“Hey, Honey; God says I need more women.” I can imagine how my wife would respond to that. :eek:
I would some LDS types would come in and defend the Church; I know there are several on this board. But I guess they foresee it would just be a pile-on.
Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. Dangermom and Monty are both active Mormons; TokyoPlayer, as well as a few others and myself are former Mormons. It usually gets heated, but I don’t think it’s usually a pile-on.
Yes, I’m one of them–I said a little above about why I’m not responding. I’m seeing a lot of ignorance on this thread, but no one seems to want to have it fought today. I’ve done plenty of this in other GD threads, but this one doesn’t seem to be the place for it, since it hardly qualifies as a debate. If people have honest questions and actually want to learn something, I’m happy to help out, though.
More like:
“Hey Honey, God says I need more women! And if you don’t let me, God will destroy you! Look, he told me that, right here in this revelation I received from him! So you’d better obey me…um…er…God!”
Yeah, that would fly with my wife, as well.
And I’m one of the former Mormons, BTW.
According to what I’ve read it’s not a slam dunk. Some say this was not presented by JS but by Brigham Young after JS death.
It doesn’t matter much in relation to the whole Golden plates story. I was only asking for the sake of historical accuracy. From what I read this morning it’s not a sure thing, although even the Community of Christ says it may be true on their website.
Okay, I do have a question, although it is a tendentious one. For Mormons, the age of revelation is not over–revelation is ongoing, and the head of the church is a prophet who receives revelation from God. How does one reconcile this with the fact that LDS has actually been behind mainstream society on some important moral issues, like the race issue I mentioned above? The revelation clearing the way for blacks to enter the priesthood wasn’t until 1978, for example. I mean, if you have a prophet who receives communications from God, wouldn’t you be ahead of the moral curve, not behind it?
there’s a humorous retort to this in Barbara Streisands movie Yentl.
She plays a 19th century woman who wants to study theology, and she asks her father the rabbi why God won’t let women be ordained.
The rabbi responds “I’m sure God would be willing to let you study for the ministry… …but I’m not so sure about our neighbors”.
Organized religions are the most conservative element of society, and they are almost always “behind the curve”.
…that Joe Smith ‘translated’ into the Book of Mormon: I know they are nowhere to be found. But what about the fragment that was shown (by one of Smith’s followers) to prof. Charles Anthon (of Columbia university)? THAT oughta answer a few questions!
If that “reformed egyptian carakters” ain’t right, who CAN you believe?
But that gets right to the nub of it: Mormons say they’re not a new religion at all, but rather an ancient one that recently resumed after a 14-century break.
There’s a few differences here. One is that there are assorted variants of Christianity and Judaism. The LDS, unlike non-Catholic Christianity, is a hierarchical religion.
As such, the front office of the LDS faith stands behind the veracity of their scriptures, while you can be a good Christian and still not believe a lot of what’s in the Christian scriptures is factually true.
While practically all Christians consider Jesus’ bodily resurrection to be an essential belief, there’s no inherent conflict between that belief and objective reality: it’s not falsifiable.
So my conclusion would be that there’s a bit more tension between the LDS faith and objective reality than is inherently the case for non-Mormon, non-Catholic Christianity.
Another active LDS sometime poster - I would also be happy to answer some questions.
This is the one true faith, heathen! ONE! ALL ONE!
Might I remind you that Martin Luther King was a minister? I’d be much more likely to believe he had a direct line to God than a Mormon official prophet who has convenient dreams after political pressure.
I wonder what the next revelation will be? Considering the state of world overpopulation, maybe limiting family size?
And while I don’t know about Mormonism, there’re more branches of Catholicism than you can shake a stick at. We probably have more theology than the rest of the planet combined. And only most of it is so obscure it’s incomprehensible without decades of careful study and research. 
The CoC denied it for a long time, but it’s perfectly true. The best book that I know of on the subject is In Sacred Loneliness by Todd Compton.
Excellent question! And one which has engendered an enormous amount of investigation and scholarly work. It can’t really be tackled well here, so I’m mostly going to point you to essays and information on other pages. I will note a few things:
Joseph Smith ordained a few black men to the priesthood, Elijah Abel being the most well-known. He was vocally anti-slavery and promoted a plan for freeing all slaves by 1850 by purchasing their freedom with money from the sale of government land.
Mormons’ acceptance of black members and opposition to slavery was a huge factor in getting them thrown out of Missouri–Mormons were active voters.
