AnchoredinChrist

I considered myself to have a good idea of the topic of race in the scriptures, but there were several new concepts in this video that I hadn't considered before. I'm super grateful for this presentation.

I hope you will be able to move through your grief with the most support possible. Please feel free to update us going forward.

For some time now I've been self-identifying as both a Mormon and a Christian Universalist.

I agree, though I also think there to be certain current canonized revelation that ought not to be canonized nor considered to be revelation, so you and I would perhaps diverge on that point.

In the Torah, the Book of Job is included in the "Poetry" section, not the "History" section. I think the whole story of Job is a work of allegorical prose/poetry literature, and not a true or accurate history of a man.

What do you make of the verses in Exodus regarding the treatment of slaves? Do you think that such verses mean that slavery is also not wrong by default?

I don't understand why a girl being married off to get her out of the house would be less of a case of forced marriage than if her parents had no such ulterior motives. Even if you are wanting to argue that the marriage wasn't necessarily immediately consummated, it is still a forced marriage situation. If she tried to run away on the way back instead of the way there, then that detail should be changed on the website, though it would lead me to question whether the girls had been informed of what their trip to Salt Lake City was for. There are other stories of women not having full & informed consent before a sealing ordinance was performed. But regardless of whether Augusta was Brigham's first or second plural wife, or what the name of the man Augusta wanted to remarry was, or which of Jules Remy's accounts are most accurate, the stated assertion of Monogamy as Divine Design is to show that: polygamy is not a good practice for women, families, or for societies there is not sufficient doctrinal or theological foundation that God commanded, inspired, or guided early Mormons in their polygamy practice there is not sufficient doctrinal or theological foundation that polygamy would ever be commanded by God for any 'higher unknown reason that we just don't understand." I agree that making details as perfectly articulated as possible is good in order to lend greater credibility to an argument, but I think the writer of the website does a good job of arguing the above points. I consider historical details (which are often extremely complicated and difficult to shorten into easily readable text) to be of lesser importance (not of no importance, but lesser) than the understanding that polygamy was wrong, not of God, and never will be of God. The last section of both websites reads, "Also seek confirmation of the truth from the Lord in prayer, as "by the voice of the Spirit ye may know the truth of all things," and as Joseph Smith read, "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him." I would think that to focus on the minor points and neglect going to the Lord in prayer to ask if He never commanded polygamy, never would command it, and that it is harmful to us, would be rather missing the point. I hope that along with all of the examination of particulars, those who read the websites would foremost ask God himself if the premise of them is correct.

I actually happen to have read this story previously because it circulated in one of the anti-polygamy Facebook groups I'm a part of not so long ago so I was able to dig it out from there: I looked up where the screenshot is from and it's apparently an earlier account from the same man, printed in 1856: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045462/1856-05-07/ed-1/?sp=1&r=0.059,-0.188,1.158,1.671,0 I hadn't read the whole account of his story before, the whole of it fills up all of the second to last column:

My search of it all came up with this address given in 2012. 140 letters is a lot to go through but the intro says that Augusta repeatedly asked to be sealed to "scores" of different men. It wouldn't be a far stretch to me to imagine that at least one of those scores of men would be someone who was alive that she was wanting to go to instead (especially given Brigham's "love to whip" as she puts it) but I haven't listened to this address or looked through all the 140 letters myself: https://sunstone.org/the-lioness-of-the-lord-the-letters-of-augusta-adams-cobb-to-her-husband-brigham-young-2/

Okay so, I did some more digging and I discovered that Brigham Young's marriage to Lucy Ann Decker was not recorded until 1846 -- it was recorded as an 1842 marriage, but the record itself was not actually made until the year 1846. I think you might be able to find it in the Nauvoo 1846 temple records here: https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/285774 Since there wasn't any evidence before the martyrdom that they were married pre-martyrdom, those who espouse the narrative that Brigham Young introduced polygamy consider such back dates to be fabricated, or at least without proper evidence. We have contemporary evidence that Augusta Cobb, before the martyrdom, followed Brigham to Nauvoo to be a plural wife (but we find out from her letters later that Brigham forbid her to speak to Joseph Smith) so that would be why those who don't believe Brigham Young to disregard when he later said a marriage date was. Another piece of evidence against the LDS narrative was that Lucy Ann Decker was still married to her first husband William Seeley in 1842 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Brigham_Young's_wives), so that makes the back-dated marriage claim to Brigham Young a lot less credible too. I also found that even though no sealing record was made until 1846, they were definitely in a relationship earlier, as she gave birth to their first child together on June 19, 1845, (https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/KWJH-DJZ/lucy-ann-decker-1822-1891) about a year after the martyrdom, but that still doesn't date their relationship as being before the martyrdom by any contemporary evidence, as Augusta's was. So as a whole, those who don't ascribe to Brigham Young's narrative of polygamy also don't necessarily ascribe to the LDS church's given dates when certain polygamous events happened either. I guess it would be great if there were to be a narrative timeline put together of the two sides so each side's proposed chain of events and their differences could be compared side-by-side, but I've never seen anyone put something together like that.

