If I could ask them one question, Special Edition

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annotatedbom
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If I could ask them one question, Special Edition

Post by annotatedbom » Tue Jun 09, 2020 10:31 am

If I wanted to encourage thought and try to understand devout believers better, I might ask:

Since Black Lives Matter,
why don’t we renounce Mormonism’s racist past starting with Brigham Young?


Because I couldn't just shut up about this,
A-BoM

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jfro18
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Re: If I could ask them one question, Special Edition

Post by jfro18 » Tue Jun 09, 2020 11:04 am

I wish I could post this on Facebook and just wait for the responses to roll in.

You don't need to start with Brigham Young though, you can start with the Book of Mormon, Moses, and Abraham... all of which are still obviously held up as the word of God today.

Those books all teach white supremacy and racism - the only way they don't is if you change what words actually mean.

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moksha
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Re: If I could ask them one question, Special Edition

Post by moksha » Tue Jun 09, 2020 11:17 am

I can't see the Church erasing whole verses of their scriptures, but striking through those verses pertaining to curses of dark skin would be appreciated and helpful.
Good faith does not require evidence, but it also does not turn a blind eye to that evidence. Otherwise, it becomes misplaced faith.
-- Moksha

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annotatedbom
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Re: If I could ask them one question, Special Edition

Post by annotatedbom » Tue Jun 09, 2020 12:59 pm

jfro18 wrote:
Tue Jun 09, 2020 11:04 am
I wish I could post this on Facebook and just wait for the responses to roll in.

You don't need to start with Brigham Young though, you can start with the Book of Mormon, Moses, and Abraham... all of which are still obviously held up as the word of God today.

Those books all teach white supremacy and racism - the only way they don't is if you change what words actually mean.
You're right. I'm not sure why I focused on BY. It's likely because the post was inspired by commentary I was drafting for a Come Follow Me lesson for a couple weeks from now. Brigham was a part of that. Then there's the fact that I have two degrees from the original university namesake for the man. Embarrassing that is, but maybe that brings BY more to the front of the line for my thinking. So I agree; so many places to start.

Change the meaning of words? In Mormonism? That's like suggesting that “translate” in Mormonism means something different than how the rest of the world uses it ;)

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annotatedbom
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Re: If I could ask them one question, Special Edition

Post by annotatedbom » Tue Jun 09, 2020 1:02 pm

moksha wrote:
Tue Jun 09, 2020 11:17 am
I can't see the Church erasing whole verses of their scriptures, but striking through those verses pertaining to curses of dark skin would be appreciated and helpful.
I think they might be even less likely to strike through the text (but then, maybe you were joking). I wish they would do that. It would preserve it for posterity so we wouldn't pretend it's wasn't there, and maybe, just maybe, we could learn from it.

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alas
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Re: If I could ask them one question, Special Edition

Post by alas » Tue Jun 09, 2020 6:11 pm

moksha wrote:
Tue Jun 09, 2020 11:17 am
I can't see the Church erasing whole verses of their scriptures, but striking through those verses pertaining to curses of dark skin would be appreciated and helpful.
The church would not have to strike out the verses at all. All they would have to do is add footnotes that explain that prophets write down what they understand, and when Nephi wrote this scripture down, he understood, incorrectly that God cursed the Lamanites with a dark skin.

If they did that with ALL the racist crap, they might put the church on a correct course. But that would be accepting that prophets are not infallible, or perfect, and what they claim to be the word of God is sometimes their own prejudice.

Imagine, they go through the speeches of Brigham Young and foot note every single racist statement with the disclaimer that prophets sometimes speak their own prejudices and claim it as the word of God. My gosh that would be a lot of foot notes. While they are at it they can footnote his misogynistic statements. And all the polygamists who talked about women like breeding cows.

They can put a footnote on the statement about God knowing Abraham before he was born, that while this applies to Abraham, we simply do not know how it applies to the rest of us. It does not mean that God sent his most valiant spirits all to be prophets or great men. Some of his most precious spirits are born as children with mental handicaps and never attain the age of accountability, so they go straight to the CK. Some of the most valiant are born into families where abuse has been passed down for several generation and they are sent to end the abuse. We simply cannot judge pre-existence valiancy by our station on earth.

But they are afraid that church member will realize that if Nephi could confuse his own prejudices with the word of God, that maybe our current prophets do that with women and LBTG and others.

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Hagoth
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Re: If I could ask them one question, Special Edition

Post by Hagoth » Tue Jun 09, 2020 8:01 pm

Because General Authority lives matter more than anyone else's. Although I admit that BY seems to have some pretty heavy bus tread on him whenever needed to keep Joseph Smith in the clear.

If they changed anything in scripture they would just do it without apology or even announcement, as they did with the intro to the BoM. It would just be different in the next version and they would be caught off guard yet again when people noticed and called them on it. They do it all the time in non-scripture publications, like changing "wives" to "wife" in BY quotes. They did give Elohim's boner a vacation for a while, so maybe they will eventually change some verses one-word-at-a-time over a period of decades.

Today I listened to the first installment of the Infants On Thrones series about the seven deadly heresies. I experienced a serious jaw-drop moment when Glen read the rewrite of the transcript and compared it to the original audio. Truly mindblowing. I would like to start another thread about that soon.
“The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.” -Mark Twain

Jesus: "The Kingdom of God is within you." The Buddha: "Be your own light."

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jfro18
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Re: If I could ask them one question, Special Edition

Post by jfro18 » Tue Jun 09, 2020 8:29 pm

Hagoth wrote:
Tue Jun 09, 2020 8:01 pm
Today I listened to the first installment of the Infants On Thrones series about the seven deadly heresies. I experienced a serious jaw-drop moment when Glen read the rewrite of the transcript and compared it to the original audio. Truly mindblowing. I would like to start another thread about that soon.
That was a great series - I think I listened to that like 1.5 years ago now, but it was really crazy as they went through it. You should definitely do a thread - it deserves one.

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moksha
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Re: If I could ask them one question, Special Edition

Post by moksha » Wed Jun 10, 2020 1:21 pm

Over on the Mormon D&D board, one of the posters, Juliann offered these excellent recommendations for the Church:
1. Stop pretending the priesthood ban was anything but racist to the core. Put the Gospel Topics where people can see them rather than have to know they exist to find them.

2. Remove any equivalency about how the ban started so that members can't hide behind "God did it." There is too much scholarship to play this game anymore.

3. Instruct local units in what racism is and start talking about it. (All one has to do is read Desert News comments to see the problem we have, it's not like there aren't blaring examples in front of our faces.)

4. The biggest force for good, General Conference. Start. Talking. About. Racism.
Good faith does not require evidence, but it also does not turn a blind eye to that evidence. Otherwise, it becomes misplaced faith.
-- Moksha

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