No one is quite sure when the policy disallowing blacks from the priesthood was instituted. There is no scripture, no revelation on the subject. However, once it was in place, it was felt that a direct revelation would be needed to rescind the policy.
David O. McKay (president of the LDS Church in the 50’s) and other presidents are known to have felt strongly on the issue and to have been acutely disappointed that it did not yet seem to be time to rescind the ban. Sometime in the 60’s, the general membership was asked to pray for it to happen. The general feeling these days is that God was waiting for us to catch up and be ready.
While we don’t have a lot to be proud of in this record, it’s not the case that the Mormon leadership was a bunch of vicious racists, end of story. It’s considerably more complex than that.
Some good resources to read on this question can be found at BlackLDS.org, an ignorance-fighting website. I recommend that you read all of the timeline and the page on the priesthood, along with the articles listed. I would particularly recommend that you read Eugene England’s famous 1973 essay The Mormon Cross, which is happily now available online. The essay was written partly as a commentary on the first thorough history of blacks in the Church: Neither White nor Black by Lester Bush Jr., which you can also read.
Thanks; this is a very helpful response and corrects some of my misimpressions about the early church. I will have to do some more reading, because some of the other things I have read about the Church (e.g., they subscribe or did subscribe to the doctrine of the Curse of Ham) are disturbing.
Sure, but only if Christianity sings tenor and objective reality sings bass.
Well, they did that too. You have to remember that in the mid-19th century, the curse of Ham and most of the stuff that went with it was considered to be practically scientific and historical fact. So while it wasn’t part of the LDS scriptures in any way, it was part of the common knowledge of the day, and of course people subscribed to those ideas and brought them into the LDS Church. In general, however, Mormons were anti-slavery, and Joseph Smith preached that blacks were morally equal to anyone else and that a black person educated like anyone else would just as intelligent as anyone else.
The lives of the early black Mormons make for fascinating reading, so if you’re interested I would highly recommend that you look up Jane Manning James, Elijah Abel, Green Flake, and everyone else. There was even a fictionalized historical trilogy published a few years ago based on their experiences; I have it, though of course you’d find it difficult to get copies without buying them.
Anyway, I’m glad you found the information useful.
Krakauer reports in his book ‘Under the Banner of Heaven’ that those revelations were from Joseph Smith and that Joseph Smith appears to have already taken on at least one “spiritual” or “celestial” wife before the revelation, and continued to take more wives after getting Emma in line. He may have had 30 or 40 wives. Here is a list, but I can’t say how accurate it is: http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Search/AF/individual_record.asp?recid=7762167&lds=0
“The Doctrine and Covenants, Section 132” begins like this:
Revelation given through Joseph Smith the Prophet, at Nauvoo, Illinois, recorded July 12, 1843, relating to the new and everlasting covenant, including the eternity of the marriage covenant, as also plurality of wives. HC 5: 501–507. Although the revelation was recorded in 1843, it is evident from the historical records that the doctrines and principles involved in this revelation had been known by the Prophet since 1831.
This seems to support Krakauer’s view tha JS was dabbling in plural wives before he made his revelations official, as were many others in the upper eschelons of Mormonism at that time. Because polygamy caused so much divisiveness (then and now), it was often hidden and “celestial” or “spiritual” wives don’t come with marriage certificates, so they can be difficult to track. This seems to be one of the major issues that allows Mormonism to suffer so many splinter groups.
I actually stumbled upon this book a few weeks ago after reading soem adventure stories and though it was a book about hiking in the Himalayas. Oops.
The fact that the D&C contains that doesn’t prove anything. It does appear to be likely though. Enough evidence points towards it even though it is disputed. His son that eventually led the RLDS church denied it and I read a couple of reports that Emma Smith denied it as well. I also read that no other children have been shown to be descendants of his. Kinda odd for 30 wives ain’t it? Regardless, it just doesn’t matter much either way.
When asked by her son Joseph Smith III whether his father was an adulterer, Emma answered no. He didn’t ask her anything more specific than that, and obviously that’s a pretty vague question. Since Joseph was supposed to have been married to his plural wives, Emma could answer no to the charge of adultery without actually addressing the polygamy question at all. JSIII took that as a complete denial of polygamy, and the historical position of the CoC stemmed from that.
In Sacred Loneliness addresses the question of children. I believe that there were a few, but not many. Quite a few of the plural wives were wives in name only, and there wasn’t nearly as much action going on as people assume from hearing about “30 wives.”