webbles

I listened to the video and Don made a few really interesting points about Emma and polygamy. One was that a few years before her birth, a pastor in her family's community was kicked out of the congregation for preaching an immoral practice from the Bible. Don has another historian friend who hypothesizes that could have been polygamy (any other immoral practice in the Bible?). If it was, that would mean she grew up in a community that had a bad experience with polygamy and would have colored her own view of it. The other point is that Jacob (in Jacob 2) mentions a revelation from Lehi telling the Lehites to not practice polygamy. That revelation is not recorded anywhere in the Book of Mormon. But it could have been in the lost Book of Lehi. And Emma would have likely been the transcriber for it (as she was the first transcriber for Joseph). That would have also had an impact on her view of polygamy. A paraphrase of that quote was in the video. Around the 1:10:00 mark. Also a few other quotes from her against polygamy were also mentioned. Don makes an interesting point around this. He points out how Joseph told William Clayton to burn or bury the records of the Council of Fifty. He says that is an indication that Joseph tried to hide/destroy things that could be damaging to him. And many of the stories about the burning of the Section 132 have Joseph burning the section, not Emma. So, Don proposes that Joseph did burn the paper to ensure that it wouldn't fall in the wrong hands and get him killed. And Emma saw that and misunderstood that to mean that Joseph was giving up polygamy (similar to how William Marks also believed that). And so Emma was trying to follow his wishes and example by denying polygamy after his death because he was giving up. She also had seen what it did to her husband (polygamy was a main reason he was killed) and she didn't want the same thing to happen to her sons. So she would deny it to her sons to ensure they didn't follow their father's lead.

No, not yet. Neither of the women (there is also now an assistant to the secretary) are in my ward so I don't know them personally and no one that I've asked knows what they do.

The AZ Supreme Court has issued their ruling. They affirmed the trial court and reversed the appeals court - https://www.azcourts.gov/Portals/0/Opinion - CV-25-0213.pdf. It was a unanimous ruling. I believe that ends the Bisbee case against the church. The case against the visiting teacher is still waiting for an opinion. Interestingly, it overturns a previous ruling from an earlier appeals court (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints v. Superior Court, 159 Ariz. 24) which had said that the penitent held the privilege solely. The AZ Supreme Court ruled that in the Clergy-Penitent Privilege, the penitent controls the privilege. But in the statute about mandatory reporting, the court says that the clergy holds the privilege. So it is impossible to force clergy to reveal what was said in confidence, even if the penitent had relinquished the privilege. I think that's a pretty substantial change. The court basically ruled that the bishop holds the privilege and so you can't force him to testify unless there is some evidence of fraud or similar.

He was trying to show where to look for on the water tower. Then we drove around and showed several spots in town and showed how it is not easily visible (ignoring the big water container on top). In an earlier video, he did something similar but with large churches (several bigger than the temple) but none are actually in Fairview, though they are all a few miles away. Thus was an attempt to show its impact in Fairview itself.

I watched the video. He isn't comparing the scale. He is using it as a way to visualize if you can see the temple or not. He drives around the town and says that if you can see the white bar (the part underneath the big water container), then you would see the temple because that is the same height. The photo shown makes it look like the water tower is massive compared to the temple but the photo is taken above ground by a drone so he had to shrink the temple size to fit it in there.

This isn't from the King Follet Discourse I don't know why you are quoting it. Can someone read out of the King Follet Discourse that God had a Father? Yes. But I thought we were talking about what Joseph actually said (per what we have recorded). First, this is an internet forum. How about you link to the sources instead of copy/paste like this? Or least have page numbers, publish dates, etc. That is from the June 16, 1844 discourse. You can see the original sources at https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/discourse-16-june-1844-a-as-reported-by-thomas-bullock/1 and https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/discourse-16-june-1844-a-as-reported-by-william-p-mcintire/1 and https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/discourse-16-june-1844-a-as-reported-by-george-laub/1. The one from Bullock is the only one that talks about infinite regression. The other 2 don't. They are much shorter, but it is odd that none of them mention it since, per Bullock's transcription, that's one of the major things he is trying to say. So, does it mean that the 2 just didn't see it important enough to write down or that Bullock's transcription doesn't give us a clean view of what he actually said. Additionally, you'll notice that he is referencing Abraham 3 (he quotes parts of it several times in and around the passage that you quoted). And in Abraham 3:19, That gives some weight to the idea that Bullock misheard or miswrote what was said.

