My favorite argument is that I was given access to Super God when I a child. Which gives me access to Super Heaven when I die. It’s waaaaay better that regular heaven. You keep praying to regular god or whatever, you mud dwelling peasant. I’ll be looking down on you from Super Heaven and laughing for Extra Eternity.
The Order of the Stick pointed out that the ability to hyper focus gets stuck at 11 for the dead. The main character spent about 6-8 months dead and didn’t notice until 4 months had passed. No need to sleep, eat, or use the restroom makes time pass unnoticed.
Ah yes, the highest degree of the celestial kingdom, reserved only for married (m-f) Mormons, where polygamy is allowed but only for men to have multiple wives, not vice versa.
Much better than those telestial peasants. Muahaha
Note that slavery was abolished in 1865 and the civil rights movement started in 1950s-1960s.
And in 1978 mormon god said that black men can have the priesthood which is mormon god’s way of saying black men are treated as equals now. (Women, regardless of race, never were treated equally and still aren’t).
The Mormon church likes to celebrate the fact that black men are treated equally but they never mention that this was 110 years after slavery was abolished and still ~3 decades after the civil rights movement started. Mormon God sure has great timing.
But polygamy is actually still alive and well in the Mormon church, and i mean the actual Mormon church and not an offshoot. The Mormons stopped practicing polygamy outright but it is still alive in how they actually treat marriage.
Under mormonism they marry you for eternity. Except if your spouse wants a divorce or they die then you are no longer married from a civil law perspective. If a woman wants to get married again then she needs to have special permission from the Mormon prophet which i believe they do to release her from the Mormon eternal sealing. To do this they also try to get the ex-husbands approval (and too bad if he’s dead). Where this gets interesting is that if the husband wants to remarry then he can. No strings attached. He can have as many eternal sealings as he wants. No permission needed from the prophet or wife. Just can have only one civil marriage at a time but if you get a civil divorce then a man can easily get another eternal marriage and a woman cannot. Basically this means that Mormons are letting men practice polygamy in the afterlife. It’s wild.
But this just one example of how women aren’t treated equally in the Mormon church. And don’t get me started on LGBTQIA+. But if you ever hear someone say mormonism likes the the gays they are gaslighting you. They believe that being gay is a sin and you can only be accepted at arm’s reach if you’re gay, but never do anything gay, and conform to your gender. Telling someone you accept them while believing part of them they can’t change is a sin is Olympic level mental gymnastics. But welcome to Mormonism!
But if you ever hear someone say mormonism likes the the gays they are gaslighting you.
There are a lot of members that don’t agree with the church’s approach to the LGBTQIA+ community. They hope to change things from within and don’t always leave because they hold out hope things will change. Not all mormons are the fuckin mindless whack jobs, though there are plenty of those around. Plenty are really normal people and they disagree with the way the church handles certain topics.
Hello, I’m well aware that there can be good-intentioned people in the mormon church, however, I’d ask you to consider what it means to stay a member of an organization whose teachings lead to LGBTQIA+ youth committing suicide at a prevalence higher than other states? How can you be a member of an organization that doesn’t, really, treat women equally when you stop to think about it? There are a lot of warts in the mormon church, and they have rewritten the history and have been gaslighting their members about it. You’ve been told that people will just try to spread lies about the church, and that the church is true so you don’t need to question it. But if the church is true then it should be able to stand up to scrutiny of your own research.
Just because you think you are doing some greater good by trying to change the mormon church from within doesn’t mean you’re not oppressing LGBTQIA+ directly or indirectly. Consider this-- does someone joining the KKK with the intent to change it from within make them not a racist? How many years can they be part of that organization before they are complicit?
I’m sorry if any of this seems too harsh, these are just things I wish I would’ve thought about a few decades sooner. Best of luck in whichever path you take.
Nah, not harsh at all. I understand your perspective and agree that it’s a bad look to stay in a place that does bad things. I greatly disagree with the church on many points and have been on the edge of leaving for a long time. My wife and I talk about various things on the near daily honestly including all the bullshit they have done to women. We both have our own wounds from the church.
I see through the gaslighting. I’m under no illusions that the church has some fucked up past and present. Much like our own country though, which also has fucked up past and preseng, if people don’t try to enact good, it won’t come on its own and the assholes win. I’m not ready to throw everything away that is good when I can see the bad being removed, and it is happening. Despite the old guard clinging to their bullshit I see more and more of us pushing back against that and trying to correct the wrongs of the people that came before. Very few things in this world are all good or all bad. Especially anything with history to it. And if no one tells people they are in the wrong, then people will rarely question themselves if they are.
