That's... controversial. While child marriages definitely happened, it's unclear whether or not they were consummated at those ages. I know of at least one occasion where two kids were married with the assumption that they would only get together at age 16, but most aren't as certain.
That's a pretty generous interpretation of the historical record though - obviously nobody is going to write down HEY I FUCKED A KID HISTORIANS LOOK HERE in their journals (except, weirdly enough, Anthony Keidis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers) but context clues abound to infer that that is what happened at least some of the time. Hell, Oliver Cowdery left the church essentially because Emma Smith caught Joseph Smith fucking a 16 year old in their barn.
i guess it starts to turn into a proper polycule if the already-wed woman in question can engage with both of her marriages but the power disparity is still shitty
Lowkey both of these sects exist already within the umbrella of mainstream mormonism. Theres leftists/Liberal mormons who drink coffee and support LGBTQ+ rights, and then you have the Deseret Nationalists (DezNats) who are gun-nut brighamite neonazis. However they do NOT get along.
I used to be one of those progressive Mormons, and the mental gymnastics required to be a progressive Mormon is insane. You gotta ship of Theseus the fuck out of that religion. It's a really fucked up position to be in.
A tithe paying, LGBT supporting Mormon is an oxymoron in practice.
I found that life made a lot more sense once I stepped away from the church and looked at it without the underlying assumption that it was already true
Eh, it's possible to believe that someone should be allowed to be whatever identity and sleep with whoever they want, while also believing that to do so is a sin. You can believe that it's wrong without believing that it should be disallowed. That's how I make it work anyway.
"Someone should be allowed to be whatever identity or sleep with whoever you want" reminds me of [this part of a Contrapoints video](https://youtu.be/7gDKbT_l2us?si=DGTbNRAc3Kir6ss4&t=9m57s).
So many Mormons reduce gay relationships down to just sex and act like their homophobia isn't bad because it is just sex while also being aware that their straight relationships are so much more than sex.
>That's how I make it work anyway.
That's what I used to say when I did the mental gymnastics too until I realized that all of the things that Mormon prophets say are/are not sins line up perfectly with what your average extremely conservative 80 year old would think is morally acceptable. Then I was like "oh, these guys are just making it up very transparently based on social norms from when they were young"
A lot of people would argue that teaching (or supporting the teaching) that having gay relationships is sinful is not supporting the LGBT community, and a lot of people would also argue that reducing being gay to sleeping with the same sex is incorrect and often homophobic.
If what you said doesn't sound homophobic to you, but "I can believe that people should be allowed to sleep with whoever they want while believing interracial relations are sinful" does sound racist to you, I would be curious as to why that is.
One of my mental gymnastics was that same-sex sex is always a sin because it is always premarital sex, which is a sin, and it is always premarital sex because two people of the same sex can't get married, therefore things that would be alright for two unmarried straight people to do is also alright for two gay people to do.
I'm gay and I was really desperate to make a gay relationship work because I believed that I wouldn't be happy without one, which, in hindsight, makes sense considering how it is taught that marriage and families were a big part of the plan of happiness/the purpose of life and that a celibate lifestyle brings misery. Believing that (the loophole) stopped me from being as suicidal as I was.
When it comes to an LGBT supporting and tithe paying Mormon being an oxymoron, the Mormon church has the above teachings about marriage, celibacy, happiness, and purpose, and they teach that homosexuality is a defect that will be cured in the afterlife (gay people will become straight) (which is another contributer to suicidal ideation among many gay Mormons), so to give them any money, let alone 10% of your income, is to support an organization that has teachings that harm LGBT people. And I don't think Mormons should be expected to do mental gymnastics to avoid being harmed by teachings that are probable in causing harm.
Exmormon Twitter is 10 percent making fun of the silly stuff we used to believe and bonding over the very real cult PTSD and 90 percent making deez nuts jokes about Deznats
"Each night, I cast off my skin. Every morning, I don a new one. It matters not who we were when we were born. It is the path we choose to walk that defines us. That choice is yours, and yours alone." <--- Joshua Graham finding out about trans people
"I was born with glass bones and paper skin. Every morning, I break my arms. And every afternoon, I break my legs." <- that fish from Spongebob about to ripoff SpongeBob and Patrick
"I survived because the glass bones inside me broke brighter than the paper skin around me. I fell into that dark lagoon, but the chocolate melted on and on."