Right, so the data analyzing overall GDP was country-by-country, and like all of the other WomenStats data, each country was "rated" on a five-point scale from least polygamous to most polygamous, with more factors taken into account than just whether or not polygamy was legal in a country or not. -- When I looked up the WomanStats project online just now, I saw that it was actually started by BYU, which I hadn't known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WomanStats_Project I presume a greater factor involved in marking whether a country is very polygamous or not would be prevalence. I didn't know anything specific about Angola, but my wikipedia search just now says that even though polygamous marriages aren't legally recognized in Angola, they are very common, "Although polygamy is officially illegal in Angola, the practice is known to be widely socially acceptable and very prevalent among the Angolan population." Apparently polygamy is less prevalent in Bahrain, even though it is legal there: "Like many nations in the Muslim world, polygyny is legal in Bahrain. However, according to the Bahrain Center for Human Rights' write-up on women's rights in Bahrain at the present time, polygamy is only practiced by a minority of Bahraini citizens" The graph of course, even though it is by location, is by continent/region, not country like the WomanStats data, so it's a general visual showing overall performance of regions, with the more polygamous "regions" of the world showing to have significantly more extreme poverty. I understand that you would perhaps prefer to see a graph detailed country-by-country as that would of course be more accurate, but to me it still works to show the overall trend that the more polygamous parts of the world are the more impoverished parts of the world. The actual WomanStats data is much more nuanced than "polygamous" or "monogamous" and "impoverished" or "not impoverished", due to the five-point rating, and it shows that the 170 countries that they measured followed this scale, but all that might be more difficult to put into one graph unless the graph were to be interactive. All of the data for the WomenStats project is online so you can look it up there: https://www.womanstats.org/mobile/index.html — I don't happen to have an account there myself.

I happen to like her efforts regarding Heavenly Mother, and of doctrinal polygamy being harmful. I'm less familiar with her as a poet/performer. She ascribed to a different narrative of Mormon polygamy history than I do, so I diverged from her on that point.

I was perusing the 'Another attack on monogamy' thread and it seemed to me from the responses that the website Monogamy as Divine Design hasn't been shared on this forum. It contains a lot of secular research done showing psychological and societal harms of polygamy and how all that can be related to early Mormon polygamy and I think it to be worth the read so I'll just link it here: http://historicalmonogamy.wixsite.com/divinedesign It's the "sister" website of Historical Monogamy Doctrine: http://historicalmonogamy.wixsite.com/evidenceofdoctrine Historical Monogamy Doctrine is the first website and argues doctrinally against polygamy having been commanded by God or practiced by Joseph Smith (and I suppose is intended to be read first -- it's also the Mormon history narrative that I myself align with.) And Monogamy as Divine Design continues the argument that polygamy isn't of God, mostly from the psychosocial angle -- even though its message is Mormon-polygamy-focused I think its info contains a lot of relevance when talking about secular non-monogamy ideas.

I happen to think the locket photo is more likely to be Hyrum Smith, and when I looked to see if anyone else had thought so too I found this analysis of it that I thought was really compelling: https://josephsmithjrphoto.blogspot.com/2023/07/hyrum-smiths-identity-through.html?m=1 I know many think the locket photo to be depicting a man too old to be Joseph Smith, as he died at 38 and many people think the locket picture to be of a man in his 40s.

When I first saw this photo last week it was from someone who said they had previously received a visitation from Joseph Smith and had seen his face. They said that they consider this purported photograph of him to be a real one. The provenance of this photograph is WILD and an interesting story all on its own. It was first noticed by a church member (who has a blog) in a catalogue of old photographs in Brazil of all places. The original cataloguer had gotten the photograph from New York and brought it to South America. They had estimated the photograph to have been developed in 1845. Coincidentally, Joseph Smith wrote in his diary in 1844 of having his picture taken in New York. So he perhaps got the photo for his presidency campaign but died before it was sent back to Nauvoo. The church member in South America who found it in a random book of pictures decided to investigate it solely because they thought it looked like Joseph Smith.