Uhhh… yes, they do. If you apostacize from mormonism and your family is still mormon, they will be asked (they’ll be asked if you apostacize or not) at the interview to receive their temple recommendation card, if they associate with apostates. If they do, they are to either shun/disown you, or they are not allowed to get a temple recommendation and cannot attend the rituals in the temple.
No, they do harrass you. They also have a meeting at the end of each year called “tithing settlement” to determine if, in fact, you paid your full 10% to the church. If they can document that you were a less-than-full tithe payer, again, your temple recommendation can be withheld and all the blessings of full membership are denied to you.
That’s not entirely accurate either. Still-believing members will stalk you at your house, leave baked goods on your doorstep, send priesthood holders or church authorities to your house to talk you back in. They exert ridiculous amounts of social pressure on people to return to the fold. This is referred to as “love bombing.” If you miss one Sunday, rest assured, you will have a plate of cookies on your doorstep with a saccharine note about how much you were missed and* we looooove you*.
As a resigned Post-Mormon who has experienced all of these things first-hand, I gotta tell ya, I couldn’t disagree more.
For evidence – stories from ex- and post-mormons who do experience all these culty control things that you mentioned – see also www.postmormon.org, and/or www.exmormon.org.
There was a letter writing campaign amongst mormon churches, and not just in California, to encourage mormons to donate to the cause of passing Prop 8. Mormons ended up contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars and managed to be instrumental in passing this ugly legislation. Mormon bigotry effects a hell of a lot of people outside the group.
On another note, to those of you who think mormons are so damn nice, I can assure you. You might not think that if you heard what they said about you behind your back, after the fake plastic smiles faded and their back in their safe little mormon cocoon. That mormon niceness is passive-aggressive manipulative behavior designed to make you think they are all so pleasant so you’ll want to be one. Mormon nicety is nothing more than thinly veiled missionary work.
Sorry, I didn’t read this post all the way through at first, so I’m quoting and snipping again.
Polygamy is still officially sanctioned… in the afterlife. The polygamy doctrine was never stricken from canon. Anyone who wants to get hold of some mormon scriptures can read Doctrine & Covenants section 132. That is the polygamy “revelation.” It’s still taught. If a mormon man is married and their spouse dies and he remarries, then both wives get to be with that husband in the afterlife. Any woman who never marries will be assigned to a worthy priesthood holder in the afterlife.
And mainstream mormons never acknowledge that the FLDS (the weird polygamists in Texas, Arizona, British Columbia, and Mexico) practice mormonism much more faithfully to the exact same scriptures that the mainstream mormons use. It’s all based on the same books.
It is easy to make fun of Mormons for the magic underwear, the weird alien beliefs and other strange ideas including accepting Joe Smith as something other than a con man. But the church stance against blacks , gays and women has been known for a long time. It has been so offensive to the general populace that they felt the need to backtrack. Now blacks are accepted and loved to pieces. Now women are suddenly acceptable in more elevated levels of the church and may have more use than just breeders. They still hate gays though.
What kind of religion is it that changes its beliefs due to public pressure? Do they really do it or just say so to diffuse the problems? If you change from pressure so easily, how can you be divinely inspired and acting with gods teachings. If the ancient teachings are wrong and need to be changed, does that not say the basis of the church was flawed? Does it not question the entire idea of Mormonism?
May be slightly off-topic, but I would like to ask this of the former LDS missionary folks here (please). It is based on conversations I had with a person whose son was ‘recalled’ due to ‘poor performance’ whilst early in his mission thing. Or words much to that same point anyways. Also well over a decade ago. There seemed to be considerable embarrassment to Mom/Dad about son not being ‘worthy’, so to speak, and in hindsight now, has me curious as can be. Dad was clear about how hard son was trying, but his higher-ups were very disappointed in son and wanted him back to do some more ‘classes’. Dad definitely said son had to come back to do some more ‘mission training’, fwiw.
Do the missionary folk, past or present, have a quota or a percentage of persons they contact-v-convert, to fulfill per their ‘mission statement’? If one of the missionary persons does not achieve what the mid/upper-mgmt (Bishop?) feels is enough ‘conversion’, is there more ‘training’ or such required/requested per the ‘management’? I use lots of '… ’ due to my bona-fide ignorance of actual terms and my honest want to learn more of this side of things LDS. Kind of a follow-up to postulations of LDS-church striving to have many ‘officially enrolled’ Members as possible (for whatever reason). Is it ~‘try hard and accept what comes’ or more of ~‘you need x number, period, or ya ain’t really trying hard enough’? Thx for clarifications on this aspect
Look up the curse of Ham to see how many Christians justified slavery. In fact if you go to your library you can find all sorts of religious defenses of slavery in 19th century America.
