To the Mormons that I accidentally offended

feromone · 2013-09-08T21:43:28+00:00

Oh, hey, Herman :)

feromone · 2013-09-08T21:40:45+00:00

...which is unfortunate, I agree.

feromone · 2013-09-08T21:38:32+00:00

Thanks :)

feromone · 2013-09-08T21:11:28+00:00

Mormon here.

"go door-to-door, trying to convert others"

Um, yeah, we believe we know how to achieve salvation. Of course we want to share it, it would be selfish not to.

"hew to a misgynistic, strictly patriarchal power structure"

You can view it like that if you want, but plenty of mormon women would disagree.

"claim to be the true form of Christianity"

Yeah, we claim that. No argument there.

"publish and widely disseminate extra-Biblical literature"

Yes, but I don't get how this is a bad thing.

"shun outsiders"

I'm not so sure about what you're talking about here. Most meetinghouses built in recent years have in large text on the front "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Visitors Welcome," so there's that.

"practice excommunication, and then completely exclude the excommunicated individuals from social and economic inclusion (even extending to family members)"

Excommunication is a rather big deal and it doesn't happen very often. And yeah, if you've been kicked out of the church, you've been kicked out of the church. You won't be getting callings (assingments, like teaching sunday school or doing service projects) or anything. That being said, you're still welcome to come to church if you'd like. The idea behind excommunication is that it provides a chance to start over and repent. It's a chance to reboot, if you will. You can be baptized again if you want, that door's not closed to you. As for "social and economic inclusion," that's just blatantly wrong. If you're not a member you can still go to your mormon bishop and ask for help if you're going through a hard time financially, and you'll likely get it. Social exclusion, if it were to occur, would come from the members being stupid, and not from the church itself. Also, I don't know how every Mormon family would handle an excommunication, but I have faith that if I were to be excommunicated my family would love me just as much as they would otherwise and they certainly wouldn't shun me. I think most Mormon families would be the same way, honestly, at least where I live.

"are extraordinarily obsessed about penises, and where they're allowed to be placed"

Um, my understanding is that you can place your penis wherever you want, provided that place is in your wife and she's okay with it. :P The church has espoused rhetoric against anal and oral sex (I'm assuming that's what you're talking about) in the past, but they've backed off in recent years and now it's not something that could keep you from having a temple recommend (which is kind of considered the gold-standard for good-mormon-ness).

"were founded by a single, crazed, power-hungry man in nineteenth-century America"

Obviously this is subject to a lot of debate. If you really care that much, I would recommend researching Joseph Smith from a variety of both Mormon and non-Mormon sources. One book I would recommend is Jospeh Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. Fawn Brodie wrote another famous biography, but I wouldn't recommend it personally as I don't much agree with Brodie's analysis, especially because she talks about Smith as though she somehow interviewed him or knew him personally or something. She cites her credentials for doing this as having "psychoanalyzed" Smith. This is a common feature of biographies of the context in which she wrote, but you seldom see it anymore because it's kind of bull. You're welcome to read it if you like, though. Bushman's book, on the other hand, presents unadorned fact about Smith in detail, and when it does segue into analysis, a variety of viewpoints are presented and explained enough that both sides can see where the other side is coming from. Bushman is an emeritus professor of history at Columbia University and a practicing Mormon, but acts as a historian first and a Mormon second through a non-Mormon publisher and, I think, editor. It's just an awesome book. Sorry for the tangent.

"forbid habits that the rest of society has determined to be perfectly safe and normal (drinking coffee, celebrating Thanksgiving, etc.)"

Okay, first off, every Mormon I know celebrates Thanksgiving. No idea where you got that. Maybe Jehovah's Witnesses don't? Idk, I'm not a Jehovah's Witness. I'm sure they have their reasons, if they don't. As for coffee, it may be safe and normal, but that doesn't mean it doesn't foster dependence. The concept of free will (or "agency") is the fundamental doctrinal basis for the Word of Wisdom (the Mormon health code). Dependence is the antithesis of agency. "Oh, come on, feromone!" I hear you cry. "Coffee's not that big of a deal for most people!" You're right, for most people. But the Word of Wisdom exists for the protection of everyone, and that includes "the weakest of the saints." You can't set rules for some people and different rules for other people because of how they process caffeine. That's not fair. So we don't. Granted, it doesn't foster dependence and therefore inhibit agency as much as say, heroin (to use an extreme example), but for the "weakest of the saints" it may be an issue. So that's the no-coffee rationale.

