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naraburns  nihil supernum  11mo ago (text post)   5256 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for April 2023

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. Here we go:

Quality Contributions to the Main Motte

@ymeskhout:

@gattsuru:

@johnfabian:

Contributions for the week of April 3, 2023

@Soriek:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@grendel-khan:

@ymeskhout:

Recognition Diplomacy

@naraburns:

@07mk:

@FiveHourMarathon:

Contributions for the week of April 10, 2023

@HlynkaCG:

@TracingWoodgrains:

@FlyingLionWithABook:

@Soriek:

@RandomRanger:

Transitive Reasoning

@Lewyn:

@self_made_human:

@roystgnr:

@RandomRanger:

@TracingWoodgrains:

Contributions for the week of April 17, 2023

@gattsuru:

@ControlsFreak:

@faul_sname:

Identity Politics

@throwawaygendertheorist:

@RenOS:

@SophisticatedHillbilly:

@FCfromSSC:

Contributions for the week of April 24, 2023

@naraburns:

@faul_sname:

@Dean:

@self_made_human:

Discriminating Taste

@RenOS:

@Unsaying:

@Esperanza:

@FCfromSSC:

@MonkeyWithAMachinegun:

@laxam:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

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The Mormons have come up with a brilliant solution to this kind of problem: if a church doctrine becomes unworkable because of social change, their leadership can just say they've had a new revelation from God and the dogma has been revised. This is exactly what happened with polygamy.

And blacks receiving the priesthood. That must have been embarrassing. As "I Believe" from The Book of Mormon puts it:

[ELDER PRICE]

I believe that Satan has a hold of you,

I believe that the Lord God has sent me here,

And I believe that in 1978 God changed his mind about black people!

[ENSEMBLE]

Black people!

How long until the president of the church has a revelation allowing gay "marriage"?

And blacks receiving the priesthood. That must have been embarrassing.

Black people received the priesthood early in church history and had a promise that they would receive it again eventually. I agree that it's embarrassing, but not as much so as you make it out to be. The church won't pivot on gay marriage.

a promise that they would receive it again eventually

Is this an interpretation of Brigham Young's "they never can hold the Priesthood or share in it until all the other descendants of Adam have received the promises and enjoyed the blessings of the Priesthood and the keys thereof"? That qualifies as "eventually", and straight from the horse's mouth, but it was at least a bit of a pivot to interpret it not as "after the Resurrection", but rather as "after mid-78".

The church won't pivot on gay marriage.

Maybe not, but if they did it wouldn't be any harder to rationalize. Pivoting on prior scripture about what's clean vs unclean is as old as Christians eating bacon; it even makes sense to the non-religious! Something like "this was actually risky before modern STD cures" (i.e. accounting for some failures of celibacy and trying to minimize the damage) would be closer to "this was actually risky before modern animal husbandry" than to "I guess the pre-existence ran out of less-valiant souls?"

Is this an interpretation of Brigham Young's "they never can hold the Priesthood or share in it until all the other descendants of Adam have received the promises and enjoyed the blessings of the Priesthood and the keys thereof"? That qualifies as "eventually", and straight from the horse's mouth, but it was at least a bit of a pivot to interpret it not as "after the Resurrection", but rather as "after mid-78".

Yes. To be honest though everything he said about that topic (and many others) is very doctrinally questionable, so I am more of the opinion that he was mistaken (and later church leaders were not confident enough about this to correct the doctrine) than that this was an actual promise. Whether it was a mistake or not though, I think you understand my point, which is that a pivot in timing is less significant than a flat-out rejection of the doctrine itself.

if they did it wouldn't be any harder to rationalize.

I strongly disagree here. Just because superficially, one single change has been made in the past, does not mean that any other change is exactly equal. The non-religious should probably be thinking harder about these things too--why should all of God's commandments have readily apparent physical justifications, such as the parasites common to pigs? Is he not allowed to give any commandments as a test of obedience? We can look for ways in which the commandments, especially the more "ritual" ones, benefit us (and usually find them), but at the end of the day they're "commandments", not "tips and tricks".

A change in the doctrine of eternal marriage would contradict LDS doctrine to a far greater extent than a change to the timing of the priesthood ban being lifted. The former is much more important, has a longer history (it is both much older and outlived 1978), and has far more scriptural support. Heck, for most of the OT the priesthood was restricted to a certain lineage of Jews so it's not like other arbitrary restrictions are that far-fetched.

The non-doctrinal policy change of forbidding polygamy created a whole offshoot church, so I fail to see how a much larger doctrinal change would not have a larger effect.

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