Calm

Meaning?

Not if you don’t qualify or can’t afford adoption, but that would likely be a recent change as I am guessing taking unwanted kids in would be relatively easy in much of the past. There is also the issue of health that might limit a couple, but the same would apply to having children in the first place. But I do agree that generally speaking adoption is a possibility and it would seem this applies to the next life as well because scripture speaks of Christ adopting us for God and I assume we count as part of his eternal increase as well. PS: again this does not mean I reject the doctrine it will be male and female couples only, I am undecided at this point if my life. Part of me hates the idea that there is yet another way to remove women from the eternal picture as unnecessary, but also looking at heaven as truly Godly, that logically wouldn’t happen even if creation didn’t require at some point female involvement. God doesn’t require each individual’s involvement for creation apparently, so none of us are inherently necessary to God….except that he appears to have made us so as his children and he invites each of us to participate, so why would women be excluded just because men possibly could create even spirit children on their own?

Yes. Then if we are truly one in the Celestial Kingdom, then why would only the children we produce ourselves be seen as contributing to our own glory rather than all who are of God’s family? Why can’t we also have eternal increase through others having children when we are in total oneness with them as we are with God?

What if you know they are wrong rather than just having doubts? Iow, you know it will be a sin if you do it?

At what point does suboptimal become unlawful in a religious context? So one doesn’t wait to complain, but rejects.

Do you believe God’s eternal increase is only limited to children or does it include knowledge, kingdoms, power, glory, and posterity and likely other things that don’t occur to me now? Does God’s eternal increase include his exalted children’s children and their exalted children’s children, etc or only his own children in your view?

I was wondering why I was so certain it had been explicit about it being husband and wife only (endowed 1980). Plus marriage was always presented growing up in the Church in the context of boy meets girl/girl meets boy, they fall in love and get married. Of course, you teach or assume the context of what you see around you, somethings don’t need to be said because everyone in that culture just ‘knows’. It’s why the Bible is often guesswork on what was originally meant because the unwritten context the authors used, but did not include except at times through references we do not ‘get’ (think of someone who never heard of Star Wars or Tolkien, didn’t have the internet available to look up memes, etc trying to figure out conversations in our culture). Such references likely had massive additional information if only we knew them.

As long as it is legal is a big condition though. Whst would that look like in a religious context?

Never thought this way and very, very grateful for parents that didn’t support this way of thinking. I know it was at least implied, if not taught outright at church, but I have never viewed anyone in my life as a role model that I can remember or someone I admired to the point of accepting them as an authority, I have never idealized people in that way. I have always picked individual aspects out to adapt and adopt rather than assumed because I liked this about them, they must be doing other stuff well as well. When young I did believe if leaders came out and said it was from God, that part of what they said was from God as if God had spoken it, but I shifted smoothly to recognizing they had to interpret the Spirit themselves and then find words to convey that interpretation. Probably at least by midteens, if not a few years before. Mom talked to me a lot about Joseph’s spiritual experiences and I interpreted his experience as more struggling for words to describe and share what he knew through personal experience. Whether this was more a reflection of Mom than Joseph, I don’t know.

Do you view life’s main purpose is evolution? The passing on of DNA? If not, why is the principle purpose of heterosexual sex about reproduction? Because my guess is given the search for and use of many different forms of birth control over the ages as well as the evidence for the frequency of premarital sex (a woman would be crazy in most cultures to attempt to raise kids without a husband because of property issues, physical protection, rights of women or rather lack of them) as well as sexually active women who are no longer fertile, the majority of heterosexual acts in humanity’s existence have been most likely been for the purpose of pleasure, not to produce children and that often they were an unwanted side effect (and thus many were abandoned when abortion was not an option). God and/or evolution may view heterosexual sex as principally about reproduction, but those doing it….much lower percentage. In the 45+ years of my marriage, about 6 months of heterosexual sex was principally devoted to having children with the side purpose of having fun. The rest of the time it’s been about pleasure and companionship. So around 1%.