That would be outside my experience. There are no official quotas as such. But every week missionaries have district and zone meetings, where they get together and discuss what was done the previous week and to set goals for both the next week in particular and longer term in general. In Brazil where I did most of my work, goals would be something like having 30 discussions (A discussion is an hour long meeting with potential members) and a commitment for baptism from at least one investigator. Most missionaries in Brazil were expected to bring someone to baptism every month. Expected numbers are vastly different in various parts of the world. Most missionaries in South America can expect to convert 20 people on their two year missions, and high performers may get many dozens. In places like Norway, even a single conversion would be a very successful mission. But in any case, like I said, the goals were set by the missionaries themselves and there was no disciplinary action except the disapproval of your peers.
These reviews and goal setting sessions were held and led by peers. In fact, aside from the mission president (who manages between 150-200 missionaries in a region), all positions of leadership in a mission are held by senior missionaries in the last half of their two year missions. So most everything is done by kind in their late teens early twenties. Peer pressure is huge. And the whole thing has a lot in common with sales organizations. I know a lot of returned missionaries who have had very good sales careers from the training they received.
As to your specific example, I can’t recall anything quite like what you described. Missionaries did get sent home from time to time. Serious sin could get you booted. Missionaries are supposed to keep to an extremely exacting code of conduct. Far stricter than the general membership. But going to the beach rather than proselytizing would get you a stern lecture from the leadership not sent home. In my experience “not being worthy” was generally code for sexual activity. Even the general members are expected to be chaste. But the missionaries are supposed to take it even further. Being a non-sexually active gay would be fine (as long as you accepted it was wrong) in a general member. But even admitting gay thoughts might get you sent home… unless you could convince the mission president that you had really repented from your evil, evil thoughts. And any actual sexual activity of any type even without sexual intercourse would get you sent home post haste.
As long as someone was seen as trying I can’t imagine that they would get sent home. There is a huge stigma associated with being a failed missionary in the church. And the mission leaders are aware of it. They will do quite a bit to try and keep from attaching it to someone. And the missions are seen as much as a way to strengthen the faith of the missionaries as it a way to achieve new converts. There is constant training going on during the mission. So it would make no sense to send him back for training. In general someone who is struggling, would instead be partnered with a high performer. But unless the missionary had sinned grievously (again mainly sexual), was a huge disruptive influence among the other missionaries, had severe health issues, or actually quit (very uncommon) they don’t get sent home.
My assumption on hearing that story would be that the kid engaged in some sexual immorality, and the parents were in denial. And I’m fairly certain that would be the rumor in the local congregation (which is why there is a stigma attached to it). Otherwise the parents would have provided the actual reason and avoided the assumption of the rest of the members.
Thanks for that insight, Bartman, very much. This ‘kid’ was somewhere in US (forget where exactly), and all I heard was he wasn’t ~“doing well enough on his mission” and parents were downtrodden about it for awhile. Knowing more about the structure of goings-on helps me with my ‘ignorance’. Appreciate your time/answers! I had always wondered about (possible) ‘quotas’.
Most mormons, IME, are terrified to even try drinking. And I’ll say this: for most of us (even true believing mormons who have lapsed in the past, but repented) it’s a hell of a lot easier to give up booze for two years than it is to give up sex for two years (and by that, I’m including masturbation).
While one might get sent home for drinking, I’ve heard stories of missionaries in Germany, for example, who drank a bit and nobody batted an eye.
Typically, in the Young Men’s and Young Women’s programs, you are taught (Well, I was taught this) that sex is the sin next to murder in severity. You can be forgiven for drinking, but it’s much, much more difficult to get forgiveness for fucking. Or for being gay and admitting to it.
My mormon-o-meter pings on “the missionary was gay and made the mistake of talking about it” or he confessed to masturbation and was sent home for being a sick, twisted perv because he was “addicted” to it. :rolleyes: I know, it sounds so ridiculous, but there’s about a thousand returned missionaries over there at exmormon.org who can tell you anecdote after anecdote in this vein.
As someone who’s worked in sales organizations for going on 15 years now, I can confirm that many Mormons go into sales, and do quite well. I have a friend who is ex-LDS and in sales, and he says that missionary training was way more effective than any sales training in teaching how to close a deal.
Which always makes me think of the LDS-version of God as Alec Baldwin, standing at the pearly gates: “Heaven’s for closers!” “A-B-C - A-always, B-be, C-Converting. Always Be Converting!”
From the parts of Krakauer’s book that I did read (haven’t read more than a few excerpts) I found it to have basic factual errors, the account of the Mountain Meadows Massacre didn’t seem realistic, and he seemed to conflate mainstream Mormons with the FLDS.
