This is so…Really, i don’t have words for it

Today’s assignment: Go to the lesson in the young women manual that all of our daughters are getting taught sometime right around now. Next, scroll down to the story that begins “It all began that first Sunday in March.”

Now swallow hard, and read the story. I expect there’ll be flinching, but make it all the way through.

And after that, discuss the following questions (and feel free to propose your own):

• What kind of drifted-away-from-someone friend rushes home from college for a weekend for no other reason than to, essentially, lecture their friend about a choice they made (and about something where the one rushing home hasn’t been faced with anything relating to the choice they’re giving the lecture about)?
• What kind of non-Mormons get engaged after two months of knowing somebody, and then get married one month later (even in the early 1970s, when these events allegedly happened)?
• Speaking of which, does anybody else doubt that these events actually happened? Hmmm, maybe i ought to rephrase that so that i can get an accurate count: Does anybody think that this actually happened even close to precisely as narrated?*
• It asks: If you were Emily’s friend, what would you say to her? I’m assuming you mean other than “Congratulations! Have you registered for gifts anywhere yet?”
• They read their vows while a flute played softly in the background? Filthy, dirty hippies!
• Did anybody else notice that when Emily surprisingly [sic!] stayed active in the church, she got called as assistant librarian? In the context of the story, does this feel utterly dismissive to anyone else, specifying that she got called as an “assistant” something?
• Emily, as a child, had wished that her non-member father would be able to baptize her, she wasn’t sure whether her father would go to Primary daddy-daughter parties with her, and he went golfing rather than attend her seminary graduation. Um, did the old Sesame Street “One of These Things Is Not Like the Other” song start going through anybody else’s mind? the first of those is a religious thing. The other two are just being involved in your kid’s life. Her father wasn’t a problem because he was a non-member, he was a problem because he wasn’t a fully involved father.
• So neither Emily’s husband nor father could give her child a name and blessing. Fine. But what’s up with her heavily-sobbed “Who is going to bless my baby?” They had home teachers in the 1970s, right? I’m pretty sure they had bishops. I mean, this is the ward she grew up in—she had to know somebody!
• Interesting assumption in this story, that “member of the church” means “worthy holder of the Melchizedek priesthood”. Hint: Those two sets are not identical. (And there are a lot of non-members i know who i believe are more worthy than a good number of holders of the Melchizedek priesthood i know—but that’s a somewhat different topic, really.)
• And finally, could the word choice throughout the story have been any more horrifically loaded? If your answer is yes, please describe in some detail, ’cause i can’t come up with anything.
• No, strike that, this is the and finally: This young women manual was written in 1992 (with a bit of a revision in 2002), and it was old-fashioned even then. Its outdatedness shows. Badly. Seriously, folks, if the youth programs are really all so important, isn’t it time we fixed stuff like this?

* One change that the church has made to its publications in recent years (that i approve of most vigorously!) is that all stories like this must be at least closely based on real-life events. Back in 1975, though, when this story appeared in the New Era, there was no such requirement.

Metapost

So Blogger has been telling me that my blog is popular,* and that i’m missing out on making money by not placing ads on my blog (or, in their focus-group-tested language, i haven’t “monetized” my blog). Surely they’re only looking out for my best interests, and they want me to have some extra pocket change, right?

Actually, what i suspect is that Blogger knows it is missing out on the pocket change that they would get if i and a few thousand more like me were to allow ads to be placed on my site.

But i would like to publicly state my position: I will not place ads on my blog. Ever. I do this thing for fun, and advertising just doesn’t seem to fit in my ethos of fun, you know?

Anyway, just wanted to say that out loud for some reason. Back to the regularly scheduled snark in a couple days.

* I suspect that that means they’ve discovered that more than two people read it, which certainly is an achievement for a blog, but i’ve seen the numbers—with the possible exception of my twice-a-year general conference notes, this blog is not what i would call “popular”.

Good timing

Today is the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001—or, in other words, it’s rather a big deal day to a lot of people.

We also had stake conference today (and yesterday).

And in none of the stake conference meetings i was at (that is, the general meeting this morning, the adult session* yesterday evening, or the leadership meeting yesterday afternoon) was there even an oblique reference to the anniversary.

I would just like to say that i’m happy that my religion was able to serve as a refuge from the incessant coverage of the date that national and local media has been throwing at me over the past week or so.

* I can’t be the only one evil enough that the term “adult session” instantly triggers the concept of an “adult movie”, can I?

Drawing lines

Quick question, in case anyone out there knows: Is there an easy way to find out what ward boundaries are? I mean, i know that for my own ward it’d be easy* to ask the ward clerk, and for wards in my stake or nearby ones i could maybe ask a stake clerk, but is there a way i could just randomly check how many wards there are in, say, Munich, Germany and where the boundaries between them lie?

