Can I get a straight answer to an honest question?

[_cafe crema]

Do you think God approved of how Joseph Smith practiced polygamy?

On the whole? I don't know. Do I think there's a pretty good chance some errors were made? Yes.

This is where the train goes off the tracks for me. It is utterly unfathomable that God (as taught to me by the Church) could ever sanction the way Joseph Smith practiced polygamy. This leads me to reject it in its entirety as an uninspired mistake. Once you can do that with one very large principle, it's not too hard to do it with smaller things like counsel not to wear two or more pairs of earrings.

Baby, bath water.

And sometimes you only have only water drawn for bath. Like this whole scenario, water drawn to pretend to cleanliness.

[cacheman]

Runtu and other critics seem to ignore accounts of Emma Smith refering to plural marriage before 1843. I'm simply waiting to see if they come up.

What does that have to do with the OP? It's a simple question: did Joseph marry the Partridge sisters without Emma's knowledge or consent?

This is one of the things that really bothers me about you, bc. No matter the issue, you always approach things as if this were a debate. So, rather than try to help someone like me understand or resolve my issues, you look for an opportunity to use a particular tactic or argument. I don't get it.

I'm not asking for a debate. I genuinely would like to know how to resolve this issue.

[_Runtu]

For me, the issue that made me crack wasn't so much hiding it from Emma, it was the methods used to get young women to marry him. The stories of Helen Mar Kimball and Lucy Walker are the ones that give me the hardest time because so much coercion was used to gain their consent. Why coerce if it is of God?

That was what made me "crack" too. I realized that if this had been done by anyone other than Joseph Smith, I wouldn't even try to defend it.

[_dblagent007]

This is where the train goes off the tracks for me. It is utterly unfathomable that God (as taught to me by the Church) could ever sanction the way Joseph Smith practiced polygamy. This leads me to reject it in its entirety as an uninspired mistake. Once you can do that with one very large principle, it's not too hard to do it with smaller things like counsel not to wear two or more pairs of earrings.

Baby, bath water.

Polygamy is the bath water and the two pairs of earrings policy is the baby? Really?

So for me it really came down to a decision, do I want to believe that Joseph was a prophet, commanded of God to do that, and that God was a complete bastard. Or did I want to believe that God had nothing to do with it and that Joseph was out to lunch. I chose the latter, it seemed like the obvious choice.

This was exactly the dilemma I faced and I made the same choice. Blake Ostler confronted the same problem and reached a different conclusion.

[P]olygamy was and is intended to be a test that stretched those who confronted the request to engage in it beyond anything they could imagine. It also stretches and challenges us. Indeed, even today it challenges us to give up the preconceived notion that we can pigeonhole God into our matrix of judgments. The practice of plural marriage obliterates the notion that God must fit into our categories of right and wrong and that we can know all about God without God revealing himself to us as he is, rather than as we think he must be.

I've got to hand it to Ostler. He seems capable of worshiping a God that would approve of how Joseph Smith practiced polygamy. I, on the other hand, find such a being contemptible.

[_ttribe]

Polygamy is the bath water and the two pairs of earrings policy is the baby? Really?

No. Not at all. Polygamy is the bath water and belief in modern-day prophets is the baby.

[_Runtu]

I've got to hand it to Ostler. He seems capable of worshiping a God that would approve of how Joseph Smith practiced polygamy. I, on the other hand, find such a being contemptible.

That Ostler quote really hit me hard, too (I think it's the one from him MST testimony), so much so that it indirectly led to my being banned from MADB. It made my stomach hurt to think that I had taken the same position as Ostler for 15 years or so. I knew what Joseph had done, and it weighed on my conscience, but I used the same rationalization Ostler does: God must have a different idea of right and wrong than I do.

I appreciate ttribe's position, which I see is his understanding that what Joseph did wasn't right, but it doesn't invalidate his prophetic calling. I could probably accept that, but the problem for me was that when I stopped rationalizing this particular issue, I no longer felt the need to rationalize all the other problems. So, now I'm left with a mountain of problems with no good answers.

