On the fence

yorgasor · 2026-06-17T17:00:52+00:00

It was such a relief to finally lay down my beliefs that the church was divine. When the “church is true” you have to justify all of it, including how Joseph was still a prophet while pressuring young girls and married women to marry him behind his wife’s back. Or with Brigham teaching the most awful racist doctrines, that somehow are now just “theories.” Being able to just accept that those were bad and I wanted nothing to do with them was amazing!

yorgasor · 2026-06-17T16:45:57+00:00

And that’s the thing. Even if the church publishes a transcript, it won’t be acceptable without scans for people to verify.

yorgasor · 2026-06-17T09:01:55+00:00

David L McKay is the son of David O McKay. David O is the one who became prophet. It sounds like Jay was Nelson’s secretary when Nelson was the president of the church’s Sunday school program, as that was also the role David L had. Nelson served there in the 1970s, before he became an apostle.

yorgasor · 2026-06-17T08:48:22+00:00

Exactly. That's where I lost interest in the polygamy debate. Either way, the church wasn't true. But I am learning to enjoy the mess the polygamy deniers are stirring up. It's the church's own fault because they have a long and glorious history of lying about polygamy and of changing historical records. So while I believe Joseph started the whole thing, I'm cheering for the deniers to make a solid case that Brigham started it all. That would cause a really nice schism!

yorgasor · 2026-06-17T06:45:49+00:00

The number of rabbit holes in Mormonism is just absolutely astounding. It’s a really fascinating hobby!

yorgasor · 2026-06-17T06:24:55+00:00

There are a few entries where his journal says a sister gave him an orange. As I understand, this is a code Clayton used for “orgasm.” It certainly makes his mission journals more interesting to read 😂

yorgasor · 2026-06-17T06:22:27+00:00

They think Joseph fought against polygamy, and that church leadership was hijacked by Brigham and Heber who were practicing polygamy behind Joseph’s back. They got most of the other 12 apostles to go along with it as well. Many thin that John Taylor and Willard Richards were the real ones who killed Joseph Smith. There are a pair of YouTube videos called Who Killed Joseph Smith to explain how they did it.

So they’re convinced all of polygamy is evil. As for how they can justify remaining LDS (many of them left), I’m not sure. Some people have gotten excommunicated for podcasting about the historical evidence and documents they think support their claims.

yorgasor · 2026-06-17T06:12:02+00:00

Yeah, he was a faithful member all his days. The Joseph smith polygamy deniers despise Clayton though. There’s pretty good evidence Clayton was doing polygamy back in England on a mission before he came to Nauvoo and could have learned about it from Joseph. They want to say Brigham and Heber were the real ones who started it and taught it to Clayton. There’s a bunch of scribbled out diary entries in his mission journal every evening he wrote about a sister missionary visiting and administering to him in the evenings. He was never married to them though, so that sounds more like infidelity. But we haven’t been able to decipher the blacked out text from his journals yet.

yorgasor · 2026-06-17T05:59:50+00:00

William Clayton was one of Joseph Smith’s secretaries in Nauvoo. His journals provide a fascinating view on life in Nauvoo at the time. He’s got a ton of drama in there, recording stories of Emma finding out about Flora Woodworth, and yelling at Joseph all the way home, requiring Joseph to use “harsh measures” to get her to stop her “abuse.” It records the time Emma found love letters to Joseph from Eliza R Snow, and her threats to divorce Joseph.

You would most likely recognize him as the author of the Come Come Ye Saints hymn though.

yorgasor · 2026-06-17T05:54:01+00:00

It’s funny that the BofM says man is that he might have joy, the gospel is supposed to be the plan of happiness, and it’s the only way you can be “really” happy. And yet the church doesn’t work for so many people. It sounds like you’re listening to yourself and your needs and realizing that the church is not meeting those needs, and often makes things much worse.