And what happens with your reasoning when science allows this to change, when two women can create offspring with one of them carrying the child till birth?

Why is there an ordinance required for the bearing of children in your view?

I have heard of someone getting kicked out for marrying someone who was black though. And it certainly didn’t stop racists remarks and treatment from the white side of Bluedream’s family from what she has reported (and I have heard similar things from others). I also know a parent of an adopted young woman who is convinced she will never marry in the Church contrary to the reality. My guess is the nasty bigotry of that parent’s (I know some stories of their childhood, tragic) own parents is embedded in their views so that they end up treating her differently, telling her she is seen as inferior, telling her she won’t succeed, but blaming it on others rather than accepting their own responsibility in conveying to her she is less than (thankfully she is getting very strong support from others members in her family to resist such programming, plus always was a strong, determined individual since I knew her from toddler age). Just because it’s family doesn’t mean they won’t be racist to their own family members. Not that it’s a competition. Bigotry is bad whatever the target. I do think being able to mask, a choice for those who are gay that does not exist for most Blacks, adds a fundamental difference in the dynamics, but that ‘option’ creates both better and worse conditions…masking allows one to avoid the bigotry being directed at oneself but likely still will encounter people exhibiting it and even be expected to join in, the bigots unaware they are insulting the person in front of them. The masking itself is a denial of self, unnatural and a heavy burden to manage, very high cost emotionally, mentally, and physical…masking is exhausting. One does not avoid fear either by masking because there is always the fear of exposure. Not saying here Blacks don’t engage in masking in and out of the Church as I am aware that many do to avoid being seen as different, to fit in; I am speaking specifically to the issue of the Bans in the context of the Church. Very few Blacks could mask their blackness to the point of being able to receive a temple recommend. Any one with same sex attraction could and can mask that attraction and and related behaviour in order to receive a recommend….and many did.

He said claims of revelation, not evidence of revelation…unless you believe that the First Presidency and Apostles stating something is a revelation or a “direct commandment of God”, see above) counts as evidence for revelation. If so, you are wrong about the ban having none such. Sections of scripture were misinterpreted imo to support the claims of revelation for the ban. Why could this not be happening with the sections of scripture used to exclude gay marriage today? What is different? (I do not support gay marriage being accepted in the Church, but I don’t believe we have the certainty of it being against the commandments that is claimed. Added to be clear, I don’t reject it being accepted either, I am currently in limbo on this though the symmetry of male-female half making a whole symbolism appeals to me, possibly because it surrounded my youth in and out of the Church).

And they get the same rewards…nuts.

Dan Brown

Ah, I thought you meant the author.

Dan?

The worse used words that you wouldn’t hear at Church in my youth as I remember, so I think that lowered the number of overall comments, but from what I heard around my kids (my eldest is 45), while not as extreme, juvenile humor did include a lot of derogatory remarks about those in the queer community. I think it could be easy to phrase out and not register because they often lacked the edge, were throwaway lines not meant to be terribly insulting, but that’s the way racism and bigotry can stay in our culture for so long, imo, as it’s dismissed as ‘it doesn’t really mean anything’.

I can often see how Smac interprets the way he does and sometimes it does seem to me the most reasonable interpretation, but other times not. Plus I typically see your ‘that’s not what I said’ as reasonable because you don’t attach the same meanings as I might, so I see it as always good to support interpretations by presenting the actual quote with enough additional material for context and then explaining how you got there so the other can point out where one goes wrong. People who say something are the authority for what they meant, imo, even if they don’t express it in a way that’s clear to me.

If you are not trying to be insulting, you might consider other word choices…you use assert elsewhere, why not stick with that?