None of them actually state that Heavenly Father has a Father. You can read all 4 at https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/site/accounts-of-the-king-follett-sermon. There is nothing in there that states that there is an infinite regression of Gods. It is a possible reading but not a required reading.

Funny that you quote a 1985 article first (your quote even gives the year) and then say an article written in 1994 is earlier.

As pointed out by InCognitus, it depends on how you read the King Follet Discourse and the various transcripts we have of it (since we don't have an actual official transcript that is 100% accurate). If you read it to have Gods above God, then yes, Heavenly Mother would have a Mother and Father (and who Her Mother and Father are would be pure speculation as there is absolutely nothing revealed about it). If you read it that God is the first God, then no, She would not have a Mother (just like Heavenly Father wouldn't have one).

InCognitus has pointed out multiple times that this is claim might not be something Joseph even made. And there are several LDS who don't believe Joseph ever made this claim and can point to the King Follet Discourse for their reasoning.

That has puzzled me for a long time. I do agree that Satan wasn't actually necessary for the Plan of Salvation, I did work up a solution to this. Satan wanted more people to follow him (or be as miserable as him). If he left Adam and Eve there, he wouldn't be able to get access to the other 2 parts in heaven (since they couldn't be born). If he was successful in corrupting Christ (as I don't believe in perfect foreknowledge and so Christ could have messed up and frustrated the Plan of Salvation), then he gets all of those in heaven. But even without corrupting Christ, he gets a chance to have more under him. So, his hubris (which was his original downfall) led him to take that chance.

For me, the way he phrases things, it sounds like he is talking about abortion.

GPS only has 31 satellites. Starlink is the first mega constellation and there is over 10,000 satellites. But the valuation of SpaceX is not based on Starlink. If it was just Starlink, it would not be a valuable.

I like crunching numbers. I'm not trying to normalize it. It is definitely abnormal. But it isn't unique to Utah at the time. If it happened today, it would definitely be weird and frowned down upon. It breaks the the pop cultural math of "age / 2 + 7" for what is acceptable today. But go back earlier, that wasn't always true. A fairly famous case is President Cleveland's marriage to Francis Folsom in 1886. She was 21. He was 49. He was good friends with her dad and when her dad died, he became her unofficial guardian when she was 11. Their marriage happened while he was president. That marriage would raise a lot of eyebrows now a days but was a social sensation back then. But to say that the church taught or believed that woman should be young to be married (either here or in the afterlife) or that even those men wanted young wives is taking it further than the data suggests. If you look more deeply at those wives in the infographic, you'll find that all of those women didn't have their first child till years later. Clarissa Young was 21 with her first child, Sarah Snow was 21 with her first child, and Emma Woodruff was 19 with her first child. So, yes, they were married very young and that is problematic. But the data also suggests that it wasn't consummated until they were a bit older. If they had been a monagamous marriage and had married shortly before the birth of the first child, the age difference between the man and woman would have been fairly normal for the time period (pretty close to President Cleveland's marriage). Another thing that you seem to be missing is that there were several men who did write to Brigham Young and asked to marry young girls. This included 12 year old girls. He wrote back and told them to wait for those girls to grow up. That wasn't always specified as I have a ancestor's sister who was married when she was 14, but it shows that it wasn't normal to marry young women.

As I mentioned, pure speculation. And when we usually talking about "getting other planets", it isn't the planet we reside on, but the planet that our children would be born on and grow.