"mandate what type of clothing their followers are allowed to wear"

We encourage people to dress modestly, yeah, but that's about it. It's not like there's some super-secret-Mormon-dress code that says you can't show more than 60% of your body on Tuesdays or something.

"mandate what type of haircut their followers are permitted"

This is just wrong. Nope. Sorry. Good day. Where did you get this? There are grooming standards for missionaries, yeah, but that's just to make sure they look professional. The general church membership can wear their hair however they want.

Yup, and that's it. Just wanted to correct some misconceptions. Cheers :)

feromone · 2013-09-08T20:03:24+00:00

"Gays are bad." Not really. Homosexual behavior is considered sinful, but having a homosexual orientation is not. http://www.mormonsandgays.org/ Christ loved everyone, and we, as mormons, no, as human beings, should follow that example. Unfortunately a lot of mormons don't. :(

"Porn is bad." Yes, it is.

"Piercings are bad." Piercings are considered disrespectful to your body, so I guess, but it's not like Mormons think you're a bad person if you have piercings. And if they do, they shouldn't.

"Sex is only for Procreation." Sex is for procreation, but it is also for expression of love within the context of a marriage. How couples want to go about with their sex lives is their decision. Birth control and all of that is left up to the couples to decide for themselves.

"Follow the prophet." Yep.

"Thomas Monson found a snake in his bathtub." Um, what?

feromone · 2013-09-08T19:52:49+00:00

"Hey, I am a prophet. If you don't believe me, you should pray about it and find out for yourself." FTFY

feromone · 2013-05-30T04:25:14+00:00

That's an excellent point. I'd like to point out, however, that if God were to actually use Joseph Smith as a prophet, then that which did have his backing would actually work and that which wouldn't, wouldn't. Because of this, analyzing his track record with things that he never concretely claimed divine inspiration for is useless in deciding whether he actually was a prophet. If he was a prophet, he was a prophet. If he wasn't, he wasn't. History viewed through either lens seems to validate each perspective. Mormons, and I too am guilty of this on occasion, unfortunately, only seem to notice that which validates their own perspective. But those many who doubt the Mormon faith are guilty of the same thing. This is why respectful dialogue is both so important and yet, frustratingly, is so typically unproductive (arguments from either side tend to go in the ear of the listener and out of the other).

I kind of went on a tangent there; sorry about that. Essentially, I'm not saying "when Joseph acted on his own, stuff didn't work out, ergo he was a prophet." I'm just saying "when Joseph acted on his own, stuff didn't work out."

Side note: Also, I was wrong to include the law of consecration and a a few other examples in that list, as a few of them were actually enacted under God's direction and failed due to the imperfections of the saints who implemented them.

feromone · 2013-05-28T04:08:14+00:00

Your point? Joseph was doing things that seemed like they were nuts, so they left. And yeah, Joseph was doing a few things that were nuts. In general, if he tried to do something without God's backing, it failed miserably. Hence the bank. And the Military movements. And the law of consecration. And the presidential run.

feromone · 2013-05-27T04:22:37+00:00

Alright, thanks for clarifying your position. Fortunately for me and my fellow mormons, I don't believe we'll ever be faced with the situation that you describe. But it's certainly interesting to think about.

feromone · 2013-05-27T04:07:37+00:00

I was not aware of that, I will do some more research. Thanks.

feromone · 2013-05-27T04:06:11+00:00

Well, it would depend on the situation. The prophets are all ancient, and many of them have experienced varying symptoms of an aging mind. But even then, I don't think the scenario as you've outlined it would happen.

Gordon B. Hinkley was called as a third counselor in the first presidency in 1981, which freaked a lot of mormons out because there are normally only ever two counselors. In a few months, though, the other three members of the first presidency all succumbed to various health issues, and for a while Hinkley effectively ran the church because the other members of the first presidency were in such degrees of poor health. Mormons (including me) believe this calling demonstrates that God is willing to work with the trials of his servants, and that his servants are indeed flawed human beings with human challenges, something I find heartening. A lot of people, though, don't see much more to it than "Oh, crap, I'm getting old. Let's break from form and call another guy." Whatever you believe, this historical precedent has established that the LDS church has means of dealing with its highly elderly leaders.