I’m an actively involved LDS now, and have been most of my life. I served as a full-time missionary in Chile (Santiago) in 1993-1994 and currently serve in the Elders Quorum presidency–my stewardship is to watch over and help out the families with (rule-of-thumb) heads-of-household under their mid-40s.
I have a BA in Computer Science and have spent most of the last decade modeling physics for radiation therapy and visualization of 3D medical images (CT, MR, PET, etc.). I consider myself generally a skeptic, though my LDS beliefs would be laughed at by most of the JREF crowd, though there are other Christians who consider themselves skeptics (see the recent flap about Dr. Pamela Gay).
All that being said, the so-called debunkings of LDS scripture historicity have been pretty poor IMO. All too often, criticisms are based on beliefs that we don’t actually have, or things about the Book of Mormon (BoM) that aren’t actually there. For instance, from Erdosain’s post:
Many of those items deserve discussion on their own, but the BoM references rare steel weapons, but no steel armor. The translation of the papyrus has not been proven false. People have claimed that the Joseph Smith papyri fragments discovered after the full papyrus was thought to be lost in the Chicago fire are the full papyrus, and thus the translation can be shown to be false. However, contemporaneous accounts of the papyrus show that the recovered fragments are far less than what was originally described.
American horses were widely believed to be extinct about 10,000 BC, but recent (last 10 years IIRC) discoveries have challenged that (see here for one example).
While many early Mormons believed that all of the Native Americans (North and South) were entirely descended from three waves of immigration described in the BoM (ca. 2000 BC, 600 BC, and sometime after 600 BC), that’s not what the book actually says. We also don’t have much idea where the lands described in the BoM are other than they’re somewhere in the Americas.
Believe it or not, some smart members of the LDS church actually have researched these topics. Some of us after doing such research are satisfied that criticisms are invalid.
AFAIK there has been very little independent scholarly research on the BoM’s claims generally. Typically it’s dominated by anti-Mormons on one side and Mormon apologia on the other. That being said, I’ve been happy to investigate any claims I’ve seen against our church and history and haven’t found anything compelling.
Lastly, the whole polygamy thing is pretty straightforward to me. It was practiced for a time (IIRC about 2% of LDS practiced it at its peak), is not practiced (on Earth) today. Marriages performed in temple ceremonies are for “time and eternity” thus if a man’s wife dies and he marries another woman in the temple he would be plurally married in the afterlife (assuming all parties live up to their covenants, etc.). It may be practiced again in this world, though I don’t expect it. We tend to avoid talking about it much in a sound-bite conversation because a full discussion is complicated, but there’s no doubt that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young had multiple wives (though I don’t think Smith fathered any children with his plural wives – I remember seeing that even assume Smith’s wives were all fertile, he wasn’t around them with enough frequency to have a high probability of fathering children with them).
Well, after veering wildly (and frankly, stupidly) off-topic, this thread finally gets back on track with emarkp’s perfect post.
How does Mormonism survive modern scrutiny? Because 99% of Mormons don’t bother scrutinizing it. They’ve been taught to fear scrutiny, to be bored by scrutiny, to feel that scrutiny has no relevance with how warm and fuzzy they feel at church. That’s the secret. To quote the immortal movie WarGames, the only way to win is not to play. The only question is how long the Mormon church can tamp down curiosity from its own members in the digital age.
Those who DO bother scrutinizing these zany beliefs and unsavory historical facts fall into two camps: those who leave and those who stay. I think both of these groups are too small for the leadership of the church to care about, at least for now. Anyway, emarkp’s previous post provides a perfect picture of the mental gymnastics necessary to be a believing, informed Mormon. It’s 25% moving goalposts, 25% pointing out irrelevant facts, 25% a wizard did it, and finally 25% of “la-la-la-I-can’t-HEAR-you!”
It really doesn’t bother me. I latched on to the same improbable, silly, and dishonest arguments when I was working through my crisis of faith. I sure felt embarrassed after it was over, but I knew that I had no one to blame but myself. Such is the power of wanting to believe. If you want it bad enough, it can be stronger than any facts or logic.
Regardless of whether the fragments we have now were a small fraction or a large fraction of what JS was working from, we have proof that his translations of the pieces that we do have were completely wrong, and there are no parts of the BoA that correspond to what the fragments actually say when properly translated from the hieroglyphics.
Further, the drawings (facsimiles) from the BoA are a comical exposition of JS’s fraud. Egyptologists correctly predicted, before the originals were found, where the source drawings would have missing pieces (lacunae), because the drawings were a common feature of funerary documents and they knew what should be in the holes, but where there were holes, JS drew the completely wrong things.
I think emarkp’s post is a great demonstration of the question asked in the OP. How has Mormonism survived modern scrutiny? Deny, deny, deny.