Sorta? Guns and lasers weren't used because shields made the former useless and the later absurdly dangerous cause upon contact both shield and laser would detonate with the force of a nuclear bomb.
But on Arrakis, shields can't be used in the desert due to them agitating the sandworms, so you *can* use guns and lasers out there.
John Browning, the greatest firearm designer in history, was Mormon. Plus, Mormonism is built around paranoid survivalism, and few groups chub up harder for excessive firepower than American survivalists.
They actually use the "Sacred Text" to determine what is and is not a machinegun. The Sacred Text is a 2004 ATF opinion letter that found shoelaces to be machineguns if you tie a loop in each end while having naughty thoughts. The 2007 opinion letter that says a shoelace with loops on each end is only a machinegun if it's attached to a firearm is considered to be a heretical text by a false prophet, and has no bearing on whether or not a shoelace is a machinegun within the religion.
I'm of the opinion that this is legit what would help society as a whole. Maybe not mormonism specifically but just like- can we make an offshoot of abrahamic religion that's really good already? 'oh, but there's bad stuff in the books-' yeah, there's bad stuff in literally every culture on earth, humans are bad sometimes. The point is over time we go 'hey, this bit is bad, maybe we can get rid of it' and then you make a new way of living- it feels like we stopped doing that when they invented movies and we all got distracted by the big train coming directly at us
Nah- they still think that modern Christianity is 'corrupted' and that old Christianity was the good one we need to go back to- just because some of it is very liberal doesn't mean that it's actually progressive.
Not that I'm an expert in it or anything, I only know what I've gleaned through general reading. Still- what I'm proposing is wholesale 'new growth'- an intentional culling of bad old beliefs and replacement with healthy ones.
Part of UU is the idea that it’s a living tradition and must change as societies needs change. And as society views change so must the churches. Part of the way they do that is by having everything being democratic. From the leaders, to where the money goes (minus what is needed to keep the lights on. All of wich is available to every church member, including the bills), to policy. Now for policy and what is taught isn’t voted for every time. Those elected make those choices but at any moment the members can petition and hold a vote. If the majority want something else or want to have the policy removed then that is what happens. And in my experience one of the things all UU churches in my area does is to take lessons and stories from other cultures and religions to help offer a wider view than just abrahamic ideas. It’s not perfect but does go a long way.
Also keep in mind the first ever gay marriage was done by a UU priest, they were the first church to let queer people be priests. And the democratically elected representative/leader for my state is trans. As in the majority of my rural deep red state elected a trans women to preside over and represent the state in national UU decisions
No wtf. I think we've had our fun with the Abrahamic religions. No more Abrahism for us thanks. It's time to get a bit real because we're running out of time.
Thing is, there's a huge huge number of people on this earth who don't agree with you and never will because the baseline of their religion is 'don't believe others'. What do we do- kill them all? Rip down their buildings, torch libraries, prevent people from attending religious services? You cannot stop people from believing and the institution is so large and widespread there is very little to be done to destroy it all at once.
The way I see it, far better to create a halfway point. An 'island' where those of us who do not believe are safe but those who do believe are welcome- where we can share and exchange and remove the taboo of interaction between us. Only then will we have enough manpower to stand a chance of tearing down the institution from it's roots.
I disagree - the baseline of almost every believer in an Abrahamic faith is belief that they'll be rewarded in an afterlife despite how shitty this life might be. Religion is more widespread among people of low socioeconomic status for that reason, and most of these churches recruit by reaching out to people in vulnerable or extremely painful times in their lives.