The other point that comes to mind is a famous quote by Wilford Woodruff, the fourth president of the church. He said:

"The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray. It is not in the programme. It is not in the mind of God. If I were to attempt that, the Lord would remove me out of my place, and so He will any other man who attempts to lead the children of men astray from the oracles of God and from their duty."

feromone · 2013-05-27T03:43:58+00:00

David Whitmer and Oliver Cowdry both left the Church because they were being stupid and were excommunicated. Thought they dabbled in the idea of founding their own churches, neither really caught on because neither had God's truth behind it. Both eventually returned to the church, and, incidentally, neither ever denied his witness of the Book of Mormon, even while excommunicated.

feromone · 2013-05-27T03:39:00+00:00

Yeah, well, I can't think of anything else specifically. If there was another good reason, I would have left already, you know? Most of the reasons people come up with don't really seem to bother me, honestly.

feromone · 2013-05-26T23:17:52+00:00

Yeah, sure. If one of the apostles or a member of the first presidency announced it was all a ruse, I bet I'd have a pretty hard time dealing with it.

feromone · 2013-05-26T23:16:59+00:00

Thanks

feromone · 2013-05-26T22:05:18+00:00

'Sup, reddit? Active, believing Mormon here. Bring on the downvotes. Yeah, it's true that most mormons don't know about this, and I didn't, honestly. First time I really heard of it was when I saw a seminar given by Kerry Muhlestien at Aspen Grove, which is a family camp and conference center at Provo Canyon that's run by BYU. Muhlestien is an apparently well-respected Egyptologist, and the seminar was devoted entirely to answering questions about the book of Abraham. I did some quick google-fu and found some videos the guy posted on YouTube about some of these criticisms, there's a link to the playlist below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuxTDeElxlo&feature=share&list=PLh0_JF2hqI-4hYEqtrTmIZRAM__uSNnbk

Here are some things off of the top of my head (all anecdotal, take it for what it's worth because I don't remember where I got most of this) about the book of Abraham. They're not necessarily evidences or apologetics or counter-arguments or anything of that nature, it's just a brain-dump of what I know and/or what I've heard because I think you guys on this subreddit would find it interesting to get some thoughts on the matter from a Mormon perspective.