Membership rolls are vastly inflated. Anecdotally, a week or two ago I was having a discussion with my father, an active member and former many-years membership clerk of his ward and stake, and the conversation wandered to the trials of home teachers, who as you may be aware are the teams of paired men assigned to go visit with each of the members/families in the ward. The home teachers fell into two camps: young men, who didn’t want to do it and tended to count knocking on the door of an empty house as a visit or blow it off entirely, and the old men, who were champing at the bit to visit people, but running into the problem that apparently a surprising (to me) number of people on the membership rolls actively don’t want to be visited, to the point of telling them to go away and never come back. From there the discussion went to the efforts that mormons go to to keep members on the rolls. He reported that (as has been said earilier in the thread) the church will indeed track you across state lines to try and find you, which is quite creepy in my opinion. And he said that in his opinion, as membership clerk, a third of the members on the rolls aren’t just inactive but actively don’t want to be counted. This is in Boise Idaho, a relative hotbed of mormonism, mind you.
And yes, denail of reality is a favored tactic for dealing with the little problems of mormonism. Smith a treasure hunter? Was not! And when that fails, they will fall back on any hokey explanation necessary to justify their belief. Not that this distinguishes them from theists in general, mind you, though Mormons tend to seem a little more desperate when they have to do it about recent and/or obviously false things. They much prefer to just stay ignorant of such things if possible, and when that fails, then, as noted, denial.
So all the people who agree with your conclusions are The Enlightened, and people like me aren’t necessarily stupid, just self-deluded. That’s quite the self-affirming conclusion, but reasserting it doesn’t make it so. In fact it’s the anti-Mormons who keep moving the goalposts. Hello? I pointed to evidence of horses where there weren’t supposed to be any. You ignore that. Contemporary critics of Smith ridiculed the idea of a “golden Bible” – scripture written on metal plates, until the evidence mounted that this was in fact an ancient practice (here’s a length apologetic piece on the topic). Anti-Mormons ignore this and just drop the argument. For years critics mocked the name Alma in the BoM being used for a male, until in 1961 when a deed was discovered referring to “Alma the son of Judah.” Critics dropped that argument. So it goes.
No, we don’t have proof of the translations, AFAIK. If you’re referring to the “alphabet & grammar,” that’s not a work of translation. If you’re talking about something else, I’d be interested to know what it is.
Yes, they claimed they knew what should go in the holes in the papyrus. :rolleyes: Admittedly, this (I think) is the strongest criticism of the Book of Abraham (BoA), yet it’s tenuous IMO and I do need to research more about it.
Where am I just closing my eyes/plugging my ears and “denying” anything? The lacunae is the first issue I’ve found that’s not trivially proven to not be a problem. I’ve already seen several spurious criticisms in this thread. Do I deny the claims that are trivially rebutted? Well, yes. But that’s not just denying, it’s evaluating the evidence. And there is an enormous body of claimed evidence that has turned out not to debunk Smith’s account of the BoM, but rather have come to support it.
Simply saying over and over that I (and any of my stupid deluded friends) who look at the details are simply denying everything doesn’t make it so. One reason perhaps that LDS has “survived” modern scrutiny is because so much of the criticism has been weak, fallacious or so rabid that facts are ignored. It’s nearly impossible to have an honest discussion, especially in any thread about Mormons that comes up on boards like these because as soon as I (or another apologist) start defending my faith, it descends into ad hominem or simply a rush of several people attacking along several lines and it’s too time consuming to respond to everything. The one time I tried to focus on a single issue at a time (in that case it was the BoA, the Grammar, the lacunae, etc.) the people I was discussing it with refused to stay on that topic and started hitting out every criticism of LDS they could find – BoM historicity, early church practices, etc.
I’m happy to engage in serious debate about things, and I recognize mistakes when the evidence points to it. But just telling my I’m a denialist doesn’t accomplish anything. It simply ends the discussion.
I don’t know about you and your stupid deluded friends, but I’ve spent my life surrounded by Mormons and deny, deny, deny is exactly how they dealt with fact-based arguments against Mormonism. Sure, in some cases some rather strained arguments can in theory be made against some specific points, depending on which goalposts you choose to defend, but the laity in general don’t make these arguments. They instead retreat behind assertions that their opposition is simply wrong, and that the world is not how it is, but instead how their leaders told them it should be. All native americans are darkened jews. Horses abounded in numbers. Writing was common, and egyptian in nature. There are sunken cities just off some coast somewhere, from the cataclysms that followed the ressurection.
You may argue that it is possible to believe a variant version of Mormonism that does not require too much goalpost shifting or denial of reality to accept. I would argue that there would still be rather a lot of denial going on, myself. But either way, even if you can be a coldly logical rational believer, that’s not common, and that’s not what the bulk of the laity rely on to sustain their beliefs. Instead, in my experience, kneejerk denial is the first and final defense.