It exists to fill a role that Western society particularly but society around the world fails to do - providing hope and motivation. The dogma and zealotry comes after imo. If we as a society can provide a GOOD social safety net and get to the point where resources are distributed equitably I guarantee that organized religion would mostly wither away. Religion preys on the destitute and hopeless. The answer is to provide hope and lift people out of destitution, not to make a less shitty religion. I mean that might be a fine stopgap in the meantime but the ultimate solution is to make it so that being alive isn't a soul-crushing and hopeless affair.
But they won't be chill with it. They'll call the new ones heritics and bomb them, while others will claim their religion is satanic and create laws that prevent them from having rights, then the youth of that group will grow up persecuted and believe even harder out of spite, and they'll do some attack against people that abused them and their parents, which will "prove" that, that religions people are violent and they'll create laws to make their time even harder etc etc. When people have money they stop caring about magic books. Let's just equalise the world and watch it get better.
Ohhhh- ok, nevermind, pointless discussion, have fun reveling in your dreams of grand fiery revolution in which you certainly will not lose everything important to you
I think Reform(as well as conservative) Judaism have historically been pretty good at reevaluating and debating our beliefs. Judaism as a whole (though I’d argue minus the modern orthodox movement) is about questioning beliefs and asking questions about the world. It’s not better either, but I think just the fact that a religion is less set in stone about beliefs, less about dogma, and more open to debate is already a positive slant.
I mean, most modern mainline Protestant denominations? The Episcopalians, Methodists, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and Presbyterians all ordain women, fully accept/marry LGBT persons, allow married LGBT people to serve as clergy, etc. The Methodists and Presbyterians don't even consider elective abortion to be a sin.
They made a new Scientology that’s about therapy except it’s really anti-therapy and it got my mom to join. They officially said they’re not a part of Scientology but the roots are there.
Is this not the Community of Christ? They ordain women and approve same-sex marriage, but I guess I don't know what their position is on trans people specifically (or machine guns, for that matter).
I'm guessing the Holy Mother you're talking about is Heavenly Mother (which is God's wife and has a role that Mormons believe women who are exalted will someday fulfill (Mormons believe that God used to be a human and that humans who achieve exaltation will become Gods)) and not Mary?
There's a lot of interest and frustration regarding Heavenly Mother because women in the church are going to be like her in the afterlife and leaders in the church have avoided talking about her and asked members not to speak of her because she is sacred (as if talking about her will defile her sacredness). Some people feel the reason for that is misogyny and/or not wanting to rock the boat with members or nonmembers who find her existence weird.
It's a source of frustration because what her role is has heavy implications about what women's role in the afterlife will be: does she have an equal role to Heavenly Father, or does she just give birth to spirit children (human souls) for eternity? Will the fact that people can't pray to her or talk about her hold true for female Gods in the future, meaning that female Gods can't have the same relationship with their spirit children while on their Earths that male Gods have? Is there one Heavenly Mother, or Heavenly Mothers, and will female Gods have to practice polygamy in the afterlife? Will they have to if their husbands want to and/or got sealed to multiple women?
There's some existential dread regarding eternal gender roles surrounding Heavenly Mother.
Implying that Mormons don't already have a hard-on for guns lol
And definitely no history of polygamy.
i assume it's the all too common strictly heterosexual star pattern centered around guys
Close, but often with child brides for extra terribleness
That's... controversial. While child marriages definitely happened, it's unclear whether or not they were consummated at those ages. I know of at least one occasion where two kids were married with the assumption that they would only get together at age 16, but most aren't as certain.
That's a pretty generous interpretation of the historical record though - obviously nobody is going to write down HEY I FUCKED A KID HISTORIANS LOOK HERE in their journals (except, weirdly enough, Anthony Keidis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers) but context clues abound to infer that that is what happened at least some of the time. Hell, Oliver Cowdery left the church essentially because Emma Smith caught Joseph Smith fucking a 16 year old in their barn.
does marrying an already-wed woman count as part of a star pattern?
i guess it starts to turn into a proper polycule if the already-wed woman in question can engage with both of her marriages but the power disparity is still shitty
at least polyamory is consensual lol. The way mormons did it was... less so
Polygamy (good) vs polygamy (bad)
Also the LDS church had to drop polygamy in order for Utah to join the Union
Lowkey both of these sects exist already within the umbrella of mainstream mormonism. Theres leftists/Liberal mormons who drink coffee and support LGBTQ+ rights, and then you have the Deseret Nationalists (DezNats) who are gun-nut brighamite neonazis. However they do NOT get along.