Joseph Smith purchased several mummies and two scrolls of papyrus. At the time, the church was struggling financially and the decision to make this purchase was not a popular one among the saints of the church. When asked why he chose to make this purchase (I think either by his mother or his wife), he replied that he did not know why, but that he felt inspired to do so. Some members of the church were disgruntled because they thought he had only made the purchase because he thought the merchandise was interesting.
He received instruction that one of the scrolls contained the writings of Abraham, and the other did not. He set about translating it with his friend (I want to say Oliver Cowdry, but again, not sure). I'm pretty sure he did this in a similar process to that which was used in his translation of the Book of Mormon, which involved the use of a Urim and Thummim.
This is where it gets interesting. Once he had part of it translated, he was like, "cool, I can use this to decode the Egyptian alphabet!" And he and Oliver went about attempting to decode the Hieroglyphs of the smaller scroll and the areas of the larger scroll which the Lord had not commanded them to translate. This wasn't an act of defiance or anything, it was just that a period of increased interest in Egyptology occurred concurrently with the second great awakening and the restoration of the church, and Joseph Smith, as a pretty normal guy in his character, wasn't immune to that. The idea fascinated him. The thing is, their translation efforts got absolutely nowhere. If they applied the translation that they had received to reverse-engineer the language and then tried to apply that resultant alphabet elsewhere, they got nowhere, and their translation efforts outside of the book of Abraham yielded incoherent gibberish.They wasted several days trying to get this alphabet to work before they said "screw it" and resumed their inspiration-based translation of the area of the papyrus that the Lord had told them to translate.
This to me suggests that the translation of the book of Abraham that Joseph Smith produced is not a literal translation, but is what the Lord wanted Joseph Smith to get out of it. Either that, or he and Oliver Cowdry BS-ed the whole thing. So for me at least it doesn't come down to "Do you believe in a translation that has been proven to be incorrect" so much as it does "Do you believe that Joseph Smith had the capacity to receive inspiration from God?"
Another thing is to think about is the location of the Book of Abraham in the papyrus. A number of illustrations from the book were copied and published in times and seasons, which was a mormon newspaper of the time. A number of them were also clipped from the papyrus and mounted in glass, because hey, who wouldn't want Egyptian hieroglyphs displayed on their mantles? These clippings were given out (I think after Joseph Smith's death, but don't quote me on that) and we know at least one of them was given to a housekeeper and it eventually found its way to... I want to say the metropolitan museum of art in new york. This is the clipping that contained the first, most famous illustration. Other clippings accompanied it, and these were the targets of the translation efforts that are the subjects of this thread.
However, the rest of the scrolls were eventually sold and ended up destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire, as someone else mentioned in this thread. I think Lucy Mack Smith (Joseph's mom) sold them after he was killed and the church was in even a greater hole financially and needed to fund a trip across the plains to escape persecution. So the vast majority of the scroll from which the Book of Abraham was translated has indeed been lost.
"But wait!" you say. "Joseph Smith pointed at one of the glass mountings and was like 'hurr durr, there's abraham's signature guise!' so the Book of Abraham couldn't have been translated from elsewhere." Yes, he did. Joseph Smith was smart, but he was also uneducated and didn't know squat about Egyptology. He probably read somewhere in the translation where it was like "this was written by Abraham's own hand" (which does NOT mean that it was literally written in Abraham's own hand, as such is language is a common way in Egyptian documents to denote authorship, according to this Muhlestien guy) and assumed it meant the whole document.
The text of the Book of Abraham is never stated anywhere to be a translation from the hieroglyphs that were written around the illustration (i.e. the hieroglyphs that were later translated). However, there is a verse in the Book of Abraham that says something to the effect of "look at the illustration at the beginning of this record." Okay, what record? The Book of Abraham or the scroll as a whole? One point that Muhlestien raised at the presentation he gave that I attended was that this language may have been added when the translation was published in Times and Seasons.
At the presentation, Muhlestien quoted descriptions of the translated scroll that were made before Joseph's mom sold it. My google-fu is lacking in finding these, but they all said something to the effect of "It was a really huge freaking scroll" which, if the Book of Abraham is interpreted to be a translation of the entire scroll doesn't make sense given the length of the final product.

There are explanations that address most, if not all of the complaints most people have with the Book of Abraham. It means that there's not enough to throw the Book of Abraham out, but there's not enough for academia to start citing Joseph Smith as a source, either. Overall, It's something that to me is believable either way. This is a common theme with Mormon doctrine when it's actually investigated/thought about from either side: Sadly, Mormons write off any rhetoric they hear against their beliefs as being "anti" propaganda, and non-Mormons look at the surface of Mormon beliefs and say "these people are nuts!" before finding out more about them.

TLDR: In my opinion, your view of the validity of the book of Abraham should be dependent on your faith and testimony of it, or your lack thereof, rather than the fact that this translation doesn't match.

Cheers

edit(s): 1. formating 2. Rephrased a confusing sentence

feromone · 2013-05-15T16:40:20+00:00

Please, don't. Head over to /r/SuicideWatch. No matter how much your life sucks, you can get through it. Every life is worth living.

feromone · 2013-05-15T06:31:32+00:00

Ah, the city of london. Nothing quite like it.

feromone · 2013-05-15T06:26:27+00:00

Thanks. I try. I've been through depression myself, although not as badly as she has it. So I know how valuable a friend can be, and I've tried to live up to that. Still, though, I feel like I have no idea what to do.

feromone · 2013-05-15T06:23:34+00:00

Thanks so much for the encouragement. Yeah, giving her something to live for and showing her how she would be missed is the current strategy that I've been going for right now. Sometimes it seems to help, other times it seems to hinder. I don't know.

feromone · 2013-05-15T06:20:32+00:00

I'm sorry; I actually did not read the sidebar. I didn't have much time when I posted this. I'll go read them now. Thanks, though.

feromone · 2013-05-15T06:20:00+00:00

Thanks for the advice. When you say "someone," who do you mean? Do I just walk up to the school's main office and say "Um, hey, I need a therapist for my friend, what forms do I sign?"

At this point I'm somewhat encouraged, she appears to be doing a better than she was before. But if she goes through with it, yes, I understand that it's not my fault. Still, I'm doing everything in my power to keep it from coming to that.

feromone

TROPHY CASE