keito-ninja
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- Posted: Tue, 06 Sep 2016 20:20:39 +0000
Arcoon Effox
Citation, please? The early Prophets and apostles made a big deal out of a woman's "worthiness", which as far as I can tell has continued to this day (ie Temple recommends, etc). Can you show me something that indicates that a man who wouldn't take a wife through the Veil wouldn't himself be worthy of Exaltation?
To me this just seems intuitive--I've never seen a talk that went this in-depth, I'm just going with my understanding of temple covenants. When a man and a wife are sealed in the temple they make covenants to each other. If the man were to cast her aside (for example, by planning to refuse to receive her into heaven...because he couldn't keep his intentions hidden from God), then he would be breaking those temple covenants (breaking temple covenants - repentance = unworthy). If either party does not uphold their covenants, their sealing will not remain in effect (it is conditional, not final). The woman, no longer sealed to her unfaithful husband, would then have time in the millennium to be sealed to a different, worthy, man, and become exalted with him instead.
Arcoon Effox
So, rather than just changing the rules to accommodate for that, God says that women have to share husbands so that there's enough men to go around...? Why not just "poof" some more men into existence to even the tables, or something?
As LDS, we don't believe that we are "poofable" beings. However our spirits may have been created initially, we believe that we all lived with God in the pre-existence for who-knows-how-long before we were all ready to come to earth, so at the beginning of the creation there were a certain finite number of us, with some certain proportion of men and women to start. God cannot control how many of us will choose to live worthily, and we aren't "poofable" beings...so he can't control the final proportion of men and women who end up worthy...but he can foresee the general trend and make sure there is a way for every worthy soul to become exalted.
Arcoon Effox
keito-ninja
Retcons don't bother me.
How not? I mean, look what they did to Superman!
Well, if you're OK with such things, then 'nuff said... but I sure as hell couldn't do it. Far too much potential for enabling people to avoid accountability, there.
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Would you mind explaining it, then? (Why you think so many members might think they're infallible, I mean.) Also, how do you determine what's erroneous and what's not? If anything a given prophet says could be wrong, how do you know what isn't?
The easiest way to answer is to describe how I came to this way of thinking. The first big retcon I ever came across was Brigham Young's Adam-God teachings. He was a prophet, and he taught doctrine that was later officially declared to be wrong (I take it this is exactly the sort of thing you mean). At first this confused me because I thought prophets were supposed to be infallible; I thought this because of LDS teachings which are summed up in D&C 1: "whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same." I thought that prophets never said anything unless God had specifically told them to say it...but that idea fell apart when I started discovering words of past prophets which were historically believed to be doctrine until later prophets declared it had only been the speaker's opinion, and not absolute truth from God. If that were true, it meant that my concept of how prophetic revelation worked had to be wrong.
Some people might conclude that there was no revelation, that the church was a hoax, or that the prophets were corrupt; while I understand that perspective, I don't feel that way. I pondered and prayed and eventually came to the conclusion that, while the prophets have a special connection to God and authority to receive revelation for the whole church, they also are only human and so it makes sense that they, like the rest of us, could have trouble understanding and explaining much of the revelation they receive...and even trouble differentiating between the Holy Spirit and their own thoughts and ideas. This creates ample opportunity for miscommunications, mistakes, and the need for retcons when revelations become more clear to future prophets than they were in the past. I see this as an unavoidable imperfection in a church organized by God but run by mortals.
That brings us to the question of how we can tell what is true and what isn't. Some people have a hard time with the idea that we must trust and follow the prophets, knowing how capable the prophets are of making mistakes. In my experience of reading about various retcons, none of the ones I've seen have been this that posed big problems to those that believed in them, even if they turned out to be incorrect. Take the Adam-God teachings for example: that was a very significant claim later debunked as utterly incorrect... yet did it pose any harm to those early saints who trusted Brigham Young and believed in it? I don't think so. From a theological perspective it is not a sin to be honestly mistaken about a bit of information when you had no way to know otherwise. Perhaps there are other retcons which I have not come across which you think caused damage or grief for the members who mistakenly believed them...if so, feel free to bring them to my attention.
Arcoon Effox
I know you said that you're not knowledgeable enough about political matters to form an opinion on this matter (kudos for admitting that instead of just giving some arbitrary response, BTW) so let's look it it from an ethical point of view - that of fairness.
Separation of Church and State is a two-way street; the State does not get involved in religious matters, and the Church does not get involved in government. You intimated the Church/State split by mentioning how "the state infringing upon religion" - but wasn't the Church doing the exact same thing when they became involved in a legal matter? The pitch of ProtectMarriage (the organization behind Prop 8) was that it was "defending the traditional definition of marriage"... and that "traditional definition" was based on the Bible. Doesn't that mean the Church was infringing upon the State, by invoking the religious definition of something in a legal matter?
I heard a lot Christians (not just LDS ones) talking about how they were concerned about gay couples forcing them to performing marriages in their Churches, but that really made no sense at all because they were protected from that happening by the very same concept you mentioned - Separation of Church and State. People cite the whole "Gay Wedding Cake" thing as "proof" that legalization of gay marriage would have such-and-such consequence for churches, but that bakery was a business, and not a Church, regardless of the religious affiliations of its owners, so it's fundamentally different. If things actually worked like that, then the LDS Church would have been obliged to perform Temple Weddings to anyone who wanted one (regardless of their sexual orientation) for over a hundred years now - but they haven't, because the Church/State split protects them.
Speaking of Temple Marriage, doesn't the Church teach that civil marriages are simply Earthly contracts, and that only marriages for Time and All Eternity really "count"? As such, how could civil marriages even affect that in the first place?
keito-ninja
Marriage is originally a religious ceremony...
As far as we know (and by "we", I mean it's the general consensus among anthropologists), before the idea of marriage became a thing, families consisted of loosely organized groups of as many as 30 people, with several male leaders, multiple women shared by them, and children. As hunter-gatherers settled down into agrarian civilizations, society had a need for more stable arrangements, and thus developed a form of legal contract which divided these large groups into smaller units. The terms of these contracts were decidedly legalistic, and existed mostly for the purpose of determining paternity. Marriage bound specific women to men, thus guaranteeing that a man’s children were indeed his biological heirs.
Marriage developed independently in hundreds of human civilizations, so it’s difficult to pinpoint history’s first marriage, or even the society that first conceived of marriage as an institution (though it's thought to be ancient Sumeria), but we know that the earliest marriages on record were purely legal contracts, with worldly consequences for those who broke them.
Again, I've never really thought about what counts as fair when it comes to state and religion interactions, so the whole question of whether it is fair to become involved in legal definitions of things which many but not all people see as religious matters just kind of goes over my head. What I can look at with a bit more sense is the social perspective. You make a good point that legally the state wouldn't be able to force any religion to marry gay couples in their churches or temples. Socially, however, many churches are being pressured in that direction. In some senses marriage may be purely a legal matter, but socially many people still see it as a religious ceremony as well, (regardless of how it originated) and the case for gay marriage extends to that as well (wanting to be married traditionally in a church by a pastor and accepted in Christian communities as a married couple). I see the church's involvement mainly as a stand against this social view, which is becoming more and more popular. As for whether they made that stand in the right way (simple statement vs. influencing votes), I don't know.