And i know i could go to the church’s website and repeatedly plug in addresses until i find addresses on either side of the boundary line, but that just seems astonishingly painful. Maybe—maybe!—it’d be worth it to find the boundaries between a single pair of adjacent church units, but for the wards in even a single city? No way.

(And yeah, yeah, i know, disappointment all around on two posts in a row with the serious tag. Back to more casual observations next time, i promise—but at least this one’s not the thoughtful type of serious, it’s just a request for information!)

* Really easy, in fact.

Sustaining and agreeing

A serious question today, one that’s been rolling around in my head for quite some time but that’s been indirectly crystallized by some interesting discussions going on over at Faith-Promoting Rumor lately:

When we vote* to sustain our church leaders, are we promising to agree with them?

There are a lot of people in the church who would say that the answer is yes—the whole “when the prophet speaks, the thinking has been done“ sort of approach.** This has been supported by some church leaders, too.*** On the other hand, there are declarations that go in the other direction—see, for example, all the stress in current policy on participants in ward council being open about their opinions including if they disagree with the bishop, and the importance of consensus decisions rather than top-down directives.

It’s an interesting tension—and maybe it’s there on purpose, and there’s no actual complete answer to my question. I don’t know, to be quite honest. Y’all’s thoughts?

* Yeah, i know, it’s the wrong word, but i’m going with it anyway.

** And yes, i know the history of that quote, and that the initial introduction of the line didn’t put it in a positive light. Doesn’t keep people from saying that’s the way we should be going about things, though.

*** See, for example and perhaps most famously or infamously (depending on your position on the issue), Ezra Taft Benson’s Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet address.

In which David B pretends to be a deep thinker

I’ve read a good number of mainstream Xian critiques of the Mormon view of God from various sources, and they generally leave me with a simple question, based on the common claim that the mainstream Xian view of God entails a God who/that is absolutely perfect in every possible way and exceeds in all things, namely:

What's so great about absolute greatness?

This probably sounds like a joke, but it’s a serious question. If a critique of the Mormon conception of God is that the Mormon view entails a God who is not as wondrous as the mainstream Xian view entails,* then why is that supposed to be such a huge criticism? I see no inherent reason that that should be a valid critique; it seems to me that it’s a critique simply and only because it goes against some people’s underlying assumptions about the nature of deity, not because it somehow is a problem with a conception of deity.

And remember, an argument like “Isn’t it better to worship an absolutely great deity than a limited though still great deity?” won’t hold for this—i want concrete arguments here, not arguments in the abstract. It might be better if life here on earth didn’t involve the ebola virus, for example, but proposing an earth without ebola doesn’t make reality any different. I’m looking for arguments that speak to reality—and i haven’t found any yet.

* Something i’m not ceding, but which i offer as a basis for rational discussion on this issue.

Comparative love

So i heard a speaker in church recently say that if we commit sin, that means that we love that sin more than we love Jesus Christ.

Is that claim actually true? I have some serious doubts about it, but i’m not absolutely certain one way or the other. Others’ thoughts?

Gifts and influences

I’m off on a business trip for the next several days, and so i doubt i’ll have the chance to post again until sometime next week—so, then, a question i’ve been trying to figure out the answer to for a long time now:

     → What in the world is the Gift of the Holy Ghost, anyway?

The Gift of the Holy Ghost is generally described* as entitling the recipient to the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost, as long as the recipient remains worthy of it. This is contrasted with the influence of the Holy Ghost, which allows those who have not received the gift to feel the influence of the Holy Ghost in their lives as long as they’re worthy of it.

Sorry, but i don’t see a difference here. This is especially the case when you look at how “companionship” and “influence” are described, and you discover that they’re describing the same thing.

Yeah, it often gets described metaphorically as a “flashlight” (the gift) vs. a “flash of lightning” (the influence). This presumes, though, that those with the gift will remain constantly worthy, and those without the gift won’t—and i really don’t think you can make that claim with any validity.

So what’s the difference?

And, to add an additional wrinkle, i have to say that i’m not certain that the Gift of the Holy Ghost actually has anything to do with receiving inspiration from the Holy Ghost (in the usual ways we talk about it, at least), anyway—i mean, the Gift of the Holy Ghost is generally described as a saving ordinance, which means that there’s something way beyond experiences in mortality going on with it. Receiving inspiration from the Holy Ghost doesn’t seem to be quite comprehensive enough to have it have that sort of effect, you know?

So, i repeat: What in the world is the Gift of the Holy Ghost, anyway?

(And now i think i’m gonna have to break out the “serious” tag on this one.)

