No, because it’s Yet Another Person Who Got The Story Wrong.
Galileo’s troubles with the church weren’t because of heliocentrism. They came about because he attacked the Pope*, calling him an imbecile. Calling the local ruler (who by the way is one of your sponsors) an imbecile is generally considered bad policy. The charges weren’t “saying that the Sun is the center of the universe”; they were “calling the Pope an imbecile”.
Hawaii used to have a very strict moral and spiritual code called Kapu, which, according to the Wikipedia article, “was used in Hawaii until 1819, when King Kamehameha II, acting with his mother Keōpūolani and his father’s queen Kaʻahumanu, abolished it by the symbolic act of sharing a meal of forbidden foods with the women of his court”. Although it is not mentioned in this entry, I remember reading that it was the effect of westerners being perplexed by all the strict policies that caused the king to successfully challenge it.
The Dalai Lama has explicitly said, “If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change.” He also said something very similar in the book The Universe in a Single Atom. I’m not aware of whether he’s actually applied this to any particular doctrine or tenet.
You are correct, and since this isn’t directly related to the OP, I’ll place my lengthy comments here.[spoiler]This was not a revelation and was penned by a secretary to the president in order to get the federal government off of their case. The Feds had been making things increasingly more difficult for the Mormons, and the next step was to seize the LDS temples.
Wilford Woodruff was expecting the end of the world any day. He never officially stated his belief in the reported Joseph Smith revelation that the Second Coming would occur in 1891, but nevertheless he believed the end was imminent. WW believed the temple would be instrumental in the Lord’s coming so it was imperative to not lose those.
This sort of ban was widely flouted, even by Woodruff himself, who married his last wife in 1897, nine years after the manifesto issued in his name. Polygamy was continued in secret for well over 15 years by the LDS church. There was a second manifesto by a later president:
Woodruff had been succeeded by Lorenzo Snow who didn’t stamp out polygamy. He in turn was succeeded by Joseph F. Smith (nephew of LDS founder Joseph Smith Jr., cousin of Joseph Smith III, the president of the RLDS church (now Community of Christ)) who finally decided to end the practice.
The court intrigue surrounding the secret practice of LDS polygamy is fascinating. D. Micheal Quinn, the single-most authoritative historian on the subject was excommunicated for exposing this part of LDS history.
In order to maintain plausible deniability, they implemented coded language which was not make explicit even to the recipients. What because a source of further confusion was efforts by the First Presidency to crack down on the practice, all the while one of the members of that presidency was authorizing plural marriages, albeit without the knowledge of other members.
An investigatory body was created to seek out these illegal marriages. In some cases, senior apostles who had authorized marriages for junior members of the Quorum of the Twelve were unknowingly tasked later with asking the same members if this junior members knew of anyone authoring such act. One such member later reported that believed it to be a test of loyalty rather than in inquiry for truth.
Gradually the leaders of the LDS church who wouldn’t stop broke off into splinter groups of fundamentalists. However, because of the decades-long secret practice with coded talk contradicting public statements, it became impossible for the LDS church to completely eliminate polygamy. The growth of the fundamentalists comes almost entirely from the main body of the LDS church.
It needs to be explicitly noted that the eternal principal of polygamy has never been renounced by the LDS church. It is still official doctrine (although not really publicly acknowledged). Mormon believe in “eternal marriage,” that is Mormons will be married in the afterlife. Men whose wives die may become married again, and this will become a polygamous marriage in the next world. [/spoiler]It was not a ban. The practice of immediate polygamy was suspended sometime in the 20th century, but will resume at some point.
This is also an interesting topic (for me, of course) but this was a case of revelation of “silence.” The governing bodies of the church, the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve got together and asked God to change the doctrine. They asked Him to let them know if He had any objections; if not then they would take this as a revelation to proceed.
I think it’s going to be hard to find any answers.
Most tenets promulgated by a religion are unfalsifiable, which is to say there are no facts that can disprove (or prove) it. It will thus be difficult to find examples where facts made any difference.
And then there’s the problem that many beliefs held by the religious are not actually tenets of their religion. If every Pratchettist believes the earth is a disc carried on the backs of elephants standing on a turtle, but the Church of Pterry had no official stance until it declared that it’s all allegorical, has the religion changed because of the facts?
That said, I think the place to look is within the religion itself rather than claims about the world at large. For example, it was common belief that the four Christian gospels were written by their namesake apostles. Literary and historical analysis indicates that this is unlikely. Are there definitive declarations by a single church where the doctrine is first the former and then changed to the latter?
Or look at the lists of Roman Catholic saints. Many early saints have been disclaimed because of lack of evidence. Is sainthood a tenet? How many early saints were declared by their local community versus officially by Rome?
Joseph Smith III of the RLDS (The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) did indeed make that claim but it was thoroughly debunked. They later discovered irrefutable evidence of Joseph Smith (Jr.)'s polygamy and were forced to retract that claim. They now acknowledge that he taught and practiced polygamy.