But this is the big one. I wish I could make sense of this and feel right about it. If I could, maybe I could pick up the other pieces of my faith. At this point, all I am sure of is that I believe in God and I really want to live the kind of life He wants me to live.

[_dblagent007]

Polygamy is the bath water and the two pairs of earrings policy is the baby? Really?

No. Not at all. Polygamy is the bath water and belief in modern-day prophets is the baby.

I can understand that. I'm trying to negotiate that path right now. The problem is where to draw the line between legitimate revelation and uninspired mistakes.

One approach is to rely on our own revelation to drawn the line. This presents a few problems with the reliability of personal revelation being one of them. Obviously the prophet felt his own personal revelation was reliable, but now God is telling me something different. How does that make sense?

Another approach is to impose a filter over the things the prophets say to eliminate weird, outrageous things that are contrary to reason, logic, your own experiences, etc. If the prophets words make it through this filter then we accept them as drawing us closer to God.

Ultimately, any approach that is less than complete, total obedience requires some methodology to identify and ignore prophetic counsel. I still think I fall on this spectrum, just more towards the ignore side (I try to follow the second approach above).

[_Aristotle Smith]

In all of my online interactions with Blake Ostler he has been uniformly rude and condescending. I also think that most of his apologetics end up being intellectual "three bank shots." Yeah, I guess I am biased against the guy. But at the same time I think this quote:

[P]olygamy was and is intended to be a test that stretched those who confronted the request to engage in it beyond anything they could imagine. It also stretches and challenges us. Indeed, even today it challenges us to give up the preconceived notion that we can pigeonhole God into our matrix of judgments. The practice of plural marriage obliterates the notion that God must fit into our categories of right and wrong and that we can know all about God without God revealing himself to us as he is, rather than as we think he must be.

Is par for the course for him. It's a three bank shot because polygamy is not about family, or dynasty, or priesthood, or eternal progression or anything else that Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, et. al. thought it was. No, we need Blake Ostler to explain that the "three bank shot" of polygamy is really a surreptitious lesson in the character and morality of God. Of course God can't reveal himself directly so he does the next best thing, he has old men marry and have sex with lots of young girls. But of course we're all too stupid to figure that out until Blake Ostler comes around and explains it to all us idiots.

I also think it is uniformly rude and condescending to the women and children whose lives were total crap because of the realities of polygamy. I guess they are supposed to think it was all worth it so that Blake Ostler could come along 150 years later and explain that they lived crappy lives so that we can know something about God and morality. Whatever Blake.

Even more ironic is that the LDS church is trying it's best to hide everything and anything about polygamy, thus depriving the whole world of these amazing lessons in God's nature and morality. Good thing the church has Blake around to sound the trumpets about it or the whole world might come to the erroneous conclusion that the whole thing is a massive embarassment that the LDS church would like to forget about.

And don't get me started on his expansion theory stuff...

End Rant.

[_Kevin Graham]

Polygamy is the bath water and belief in modern-day prophets is the baby.

Why not challenge this assumption by asking yourself, what evidence is there for modern-day prophets?

What rationale exists for modern-day prophets?

These men act like what they are, CEO's of a corporation. They shield themselves with PR depts. They make infrequent public appearances and even less frequent public statements and virtually nothing that can be considered uniquely Mormon. Meaning, virtually everything these "prophets" have said since the 19th century has been the usual platitudes that appeals to most Christians. What makes them different from regular preachers, aside from the fact that they don't preach? They're just symbols really.

But where is the justification in calling them prophets? Where are the prophecies? Why do they remain silent on so many crucial issues that plague us? The only "new" changes in doctrines/practices produced by the Church over the last century were culturally driven. Any CEO could have made these changes the same as any self-proclaimed "prophet."

The whole argument for the justification or need for prophets falls on its face once we consider what these prophets have actually done.

[_Joseph]

"Polygamy is not doctrinal". Gordon B. Hinckley