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It speaks for itself :
http://www.LDS.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?h ... 94610aRCRD

I'm always told to check out LDS.org for what the church really teaches.

Tim wrote:It speaks for itself :
http://www.LDS.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?h ... 94610aRCRD

I'm always told to check out LDS.org for what the church really teaches.

Tim, I noticed that your sig says, "LDS & Evangelical Conversations". Does this website you've listed indicate that LDS doctrine is any more racist than Jewish doctrine, as described in the Hebrew Tanakh, and therefore Evangelical doctrine, as described in the rough equivalent to that book, namely the Old Testament?

KevinSim wrote:

Tim wrote:It speaks for itself :
http://www.LDS.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?h ... 94610aRCRD

I'm always told to check out LDS.org for what the church really teaches.

Tim, I noticed that your sig says, "LDS & Evangelical Conversations". Does this website you've listed indicate that LDS doctrine is any more racist than Jewish doctrine, as described in the Hebrew Tanakh, and therefore Evangelical doctrine, as described in the rough equivalent to that book, namely the Old Testament?

Why not defend your own beliefs rather than play moral equivalence? What good does throwing the Bible under the bus as racist when you still believe it yourself? And why bring Jews into this? The site is called LDS & Evangelical Conversations, not LDS, Jewish, and Evangelical Conversations.

And here's the difference between Evangelicals and Mormons on race: sometimes Evangelicals, even the most conservatives ones, will admit their past racism and issue apologies. See for example Bob Jones University apologizing for past stances on interracial dating. Or checkout this video by conservative Calvinist pastor John Piper on his past racism:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs_unRFvS5o

But then again, it's probably just better to call everyone else racists. That's the best defense for LDS beliefs and certainly puts LDS practices into a good light.

Aristotle Smith wrote:But then again, it's probably just better to call everyone else racists. That's the best defense for LDS beliefs and certainly puts LDS practices into a good light.

LDS prophets and leaders were simply doing God's work! Calling this work racist is calling God himself a racist!

I'm always told to check out LDS.org for what the church really teaches.

Amen! So how is it racist?

Laman and Lemuel’s followers called themselves Lamanites. They became a dark-skinned people. God cursed them because of their wickedness.

Hmmm... The chronology seems off.
In the Book of Mormon God curses them and denotes then as cursed by giving them a 'dark skin'.

In order to be consistent with the Book of Mormon, the above piece of racist doctrine should read....

" Laman and Lemuel's followers called themselves Lamanites. God cursed them because of their wickedness. They became a dark-skinned people."

bcspace wrote:

I'm always told to check out LDS.org for what the church really teaches.

Amen! So how is it racist?

It's kind of like with you, bcspace. We don't think you're stupid because you're a Mormon. We think you're a Mormon because you're stupid.

bcspace wrote:

I'm always told to check out LDS.org for what the church really teaches.

Amen! So how is it racist?

Exactly. Indians are lazy and don't like to work. For hundreds of years the white man has wondered why Indians are dark skinned savages who are lazy and don't like to work. The Book of Mormon explains why. It is not racist. It is educational.

Aristotle Smith wrote:Why not defend your own beliefs rather than play moral equivalence? What good does throwing the Bible under the bus as racist when you still believe it yourself?

Okay, fine. My father told me a story of a time from his experience in the Air Force where he witnessed a fight among his military colleagues. One of them was black, my father witnessed someone hit the black man on the head with some heavy object, and my father observed that that did not phase the black man at all. My father's conclusion was that it is not wise to hit a black man on the head.

Was my father right to make such a generalization? There's a remote chance that that generalization might be accurate, but over time I have found myself leaning more and more toward the theory that my father was prejudiced by this one instance. My father, I have concluded, is to some degree racist.

On the other hand, if you go to "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease" you will find an article that says that a much higher percentage of blacks have Sickle-cell Anaemia than whites (or other miniorities) do. I don't consider the author of this article to be racist, both because it looks like that author has done her/his research pretty thoroughly, and also because I have heard from other respected sources that there is a high corelation between being black and having Sickle-cell Anaemia.

So having opinions about people due to their race is only racist if the opinions are based on prejudice; if someone finds a real corelation between someone being of a certain race and some other characteristic, it is not racist to wonder if a person of that race might just have that characteristic. Also, note that one's level of academic rigor plays a part. I found it more likely that my father, who is not in the habit of rigorously researching his opinions, might be racist, than that the apparent scholars who put together the mentioned article were.

Well, I consider God to be pretty rigorous, academically. If I have reason to believe that a book had God as its source, then the fact that that book might make generalizations about Lamanites because they descended from Laman is only racist if those generalizations aren't true.

Furthermore, the website Tim found only really described the characteristics of the Lamanites in the period after they separated from the Nephites. The Book of Mormon is very clear that there were many exceptions to those general characteristics in later generations. In fact, as it got close to the arrival of Jesus in the Americas the undesirable characteristics the website observed of the early Lamanites, were actually more prevalent among the Nephites than they were among the Lamanites.

So I think there's plenty of room to doubt that the Book of Mormon is really as racist as some people make it out to be.

Nonetheless I would still like to hear Tim's answer to my original question.

No matter how you struggle, squirm, twist, wiggle, shake, rattle, and roll, there is nothing racial at all in the Book of Mormon. There is ethnicity, there are nations, kindreds, tongues, and peoples, but not races. Skin color, or any other morphological trait, has nothing to do with race, and especially in the Book of Mormon. The text of the Book of Mormon never mentions race, or gives any indication that the Nephites thought of the Lamanites as anything other than their brethren and as apostates who's fathers lead them away from the gospel and who's culture and society reflect that benighted reality.

Everything in the Book of Mormon relative to the Nephite/Lamanite split and the conflicts between them are expressed in terms of spiritual, cultural, social, political, and moral dynamics, not racial.

Indeed, the only actual mention of skin color as a reason to dislike the Lamanites a priori is denounced as sin by the Book of Mormon itself.

For all the incessant huffing and puffing about this issue among the secularist critics of the Church, the book itself cannot not be used as a proof text or religious support for racism. It isn't in the book.