Re: lds missionary explains the priesthood ban
Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2022 6:21 pm
Bott soon found himself out of a job and on a senior mission for that comment. I seem to recall the author of that article just serendipitously walked around BYU's campus looking for a faculty member to comment and Bott agreed.dastardly stem wrote: ↑Fri Sep 30, 2022 2:05 pmI've heard this explanation before or something like it. It is awful though. God gave the Mormons polygamy...well not just polygamy but a pretty extreme form where the highest rated member men have the most wives and the lowest were left with one...God refuses still to give women the priesthood...God fights all moves made by humans to adopt civil rights...and yet what really would have chased members away was God saying all races are equal?
Randy Bott, formerly of BYU, taught something that goes along these lines:
https://religiondispatches.org/racist-r ... ntroversy/God has always been discriminatory” when it comes to whom he grants the authority of the priesthood, says Bott… Bott compares blacks with a young child prematurely asking for the keys to her father’s car, and explains that similarly until 1978, the Lord determined that blacks were not yet ready for the priesthood.
“What is discrimination?” Bott asks. “I think that is keeping something from somebody that would be a benefit for them, right? But what if it wouldn’t have been a benefit to them?” Bott says that the denial of the priesthood to blacks on Earth—although not in the afterlife—protected them from the lowest rungs of hell reserved for people who abuse their priesthood powers. “You couldn’t fall off the top of the ladder, because you weren’t on the top of the ladder. So, in reality the blacks not having the priesthood was the greatest blessing God could give them.”
On his view God was saving those restricted from getting the priesthood because if they were given it, they would have failed and sent to hell. On this young missionary's view God would be sending many white Mormons to hell if he had given the priesthood to black men. The poor whites would have ran from the Church if GOd did that. And whites are the majority...in America at least, or were at the time...and somehow everyone was shallow enough to see diversity as nothing but color of skin....
In a sense I agree with Everybody Wang Chung's assessment--as long as the Church leaves everyone to guess any ol' explanation will do. That's the whole point behind apologetics.