The Nehor

Disagree with the Public Square article. They talk about journalistic respect but their analogies are flawed. They suggest a picture of someone protesting in temple clothing as the equivalent of sneaking into a Catholic conclave or Mecca. The equivalent of this would be if the WSJ reporter infiltrated the temple which didn’t happen. I found it hard to take the article writer seriously after that.

If being Him is not being able to coherently communicate I am not sure I am that eager for that goal.

Just once I want that audit report in General Conference to reveal some bombshell finding on the books they discovered.

Proof that we are so stupid and useless that even omniscience won’t enable the divine to construct and deliver a message through to us. That is kinda terrifying. Why are we trying to seek divine direction again?

Also whether the sources are reliable.

There is this old piece from Sunstone: https://sunstone.org/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/095-10-13.pdf From what I have read it seems Heber had an affectionate relationship with his wife but not a romantic or particularly loving one at least in his early letters. When he entered plural marriage he was much more effusive but it is not clear if this was a change in their relationship or compensating for his new wives. From what I have read he tended to be more distant with his other wives and much more practical. Could be attempts to protect Vilate’s feelings or not being comfortable with them or any number of things. I feel a bit bad for them.

If the woman was in a position in which a divorce wouldn’t be potentially ruinous then yes, it is an advantage. Which is why women in Utah during Brigham Young’s time were all becoming doctors and lawyers and scientists. He said some semi-progressive things about women’s education but I am not going to find them for you. The terrible caveman caricatures and the enlightened ‘ahead of their time’ beacon of gender respect/equality caricatures can burn next to each other.

They had liberal divorce laws from the 1850s to 1878. After that they were relatively normal. Utah was behind the curve in modernizing divorce law with “no fault” rules. I also suspect that without plural marriage the laws wouldn’t have been so liberal. Utah was not the first territory or state to grant women suffrage. New Jersey (weirdly) was. This was in the late 1700s where their first state constitution gave voting rights to women who met the property requirements. Admittedly the property requirements were high and could realistically only be met by widows and heiresses since if the woman was married the property was his. This was done away with within a few decades where voting was explicitly tied to being a man and the property requirements were being lowered to allow more people to vote as part of the wave to give the federal and state governments greater legitimacy. The first territory to give women the right to vote was Wyoming. Utah granted the same rights shortly afterwards. Elections were held in Utah before Wyoming so (assuming you ignore New Jersey’s short-lived and limited suffrage) Wyoming territory was first to grant women the right to vote and Utah was the first to have women actually vote. I am glad Utah did this but it is disingenuous to suggest that this was done because the territorial government (and the Church) thought women should be voting on their own merits. Some did but the Church needed a voting bloc to oppose the Liberal Party (an anti-Mormon party) and wanted to counteract the votes of a lot of the non-Mormon immigrants in Utah who were very often unmarried. On a more national level there was support for giving women in Utah the right to vote hoping they would oppose polygamy. They mostly didn’t. Then Congress passed the Edmunds-Tucker act which was aimed to break at least some of the church’s political power and which removed the right to vote from all women in the territory. Women got the right to vote back when Utah became a state. Utah was one of the first states to grant women’s suffrage. In general Utah’s record on granting suffrage is mixed. Early to grant it to women but really slow to remove laws preventing Native Americans from voting. Sending women to testify before Congress and meet with legislators to try to make plural marriage seem more palatable was a good PR move and they were very sincere but it doesn’t mean latter-day saints were deeply invested in women’s rights in general.

You’re projecting again.

Your sarcastic comment is unironically correct.

You have to really rip that verse out of context to make it about Jesus preaching to the dead. In context it is pretty clear that it is talking about people that were taught the gospel while alive but are not dead. I know I spend all day grinning and chuckling about living in the most unjust and unmerciful horror show imaginable. This is why you can’t reach anyone. Everyone else is just an inhuman caricature to you that operates on pure spite and malevolence. I am not sure if this is how you think most people operate or if this is how you operate and you are projecting. I don’t know which is scarier either.

I don’t think they were terrible. I think they were just normal. What Heber C. Kimball was saying is harsh to our ears but take out the plural marriage bit and there were tons of men everywhere echoing similar sentiments about the worth of women. At times I envy the Catholics. They have lower expectations of popes.

More from Heber C. Kimball: Lovely. Women are just interchangeable things. If one breaks just get a different one. And before that in the same sermon: I really hope his wives weren't listening to that. Also he thinks people have children in the spirit world? Interesting. Then talks about how there will be a lot more of them due to the lack of medical care/abortion doctors? Yikes on bikes!

To Heber C. Kimball: Buddy, pal, friendo, I've seen pictures of you and "fresh, young, and sprightly" is not how I would describe you.

Maybe some future me in some future life with some expanded perspective will be able to look back and realize that things were actually wonderful and amazing and joyful. I hope my future self doesn't look back with contempt for current me for not being somehow omniscient. Sometimes I can see how things that seemed bad at the time turned to good eventually but I also see lots of things that seemed good at the time that turned out to be bad. If I extrapolate this it leaves plenty of room for some hope and some cynicism. If this body is a rental I want my money back. I think I have only experienced that when I was very ignorant. I have too many friends that I think will never experience either. It doesn't seem to be enough. It is usually both of them. Careful friend, sounds like you are saying that following the commandments means you have earned forgiveness and mercy. There is a variation of this scripture in my patriarchal blessing. I haven't found either version to be a lot of help.

That would suggest that a lot more women than men didn't make the cut and were used as animal spirits. Possible but the implications would be weird. I personally am only willing to marry human and sugar glider spirits.

Unless you are doubting your doubts. That for some reason is approved. I don’t know what the stance is on doubting your doubts about your doubts.

Or their trial is at the end of the Millenium.

I don’t generally buy the delayed blessing thing. Firstly because King Benjamin says that blessings for righteousness are immediate and partially because too often it means in some other life or other world and then it becomes untestable. Or at least untestable in the sense that you can’t report back on it to others.

I wasn’t attempting to discredit your experiences which part of me envies. I am just being my cynical self.

So I’m an honor student at St Brutus’s Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys? Yeah, the Primary and Youth lessons about being part of a chosen generation left that bit out for some reason. Yet more undeserved hype. I am really hoping that the real purpose of life is to develop a deep sense of cynicism. If not, I’m in trouble.

If we consistently taught this resignation to what you endure in mortality and were told to expect little of God in terms of intervention I would probably trust things more. It just doesn’t seem consistent with scripture to me where at times it is almost embarrassing all the things God promises to do. I find I can’t be both resigned and stoic when facing trials while also following President Nelson’s teaching to “expect miracles”. Instead we seem to play games where we jump back and forth. We have people promising that if you do A and B that God will pour blessings upon you and preach patience when someone does A and B and said blessings aren’t there. One can say it varies by circumstance but then it is not really a promise at all.

At least we could get rid of that chosen generation and saving the best spirits for the last days thing. The best amongst us are the stillborn and those who die young. We are all the failures who barely qualified to come at all.

Yeah, from what I have read it would be about 45-50%. It wasn’t until the 18th century that anything made a meaningful dent in those numbers and even then it was a lot longer before those practices were widespread.

No. I mean the idea that Jesus’s ‘harrowing of hell’ was definitely around and was tied to baptism for the dead but this rewrote the whole thing. We find out that Jesus didn’t go to hell at all.