Big Love - March 1, 2009 -- OPEN SPOILERS

Cafe Society
41

It wouldn’t necessarily make you hellbound, but it’s un-cool to say things like that out loud, in church. To your mother, in the privacy of your own home… Sarah’s fortunate that Barb felt the same way and was being pretty empathetic in that scene.

I’ll put it to you this way. When I was 15, I made the decision that I really wasn’t interested in toeing the party line and dedicating my life to making babies. So announced this – that motherhood is fine and dandy if you want to do it, but it wasn’t going to be for me, so don’t be expecting much in a few years. I was told that I didn’t know what I wanted and that I would change my mind. :smack:

In my 20s, I reiterated this, that I didn’t really want to make babies and was not terribly interested in ever being a Wife + Mommy. I was told that I didn’t know what I wanted and that I would change my mind.

In my 30s… well. Lather, rinse, repeat. My story hasn’t changed. Neither has the response. I’m just an ignorant woman who needs to be told what I want and when I meet the White Knight with an LDS missionary nametag, I will magically change my mind overnight and pump out as many babies as I can before menopause dries up my ovaries to raisins.

You’re not quite hellbound, but simply told you don’t know your own mind and then threatened with Eternal consequences if you don’t choose to fall back in line.

Again, in the afterlife, anyone not married who doesn’t have babies will be assigned to a righteous family. You become their slave/servant, and multiple wife if you’re a woman and you get to raise spirit babies in heaven. Nevermind that you made a choice in this life and were happy with that choice. Evidently, there’s no more free will in the afterlife.

I could never make sense of all that.

42

Uh…spirit babies? Where do they come from? Unbaptised infants?

Also, a question for Dogzilla and any other Mormons…do you guys feel different from other Christians? I mean, I know Mormons believe in Jesus and all the other things that Xians believe. But it just feels very different. All the mythology. Like on their vacation–they have all this recent history that doesn’t apply to most people. Like the angel Moroni and the gold plates…are they just emphasizing that stuff because it makes for better TV? Or do Mormons also heavily emphasize other stuff, like stuff from OT and NT and all that?

I felt really bad for Sarah. I kind of wonder–is that why, when she was so upset, was she saying stuff like, “I lost my baby.” Like, as in that’s the thing that Bill and Barb and everyone will most understand. Whereas, saying, “I’m upset but also relieved” might make them more likely to just think she was sinful. Her saying that deep down she was relieved rings more true, though, considering the precarious situation she would have been in, had she had a baby.

I get more now why they want kids sooo much. It’s just that all three women talk about wanting to get out of the house so badly, work, meet people, do things. And they have a lot of young kids. Imagine how much more stressful their lives would be with more kids. And honestly, I don’t think any of them really love spending time with the children. I think they do love their kids and all, but I just remember Nicki talking to (Wayne? Raymond?) about work and then Margene came in and asked if he wanted to watch a movie at her house, and Nicki seemed relieved. Nicki seems to do the whole motherhood thing because NOT doing so isn’t an option, but I don’t think she personally digs it all that much. And to be fair, I think two-three kids is enough for most women, even the ones who do love children.

43

I think Nikki said one that someone would be cast into The Outer Darkness, what is that?

This is perhaps a naive question but why do LDS/FLDS women put up with this stuff? Some of this Mormon doctrine makes Jerry Falwell seem like a feminist. BTW would not feminism seem like evil incarnate to them?

44

Oh, so it’s just like being a non-LDS woman and not wanting babies. Good to know.:stuck_out_tongue:

I didn’t think not really wanting the critters was necessarily a hell-worthy offense, but not wanting them is a bit different from being happy one died, you know? I thought the latter might be viewed more harshly, doctrinally speaking. (Not to get into the whole “a fetus is/isn’t a baby” argument, my understanding is that the LDS take is that it’s a baby from the moment of conception, so that would be pretty much what Barb and Sarah are saying. She had a baby, it died, and they’re sort of glad it did. Understandable, but seemingly at odds with the notion you have a moral duty to bring as many of them into the world as possible.)

45

Spirit Babies: Mormons believe that we all started in a place called the Pre-Existence. Sort of like pre-heaven. All souls originate there. Your job is to choose a body to be born into so that you get to learn whatever it is you’re supposed to learn in your temporal life. During your temporal life, you earn the right to go to one of the three levels of mormon heaven (called the Celestial Kingdom).