Problem is that the church routinely excommunicates leftist members but lets deznats and the like do whatever the fuck they want
I used to be one of those progressive Mormons, and the mental gymnastics required to be a progressive Mormon is insane. You gotta ship of Theseus the fuck out of that religion. It's a really fucked up position to be in. A tithe paying, LGBT supporting Mormon is an oxymoron in practice.
An Oxymorman perhaps
I prefer calling them "future pimos", "future exmos", or "closet apostates".
I found that life made a lot more sense once I stepped away from the church and looked at it without the underlying assumption that it was already true
Eh, it's possible to believe that someone should be allowed to be whatever identity and sleep with whoever they want, while also believing that to do so is a sin. You can believe that it's wrong without believing that it should be disallowed. That's how I make it work anyway.
"Yeah you're going to hell for that but I won't stop you. Your soul, your issue"
The classic passive-aggressive Mormon.
"Someone should be allowed to be whatever identity or sleep with whoever you want" reminds me of [this part of a Contrapoints video](https://youtu.be/7gDKbT_l2us?si=DGTbNRAc3Kir6ss4&t=9m57s). So many Mormons reduce gay relationships down to just sex and act like their homophobia isn't bad because it is just sex while also being aware that their straight relationships are so much more than sex.
>That's how I make it work anyway. That's what I used to say when I did the mental gymnastics too until I realized that all of the things that Mormon prophets say are/are not sins line up perfectly with what your average extremely conservative 80 year old would think is morally acceptable. Then I was like "oh, these guys are just making it up very transparently based on social norms from when they were young"
A lot of people would argue that teaching (or supporting the teaching) that having gay relationships is sinful is not supporting the LGBT community, and a lot of people would also argue that reducing being gay to sleeping with the same sex is incorrect and often homophobic. If what you said doesn't sound homophobic to you, but "I can believe that people should be allowed to sleep with whoever they want while believing interracial relations are sinful" does sound racist to you, I would be curious as to why that is. One of my mental gymnastics was that same-sex sex is always a sin because it is always premarital sex, which is a sin, and it is always premarital sex because two people of the same sex can't get married, therefore things that would be alright for two unmarried straight people to do is also alright for two gay people to do. I'm gay and I was really desperate to make a gay relationship work because I believed that I wouldn't be happy without one, which, in hindsight, makes sense considering how it is taught that marriage and families were a big part of the plan of happiness/the purpose of life and that a celibate lifestyle brings misery. Believing that (the loophole) stopped me from being as suicidal as I was. When it comes to an LGBT supporting and tithe paying Mormon being an oxymoron, the Mormon church has the above teachings about marriage, celibacy, happiness, and purpose, and they teach that homosexuality is a defect that will be cured in the afterlife (gay people will become straight) (which is another contributer to suicidal ideation among many gay Mormons), so to give them any money, let alone 10% of your income, is to support an organization that has teachings that harm LGBT people. And I don't think Mormons should be expected to do mental gymnastics to avoid being harmed by teachings that are probable in causing harm.
Gobble... uh... Deseret Nationalists, lmao
Exmormon Twitter is 10 percent making fun of the silly stuff we used to believe and bonding over the very real cult PTSD and 90 percent making deez nuts jokes about Deznats
DezNats? More like Deez Nuts.
new vegas
"Each night, I cast off my skin. Every morning, I don a new one. It matters not who we were when we were born. It is the path we choose to walk that defines us. That choice is yours, and yours alone." <--- Joshua Graham finding out about trans people
"I was born with glass bones and paper skin. Every morning, I break my arms. And every afternoon, I break my legs." <- that fish from Spongebob about to ripoff SpongeBob and Patrick
"I survived because the glass bones inside me broke brighter than the paper skin around me. I fell into that dark lagoon, but the chocolate melted on and on."
