Apology for the Priesthood Ban / "March of Dimes Syndrome" / "Mission Creep" / "Spencer's Law"

[Teancum]

14 hours ago, CV75 said:

Well, for one thing President Nelson is not the Pope. Who does the exempting and the blaming, anyway?

THat was a non answer. Would you like to try again?

[CV75]

15 minutes ago, Teancum said:

THat was a non answer. Would you like to try again?

Since you won't share who you think is doing the exempting and by what standard, that is eh best I can do. But if you want to consider my statements to mean the Church is exempt from apologizing, that is good enough for me.

[Buckeye]

Sorry, I don’t have the time to comment as much as I’d like. And I haven’t read this whole thread so maybe this point has been made. 
 

I would note the scriptural instruction regarding repentance. We are to confess and forsake. The church, as an organization, is striving to forsake the evils of our racist doctrine. That is laudable. But the church has not yet confessed. True repentance requires admission that the doctrine was wrong and never should have been taught or enforced. Until the church confesses - which includes an apology - it has not repented. 

Edited June 20, 2024 by Buckeye

[MustardSeed]

2 minutes ago, Buckeye said:

Sorry, I don’t have the time to comment as much as I’d like. And I haven’t read this whole thread so maybe this point has been made. 
 

I would note the scriptural instruction regarding repentance. We are to confess and forsake. The church, as an organization, is striving to forsake the evils of our racist doctrine. That is laudable. But the church has not yet confessed. True repentance requires admission that the doctrine was wrong and never should have been taught or enforced. Until the church confesses - which includes an apology - it has not repented. 

Nor will it.  
what if we all follow the church’s  example in this principle?

[Damien the Leper]

8 hours ago, The Nehor said:

I see what you did there.

I don't know what you're talking about.

[Malc]

9 hours ago, Calm said:

Especially the common background expected stuff so familiar to people there is no need to mention it…until it’s a culture not familiar with the one they are reading about and so they aren’t aware of something’s presence and assume silence means absence rather than familiarity.

Maybe apologizing was so natural they would have considered needing a command to do so laughable.  And mentioning it in scripture would make as much sense as mentioning one was washing clothes, cooking meals every day, or changing the baby’s nappies, teaching kids to read and write or to learn their father’s trade.

I'm Scottish. One of my favourite Scottish poems starts:

Quote

See ma mammy. See ma dinner ticket.

Any non-Scot who listens to this out of its cultural context is unlikely to know what "dinner ticket" refers to, and will almost certainly think, incorrectly, that the speaker expect the listener to believe that, from the speaker's perspective, the dinner ticket and the mother are present and visible - perhaps even being pointed to.

[LoudmouthMormon]

3 hours ago, Teancum said:

13 hours ago, LoudmouthMormon said:

I'm having a hard time seeing how these two things fall into the same category of moral severity.

The hoops some of the defenders here go through to excuse not doing an apology is rather amazing and amusing.

lol.  When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  I'm not a "defender", not looking for an "excuse", not jumping through "hoops".  But other than that, thanks for the response.   The answer to both of your questions is "no". 

Anyway, I have a dog in this hunt from two directions. 
- I have more than a passing familiarity with being on the receiving end of discriminatory treatment from the majority.  I have personal and ancestral stories of being a member of the oppressed minority.
- I also have more than a few 40-year-old personal experiences in the church with LDS folks opining and behaving badly towards black people.

I have intersectionality in me, @Teancum.  If I dazzle you with my facets, feel free to wear shades so you can see more than a bad guy defending racism. 

Edited June 20, 2024 by LoudmouthMormon

[Calm]

4 hours ago, ZealouslyStriving said:

Your two conjectures are no more, or less, valid then the conjecture that they didn't apologize.

Of course they are (no more or less valid).  I don’t see anyone saying they are not.

 My pushback is against stating something as a fact when it is only a conjecture.  If anyone wants to say ‘I don’t believe Jesus apologized because it doesn’t say so in the scriptures and therefore we shouldn’t as well,’ go for it.  I may not agree with that as I said before because I believe reconciliation and forgiveness are apologizing, but I am not going to be dismissive. I can respect that position as reasonable.  OTOH, saying “we know Jesus never apologized” is going to get me going “now wait a moment here”.

Quote

So using scripture to demand that the Church apologize also falls flat.

Since I am not doing that, guess I am okay.   

Edited June 20, 2024 by Calm

[Teancum]

6 hours ago, CV75 said:

Since you won't share who you think is doing the exempting and by what standard, that is eh best I can do. But if you want to consider my statements to mean the Church is exempt from apologizing, that is good enough for me.