Do mormons feel different from other Christians? A. I am not a mormon anymore, nor am I Christian any more. B. I really don’t want to speak for 12 million+ mormons. Most consider themselves Christians and most do not realize the doctrinal points that separate mormonism from other protestant religions make it look like, to outsiders, that mormons don’t believe in Christ at all. It also looks that way from attending Sunday services because more lip service is paid to Joseph’s Myth and the other profits than to Jesus, in general. Easter is not really celebrated, per se, just acknowledged. But JS’s birthday is celebrated (04.26 IIRC). So go figure.

The Golden Plates and pioneer history are much more emphasized than OT/NT history in my experience. Like I said, this should not imply that mormons don’t believe in Christ. They believe that Ole Joe “restored” the “true” church from OT days “in this new dispensation,” so the new history is more relevant.

I’m not sure this makes sense (probably not so much) and I am no church doctrine expert. I’m trying to address these questions based on about six years of membership from ages 12-18. Search for an Ask the Mormon thread – there have been loads – for deep doctrinal questions answered by currently practicing mormons and people who know a hell of a lot more than I do.

46

Outer Darkness is the mormon version of hell. They don’t believe in heaven and hell the way traditional Christians and Dante do/did. There are three levels of heaven:

Celestial - the highest and bestest form of heaven, reserved for the polygamous and truly righteous.
Telestial - the middle heaven, reserved for good mormons who weren’t polygamous and maybe didn’t attend the temple for whatever reasons.
Terrestial - Reserved for Hitler, unwed mothers, nonmormons, and people who were taught by missionaries, rejected mormonism, but were never baptized as members.

And then there’s outer darkness which is pretty much reserved for apostates like myself: people who had this mormon gospel and rejected it as untrue. I plan to bring a flashlight. :wink:

Notice that apostacy is a worse sin than genocide. :cool:

47

Thanks for all the info. Mainstream LDS frowns on the practice of polygamy, I thought? So does this apply to the way Mormons practice now or is it more of how things used to be?

48

Yeah, pretty much.

The pressure to marry and breed is a little more intense and women are considered old maids and practically unmarriageable by age 25.

Mormons have a very different attitude toward death. I once attended a funeral for a small baby that died shortly after birth due to some defect or another. The mother was trying to grieve, but the atmosphere at that funeral was, in a very surreal way, celebratory. She was supposed to be happy that her baby died because it hadn’t reached the age of accountability yet (which is 8), therefore, unbaptized babies automatically pass Go, collect their $200 and go straight to the Celestial Kingdom, where they will finish growing up and be assigned to a faithful mormon family to carry out the nonstop breeding into eternity. Or something.

It was very weird.

On the postmo boards, you hear a lot of horror stories where someone has lost a beloved family member or worse, a child, and most of them are still traumatized from the cognitive dissonance that is created when you are told you are supposed to celebrate the death of your child. This runs counter to any parental instinct.

And no, I don’t really understand why women put up with this. Many don’t. Many do what I did and leave to suffer the consequences of family shunning for living a life of integrity. I think some women don’t know any different and were raised in a patriarchal, mormon environment. Converts are another story, obviously.

I think there’s a couple things at play there.

  1. The brainwashing. (I expect a TBM to pop in here any second to proclaim how faithful mormons are not brainwashed. This will underscore my point rather than refute it, but you interpret that however you like. I’m not going to debate that here.)
  2. The promise of eternal families. If you believe all this stuff (and that’s why you converted, because you believe it all), then if you live righteously, according to god’s plan as it has been laid out to you, then you get to make and raise babies in the afterlife, on your husband’s planet, to eternity. Or if you lost a child and were sealed to that child in the temple, you get to finish raising the child in the afterlife.

There is a mormon feminist website, but it’s a bit of a joke to me. While the other f-word is a bit reviled and the LDS church was instrumental in making sure that ERA did not pass in the 70s, my opinion is that most LDS women have never taken a Women’s Studies class in their lives and have no idea what feminism means. Many probably think it means you have to go join the Army, stop shaving your legs, and pee standing up. I think most mormons wouldn’t know a feminist if one bit 'em on the ass.