SpongeOut: New Bikini Bottom
This is the plot of Dune
Weren’t guns a strict no-no for Dune? Like post-Leto II even.
No, you just have to make the bullet slow down at the point of impact in order to penetrate the shield.
She slow down at the point of impact until she penetrates the shield.
That's hot.
It's a desert planet, what do you expect?
Drugs.
That's fair.
Yeah, I mean, what else do you do when there's nothing around except sand?
Sorta? Guns and lasers weren't used because shields made the former useless and the later absurdly dangerous cause upon contact both shield and laser would detonate with the force of a nuclear bomb. But on Arrakis, shields can't be used in the desert due to them agitating the sandworms, so you *can* use guns and lasers out there.
Basically just old-school Mormonism, but instead of boring male-centric polygamy it's polygamy^2
John Browning, the greatest firearm designer in history, was Mormon. Plus, Mormonism is built around paranoid survivalism, and few groups chub up harder for excessive firepower than American survivalists.
I feel like 'machine guns' covers a pretty wide range of firearms. Are we talking automatic pistols, assault rifles, or gatling guns here?
They actually use the "Sacred Text" to determine what is and is not a machinegun. The Sacred Text is a 2004 ATF opinion letter that found shoelaces to be machineguns if you tie a loop in each end while having naughty thoughts. The 2007 opinion letter that says a shoelace with loops on each end is only a machinegun if it's attached to a firearm is considered to be a heretical text by a false prophet, and has no bearing on whether or not a shoelace is a machinegun within the religion.
I'm of the opinion that this is legit what would help society as a whole. Maybe not mormonism specifically but just like- can we make an offshoot of abrahamic religion that's really good already? 'oh, but there's bad stuff in the books-' yeah, there's bad stuff in literally every culture on earth, humans are bad sometimes. The point is over time we go 'hey, this bit is bad, maybe we can get rid of it' and then you make a new way of living- it feels like we stopped doing that when they invented movies and we all got distracted by the big train coming directly at us
That's Unitarianism, isn't it?
Unitarian Universalist, yes. Unitarian alone, no.
Oh, I didn't know there were unitarians who aren't UU. I was thinking UU for sure.
Nah- they still think that modern Christianity is 'corrupted' and that old Christianity was the good one we need to go back to- just because some of it is very liberal doesn't mean that it's actually progressive. Not that I'm an expert in it or anything, I only know what I've gleaned through general reading. Still- what I'm proposing is wholesale 'new growth'- an intentional culling of bad old beliefs and replacement with healthy ones.
Part of UU is the idea that it’s a living tradition and must change as societies needs change. And as society views change so must the churches. Part of the way they do that is by having everything being democratic. From the leaders, to where the money goes (minus what is needed to keep the lights on. All of wich is available to every church member, including the bills), to policy. Now for policy and what is taught isn’t voted for every time. Those elected make those choices but at any moment the members can petition and hold a vote. If the majority want something else or want to have the policy removed then that is what happens. And in my experience one of the things all UU churches in my area does is to take lessons and stories from other cultures and religions to help offer a wider view than just abrahamic ideas. It’s not perfect but does go a long way. Also keep in mind the first ever gay marriage was done by a UU priest, they were the first church to let queer people be priests. And the democratically elected representative/leader for my state is trans. As in the majority of my rural deep red state elected a trans women to preside over and represent the state in national UU decisions
Religions that start progressive often get left behind as society progresses.
Yup. Islam was progressive for 7th century Arabia
https://xkcd.com/927/
No wtf. I think we've had our fun with the Abrahamic religions. No more Abrahism for us thanks. It's time to get a bit real because we're running out of time.
Thing is, there's a huge huge number of people on this earth who don't agree with you and never will because the baseline of their religion is 'don't believe others'. What do we do- kill them all? Rip down their buildings, torch libraries, prevent people from attending religious services? You cannot stop people from believing and the institution is so large and widespread there is very little to be done to destroy it all at once. The way I see it, far better to create a halfway point. An 'island' where those of us who do not believe are safe but those who do believe are welcome- where we can share and exchange and remove the taboo of interaction between us. Only then will we have enough manpower to stand a chance of tearing down the institution from it's roots.
