The church gave up polygamy because it had to in order to survive. The church went from being a communist commune to being a church operating on donations because it couldn’t pay its expenses.

Temple ceremonies change, racist view points change, garments change, things get less extreme and more watered down. Why? If the church doesn’t change it will hemorrhage members and become a target. The church hates shrinking numbers and bad publicity.

Since the internet makes keeping secrets more difficult and society changes quicker the church has to reform more. It has no choice. When your temple ceremonies are ending up on YouTube you don’t want anything too offensive in them. Eyes are everywhere including in the temple.

Missions and temples are just holdover from the old mindset. I think missions will become more service oriented and temples will just be monuments to Christ where people get married in. It might just become a second sacrament. I think we are seeing the endowment getting slowly whittled away. One thing for sure. There will be more changes and they will happen quicker. All signs of a church being forced to change or it suffers the consequences of not doing so.

If one were to get the four temple signs tattooed on the chest, belly button, and right knee, would one not be required to wear garments?

If you are issued a medical marijuana card, is lighting up a marijuana pipe against the WoW?

How many ear piercings make you ineligible to possess a TR?

How many tattoos are "too many"?

If a bishop grows a beard and tells his SP, "No!" when asked to shave it, will there be any punishment other than be defrocked?

Is that also the case for a ward EQP or Sunday School teacher?

If I say that I believe in Hinckley and Monson when it comes to calling myself a mormon, how much trouble will I be in?  Would I still be allowed to have a TR?  Cuz if not, why would I bother to pay tithing?



It's kind of silly that I still identify as a Lamanite, isn't it?  Yeah, a mormon Lamanite...  I can do that and have to believe in the mormon ghawd; they're just words.

Even more to your point on getting "fired" from callings. It can all depend on where you live. If you fire a teacher in Butte, MT is there somebody to replace them

La-ma-neetay. Must be Italian.

She had one of the piercings that is high on your ear and she quit wearing the earring. Thing is, I told her she couldn't get it back in high school and my niece took her and got it done. I was fine with it. My reasoning for her not getting it is because I thought it would be painful in that part of the ear. And then she lets it grow back.

Her husband has a beard and I haven't heard anything from them. I can't believe how many men in Utah have beards, so they are probably not going to do anything about it as they won't have anyone to do callings, especially the "MEN" callings!

The church leaders wanted my wife to accept a calling. My wife made it clear that she had no intention of attending on a regular basis.

What kind of church leadership wants an inactive member to accept a demanding church calling?

A desperate one!

My wife turned it down, even though she was told that she only needed to attend church once every 3 months.

while I agree with Rubicon's original contention, the story about your wife is a reminder that U.S. society and its relationship to religions may well be changing faster than the LDS church and its reforms.

The church can’t change fast because it’s ran by committees. It usually doesn’t do anything unless there is consensus and The Quorum of the Twelve rarely agree on anything that involves drastic change.

Just a thought: they have been moving toward a Southern Baptist/evangelical model in lieu of following the traditional "mainstream" churches such as the Episcopalians. In that sense they are getting ever more right-wing and strident.

Te Episcopalians have no problem with women priests or accepting gays. The SBC certainly does. We know which way the Mormons went.

As one of the ancients who began his residency in the church at the end of '49 when the BoM was the most correct book ever written, Joseph Smith was the purest being to ever grace the planet besides Jesus, the Central American ruins were absolute proof that only "we" knew the truth, and Mormon God was still the same yesterday, today, and forever, then seeing the long slow dénouement of Mormonism laid out like this illustrates how the strands of the plot being drawn together exacerbate rather than resolve as a good story should. Of course there was no plot. They made it up as they went along and ran out of imagination on the way as short sighted meanness escalated..

And more Mormons need to stand back far enough to see the whole picture, the whole chain of events, and realize that accepting Mormonism today is way different than those of us BIC's that were taught it last mid-century.

One of my memories of just how correct the church of the 1950s was concerned 'the spirit body.'

We were told that the spirit body was made of material "too fine" to be detected by mere mortal science; no microscope could ever see down to that holy, ever-so-pure level.

I don't understand how those who did it, did it, but I take their words for it that they have photographed down to the level of 'an atom.'*

But apparently, the church has not found the need to come up with any follow up theories regarding why 'spirit body fingernail clippings' can't be seen by mere humans.  (Do ghawds get manicures?)

But at least we know that the spirit body is ... white?  Can the spirit body be 'flesh colored'?  And if so, just what color IS flesh?  


Q:  Sir, how would you like your next wife? I can offer you from very rare to very well done...But we're low on medium rare; it seems pale pink is by far the most popular flavor..."

A:  Yeah, medium rare for me, thank you!


I can just see Roy G. Biv, with a zebra-skinned wife on one arm and a CelestroCaster 12-string on the other...




* https://www.newscientist.com/article/2279115-this-is-the-most-detailed-look-at-individual-atoms-ever-captured/#:~:text=They%20used%20a%20technique%20called,the%20atoms%20that%20scattered%20them.

> One of my memories of just how correct the church
> of the 1950s was concerned 'the spirit body.'
>
> We were told that the spirit body was made of
> material "too fine" to be detected by mere mortal
> science; no microscope could ever see down to that
> holy, ever-so-pure level.

That sounds like Orson Pratt's idea, which he introduced to the world in the first issue of Millennial Star in about 1840. He said that spirit/intelligence was particulate and that the particles were spread lumpily throughout the universe like dust or rock or other matter. The particles were most densely concentrated in God and prophets and other great beings, less dense among bad people, even less among animals and then insects, followed by planets and then vast stretches of empty space.

This theory was one of four issues that BY and OP fought about, and BY suppressed the spirit-matter doctrine in the early Utah period. But it sounds like smart particles enjoyed a second efflorescence in the 1950s, when Fred Flintston, W. Cleon Skousen, and uppity young Lamanites on skis were prominent cultural phenomena.

It's remarkable how wacky old ideas keep percolating back to the surface in Mormonism.

It's funny how wacky ideas are taken seriously enough to become gospel, instead of just remaining...ideas. :/

That's a Mormon tendency.

The LDS church is a conspiratorial religion. Just as there are secret rites like the second anointing whose discovery by lay members occasions shock but not surprise, so too are there different levels of knowledge that are only available to the most spiritual people. Add in the notion that God gives more or less information to different peoples at different times, and members grow predisposed to believe that there are secret teachings.

So no harebrained teaching ever really dies. Spencer Kimball's oral dicta constantly reappear, so too Adam-God and other early musings by prophets and apostles. And some of those musty old doctrines inspire the Laffertys, the Daybell-Vallows, and other extremists. That's what you get when you teach that every word emanating from a prophet's mouth is divinely inspired.

"church has not found the need to come up with any follow up theories regarding why 'spirit body fingernail clippings' can't be seen by mere humans"

If I may scratch my pedagogical itch, said fingernail clippings would be in the same category as Bigfoot droppings. They simply slip into an unseen dimension. Like Golden Plates but without an angel.

Church leaders 80 years ago would view Russell M Nelson as an apostate.

That says it all.

Speaking of mainstreaming.
Have you noticed on Google maps for Utah cities that the many Mormon Churches are now marked with a cross instead of Moroni tooting his horn?

Does anyone here know if the Christian cross was something Google just did or was that change request by 'The Church'?

more trying to pass themselves off as just another "christian" denomination perhaps?

I'm sure it was requested by the church. Otherwise, why would Google have any reason to make the change? The LDS leadership wants to come off as just another Christian church that families can check out.

Moroni blows