In 1990, they stopped miming their gruesome death should they reveal the secrets. And they removed the Christian minister who was Satan’s minion. And they stopped pretending to speak Adamic. And they eliminated the Five Points of Fellowship that involved getting verrrry close to an octogenarian. Then in 2005 they added a lot more privacy to the Washing and Anointing.
That’s…quite the image.
Wow—
those are the just kind of scenes that make for famous movies. Freddy meets the Excorcist ,and with hints of nudity!
What is there not to like?
Is there a pre-1990 sect of mormonism I can join? I don’t want the watered-down, PG-rated version—I want the original, R-rated.
Actually, one of the things I like about the Mormon religion is that it has a mechanism for changing its rules to meet the needs of changing times. The Church leadership can declare a new revelation whenever [del]God speaks to them[/del] they get embarrassed by their own doctrines and rituals.
If you’re gonna believe in stupid stuff, it’s nice to be able to throw out the worst parts, and match the stupidity to current social trends.
(example: Jim Crow laws are thrown away…No problem- We conveniently received a revelation about that this morning!
We’ll stop talking about how dark skin is God’s punishment, and we’ll even let blacks into our priesthood, starting today.)
It apparently didn’t have as much to do with Jim Crow laws being tossed as it did other schools refusing to play BYU while the racial ban was in effect.
The miming gruesome death thing and the five points of fellowship thing are both masonic in origin too.
Yes, as are the handshakes and signs. Not sure about the passwords.
This is one of the great ironies of Mormonism. While the Book of Mormon was being written, there was strong anti-Mason sentiment in upstate New York. William Morgan had disappeared after writing an expose of Masonry, and he was presumed to have been murdered by the Masons. Much of the Book of Mormon describes various conflicts between the good guys and the Gadianton robbers, a shadowy group that infiltrates the government and uses handshakes and passwords. In its early days, the Book of Mormon was considered to be an anti-Mason book.
Morgan’s widow, Lucinda, boasted that she was Joseph Smith’s “mistress”. Scholars list her among the many wives of Joseph Smith. And William Morgan was one of the first lucky souls to have been posthumously baptised.
Masonry was making a comeback in Illinois (or was it Ohio?), and Joseph Smith joined up. And then he created the Endowment ceremony which flagrantly plagiarized Masonic ceremonies. So the little church that was founded on an anti-Mason book now uses Masonic handshakes to get past the “angels who stand as sentinels” guarding the gates of heaven. Joseph’s last words as he fell from the window at Carthage jail were “Oh lord my god…” In LDS seminary, I was taught that this was proof that he saw a vision of God and/or Jesus to accept his spirit into heaven. More likely, he was attempting to call out to any Masons in the mob for support: “Oh lord my god, is there no help for the widow’s son?”
The more I read this thread the more whack-a-doodle LDS seems. Secret handshakes with the angels so you can get into heaven?
Hey, I used to be fully immersed in that whack-a-doodle.
Oddly, the intro to the Endowment ceremony states that the goal is to learn the handshakes (called “tokens”) to pass the sentinel angels, but the handshakes and passwords (the “name” of each “token”) are then exchanged with an old geezer playing the part of The Lord at the end of the ceremony. Go figure.
“Your endowment is to receive all those ordinances in the house of the Lord which are necessary for you, after you have departed this life, to enable you to walk back to the presence of the Father, passing the angels who stand as sentinels, being enabled to give them the keywords, the signs and tokens, pertaining to the holy priesthood, and gain your eternal exaltation.”
So, do those souls without tokens wander about in some sort of purgatory?
Crane
Mormons do this ceremony for the dead by proxy, just like they do baptisms. And there are lesser heavens for those who can’t get past the Celestial Bouncer.
We probably covered this in the Big Love thread at the time, but how realistic was that Temple scene? IIRC, they did the mimicking death part.
I don’t remember if they mimed the Penalties. It was accurate, though. Except they took a mind-numbingly boring 90 minute ceremony and condensed it to 2 minutes.
What wasn’t realistic is Barbara’s family situation leading to the endowment. I’m going from memory here, but it seems that she had an “eternal” family with Bill before they became polygamists. This implies that she and Bill had already received their endowments. But I don’t think either of them ever wore the Temple Garment underwear. And then Barbara decides to go to the temple immediately before being excommunicated because her bishop discovered the polygamy. If someone’s excommunication is pending, I doubt she’d be issued a temple recommend. Maybe she was already endowed, had received a recommend sometime in the last two years, and wanted to go do proxy work for the dead one last time. That would make sense, but that’s now how the show made it look.
I don’t get it. Is this a cultural thing that’s fun and interesting or do the majority of LDS actually believe that they’ll need secret handshakes and stuff when they die?