* In the current edition of the Gospel Principles manual, even!

Attaching a name to a story

So i was paging through the August Ensign, and i noticed that in the very last article in the issue the author talked about growing up in an abusive home. However, the name of the author looked like a real name, not “Name Withheld”.

I can only assume that the editors responsible for this oversight have been taken out and flogged.

p.s. Actually, to be entirely honest, i welcome this. I mean—and i’m dead serious in this postscript—if we regularly attach things such as abuse only to nameless folks, or at least real folks who are still ashamed enough about it or still feel so injured by it that they won’t let their names be attached to the story, how will we ever really be able to combat such thing amongst us?

On fear

Just an interesting point a sacrament meeting speaker made recently: The word fear is problematic in religious contexts, because it’s ambiguous. Therefore, it becomes necessary to contrast what i as a linguist might call fear_reverence and fear_shame (with reverence and shame being the words the speaker used).

On the meaning of an adjectival affix

Serious question: Is becoming Christlike the same thing as becoming like Christ?

They don’t look identical to me

Serious question: Where did the sacrament=baptism thing originate? I mean, i don’t see where the covenants involved line up (aside from the way that all covenants line up)—so why do we talk about the sacrament being the renewal of our baptismal covenants?

So who are they, anyway?

Random serious scriptural question: In the book of Doctrine and Covenants, section 133 verse 34, who are Ephraim’s fellows?

On lust

I’m about to head off to Columbus, Ohio for an academic conference. (It’s on pedagogical practice in linguistics, if you care about that sort of thing.) As a result, i won’t be posting anything after this here for about a week—so i’ll give you something interesting to talk about.

Let’s talk about lust.

As far as i can tell, the word “lust” is consistently used in a negative sense by church leaders. I didn’t have the time to do an exhaustive search, but if you run a search of general conference addresses, “lust” doesn’t seem to come up in positive contexts.

This makes sense, i suppose—lust can be distracting, to say the least, and we do a lot of counseling teenagers to beware of lust, ’cause lust ups your chances of falling into sexual sins. Fine.

But what about those of us who are married? Is lust always a bad thing, or is it acceptable to feel lust toward your spouse?

True story: In a ward i used to live in, i was in a gospel doctrine class where the topic was the law of chastity. (By definition, not having sexual relations with anyone other than your spouse who you’re legally married to.) This led to discussing how Satan uses sexual urges to tempt us, and how we need to resist them. (Yes, how we need to resist sexual urges, not how we need to resist temptation. I disagree, as you’ll see, but it’s a pretty widespread Mormon cultural meme.) There were a handful of people who talked about how we need to do everything we can to avoid giving in to “unhealthy sexual urges”, and the word “lust” was used a couple of times in a very negative sense. Eventually i raised my hand and, when called on, said that lust is actually a good thing—if we didn’t have them, then people would probably be much less likely to have children to raise, and since part of God’s plan is for people to raise children, then it’s a good thing that lust happens.

Well, a bit of an eruption followed—and i basically got lectured by several people on how healthy sexual urges have nothing to do with lust. But you know what? I think that’s hair-splitting—the difference between “healthy sexual urges” and “lust” isn’t a difference of kind, it’s purely a difference in what you care to call it to keep yourself from shocking your Puritan neighbors.

For my part, i feel lust toward Jeanne regularly and frequently, and i don’t think it’s a sin. In fact, i would probably find it troubling if i didn’t.

But i’m curious what y’all think. Is lust always a Bad Thing? Is there actually a difference between lust and what people call “healthy sexual urges”? (And just to keep things on an even footing, let’s limit ourselves to lust directed toward one’s spouse—we can all agree that extramarital lust is wrong without having to get into those sorts of details.)

Hiring at the BYUs

Back a few weeks, there was a discussion on this blog about women working outside of the home and what the church’s actual position on it might be (which i claimed isn’t very black-and-white, as opposed to church culture, which is pretty intensely one-sided, i think). I said in an email conversation with one of the commenters on that post that at some point i’d post my thoughts on it given hiring practices at the Brigham Young University campuses (i used to work at one of them), so here it is:

I have to admit that i have difficulty believing that the prophets actually want women who desire to work outside the home not to do so. I mean, consider that faculty appointments at the Brigham Young University campuses are subject to approval by the Church Educational System Board of Trustees, and that group includes half of the Quorum of the Twelve and all of the First Presidency (among others). If the prophetic stance was actually that women (or at least women with children at home) shouldn’t work outside the home, then wouldn’t there be no appointments of women with children at home to the faculty of Brigham Young University? And yet there they are…

And before it happens, in case someone says it’s because of nondiscrimination rules, that doesn’t apply here. Colleges and universities in the United States with clearly defined religious missions are exempt from nondiscrimination rules in two ways: They’re allowed to discriminate based on religious affiliation, and they are allowed to discriminate in other ways that clearly relate to the religious doctrines of the affiliated religion. In other words, the BYUs can give hiring preference to practicing, devout Mormons—which they do—and they can refuse to hire anyone whose hire would contradict the religious doctrines of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That they hire women with small children at home anyway at the very least sends a signal that that isn’t a point of religious doctrine for the church.