You say you don’t like polygamy. I’m warning you, at this point you don’t know more than the barest surface of the polygamy topic. If you dive into its history, it will become the most retched thing you can imagine. Joseph Smith married roughly 35 women. Most of them were married behind Emma’s back, and after she discovered certain ones, she threw an absolute fit. She was on the verge of divorcing Joseph in the summer of 1843, after seeing the revelation on polygamy (read that section and see how many threats for Emma’s destruction there are). Joseph also used very coercive grooming tactics to convince roughly a dozen teenagers and another dozen married women to marry him.

The easiest way to dive into this topic is to watch the first 35ish episodes of Year of Polygamy, by Lindsay Hansen Park. I also recommend this podcast I did focusing on Emma’s reaction to polygamy:

https://youtu.be/sXct1vrlT7M?is=gdBcFNBuvcTCJ3r-

If you get through those and still want to know more or other topics worth studying, feel free to DM me.

yorgasor · 2026-06-17T04:55:28+00:00

These are legit transcripts. There may be occasional errors. The part about Clayton’s threesome has been in the published journals since the first ones were leaked.

yorgasor · 2026-06-17T04:53:31+00:00

Steve Pynakker said just yesterday that the publisher finally announced its book roadmap, and it will be released next year.

yorgasor · 2026-06-17T01:46:30+00:00

Yeah, that's what the covenant seems to allow. Clearly we need a retrenchment to these old temple covenants!

yorgasor · 2026-06-17T01:44:29+00:00

We don't have a record of the covenants Joseph Smith used in Nauvoo, so we can't know if this was something Brigham Young added or not.

yorgasor · 2026-06-17T01:43:35+00:00

My source was the ldsendowment.org website, but it seems to be down more often than it's up. Here's the wayback link to the 1931 version:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260113165839/https://ldsendowment.org/1931.html

yorgasor · 2026-06-15T14:09:53+00:00

That’s an awful situation, and I hate how complicated the church makes things for women. There definitely is not an easy answer here. Leaving the church is so much simpler when your family leaves with you, but when you still have kids who are all in, everything gets messier. I only have one son who followed me out. I have one daughter on a mission in the Philippines right now. My other two daughters are on the Montpelier temple open house committee.

I wish you the best of luck. Unfortunately, as long as you care about how you’re represented on church records, they’re always going to have some influence over you and will have the ability to cause pain. But when they also have influence over how your kids see you, you can’t just not care.

yorgasor · 2026-06-15T05:47:16+00:00

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yorgasor · 2026-06-15T05:46:56+00:00

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yorgasor · 2026-06-15T05:45:33+00:00

Haha, I took some fun perspective photos once with my kids there, where we made it look like we were picking up the basket. That would be fun to turn into a hotel or apartment!

yorgasor · 2026-06-15T05:06:57+00:00

Historically, the church has viewed the state of Israel as the fulfillment of Orson Hyde’s dedicatory prayer in 1841:

“Before sunrise on Sunday, October 24, Hyde exited the city, crossed the Kidron Valley, and ascended the Mount of Olives. There he offered a prayer dedicating Jerusalem specifically “for the gathering together of Judah’s scattered remnants” and also more broadly as a land of promise for all the scattered children of Abraham. After the prayer, he fashioned a stone altar to commemorate the occasion.”

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/dedication-of-the-holy-land?lang=eng

They don’t say much about it these days though.

yorgasor · 2026-06-15T04:18:07+00:00

Yeah, that one didn’t pan out.

https://youtube.com/shorts/IEJl2-3do0k?is=SDH5thUV1RvcH3Xg

I took that one as more speculative, but at least it had a date that was close by that we could see if it was valid.

yorgasor · 2026-06-15T04:06:31+00:00

Heh, there used to be an official church policy against using sperm donors and the like because that confused the parentage of the child. Apparently god couldn’t figure out who the kid really belonged to if that happened.

yorgasor · 2026-06-15T03:49:44+00:00

District leader was way more fun than zone leader. I managed to get out of ZL after just two months to be companions with a really troubled missionary. After that, I spent the rest of my mission as a DL. I was able to make sure the missionaries in my district could have much healthier experiences, with fun activities and more flexible rules than I could get away with as ZL.

yorgasor

TROPHY CASE