Official LDS doctrine: Priesthood Ban Divinely Appointed

[_malkie]

However, I know that, as one of the few defenders here, he is kept quite busy with more substantive posters than myself.

Could be it (to give you the benefit of the doubt). Also, sometimes, once I've said my piece, I rest my case. Sometimes it's devolved into a yes-it-is no-it-isn't back and forth. Sometimes the one debating with me has nothing but invective so it's not worth my time. Sometimes, as you say, there is just too much. I'm on many boards and I also have work and family.

Right now, I've simply been waiting for things to start while my family gathers (first grandchild). In between my last two posts and the one previous, I went and videoed one of my daughters for a test interview for what they used to call Junior Miss.

I hear you.

Congrats on your daughter. I wasn't familiar with Junior Miss, but it looks interesting - good luck to her!

At some point, if I feel the urge, I'll collect the questions I would have liked you to answer into a single post, and you can determine then of you want to answer them. I'll continue to be disappointed, but not offended, if you choose not to.

[_moksha]

Has the Church said the original ban was hokum?

I don't think this formality is needed to realize it was hokum. Skin color is genetically determined. Dark pigmentation gave a crucial survival advantage to our ancestors from history, when they lived on the Savannah. The recessive gene for light pigmentation was only able to flourish much later on after the great migrations lead some of us to a latitude of less direct sunlight. No curses were ever involved with determining skin color.

That worthiness of lineage is like saying the Hapsburgs had something special going on other than a receding chin.

[_harmony]

Has the Church said the original ban was hokum?

I don't think this formality is needed to realize it was hokum. Skin color is genetically determined. Dark pigmentation gave a crucial survival advantage to our ancestors from history, when they lived on the Savannah. The recessive gene for light pigmentation was only able to flourish much later on after the great migrations lead some of us to a latitude of less direct sunlight. No curses were ever involved with determining skin color.

That worthiness of lineage is like saying the Hapsburgs had something special going on other than a receding chin.

+1!

*applause*

And clinging to such outdated ideas only serves to once again show how out of touch with reality our leaders and those who support them without ever giving a thought to what is real, are. (sorry, that is an awkward sentence)

[_Droopy]

So the Lord IS racist (lineageist) after all...thanks bcspace, good to know...

Yes. Everyone who does not see things in the manner you see them, and interpret the world in the way you think is proper, is a (add desired PC term of abuse and moral oneupmanship here) "...", including God, who has never been a very politically correct fellow in any case.

You've even been able to come up with a brand new PC term with specific application to the Church - lineageism. Now that we have this, we can be creative, and cast moral aspersions upon our ideological opponents by combining this with the traditional leftist anathemas.

Just think of the possibilities. We can cross feminist concerns with lineageism and (Juliann might like this) have phallolineageism to designate the the fact that woman cannot hold the priesthood through any family line.

There would be Eurolineageism, heterolineageism, late stage capitalist lineageism, post-colonial lineageism, and the dreaded right wing, TBM, Chapel Mormon lineageism.

Don't let me dissuade you from coming up with your own combinations.

[_Darth J]

Okay, then instead of being all PC and leftist, let's go with Droopy's definition of racism:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=22981

If racism is anything, it is racial consciousness; it is a focus and preoccupation with "race" and the choice to overlay all other aspects of human relationships with the template of race and to interact with people of other ethnic backgrounds, not as unique individuals, but as representatives of a racial collective.

Droopy----

Prior to June 8, 1978, would the LDS Church ordain a man of black African heritage to the priesthood by judging him as a unique individual and based on his own personal worthiness? Or would the Church view him as a representative of a racial collective?

[_Droopy]

I don't think this formality is needed to realize it was hokum. Skin color is genetically determined. Dark pigmentation gave a crucial survival advantage to our ancestors from history, when they lived on the Savannah. The recessive gene for light pigmentation was only able to flourish much later on after the great migrations lead some of us to a latitude of less direct sunlight. No curses were ever involved with determining skin color.

That worthiness of lineage is like saying the Hapsburgs had something special going on other than a receding chin.

There has never been an official, established "doctrine" in the Church that black skin was a curse. This concept was a theological explanation and theory drawn from other sources, including the culture and time in which they appeared viable. So long as you and other critics (and apparently some apologetic "defenders of the Church") continue to tilt at windmills in this manner, the debate will proceed to go nowhere.

The "curse" was the restriction on ordination to the priesthood. Black people, who happen to be...black, partook of the lineage through which priesthood was restricted. Other dark, and very dark skinned peoples apparently did not (as their men have always been able to hold the priesthood).

Black skin was certainly correlated, or associated with the restriction on priesthood, but there is no official doctrine anywhere in church history claiming that it was the reason priesthood was restricted. The reason priesthood is restricted to any people (and it has been restricted among many groups (as has the gospel itself) other than blacks), is hardly up to us to determine, but in the Book of Mormon, any morphological changes, whether skin tone (genetic) or self applied alterations to appearance, connote cultural differentiation between the Lord's people and "Babylon," or "spiritual Rome," or "the great and spacious building," or whatever the metaphor or symbol may be given the cultural context or spiritual meaning the writer intends to convey.