Intellectually I know that believing this stuff doesn’t make you crazy, but it’s hard to accept that.
Lots of religions require baptism or other rituals in order to get a better afterlife. This is just a long, complicated ritual.
The “majority of LDS” don’t even self-identify as LDS. Individuals’ levels of belief and practice vary, as in any organization. But that couple down the street, you know the ones with the BYU bumper stickers and Romney campaign signs and 7 kids and a huge framed picture of the nearest temple? You know, the stereotypical Ameican Mormon family? Yes, they actually believe that they will be presented to the Lord at a huge veil when they die, where they will gain entrance by demonstrating their knowledge of hand grips and passwords.
I think her Mom gave Barb her own recommend.
back to the original question.
when the Jesuits and the roman Catholics and other forms of Christianity spread like the ‘holy’ wildfire in the history. the tribes were desperate to avoid relinquishing their own religion. one common factor you see is the sudden emergence in tribal clans of a 'head god or top dog god figure within a pantheon of monotheist deities.
in African religion or myth or in some of the early Scandinavian myth you see the sudden advent of a main god , in some cases this god does absolutely nothing. no real thing to say that it s the numero uno big cheese, save that it is decided to be just that. it was an attempt to stave the christian invasion by saying oh we have one too.
how this works in to your question is when you consider after the major age of enlightenment and technology . the religions suffered greatly.people were wising up to the double standards and what not. however, tradition, is a family instinct.
imagine it this way, kid: i dont believe in our family traditional god. but, i have to believe in a god to be accepted.but none are close to the modern age that would satisfy the need to celebrate a few holidays by loosely following similar tenet. this is where the Mormon idea comes in. it allowed them to say i don’t believe in your particular god, but my god is technically the same as yours. in comparison it would be like the love jesus concept of the 60’s and 70’s where a lot was rewritten but they could still be accepted unconditionally because they believed in the same stuff as their parents.i think it revolves around this kind of premise. hope this made sense.
Nope. Sorry, it doesn’t. Maybe some line breaks would help. And more capitalization. And a cite. I’m not saying that I agree or disagree. Just that there’s a lot of info to digest all at once, and yet it doesn’t really say anything about Mormonism and modern scrutiny.
Interesting thread, too bad I missed it the first go around, I’d have questions for emarkp.
If people think that the 90 minutes for the temple ceremony were bad, it was much worse in the Salt Lake temple where we moved around to the different rooms and had live theater. I had grown up believing that going to the temple was going to be really special and was very disappointed when I “received my endowments” by going to the temple for the first time just before I went on my mission. My father resorted to whispering to me during one point that there was a special meaning to one of the Jupiter trees on one of the paintings. When I asked later, he admitted it was just to keep me distracted. My boredom must have been pretty obvious.
It’s pretty funny, but I never thought of how silly that there are the Mormon Gods who know everything and can read your soul like those special X-Ray glasses which were advertised in the back of the comics (do they still advertise them?), but you have to have the secret handshake to slip into heaven. Finding out that it was lifted from the Masons then made it understandable. Having secret handshakes and requiring knowledge of complex ceremonies makes sense if you are going to have a secret organization in the pre-internet days, several hundred years ago, but not so much as the deterrent to keep wannabees out of your highest degree of salvation.
Having so much of the documentation on early Mormonism readily available has really been enlightening. Personally, one of the more interesting findings is the degree to which JS’s secret polygamy drove so much of what later became orthodox Mormonism. The temple ceremony itself is an example of this. It was created in order for Smith to contain polygamy to a very small band of his top lieutenants, which then is a good reason for borrowing the secret signs. That made less sense once the ceremony was opened to the general Mormon population, although it still serves a purpose of keeping people to continue to attend.
Had Smith just been better at keeping his pants zipped up, I wouldn’t have had to know of that particular hell known only to Mormons who wear one-piece nylon underwear in the Japanese humid summers. Thank god that cotton was also an option.
Getting back to the OP, I’ve seen more than one fairly intelligent Mormon who does the type of denial as seen in this thread. It’s fairly common, although I think it will become harder and harder to sallow the koolaid as more facts become more widely known. Of course, Mormonism is jettisoning it’s particular beliefs fairly rapidly and is much more likely to become just another mainstream church in not that distant future.
One reason I bumped this thread is when reading teh zombie I saw that he was online. I will PM him to see if he has anything to add. ~~~~
emarkp is a true believer; what’s the point? If you want to know what he’ll say (almost word for word) go to http://www.fairlds.org/ or http://MaxwellInstitute.byu.edu
Mormon apologetics are very tiresome but if you’re really interested go to those two sites and read up. And remember, Mormon apologetics aren’t intended to convince an outsider; they are only there to reassure believing Mormons that they aren’t morons for believing in such a pile of poppycock.