So yes. You have in fact posted things that are false, then tried to walk it back to say you said something else. There was no mention of “black as coal” or shades of Africa or anything like that in your post. You said there was no mention of them “turning black,” but in fact there is.
That would be because you started a thread about a Mormon response to the election. I imagine if someone had started a thread about a Scientologist response to the election, we’d all have a debate about what Scientology means in the context of the country, too.
Marley, who had been so vigilant in getting this thread back on topic when I and Ibn Warraq were raising our questions seems to be suffering from a deficit of diligence on the hijack of “Aren’t Mormons actually just racists?”
Correct. As Erdosain points out, the Book of Mormon is referring to the fictional black Lamanites. It lays out that black = cursed/sinful/loathsome, but doesn’t explicitly say anything about African Americans.
Gladly. Here goes: I have looked at myself, and I have determined myself to be less loathsome than the author of the Book of Mormon. I have never written a racist book, I have never operated a ponzi scheme, I have never destroyed a printing press, I have never seduced a married woman, and I have never raped a 14-year-old. Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and their racist God are all loathsome. Fuck them and the tapir they rode in on.
No, I don’t think it applies as the fictional black Lamanites appear to be extinct. You said that the curse was to be rejected by God. I merely pointed out that it is strange that God rejects the half-black offspring in verse 23. I don’t know the race of the wife of the first so-called Lamanite to be married in the temple, but I am aware that the first African American man to be married in the temple was sealed to a white woman.
He has popped up and he has chosen to let it go. I guess it’s certain thread jacking which is permissible and certain thread jacking which is not depending on the mod’s bias. I am not surprised.
IF there is any thread hijacking here, it seems you’ve participated in it as much as anyone else. BTW, this “hate” thing you’ve got going on with anyone that dares to dispute your beliefs with solid evidence? I’m not buying it.
As far as I saw, neither Kimmy nor Ibn were defending Mormonism at all. They were calling out certain posters for double standards or inconsistency, but didn’t have a word to say defending Mormonism. Please, if any one has anything to add, bring it on.
And, to be fair to April, I think it makes sense to separate the Book of Mormon blackness of skin and African Americans in the Mormon Church. There are no black people in the Book of Mormon, only proto-Native Americans. Early Mormons clearly believed that the Native American dark skin was a reversible curse, and could change depending on faithfulness. Black people were irrevocably cursed, from before the Earth was even created. That’s why Native Americans could be full Mormons and black people could not.
I call The Book of Mormon racist, along with Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and the majority of the LDS leadership up to 1978. That is not really a controversial claim. And I’m not quite certain what it means to “call the Church racist.” I certainly haven’t implied that you are racist; I only showed where you were misrepresenting what is contained in a racist book.
Yes, recently people of African ancestry have been permitted to marry white people (despite no official change to the policy forbidding it, and despite that it is discouraged in the 2011 lesson manuals for young people). This fact does not erase the LDS leadership’s racist history.
Yep. And bigoted. But in 30 or so years, when the population of GLBT has reached proportions large enough for the Mormon church to annex, the verse will once again become open to interpretation so the current, hip Mormons can claim that the ban on temple same sex marriages referred to some other esoteric somethingsomething not revealed until modern times.
But all the “evidence” against the Mormon church given in this thread, other than the gay marriage fiasco, are things that no longer take place. It would just as stupid as calling out the US as the world’s worst country for slavery. I keep getting criticism for how the Church used to be, and not a lot about how it now is. Why can’t people see the Church for the progress it has made, and likely will continue to make? How tolerant is that? It doesn’t make any sense. People are stuck on past mistakes and not the progress made in the modern Church. That is a lot of the problem going on between countries and religious groups and politics, no one wants to look to the future and make changes for the better, they just want to quibble and fight over the past. It’s sad really. It is even sadder when the Church is criticized for making progress, like that somehow makes it less valid because it progresses and makes amendments as the leadership and Members become more enlightened. To me that should be what all religions strive for.
The Book of Mormon is still published as scripture. It still says that black skin is a curse from God in order to make wicked people appear loathsome to white people.
Fine. Is the church any less secretive now than it was back then? Doers the church openly acknowledge the past racism of its leaders and congregation? Has it apologized to past victims?
Again, there was racism in the early Church, in early America, in modern America, probably in your own circle of friends. However the modern Church isn’t racist. My own sister-in-law is sealed in marriage to her Samoan husband, and my other bro-in-law married a native American woman. That is a lot more progressive than a lot of people in the US who are non-Mormon. It is more accepted for races to intermarry in the Church than it is more the mainstream culture where I live in Memphis. I appreciate how progressive the Church is about race.
I don’t even know how to address that. I suggest you go to the mormon.org link I posted and ask that question to them and see what they say. I would be interested to see what their answer is.
I already linked to it at lds.org/scripture. And you clearly stated that the verses that I quoted are in the BOM. What question do I need to ask a missionary at mormon.org? ETA: I was a card-carrying Mormon most of my life. I don’t need to ask a missionary to tell me whether something is in their canon.
Are you suggesting that the Book of Mormon shouldn’t be read without official guidance? In the case of the Bible, I can see where partial scrolls from ancient times and more than one language would lead to a need for care study and interpretation, but the Book of Mormon wasn’t written that long ago in one language, and pretty much all of the words hold the same meaning now as they did back then.