And in that same vein, I appreciate your words. And I will honestly take them to heart and consider more thoughtfully if my time with the church needs to be done. Because you are right, how long can one be in any group without being an accessory to its actions?
The Jehovah’s Witnesses have this problem too. Their workaround is that “their [anonymous] governing body has had new revelations and insights” so now it works like this.
For a cult to survive the death of its founder, it needs to be picked up by a strong right-have man who can reform it into something that’ll survive - but not in a way that will alienate all the followers.
I suspect the Mormans do something similar. Do they have a patriarch or use an elder counsel?
Eh, while the issues are correct, I don’t recall the governing body being that anonymous; they just didn’t talk about it much in meetings. The body is listed on their website: www.jw.org/en/…/governing-body-jw-helpers/
No women of course, and not all had pictures so I can’t be sure, but didn’t see much people of color, though I do recall some in the past.
In my experience growing up in the cult, one of the things that sorta helped it not feel like one was the lack of deifying the founder and body. While they do teach their own history of it, it wasn’t a large part of the worship. There’s lots of other cult hints like isolationist and punishment by group shunning and stuff of course.
The mormons have a living prophet, who personally receives revelations with a ‘direct line’ to God somewhat like the catholic pope.
They also believe that these rules and their changes are necessary, as God sets the rules required to spread his faith. Polygamy is usually thought of (for lds) as a temporary act used to grow his re-created church via birth. Once it became a detriment, he saw it fit to disallow.
It’s a powerful idea that makes it impossible for a person to see contradictions in a constantly changing religion. Any contradictions are simply God working in mysterious ways. He said what was needed, and now something new is required
I’ve never heard that argument. I’ve instead heard that there were more women than men, so plural marriage was a way to provide for those women since men were the primary breadwinners. The men who engaged in plural marriage were generally well off, and many didn’t actually have children with all of their wives.
Missionaries are all 18-21-ish, and they get trained for like a month. There’s no way that’s an official answer in any way, they’re just repeating whatever some other missionary told them. I guess it kinda makes sense with the “multiply and replenish the earth” line from Genesis 1:28, but that’s probably as far as the thought process goes.
And yeah, the actual origins are probably somewhere between the more official “take care of women” line and “wanted to bang women” line. But the fact remains that many men didn’t bang all of their wives (or so they claim), so it’s probably a mix of both.
Roman emperor was the head of the church, so Christianity became a political tool to manage the population.
The Empire was politically managed by having it divided into two halves, a Greek speaking eastern half and a Latin speaking western half. Which ended up shearing Christianity into Catholic and Orthodox.
Well, given that not long after the emperor converts it became deadly to possess the version of Jesus’s sayings which claims he said “Let one who has become wealthy reign, and let one who has power renounce <it>” (allegedly said at the time when Tiberius was the first emperor to inherit the kingdom due to dynastic claim vs accomplishments and had abandoned ruling to party but wouldn’t turn over the position to anyone else) - probably just a wee bit of mind changing.
Tax reasons. You can have as many partners living with you as you want, but once past one “official” partner, it would get super complicated. Plus one wife would be able to hire the other partners as a way to disguise income and keep everyone just under the personal…wait. you can do that anyways.
You could set rules specifically for polyamourous marriage when it comes to taxes. I don’t really see anything ethically wrong with the practice in and of itself when it’s consensual to all and not just a scheme for bullshit like tax breaks/evasion or human trafficking.
I think official marriage is weird anyway. It’s just a ritual stemming from religion that has been co-opted by governments to deal with stuff that doesn’t matter to people who just wanna be together. 🤷🏻♂️
So many people divorce within a few years too, and (in most places, maybe not all) divorce is a long tedious drawn out process - so a lot of folks spend more time getting divorced than they do getting married.
Idk why people bother anymore, the tax bennies aren’t even all that good for most people.I was with my ex for a decade, raising her kid, and breaking up with no muss no fuss here’s your 30 day good luck in your future endeavors. Meanwhile it took her like 3 years to divorce her ex before me.
Insurance benefits, ability to make medical decisions for your spouse and visit them in the hospital, access to your spouse’s accounts if they die or become incapacitated. Lots of legal benefits you wouldn’t think about until you need them.
In Australia we have ‘de facto’ relationship laws so if you’re living together for a certain amount of time you have all the rights that a married couple do, including around property rights and separation. But we also have far less litigious divorces and nothing like alimony here.
