Sam Harris wrote:Oh my god, Dan. Please do not take your finger out of that hole that was made when the church gave you your frontal lobotomy. Seriously.
What is the priesthood ban other than some frumpy racist men stating the beliefs of their time and putting God behind it so ferverently, that it took 30 years after everyone else woke up on the issue for them to do so?
Why were Africans banned from the priesthood? What did they DO exactly? None of that mess about cultural ignorance or God's secrets...what did they DO to deserve such? And why did the Catholic church have an African bishop hundreds of years before Joseph Smith supposedly saw his first vision?
I believe that your church as an organization sees black people the way the picture in my last post portrays. And that is sad.
Whether you approve of the priesthood ban or not -- or even whether I do or not -- is irrelevant to the point at issue.
Shades claimed that the penalty for interracial marriage under Brigham Young was death.
I asked for evidence.
He responded with a familiar quotation in which Brigham Young said that, under God's law, the penalty for marriage between a white man of the "chosen seed" and a black woman was death.
To which I responded that blacks represented a special case because of the priesthood ban, and that, accordingly, while Shades had demonstrated that death was the penalty -- at least in theory (Shades offered no evidence that it was actually so in practice) -- under Brigham Young for marriage between a white male priesthood holder (the "chosen seed") and a black female, he had in fact offered no evidence whatever for the notion that there was an actual death penalty under Brigham Young for interracial marriage generally.