The Community of Christ now takes no official stance of the historicity of the Book of Mormon itself.
There were a number of LDS apostles who wanted to demote the Book of Abraham as well. The text was one of the sources for the doctrine of denying priesthood and temple ordinances to the Blacks.
The major tenets don’t go away easily for this reason. An exception might be the sects that have predicted days when the earth will come to an end. That prediction seems to be their major (and possibly only) tenet. The sects tend to dissolve when that day passes without incident but some of them just recalculate the date to some point in the future. They don’t usually give up on the point that the end will come at some specific day though. It also seems to be a scam some (most) of the time when for some reason the shepherd advises the sheep to send him their worldly possessions ahead of the climactic event, and he keeps the stuff.
A number of religions have given up the idea that slavery is allowed by God. The mainstream of the LDS have given up the idea of plural marriage. I can’t say how significant those tenets are to the religions.
You’re not going to have luck finding instances where facts defeated woo and the wooists acknowledged such, because that runs counter to the very nature of woo.
As indicated in previous posts, the best that can be hoped for is that certain doctrines are discarded for face-saving reasons. Start running a religion (or the myriad other forms of woo that depend on superstition and pseudoscience) on the basis of facts, and its days are numbered.*
*Wooists tend to see changes as weakness and/or sin; thus for example evidence-based medicine is bunk because it has rejected formerly accepted practices once they proved to be useless or harmful, while (for example) homeopathy has been chugging along in the same way since its inception in the late 18th century.
What’s the Church’s line on women who remarry after widowhood? Or do their subsequent marriage(s) not get sealed?
Many (most?) mainline Protestant churches accept homosexuality now. You could argue that this is based on societal changes more than evidence, but I think the evidence (both sociological and personal) that homosexuality harms no one and doesn’t lead to any psychological or “spiritual” damage (other than that caused by discrimination and shaming) had a big role in this.
Snort.
Sorry, that’s all I’ve got for this thread.
Exactly, he was operating as a scientist who happened to be a priest, not a priest who was using science to prove religious beliefs.
Yeah, and also it’s often framed as the Church vs. rationality, but it’s really the then Pope and the religious and secular (as much as you could be back then) vs. Galileo and a different faction of religious and secular. Heliocentricism went against dogma and current scientific beliefs.
Did you… did you seriously selectively truncate a quote in order to change the meaning?
The actual quote reads " He claimed (perhaps incorrectly) that his father never sanctioned polygamy, but that Brigham Young inserted it on his own."
Subsequent marriages for women are “for time only”, that is for only this life. Children of these couples go with the mother and the previous husband.
This also applies to divorces unless a special cancellation of blessing is approved by the first presidency. Men then lose nothing in a divorce but women may not be able to be sealed to their new husbands.
It doesn’t count. *Kashrut *is strictly a case of “do it because G-d commands it.” Anything about how it keeps people from eating things that go bad quickly is a justification after the fact, and a fairly recent one at that. If *kashrut *has any “purpose,” it’s to distinguish Jews from the people around them. That’s about it.
The traditional explanation for why Christians don’t need to keep kosher is that Peter had a vision in which God said those things are now OK to eat. Some historians argue that both *kashrut *and circumcision were abandoned by early Christians because they discouraged people from converting.
You seem to be under the notion that the RCC’s current procedures for declaring someone a saint have been in place a lot longer than they have, and that they’re more… Rome-centric than they are. Under current procedures, Rome puts the final official stamp, but one of the requirements happens to be being considered a saint by their local (or not so local) community.
The existence of sainthood (whether you define it as “people going to heaven” or as “people being set as an example of godly behavior”) is a tenet; whether a specific individual actually existed or not (the saints removed from the list are those which sound more like allegories than actual people, such as St Christopher) is not generally a tenet (the existence of Jesus or of St Peter are required, or the rest of the story doesn’t hold; the existence of a guy who once crossed a river with a baby on his shoulders and the baby happened to be the Christ, is not a matter of dogma). Believing that every miracle ever told happened is also not a tenet. And someone who is a useful example for a person may not be a particularly good one for another (life situations too different, say).
(Emphasis added.) You are misreading me, because I was referring to the fact that a saint being declared locally is not the same as Rome’s declaration. Thus the contrast I made between the two.
Technically, yes. I saw the juxtaposition of words as humorous, I thought others might not get it unless I made it obvious. On reflection, it probably would have worked just as well (or poorly) had I left the quote as Czarcasm gives it. It wasn’t intended to be a jab at anyone or anything, I have no opinion on the facts of the matter. I apologise if you were offended by it.
“on” or “into”?
Some Presbyterian sects have removed a belief in predestination or at least don’t require it. It was a very important part of Calvinism from which Presbyterianism arose.