I don’t think you read what I quoted. I don’t know about actual cards to carry, but it does say “… aims to reach 50 million voters from now until November to engage, educate, and mobilize them to vote for Democrats up and down the ticket.”
I’m not complaining about it, I’m simply acknowledging the reality that it checks one of the boxes on the “cult” checklist.
What is it you know about Mormon restrictions on dating outside the faith? Let’s say Molly Mormon decides she wants to date a nice, non-member boy. What do you believe the Church’s policy is on how to handle Molly in that situation? Please be specific.
I don’t look at my cousins’ FB feeds anymore after they bitched about Obama too much. My pushback and their subsequent doubling down weren’t helping anyone lower their blood pressure.
Here is a short video (1 min 41 sec) released by the Church showing the prophet, President Nelson (age 93) discussing the name change. Ouch. My grandmother actually sounded better when she was 99.
After watching the video, I had to rewrite my post from questioning if senile was really the most appropriate term to agreeing with you. He may not technically be senile, but that isn’t a very flattering video.
The ages of those in the First Presidency are 93, 86 and 85. The average age of the Q12 is now pretty young, actually at 70.5 years, but the younger whippersnappers aren’t going to challenge the voice of God.
Ok, work has been swamping me and I’m just getting to some of the issues in this thread.
Without going post by post, the political discussion about the DNC and political proselytizing needs to stop. It’s a hijack and you’re welcome to start a new thread. Discussion around the position of women is ok, as long as it’s forum appropriate.
I’ve kept more moderate cousins on my FB and muted a few. I don’t tend toward making political statements on FB, it’s mostly my medieval meme repository.
Mormons specialize in forgetting the past – it’s practically a requirement.
My use of “senile” was a bit flip. More accurately, I wouldn’t look to super-elderly religious zealot white dudes for tips on living in the 21st century (I’d include “dudesses” as well, if Mormon women were allowed to be GAs).
I’ve kept more moderate cousins on my FB and muted a few. I don’t tend toward making political statements on FB, it’s mostly my medieval meme repository.
Mormons specialize in forgetting the past – it’s practically a requirement.
My use of “senile” was a bit flip. More accurately, I wouldn’t look to super-elderly religious zealot white dudes for tips on living in the 21st century (I’d include “dudesses” as well, if Mormon women were allowed to be GAs).
I find myself wondering if I should ask my family about this whole renaming thing, next time I’m over there. On the one hand, I wonder if they think the whole idea is stupid. On the other hand they’d probably notice that I think the whole thing is stupid (I’m not the subtlest guy) and they’d doubtlessly get defensive and everything’d go to hell.
I’m intimately aware of how this sort of situation plays out - I have experience! (As the non-member-or-close-enough.) Allow me to lay it down for you here.
Girls can date whoever they want (parental restrictiveness allowing), due to the fact that they’re not locked inside a compound. However, presuming they’re not completely ignoring their religion, there are a few facts at play here.
You’re not supposed to have sex. Or even get to first base. Period. (YMMV on how this plays out in practice, but there is, theoretically, a hard line.)
If the dude is non-mormon you’ll never marry the dude. Period. This has implications down the line - it means the relationship is fake. It’s not serious; it’s a fling.
These are the pressures at bay. They’re very real, and a very large bullet to the head of any member/nonmember relationship beyond just a casual friendship. And by “bullet” I mean I’ve been summarily dumped twice concurrent with announcements that I am the literal actual one-and-only devil - once with a woman with whom I was engaged to be married. (She’d gone inactive for a while, but I sensed the reactivation coming long in advance, and put off the actual nuptials until after it happened. Good thing.) On the other hand I had a decades long friendship with a girl who I actively (and non-secretly) was in love with, who I’m 80% certain was in love with me too - we would doubtlessly have been long since married if not for the fact she was a mormon, and too smart/cautious to put even a single toe over the line she wasn’t willing to actually cross. (Eventually she decided to find some mormon schlub to actually date, so we cut off contact because that would be suuuuuuper awkward. To my eternal regret, as we ended the friendship she didn’t call me the literal devil. I was going for a hat trick.)
So if you think good mormon girls are dating non-mormons willy nilly, I very much beg to differ.
Now let’s talk policy.
Officially speaking mormonism doesn’t usually handle the minutae of its members lives directly…depending on how you look at it. What it does is, it ordains the father of the household and grants him dictatorial authority to speak with church-backed authority. Now on the one hand, the dude was probably going to act dictatorial anyway; he pays the rent. (Traditionally speaking mormon households have the father as a single breadwinner, though that probably has fallen by the wayside nowadays due to the economy.) But on the other hand, the church does in fact go through steps to grant this authority. And it does make suggestions about what sort of house a good mormon man should run.
Among other things, a well-run house keeps an eye on the relationships of the people therein, and getting serious with a nonmormon is RIGHT OUT. So, being very specific, the official policy on how to handle Molly is for her parents to do an intervention with her, talk her out of it, and lock her in her room if necessary to keep the illicit relationship from happening. All with official church authority to do so, of course.
Can you see how these two contradictory statements …
[SPOILER]“members are required to date only with other group members”
vs
“Girls can date whoever they want (parental restrictiveness allowing)”[/SPOILER]
… might lead someone to question how “intimately aware” you are of things related to Mormondom?