Another dodge. Very telling.

[The Nehor]

8 hours ago, Damien the Leper said:

I don't know what you're talking about.

Of course not. 😉

[Thinking]

The Church is in a no-win situation. It has always claimed to be a revelatory Church. If that's true why did it take so long for God to correct the error of the priesthood ban? The length of the priesthood ban suggests that leaders were not really communicating with God about it. Officially the Church admits that its leaders aren't perfect, but I can't recall any specific admission of error.

[Tacenda]

nvrmd

Edited June 23, 2024 by Tacenda

[MrShorty]

On 6/21/2024 at 3:03 PM, Thinking said:

The Church is in a no-win situation. It has always claimed to be a revelatory Church. If that's true why did it take so long for God to correct the error of the priesthood ban?

This is where Br. Paul Reeves' insight connecting the problem of prophetic fallibility with the problem of evil seems so compelling to me. I think you are right, the church is an intractable, no-win scenario similar (IMO) to the way that the problem of evil represents a no-win scenario for believers in an omnipotent, omnibenevolent god. I'm starting to lean towards believing that, until we have a more thorough understanding of the problem of evil, we are going to be stuck in this no-win scenario (and maybe even after we have a more thorough understanding and determine that the problem of evil is ultimately intractable). I started exploring this idea here:

 

[LoudmouthMormon]

On 6/21/2024 at 3:03 PM, Thinking said:

It has always claimed to be a revelatory Church. If that's true why did it take so long for God to correct the error of the priesthood ban?

Yeah, it's always a good sounding argument.  Point out human flaws bereft of cultural context, and think of it as a strike against the truth claims of the church.

Here - have some cultural context: I suppose it would have been nice if God had chosen to awaken a more noble understanding of race with more of His children, taking the gains we've made in the last 50 years, and having them happen 50 years earlier.  Or 500 years earlier.  Or two millennia earlier for that matter.  But he didn't.  Folks can apply this question to church leaders or Jesus all they want.  It's not especially helpful, and doesn't prove or disprove anything.  

Jesus claimed to be the Messiah.  If that's true why didn't he say more specifically about the plight of women?  Or our LGBTQIA+ neighbors?  He didn't even so much as point us towards penicillin.  Slavery wasn't really race-based back then, but He didn't even say anything that would have stopped the transatlantic slave trade, or even say anything about slavery in general.  Why?  

For all we know, if God had "forced" a 1980's era racial understanding on the saints in the 1800's, our church never would have grown large/successful/rich enough to now be building a gazillion temples in Zimbabwe, Vanuatu, Mozambique, Nigeria, Mongolia, Madagascar, Liberia, The Ivory Coast, Ghana, South Africa, and the Congo.

Edited June 24, 2024 by LoudmouthMormon

[Calm]

4 hours ago, LoudmouthMormon said:

or all we know, if God had "forced" a 1980's era racial understanding on the saints in the 1800's, our church never would have grown large/successful/rich enough to now be building a gazillion temples in Zimbabwe, Vanuatu, Mozambique, Nigeria, Mongolia, Madagascar, Liberia, The Ivory Coast, Ghana, South Africa, and the Congo.

This doesn’t really work because if God could create such an understanding in his church, he could have found ways for the Church to be successful and rich enough.  If God will do one miracle, why not another?

Edited June 24, 2024 by Calm

[Damien the Leper]

On 6/20/2024 at 4:13 PM, The Nehor said:

Of course not. 😉

🤪

[Damien the Leper]

42 minutes ago, Calm said:

This doesn’t really work because if God could create such an understanding in his church, he could have found ways for the Church to be successful and rich enough.  If God will do one miracle, why not another?

Because they never really wanted God to do the other miracle. 

[LoudmouthMormon]

1 hour ago, Calm said:

This doesn’t really work because if God could create such an understanding in his church, he could have found ways for the Church to be successful and rich enough.  If God will do one miracle, why not another?

I guess we need the eternal debate between free will and determinism to be solved, in order to figure out the answer to that question.   Our take on polygamy is "God ended it because the persecution would have stopped the work", right?  But God can do anything, yes?

Consider:

Scene 1, a dude in the 1800's.  (Literally, pretty much any dude in the 1800's): "I've read the Book of Mormon, and received a witness of it's truthfulness, and I was gonna get baptized, but I ain't gonna go to no church that wants me to get baptized by some [insert racial epithet here]."