And the Word of Wisdom is exactly the same for us all…but it’s going to mean something very different to a BIC who gets almost sick at the thought of smoking or drinking alcohol, etc (I overreact to foods…well, anything with the ‘wrong’ smell or texture, beans were my archnemesis) as opposed to someone who is an older adult convert whose family celebrates life with wine and fellowship at big family gatherings or whose favorite pasttime before joining the Church was having a cup of coffee with friends at a cafe catching up on what everyone is doing or perhaps drinking such cuddled up under a blanket with a good book on a day off when it looks like it does today (snow covering everything). Both substances are likely not that harmful to one’s body*** and therefore the only reason to view these as sinful is because of the covenant one makes. The rule of tithing is the same for all of us, but it means something very different to a family who chooses to pay tithing and let their kids go to school in third or fourth hand clothes or whose kids can’t participate in afterschool activities with friends, go on field trips etc because those won’t fit into the very tight family budget or whose grades suffer because they can’t put in the hours needed because they have an afternoon job to help out the family than it means to a family who not only have more than enough to support their children all the way through college including getting them tutors or paying for extra classes and providing them with extracurricular activities that look great on a high end college application, but can also send them on trips to Europe, buy them cars, etc. Of course those versions of giving up something that you love or that you want to do for another you love because of Church teachings pale in comparison to giving up a romantic loving companionship or potential lifelong marriage solely because the Church teaches that same sex relationships are sinful. PS: recognition of the immensity of what the Church requires here does not equate to a rejection of church teachings. *** alcohol in small or moderate amounts is looking more dangerous than once thought, but may still be less harmful than other things Saints happily do to their bodies without risking losing a temple recommend. Coffee and tea, otoh, may have some beneficial health effects depending on how they are used and by whom, so what we are requiring may only be based on a commitment to the faith as opposed to something any rational person would choose to do if they knew the science, etc. I was taught growing up that science backed the WoW, which is unfortunate because science has gotten better at observing what substances actually do to the body and conclusions can change based on new information.

Thankfully I have only heard a few, but the worst was in 2006 from a girl in Achievement Days repeating a joke she heard from a relative she thought was the funniest thing calling Blacks apes. Myself and the other leader quickly, but gently let her know that wasn’t appropriate. It horrified us that such was still be taken for humor in a devout LDS home. If I had known the family at all, I would have talked with the mother, but I was clueless about the home life and unless I know how parents are likely to react, I am not going to get a kid in trouble with them unless it’s absolutely necessary. (Living in BYU married housing exposed me to two or three parents that way overreacted to their kids’ mistakes that I would not have expected if I just knew them from church, also ran into the same thing a few times volunteering at schools, always a shock)

This is one reason why I believe the distinction between paradise and spirit prison is more a mortal concept than an eternal one born out of our need for categories and hierarchy. While baptism symbolically cleanses us of all sins, the first sinful thought (which might be as trivial as being resentful the heat isn’t turned up higher in the changing room) technically we have lost that purity the way our doctrine is taught, at least until we take the sacrament and then the process starts again. I don’t see why God would remove all trace of sin before teaching us why something was a sin in the first place, how it was harming us and others. To me that feels like being a puppet, without choice or awareness, not developing toward a purer, higher spiritual state. And since all have sins of some sort (our cultures probably load us down with many we are not aware of or don’t realize are sins if we are aware of them) throughout our lives, there is a high likelihood we carried many with us into the next life, no matter who we were. So people in paradise are going to be doing the same thing as people in Spirit Prison, learning the finer details of what is right and wrong and being cleansed of them in some fashion through the Atonement. So except for the Hell side of things, I don’t see much difference between Spirit Prison and Paradise…it’s a time of learning about sins including selfawareness of our own, choosing to forsake the sins to draw closer to God and redemption for all. If there is a significant difference, I would see Paradise as being of those who possess additional tools for learning and forsaking of sins received through baptism, confirmation, and temple ordinances. Perhaps also a mentality that predisposes us to accepting we have sins and desiring to be rid of them, but since I don’t have access to others’ inner thoughts and we appear to have plenty of arrogance in the Church as well as I’ve seen a lot of humility outside the Church, I have my doubts our predispositions in this area are any more advanced generally speaking than those outside the Church.

Unless they were oh so highly annoying, but then they could be the most devout member and they would be just as welcomed. 😛