True, sexual relations outside of marriage are considered a sin.
Wrong. There are lots of Mormon women married to non-member guys. It’s fair to say there is some pressure to marry a temple-worthy (Mormon) man in an LDS temple, but it’s not accurate to say “never” or “Period”. And I’ve never heard anyone tell a woman married to a non-member that her marriage was “fake. It’s not serious; it’s a fling” or anything like that. The one thing that does get said is that it’s not “eternal”, which relates to an important point of Mormon doctrine, but is hardly an absolute prohibition on the act.
I wouldn’t say it’s “willy nilly”, but it does happen. And that’s quite a bit different from your earlier claim that “members are required to date only with other group members.” That earlier statement is false.
You seem to be unclear on the concept of elections. Are they supposed to try to get voters to vote Republican? Or are they supposed to sit back and hope someone shows up at the polls.
When Ford advertises for their cars, trying to get people to buy them, not Chevys, is that cultish to you also?
So, are Republican cultists also?
I don’t know the official church policy, but my daughter, who even went to Mormon dances (you dance no closer than the width of the Book of Mormon) knows guys who weren’t interested in Mormon women and got ostracized. And like I said all the good Mormon girls married good Mormon boys as fast as they could. And I live in a place where Mormons are hardly a majority.
And Mormon dances are ways of helping Mormon kids get to know each other. I was going to say hook up, but it was far more innocent than that sounds.
He may have enjoyed taking it over (for whatever his reasons), but all he’s done is made folks repeat the salient points; so even if he pretends he doesn’t know what we’re talking about others will see it and question what this cult does to control women.
I’ve noticed, in hearing about things from my family, that there seems to be a stronger and stronger focus on getting mormons paired up with each other, particularly adult mormons. The whole “go on a mission, get back, get married instantly” thing doesn’t work so well now that divorce has been normalized (case in point: my brother is now a single parent) so they’re trying to patch up the situation by setting up as many opportunities to ‘pair the spares’ as possible.
I recall when I was attending the college ward the place was such an insufferable Meet Market that I couldn’t bring myself to participate; I just sat in the foyer and read. (I wasn’t there too long before my mom told me that attendance wasn’t a requirement for residence.)
What is the thing I heard about “spiritual pairing”, which is a bond into the hereafter, but at some point they decided that there can be only one spiritual pairing, which could not break, but it is not the same as “marriage”. One could have multiple spouses (as in serial monogamy) but only a single spiritual mate.
Portions. I’ve never heard the phrase “spiritual pairing”. Most active members of the church would recognize the term “sealing” or “eternal marriage”. It’s a ceremony that takes place (usually in conjunction with a wedding, but sometimes later) in LDS temples in which a husband and wife (and their children) are “sealed for time and all eternity”. Church members believe that if they’re righteous they’ll get to live with their spouse and children forever, and that the marriage will endure beyond “til death do us part”. It’s a core belief of the religion.
Not something I’ve heard of, but I’m no expert. My understanding is that a man may have only one earthly wife, but may be sealed to multiple women in the afterlife (or, in the case of a widower, he may be sealed both both his deceased first wife and living second wife). And women can only be sealed to one man (so if she’s widowed and remarries, she has to decide which she wants forever). This indicates two of the current apostles are sealed to more than one woman.
At a glance “spiritual pairing” +Mormon or +Latter Day Saints didn’t turn up any relevant results on the first page of Google for me.
I just want to point out that if a woman’s divorced from a man she was sealed to she has to get his permission to have their sealing canceled or it’s a no-go. The same isn’t true when the genders are reversed; ex-wife can’t prevent her former husband being sealed to another spouse.
The Mormon practice of polygamy came directly from Joseph Smith’s sexual behavior. He had always had a problem that his pants apparently were defective and he couldn’t keep them zipped up. If you took just his actions (marrying 14-year-old girls, the wives’ of people he sent away on mission, his wards, cleaning girls living in his house, etc., etc.) and said that this happened within the FLDS church, then Mormons would be the first to denounce it.
Smith had an affair with a live-in cleaning girl age sometime between 1833 and 1835, placing Fanny Alger between 16 to 19 years old. The cofounder, Oliver Cowdery referred to it as "a dirty, nasty, filthy [del]scrape[/del] affair of his and Fanny Alger’s.” (delete in original), and his insistence of that lead to Cowdery getting excommunicated. From there, Smith had scores of wives, but labeled them as “sealings” to avoid the term of polygamy.
There is absolutely no doctrine of only one single spiritual mate. In the early days, Smith, Young and then others taught that polygamy was essential for salvation into the highest kingdom of heaven.
Smith was sealed to another men’s wives and one popular argument by apologist is that these sealing were never consummated. However there is evidence that they were.
The Mormon church disingenuously proclaims that it not longer practices polygamy, but as Tzigone notes, it will happen in heaven, including those who are currently sealed to more than one woman.
Correct, although women simply do not get a choice in the matter. If the husband dies, then the woman is not allowed to choose who she is sealed to. She is still sealed to her first husband.
Also note that this permission requires the approval of the First Presidency and can take over a year. Also, they usually don’t give this approval except in the case where the ex-wife is getting remarried. Why? I donno, maybe women shouldn’t be allowed freedom.