The most important morpheme

One last Xmas thought, and this time a completely serious one: Why do so many people worry so much about keeping the Christ in Christmas? Seems to me that it’s actually more important (and probably more difficult) to keep the mass in Christmas.

The Law of Socialism…errm, Consecration

A serious note, because i think it’s something we need to be reminded of occasionally: The Law of Consecration≠the United Order. The United Order was a method of living the Law of Consecration, but we can live that law without the benefit of such an order being set up.

(Not that i’m doing it myself, of course, but it’s worth keeping in mind anyway.)

Wherein David B claims to have read Obadiah

Serious thought: I read the entire standard works in 2½ weeks of (mostly) 9a–9p days while my missionary companion was sick and effectively bedridden. It’s cool what you notice in, say, the book of Doctrine and Covenants when Obadiah is still in medium-term memory.

Yeah, i’m a social stats geek—so?

Thanks to Dave Sundwall at A Soft Answer, who turned me on a few weeks ago* to the Pew Center’s study of sociopolitical views held by Mormons in the US. It took me a while to get through it properly, but it was worth it. There’s some interesting stuff in there, but unfortunately a lot of what people seem to be taking away from it a simple comparison of percentages, concluding that all it says is that Mormons are all hyperconservative (but with an intriguingly nuanced view of abortion). This isn’t what the report says, though.

Well, that is, it does say that Mormons are generally more sociopolitically conservative than the US population overall. It’s the details that make that the wrong conclusion to draw.

First of all, there are some interesting regional differences. Unfortunately, the study didn’t appear to separate people out by where they grew up, but rather only by where they live. Given that lots of wards and branches across the US are populated by Mormons who grew up in the jello belt, i suspect that the findings mask what i believe is a truth about Mormonism and sociopolitical leanings: It isn’t that Mormons are generally conservative, it’s that Mormons generally hold sociopolitical views that more or less match the population they grew up with—but most US Mormons are from sociopolitically conservative parts of the country, and that skews the overall results. The Pew Center’s results give us no way of actually determining whether my expectation is true, but it hints that it may be more true than false.

Another interesting finding: Converts really are different than lifelong Mormons. This may be a regional effect, as well, of course—there are likely to be more lifelong Mormons from areas that have a large number of Mormons. I really wish the Pew Center had reported the results of multivariate (and nonlinear!) regression analyses—i know they have the ability to do so, given the people they have on staff, so why they don’t release that sort of thing i don’t know.

One really interesting thing is the age difference—younger Mormons are more likely to have religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices that are associated with higher degrees of religious devoutness. I don’t know if this stems from younger Mormons being actually more devout in general or younger non-devout nominal Mormons being more likely to self-identify as non-Mormon (and therefore not part of this survey)—it’d be interesting to know.

And finally, the last thing i’d like to point out is that a clear majority of Mormons polled state that there is one true way to interpret Mormon teachings. To be honest, this amused me—i mean, i suspect that what people were saying was one of two things: either “i know how to interpret Mormon teachings, and i’m right” (yeah, and every Mormon who disagrees with you on stuff like caffeinated beverages feels the same way), or “our prophet has the correct interpretation” (which is more interesting, since the respondent wouldn’t necessarily know what the one true interpretation might be).

Yeah, it may well be true that there is one correct interpretation of Mormon teachings—i suspect there is, though i don’t know that i’d give a firm “yes” in answer to that question, maybe a “if you mean does God know, then yes; if you mean does any mortal know all truth, then no”, but I doubt that would fit on the form—but i still haven’t seen a comprehensive Mormon catechism,** you know?

* If you follow this link, ignore the comments—somehow, it devolved instantly into namecalling and ax-grinding over immigration issues.

** I own a copy of the most recent Roman Catholic catechism. It’s a fascinating reference work, really—i’m kind of jealous. Yeah, we’ve got the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, but it’s just not the same.

The purpose of home teaching

I thought this was a one-time statement, but i’ve now heard it twice in sacrament meetings, so i’d like to register my objection to it:

• Home teaching is intended to provide priesthood leadership in homes that don’t have the priesthood present.

This is, i would argue, untrue—rather, home teaching is intended (in part) to provide priesthood assistance to homes without the priesthood present (as well as those that do). This is an important difference.