So we learned about this today.

Normally the activity is at least bearable, but this was a silent 'choose your own adventure'-type thing with paper on the wall which were numbered and you went to anothet paper depending on what your answer was.

Did I mention it was tense?

Oh yeah, really tense. My teacher's voice was unusually hesitant, and by the end of the day my whole class seemed really... uneasy.

They did mention the angel with the sword, but didn't say flaming. They also weren't specific about numbers of wives, but the choose your own adventure papers had one quote were Gordon said that everyone had 2-20 lives was a lie. They also didn't talk about sexual harassment, stealing wives, or that fourteen year old. Also said theg never tried to hide it.

Neh, methinks they're worried.

I personally think these "toss out a few mentions of it, but don't get into facts or stats or actual activities" lessons are simply designed to "inoculate" the youth. If they get just the tiniest mention of it, along of course with lots of, "It wasn't what the anti-mormons say, it was minor, etc.," then the kids have "heard about it." Then when someone brings it up to them later, they can dismiss it with, "Oh, yeah, I know about that, it's not what you say, and it's no big deal, and we don't do it any more."

They *can't* teach the full facts, because that would disgust so many young members. They *can't* ignore it entirely, because then when they find out, the young members not only feel disgust, they know they've been lied to. So they take the "inoculation" approach.

It remains to be seen how effective this is at keeping the youth "active." :)

Hopefully the kids will also catch on to the fact that the whole LDS system for "families are forever" hinges upon a belief that section 132 was a revelation from God.

If the polygamy part was just a bunch of doctrines of men, then the hoop jumping exercises of temples, recommend interviews, worthiness checklists, sealing etc. can be equally man made.

Now a person could still maintain a belief in an afterlife in which families would be together as part of a personal faith without this system. But that's up to whether God exists, and if that's what God has in mind for humanity. Those are tough questions with few certain answers that human beings just have to wrestle with.

I don't know whether this inoculation would really work that well, because there's always another shoe to drop.

Some people didn't know Joseph Smith was a polygamist. They'll be surprised to learn he was. Some people knew he married teen girls, like me. But I was surprised to learn about the level of coercion he exercised as the spiritual leader of these women, and that he married women who were already married. Full disclosure is ugly, and anything short of that allows for being shocked by finding out what skeletons are in the closet.

Re: the flaming sword, this is kinda Mormon folklore. Joseph's account says "angel with a drawn sword". But in the temple ceremony, Elohim instructs Jehovah to place cherubim with flaming swords to prevent access to the tree of life. So there may be a conflation there, or likely the flaming sword idea was just a fancy of an early Nauvoo member or two, which caught on and was passed down thru the generations, like three Nephite stories in Manti.

They use phrases like, "...several months before her 15th birthday." and leave out polyandry almost totally.

The "flaming" sword, unfortunately, may be Mormon and exmormons being too enthusiastic about the Angel threat. Joseph did say the Angel threatened him with a sword.

The essay(s) they're really going to have to use the Jedi mind tricks on, is on the BoA. Because they try to use the "Well here is one possibility" or "Here's another possibility" i.e. "We're not sure we have the full papyrus or maybe the part Joseph interpreted was on the backside". Or maybe he was inspired to write it, rather than actually translate the characters from the papyrus." Your response should be, "Well then why did Joseph write down the characters in his diary showing what the 'character' meant if he wasn't actually trying to translate?

The next essay would be "Blacks and the Priesthood". They're trying to pass it off as just B.Y. and the leader back then were just bigots and we don't know why they didn't give Blacks the priesthood. That is Bull!!! We were taught and studied for hours the doctrine on why the blacks couldn't hold the priesthood. Early leaders up to Hugh Nibley, all wrote thesis and papers giving exact reasonings and facts as to why the doctrine was of God and why it was canonized. They can't just throw B.Y. out as "Speaking as a Man" when all these other Apostles, Prophets, all said the same thing and justified God's directions.

Some of the primary source material says "drawn sword" and some of it says "flaming sword."

Here is what FAIR says about this issue:

"Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs said that Joseph mentioned an angel with a drawn sword. The account of a "flaming" sword came from Eliza Snow and Orson F. Whitney."

http://en.fairmormon.org/Joseph_Smith/Polygamy/Did_Joseph_Smith_coerce_women_to_marry_him