Polygamy =/= Polyamoury. Polygamy involves one person (almost always a man) having multiple spouses, often economically and legally dependent on him, which tends to result in abuse (quite surprisingly), as well as a surplus of people who remain single, which has its own set of problems. You probably have a good idea of what polyamoury is. Because historically we’ve mostly seen the former (in the case of the US, with the Mormons and its branching sects), but not the later, laws have been written to deal with the issues provoked by the former, but admittedly it’s about time to allow polyamoury to have its own legal framing.
Because gender bounded polygamy causes serious social issues. Look at the FLDS for examples of it in modern day. My stance is to remove the gender bounding and enforce strict minimum age to marry laws. But yeah, 18th century USA wasn’t going to let women have multiple husbands much less let men have multiple husbands and women have multiple wives.
Yup, I think we should change the whole notion of marriage. Basically, the government would provide sets of contracts that grant certain privileges for certain responsibilities, like tax benefits for sharing financial responsibility. People can pick and choose among the various contracts, and there could be a “marriage” bundle that roughly corresponds to today’s notion of marriage. Marriage than becomes a religious ceremony that people are free to define themselves, separately from any legal commitments.
This way you don’t need prenups or whatever, you only sign the documents each party is comfortable with. If you’re in a polyamorous relationship, you might combine finances with half of your partners, share hospital visitation rights with a separate half, etc, and you could marry all or some of them. Custody of children would be between biological parents or, if waived, assigned legal parents/guardians based on the contracts signed.
That’s a bit complicated, but it would make things a lot more flexible. Individual contracts could be limited in number of people involved, but you could choose to sign different contracts with different people.
I like the way the Denobulans in Star Trek handle marriage. Every woman has up to three husbands and every man has up to three wives. I wouldn’t like to live under strict marriage rules of any kind, but that seems far better than Earth’s rules.
This actually makes Mormon God sort of more reasonable compared to other, stubborn gods, right? I mean making their followers lives easier by letting them to not confront civic government makes sense…
I think organized religion is always a risk for causing trouble, but this Mormon God’s flexibility is exactly the kind of anti-extremist leadership I’d like to see more of if we are going to keep doing the religion thing. Now if only he would get cool with beer and coffee.
The funny part is that Mormon god was only flexible when it suited Joseph Smith.
I mean, it’s kinda oddly coincidental that God spoke to JS and told him that polygamy was ok right after his wife told him she was furiously against it, don’t you think?
Mormons still practise polygamy sort of. They have “sealings” which is marriage forever, not just “'til death do us part”. If a widow is to remarry, she needs to break the sealing to her dead spouse if she wishes to be sealed to get new one (or she could stay sealed to her first spouse and only marry the second until death).
A widower, however, doesn’t need to break the previous sealing. He can be sealed to multiple women no problem. Essentially polygamy, but only in the afterlife.
Can confirm. If any Mormons are reading this and think it’s made up-- ASK YOUR BISHOP what happens if you were to die or have a civil divorce and you or your spouse wants to remarry in the temple.
They don’t teach this openly, and your bishop may beat around the bush but this is all true.
I’ve hung out with a bunch of Mormons and while they personally felt it was weird now, because they have grown up in a monogamous nation, the church itself would definitely gear up to switch back, if it was legal.
That would be a process, though. They are currently taught that it is morally fine, but following the laws of the land is important, and basically treat it like part of their history. On an individual level, the ones I know seemed fine with that, even those that had an active role in the church.
It’s also not that strange in more secular contexts, see this article about polyamory in general. So I think it makes sense for people to be okay with the concept of plural marriage, while not wanting to engage with it themselves (e.g. it wouldn’t work for me).
Yeah I agree. Religions have bonus rules related to that, but consent makes it fine, there’s no actual ick there innately. There’s plenty of room for a religion to make it creepy and not OK, but that’s not fundamentally tied to polygamy.
I met a Mormon chick on a bus to California many years ago, and she told me all sorts of crazy shit I had no idea about, how native americans are supposed to be the lamanites, and latter day saints, at which point I realized Mormonism was flat out insanity. There's a youtube channel : @alyssadgrenfell where this ex mormon peels back every curtain there is, and just keeps spilling the tea, if you're interested in going down that rabbit hole
I don’t think anyone was framing Mormons as the good guys
Even by the standards of organized religion, Mormonism is very weird. Cf Ruby Franke. The early history is absolutely wild, and in Utah they still have tons of money and power and everyone acts like it’s just a normal thing.
The polygamy thing works great for new religions because it is a sure fire way to easily create more adherents from a small amount of stock. Indoctrinating children from birth is way easier than converting adults.
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