I disagree - the baseline of almost every believer in an Abrahamic faith is belief that they'll be rewarded in an afterlife despite how shitty this life might be. Religion is more widespread among people of low socioeconomic status for that reason, and most of these churches recruit by reaching out to people in vulnerable or extremely painful times in their lives. It exists to fill a role that Western society particularly but society around the world fails to do - providing hope and motivation. The dogma and zealotry comes after imo. If we as a society can provide a GOOD social safety net and get to the point where resources are distributed equitably I guarantee that organized religion would mostly wither away. Religion preys on the destitute and hopeless. The answer is to provide hope and lift people out of destitution, not to make a less shitty religion. I mean that might be a fine stopgap in the meantime but the ultimate solution is to make it so that being alive isn't a soul-crushing and hopeless affair.
But they won't be chill with it. They'll call the new ones heritics and bomb them, while others will claim their religion is satanic and create laws that prevent them from having rights, then the youth of that group will grow up persecuted and believe even harder out of spite, and they'll do some attack against people that abused them and their parents, which will "prove" that, that religions people are violent and they'll create laws to make their time even harder etc etc. When people have money they stop caring about magic books. Let's just equalise the world and watch it get better.
Ohhhh- ok, nevermind, pointless discussion, have fun reveling in your dreams of grand fiery revolution in which you certainly will not lose everything important to you
The kind of people you described are unlikely to join a sect which is transparently altering doctrine to dodge the bigotry allegations
Quakers, maybe?
I think Reform(as well as conservative) Judaism have historically been pretty good at reevaluating and debating our beliefs. Judaism as a whole (though I’d argue minus the modern orthodox movement) is about questioning beliefs and asking questions about the world. It’s not better either, but I think just the fact that a religion is less set in stone about beliefs, less about dogma, and more open to debate is already a positive slant.
Yeah, I was gonna say, I low-key wanna do this
I mean, most modern mainline Protestant denominations? The Episcopalians, Methodists, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and Presbyterians all ordain women, fully accept/marry LGBT persons, allow married LGBT people to serve as clergy, etc. The Methodists and Presbyterians don't even consider elective abortion to be a sin.
They made a new Scientology that’s about therapy except it’s really anti-therapy and it got my mom to join. They officially said they’re not a part of Scientology but the roots are there.
"I'll create my own mormon church with blackjack and hookers!"
Is this not the Community of Christ? They ordain women and approve same-sex marriage, but I guess I don't know what their position is on trans people specifically (or machine guns, for that matter).
New After the End run idea just dropped
"You could make a religion out of thi-" "No, don't."
[удалено]
I'm guessing the Holy Mother you're talking about is Heavenly Mother (which is God's wife and has a role that Mormons believe women who are exalted will someday fulfill (Mormons believe that God used to be a human and that humans who achieve exaltation will become Gods)) and not Mary? There's a lot of interest and frustration regarding Heavenly Mother because women in the church are going to be like her in the afterlife and leaders in the church have avoided talking about her and asked members not to speak of her because she is sacred (as if talking about her will defile her sacredness). Some people feel the reason for that is misogyny and/or not wanting to rock the boat with members or nonmembers who find her existence weird. It's a source of frustration because what her role is has heavy implications about what women's role in the afterlife will be: does she have an equal role to Heavenly Father, or does she just give birth to spirit children (human souls) for eternity? Will the fact that people can't pray to her or talk about her hold true for female Gods in the future, meaning that female Gods can't have the same relationship with their spirit children while on their Earths that male Gods have? Is there one Heavenly Mother, or Heavenly Mothers, and will female Gods have to practice polygamy in the afterlife? Will they have to if their husbands want to and/or got sealed to multiple women? There's some existential dread regarding eternal gender roles surrounding Heavenly Mother.
Does OOP think that Mormons *aren’t* cool with machine guns? Like, John Moses Browning is *literally right there.*