49

Outer Darkness is also where the Valar banished Morgoth, if I remember the Silmarillion correctly. :slight_smile:

50

Oh, right. Good question.

So the LDS in Utah, up until about 1890, were openly practicing polygamy and that is pretty much why they trekked out there, because at that time, the western states weren’t states yet and the eastern states had all pretty much banned polygamy. (Which is what got Ole Joe in so much trouble back in Nauvoo, IL, the site of his death.)

When Utah wanted to be a State, the feds basically said, you can’t be a state unless polygamy is illegal because that’s a federal law and you must fall in line. Brigham Young said okay, fine. Polygamy is in the closet now and we will excommunicate anyone caught practicing it. (And that is still the policy today in the mainstream LDS church.) Some splinter groups split off and continued the practice with their own brand of mormonism (although the FLDS split off for other reasons, IIRC, but I might be wrong about that). Other mainstream LDS just practiced polygamy on the down-low as recently as the 1930s. It could still be going on, on the DL, like the way the Henricksons are practicing it, today. Estimates say there are something like 30,000 polygamous groups in North America right now, and that is, of course, completely unsubstantiated, no cite, sorry. I think former FLDS Flora Jessop said that in an interview or something. She obviously has (a very understandable) ax to grind.

However, the church never struck polygamy from the canon. The temple wedding ceremony is not your basic traditional wedding ceremony. Husband pledges covenants to god and the wife pledges covenants to the husband, but the husband never pledges anything to his wife. There’s no love mentioned in the ceremony; it’s all about obedience. If the wife dies and the husband remarries, he can be sealed to his second wife and when they all die, he will have his two wives in heaven. Short answer: mormons believe polygamy will be practiced in the afterlife, but they also believe in obeying the laws of the land, so they cannot practice the principle here on earth.

Most mainstream LDS don’t know that much about polygamy and what I just posted all comes from my years of participation on the postmo boards, where this stuff is cited and vetted and verified before people wander off in the weeds making stuff up. It’s actually one of the faith’s Achilles heels and often, when a husband decides the church is bogus and wants to leave, he may bring up the polygamy discussion with the wife. The wives often follow their husbands out of the church after they research church doctrine and canon together and realize what they’ve actually signed up for in the afterlife. This information is all very much shoved under the rug on your average Sunday and it is *never *brought up with potential converts. But it can all be found in church-approved and church-published source documents, including canonical scriptures. TBMs will accuse me of making all that up from “anti-mormon” materials. However, I believe that nevermos would never be able to make this up just for the purpose of destroying the LDS church. Who would motivated to do that and why? Disgruntled ex-church members, maybe. Most of us just try to put all this behind us and move forward with our lives.

51

Just one more question. God created Adam and Eve, not Eve, Marcia, Jan and Cindy. The M/F ratio is just about one to one. By taking multiple wives this leaves most men out in the cold. If family is so important why do they practice a philosophy that will deprive the majority of men from the thing they regard as the most important?

52

No clue. Doesn’t make any sense to me either.

My best guess is: most mormons don’t think it through that carefully. You might be able to make the math work out if you practiced Polyandry, but that is expressly forbidden in mormon doctrine. See the link I posted on page 1: somewhere around verse 58 gets to the heart of this.

The FLDS have a practice of booting out teenaged boys because they present themselves as competition to marry all the young hotties. Bill Henrickson was one of these “Lost Boys.”

53

This thread has been super enlightening for me, thanks.

And so was his half-brother, Frankie. He gets kicked out because he was flirting with a girl who was earmarked for some other guy, as I recall. I guess they try to nip it in the bud over there.

54

The doctrine was created when the Mormon church was still quite small, and I suppose they counted on being able to recruit lots of new women. The advantage of the doctrine is you can grow your religion very quickly with a high chick : dude ratio.

55

friedo, I suspect that the doctrine was really rooted in Joe’s horndoggedness and he really didn’t think it through much at the time. I think he was trying to come up with an excuse to boink outside of his marriage, so he legitimized extra-marital boinking by resurrecting polygamy from the OT.

According to exmo/postmo resources, Joe had already begun his first forays into polygamy and then his wife Emma found out, so that prompted the revelation of D&C 132 (linked to on previous page). You see in that scripture an admonition to Emma to play the plyg game because god was speaking directly to Joe and who would question god? (Emma was an awesome, tough broad.)