Scene 2, same dude: "I've read the Book of Mormon, and received a witness of it's truthfulness... 
[bzzt, the sound of miracle in the form of rewiring a human brain here]
...and I notice my entire perspective on race has somehow been magically altered, and I feel absolutely no discomfort whatsoever in getting into the same water as a black person, and even getting baptized by one."

Moral of the story: That dude's descendants went on to baptize hundreds, who went on to baptize thousands, and much work was done to forward the work of the kingdom.  But he never would have consented to baptism if the priesthood ban hadn't been a thing, because he held the prevailing attitudes of his time.

 

The more you read about the history of thought and the evolution of culture, the more you realize scene 1 is the norm, and scene 2 ain't.

Edited June 24, 2024 by LoudmouthMormon

[ZealouslyStriving]

Line upon, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little..."

On God's own timetable, not man's.

[SeekingUnderstanding]

4 hours ago, LoudmouthMormon said:

I guess we need the eternal debate between free will and determinism to be solved, in order to figure out the answer to that question.   Our take on polygamy is "God ended it because the persecution would have stopped the work", right?  But God can do anything, yes?

Consider:

Scene 1, a dude in the 1800's.  (Literally, pretty much any dude in the 1800's): "I've read the Book of Mormon, and received a witness of it's truthfulness, and I was gonna get baptized, but I ain't gonna go to no church that wants me to get baptized by some [insert racial epithet here]."

Scene 2, same dude: "I've read the Book of Mormon, and received a witness of it's truthfulness... 
[bzzt, the sound of miracle in the form of rewiring a human brain here]
...and I notice my entire perspective on race has somehow been magically altered, and I feel absolutely no discomfort whatsoever in getting into the same water as a black person, and even getting baptized by one."

Moral of the story: That dude's descendants went on to baptize hundreds, who went on to baptize thousands, and much work was done to forward the work of the kingdom.  But he never would have consented to baptism if the priesthood ban hadn't been a thing, because he held the prevailing attitudes of his time.

 

The more you read about the history of thought and the evolution of culture, the more you realize scene 1 is the norm, and scene 2 ain't.

Scene 3: Modern Saints leave the church in percentages not seen since Kirkland due church’s racist history. Modern potential converts just see one more man made religion. 

[ZealouslyStriving]

44 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Scene 3: Modern Saints leave the church in percentages not seen since Kirkland due church’s racist history. Modern potential converts just see one more man made religion. 

KirTland.

[MrShorty]

I see two concepts that come out of @LoudmouthMormon's context:

1) Some say that God commanded/allowed racial segregation in the church to make sure the church wasn't too different (polygamy was different enough) from mainstream America so that the church could prosper. This seems like a kind of "the ends justify the means" moral reasoning where otherwise immoral beliefs/actions get declared moral because of the outcome. Not sure it's necessarily wrong, but I grew up being taught to be skeptical of "the ends justify the means" moral reasoning. If we believe this is a real possibility, I think there is a deeper conversation to be had about this.

2) Some say that God commanded/allowed racial segregation in the church because He could not/would not contradict such strongly held cultural beliefs. This, to me, begins to feel like moral relativism -- the morality of a belief or practice depends on the time, place, and circumstance. This "product of their times" justification seems accurate to me, but it also calls into question the very idea that there are moral absolutes. If God can declare slavery or racism moral because the broader culture believes they are moral, then is there anything that He cannot declare moral? This could lead down into a conversation about so-called "divine command theory" that posits that whatever God says is right. It also leads me to believe that. if God could declare slavery and racism moral, then He can declare same sex marriages morally acceptable, approve people's gender transitions, or even approve families who invert the "standard" gender roles (working mom with a stay at home dad, for example). Again, I can see how moral relativism makes sense, but, if we really believe that it happens, we could have a much longer conversation about it.

As I said, I'm beginning to see that this is ultimately an intractable problem (like the problem of evil), so I don't necessarily expect such conversations to come to nice, neat, tidy conclusions about anything. There do seem to be some interesting rabbit trails to follow to see what they might teach us about how God's moral calculus works and how God interacts with His church.

[Malc]

On 6/24/2024 at 9:04 PM, ZealouslyStriving said:

KirTland.

We're not talking about Costco here? 

[The Nehor]

On 6/20/2024 at 9:41 AM, MustardSeed said:

Nor will it.  
what if we all follow the church’s  example in this principle?

Oh neat, no more need to confess sins to Priesthood leadership. As long as you eventually stop doing it you are good.

[MustardSeed]

7 hours ago, The Nehor said:

Oh neat, no more need to confess sins to Priesthood leadership. As long as you eventually stop doing it you are good.

Works for me. I’m in.