Of course you are arguing from purely naturalistic, secularist presuppositions regarding how and why human beings acquire the specific physical forms they do in mortality (as with the time, place, culture, and other circumstances of mortal life) and hence, are really doing little more than talking past me into your own reflection.

[_Darth J]

If racism is anything, it is racial consciousness; it is a focus and preoccupation with "race" and the choice to overlay all other aspects of human relationships with the template of race and to interact with people of other ethnic backgrounds, not as unique individuals, but as representatives of a racial collective.

Droopy----

Prior to June 8, 1978, would the LDS Church ordain a man of black African heritage to the priesthood by judging him as a unique individual and based on his own personal worthiness? Or would the Church view him as a representative of a racial collective?

[_Droopy]

If racism is anything, it is racial consciousness; it is a focus and preoccupation with "race" and the choice to overlay all other aspects of human relationships with the template of race and to interact with people of other ethnic backgrounds, not as unique individuals, but as representatives of a racial collective.

Droopy----

Prior to June 8, 1978, would the LDS Church ordain a man of black African heritage to the priesthood by judging him as a unique individual and based on his own personal worthiness? Or would the Church view him as a representative of a racial collective?

Prior to June 8, 1978, the Church viewed men of black African descent in precisely the same way they would have viewed white males of Finnish descent had the priesthood ban been centered in their lineage: as individuals partaking of that lineage through descent from the original progenitors of that lineage.

Using your implied logic here, all males under the age 21 who are not allowed to consume alcoholic beverages are not unique individuals but part of a collective in which all members share the same intrinsic attributes (all males under the are of 21 who can't legally drink are known and understood as human beings fundamentally by this shared collective identity).

Your (attempted) sophistry here tries to conflate a central attribute shared among disparate, unique individuals with a collective perception of them as a mass, and no two concepts could be farther apart. There is, at least, no logical reason why black people cannot all be unique individuals and at the same time, share similar or identical attributes (such as dark skin, a certain hair texture, musculature, and so on), just as there is no reason to believe that white people cannot all be unique individuals and share any number of unifying traits.

The restriction on priesthood is, whatever else it is, nothing more than a specific, discreet aspect of the lineage through which most black Africans descended and has no relevance to their being unique individuals in any other sense.

A collective mentality toward black people (of both the non-Left and the Left) is a completely different creature. Race consciousness (like its close siblings on the Left (and the non-Left), class consciousness, gender consciousness, and ethnic consciousness) look at human beings, not as unique individuals, but as homogenous, lumpen masses all sharing similar underlying, innate characteristics as a collective. The collective moves, thinks, perceives, speaks, dresses, relates, votes, and in general behaves as a collective entity. Blacks, Jews, Asians, proletarians, white males, bourgeois middle class, homosexuals, "the rich," "the poor," etc., all are seen, understood, and related to only as members of the identity group to which they belong.

The restriction on priesthood was something, indeed, imposed upon black people because of their lineage, as a group. But this does not imply a collective perception of blacks anymore than restriction of piloting a space shuttle implies that all people restricted from so doing are seen in as faceless members of a mass and not as unique individuals.

One must be qualified to pilot a space shuttle. Those not so qualified are logically just as unique and just as much individuals as those who are chosen to do so. The fact that they share one defining characteristic in this narrow sense - not being qualified to pilot a space shuttle - in no sense removes any individuality or uniqueness from them in any other way.

If one is convinced, as I am, that the original ban, as well as its ultimate end, were both imposed and foreseen by the Lord, then the reason blacks were for so long unqualified in a lineal sense to receive the priesthood, while opaque at the moment (along with a number of other mysteries of the specific conditions of mortality for each of us), can be negotiated in humility and faith without rolling over and wagging our tales for Babylon and its heady pseudo-moralism known traditionally as "political correctness."

[_Shulem]

That's it. I've had enough of your garbage, bcspace. I'm officially putting YOU on ignore. It's over. I hope you enjoyed your fun under the sun. Take the Explanations of Facsimile No. 3., and shove them up your smelly Mormon hole. And tell your anxious Mormon Jesus that I'll have sex with him when I'm good and ready and not before. He will have to be patient and then I'll drill him a new one.

Paul O

[_ludwigm]

That worthiness of lineage is like saying the Hapsburgs had something special going on other than a receding chin.

Habsburgs, if I may ask.

Anyway, they were our kaiserlich und königlich (pronounced [ˈkaɪzɐlɪç ʔʊnt ˈkøːnɪklɪç], Imperial and Royal) leaders.

The medium Imperial and Royal coat of arms of Austria-Hungary (as of 1915)



Map of imperial Austria (in orange) and royal Hungary (in green), with Bosnia as a common condominium



4-year old Crown Prince Otto of Hungary in Budapest in 1916, attending his parents' coronation as King and Queen of Hungary, painted by Gyula Éder.



The signature of our last king...