die first. ...

Where are the Danites when you need them?

Time is the best Danite for racist people.

[_Shulem]

Liars at the One True Cult.

Absolute, pathetic, lying cult leaders.

Let's see what I can dig up in less than 5 minutes

Yes indeed, the leaders of the church are liars and they will be exposed before all the world because God-Google has spoken it!

Let us give thanks to the Lord God-Google for revealing the truth about Mormon ugliness to the whole world and exposing the shame of its leaders. Watching the church lose all credibility and beginning to crumble before the internet is really making me happy! Sweet revenge.

Amen.

Paul O

[_MsJack]

I've said this before but I guess I'll say it again: half of what Bott told the press about blacks and the priesthood is found in the current Doctrine & Covenants manual. As in the one he was supposed to be teaching out of for his D&C classes.

From the dispensation of Adam until the dispensation of the fulness of times, there has been a group of people who have not been allowed to hold the priesthood of God. The scriptural basis for this policy is Abraham 1:21–27. The full reason for the denial has been kept hidden by the Lord, and one is left to assume that He will make it known in His own due time.

On 1 June 1978 the Savior revealed to President Spencer W. Kimball that the ban on this lineage pertaining to the rights of the priesthood was lifted.

http://www.lds.org/manual/doctrine-and- ... n?lang=eng

There you have it. The current D&C manual teaches that blacks are the lineage of Ham. If this stuff is "outdated," then it's probably about time the church removed it from its current manuals.

[_Everybody Wang Chung]

There you have it. The current D&C manual teaches that blacks are the lineage of Ham. If this stuff is "outdated," then it's probably about time the church removed it from its current manuals.

100% agree.

[_moksha]

The Church cannot issue a formal apology right now. It needs the people still attached to those racist statements and posting them on the internet to die first. Apologizing now would factionalize the Church.

Isn't this the type of thinking that lead to this morass in the first place? We need to stand for something and we need that something to be honorable and encompass the spirit of love. Must we be so proud and stiff-necked that we cannot rise to the occasion?

by the way, Dr. Nelson was very eloquent acting in the role of God's advocate.

[_Tim the Enchanter]

Since David O. McKay, however, the church has explicitly and consistently rejected those justifications for the ban and have mostly asserted that the ban was God's will, for whatever reason. (Kimball went so far as to acknowledge that it could be mistaken.) This is what makes Bott's comments damaging; they flatly ignore the church's consistent position over the last 30-40 years.

My experience in the church was not as clear cut as you are making it out to be here. The first time I recall hearing anything less than "black skin was a curse and blacks were denied the priesthood because they were less valiant in the pre-existence" was from my mission president in the mid-1990's. Growing up in the church prior to this, even though it was sometimes expressed uncomfortably, the reasons were always clear: less valiant in the pre-existence, black skin is a curse because Cain killed Abel. The first equivocation I heard was when my mission president said that black skin was not the curse but the sign of the curse and the real curse was the denial of the priesthood. Why were blacks denied the priesthood? According to my mission president, in the pre-existence, they were not less valiant in terms of accepting Christ, but were on the fence in terms of the priesthood. Where my mission president got his ideas I don't know. Also, when a missionary, I recall exactly 1 missionary who didn't think that black people would be white when resurrected. For everyone else, it was like, "well, it's a curse, so why wouldn't the curse be lifted if black people are resurrected to a perfect body?"

[_Craig Paxton]

I have a few questions:

01. What good are the pronouncements of a so-called prophet of God if they can't stand the test of time?
02. Past prophets have been shown to be dogmatically stifled in being able to jettison false theories, Why aren’t the prophetic pronouncements of today just the false theories of men tomorrow?
03. Should we really be having our children sing “Follow the Prophet He knows the Way” when clearly they have no more insight in "the Way" than any other human being?
04. Help me understand how the disavowal of past theories a.k.a. "Church doctrine that we can no longer spin in a societally acceptable manner" helps build confidence in the churches claim that they are directed by God? Doesn’t it do just the opposite and demonstrated that the church has no more insight than any other man made-man led organization?

[_Flaming Meaux]

Since David O. McKay, however, the church has explicitly and consistently rejected those justifications for the ban and have mostly asserted that the ban was God's will, for whatever reason. (Kimball went so far as to acknowledge that it could be mistaken.) This is what makes Bott's comments damaging; they flatly ignore the church's consistent position over the last 30-40 years.

My experience in the church was not as clear cut as you are making it out to be here. The first time I recall hearing anything less than "black skin was a curse and blacks were denied the priesthood because they were less valiant in the pre-existence" was from my mission president in the mid-1990's. Growing up in the church prior to this, even though it was sometimes expressed uncomfortably, the reasons were always clear: less valiant in the pre-existence, black skin is a curse because Cain killed Abel. The first equivocation I heard was when my mission president said that black skin was not the curse but the sign of the curse and the real curse was the denial of the priesthood. Why were blacks denied the priesthood? According to my mission president, in the pre-existence, they were not less valiant in terms of accepting Christ, but were on the fence in terms of the priesthood. Where my mission president got his ideas I don't know. Also, when a missionary, I recall exactly 1 missionary who didn't think that black people would be white when resurrected. For everyone else, it was like, "well, it's a curse, so why wouldn't the curse be lifted if black people are resurrected to a perfect body?"

In my mission in the late-90s, copies of Alvin R. Dyer's talk For What Purpose? were circulated among missionaries and accepted as the "true" doctrine on the "Negro Question," though admittedly doctrine that "world" wasn't capable of handling, etc.

Marlin K. Jensen, then a member of the Presidency of the Seventy, visited the mission and, among other things, had a Q&A session. Some missionaries asked very pointed questions about the position of the church with respect to blacks and the priesthood. Jensen adopted the position of "we don't really know why things are as they are," but one missionary pressed that church authorities had explicitly addressed the question and provided the example of Dyer's remarks. Jensen indicated that any missionaries having copies of Dyer's talk should destroy it. One missionary asked whether we were being asked to destroy the talk because it was false doctrine, and Jensen simply replied, "I've simply been instructed to tell you that if you have copies of For What Purpose? those copies should be destroyed."

Since the doctrine or "theories" of Dyer were not expressly repudiated, some missionaries (particularly those in the zone in which I was serving that later discussed Dyer's remarks) left the meeting with the impression that Dyer's view with respect to the issue was doctrinal, but that the church, for obvious reasons, simply didn't want that doctrine being the subject of discussion. It was one of those "meaty" issues that you had to be "spiritually prepared" to understand (Dyer references this point in the talk, naturally).

Wow--I just went back and read that talk for the first time in probably 15 years. It's a doozy--