MH, fwiw, I think D&C 89 makes it crystal clear that drinking alcohol in moderation is just fine – at the individual level. It’s just that so many people can’t establish the proper line separating “moderation” from “abuse” that the proper line for “the weakest of the weak” was enforced for the collective group – all totally abstaining.

I’m fine with that. I don’t want to drink in moderation enough to fight over it – and I know enough families that have been wrecked by alcoholism that I am thankful none of my extended famliy or I have had to find out our limits the hard way.

Hellmut, Bushman did talk about other religious leaders sexual beliefs, but I didn’t focus on that in the excerpts I listed, though I did briefly talk about the Shakers on page 440. At that point Bushman goes into other religious practices. Perhaps I should have included it, but my post was already pretty long, and I wanted to focus on Joseph, not other religious practices.

I like FireTag’s position in 91 that we don’t have all the tools to perceive godly thoughts.

SteveM, circumcision is a real head scratcher for me. I’ve seen medical literature both for and against the medical needs. Circumcision does seem to inhibit the transmission of AIDS and other STD’s, but most people in western cultures seem to act like it’s completely worthless. Either way, I think we all agree that female circumcision is a barbaric practice, and I don’t really understand why God wants anything sharp near my genitals. Circumcision in the time of Abraham was an extremely common pagan practice, so it seems to me that God didn’t inspire it. Perhaps God put a stamp of approval on it, but circumcision pre-dates Abraham. See my post for more info on this and other topics on Abraham.

As for pork, it’s a head scratcher for me to. If it was dietary, and kept people from eating diseased meat, then fine, I’ll accept it as a godly thing like the Word of Wisdom. Perhaps God will then show us it’s ok to drink alcohol in moderation in the future?

I guess it’s also fair to ask whether this was a case of confabulation, delisions, or megalomania. I’ve met a lot of people who simply rationalize their behavior to the point of believing it themselves….but that doesn’t take away their intent. Deception of others is a better indicator of intent, in my view.

So, being attacked by mobs, being tarred and feathered, imprisoned, and eventually being killed along with one or more family members is what most consider better than working on a marginal farm? If that’s so, I don’t want to ever get NEAR a marginal farm. I’m not even sure a farm and several homes would be worth the cost in the end. Do you?

No, it doesn’t mean that it came from God, but it does establish a motive from Joseph and what his nature was, seeking God’s will instead of explaining it as Joseph was seeking his own pleasures.

#103. “Well, being prophet beats working on a marginal farm.”

Hellmut, are you suggesting Joseph and Emma were well off…better than most people of the day?

Well, being prophet beats working on a marginal farm. His dad got to charge for blessings. His brothers were employed. Joseph’s mother got to display the mummies, which had been procured with the members’ donations.

When Joseph was lynched, he owned a farm and several homes. Smith did not make as much money as Brigham Young but his ministry certainly worked better than his father’s farm.

What about pork? Wrong for Moses and right for Paul?

Second, if we argue that polygamy was instituted, in part, to “raise up a righteous seed” (or some derivation thereof), we can’t well argue that Joseph’s relationships were meant to be celibate.

Unlike other preachers, Smith codified his sex life, which provided him with a theological basis to retain control over his ministry. A baptist minister who would have been caught having sex with his congregants would have simply been tarred and feathered and driven out of town.

A comparative perspective beyond the narrow confines of Mormonism might have provided Bushman useful perspective about religion, status, and sex.

I remember my institute teacher being a bit miffed that Tippetts and Avery would put some second hand report of a sarcastic comment about being Joseph and a young woman “sealed on the hay mow” in Mormon Enigma. It seemed fair enough to me, in a book about Emma, to know what kind of gossip–credible or non-credible that she was forced to endure.

I tend to draw a line though about who’s retelling of these events I read, avoiding unbalance that favors obvious axes to grind.

In all my studies, the biggest thing to me has been that Joseph only ever did what he “thought” the Lord required of him. He made mistakes, but he was always striving to know God’s will and live it. There is not very many indications, IMO, Joseph ever tried to act for his own power or satisfaction (no money or anything like that).

I think the Encyclopedia of Mormonism explanation is well worth reading on the subject:
http://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Plural_Marriage

There are plenty of gaps one can fill with your own guesses of what makes sense, but we will never really know for sure why Joseph felt he needed to live it, only that he did and whenever he did, it was done carefully (asking permission, Brigham Young witnessing, striving to make it acceptable to Emma, official ceremonies, etc).

Bottom line, Jacob 2 states marriage is one man and one woman only. There are other evidences the Lord “allows” it under specific authority, but only rarely. Why does the Lord sometimes allow it and not others??? His ways are higher than ours. Others (including Oliver Cowdery) who tried to live it unauthorized were doing it wrong. Today it is strictly forbidden, so I don’t think I’ll ever get a spiritual witness about something that isn’t necessary for me to know(D&C 88:64-65).

Of course, there are certain things that I won’t end up believing are inspired, but that’s what creates the fine line – the difficulty of different people creating different lines. It’s called humanity; it’s called mortality; and doing away with it actually would blow mental gaskets in the brains of EVERY person here who is the most vocal about how this issue is purely black and white. It’s a two-edged sword, and VERY few people stop and think about the logical extension of denying any degree of validity to personal, experiential, subjective beliefs – and VERY few who take that position realize how personal, experiential and subjective their own beliefs are.

That’s worth considering – deeply and at length.

I’d like it better if Bushman followed up on credibility for both sides of the issue, rather than just following up on the credibility of those who made potentially negative statements about Joseph’s plural marriages. Bushman even seems ready to accept the word of William Law without question, so long as it can be used to Joseph’s favor, despite the fact that William Law was one of the men who directly precipitated Joseph’s murder.

#73:
But to act like we have no clue what the 1800s were like so we can’t judge anyone is naive, in my opinion. We have mountains of evidence. Right and wrong don’t change that much in 200 years, do they?

I have no trouble with those who make the presentism argument–that we can’t judge Joseph’s actions negatively because they took place 160 years ago, so long as they ALSO agree that we can’t judge Joseph’s actions positively because they took place 160 years ago! If we don’t know enough about the 1840s to condemn Joseph, we certainly don’t know enough about the 1840s to praise Joseph!

My grandparents and parents told me with passion of spiritual experiences, some of which were angelic in nature, that led them into CofChrist. I’ve confirmed them with experiences of my own, and then had the internal logic of those experiences lead me in unexpected directions.

Other people have equally passionate experiences that lead them to Protestantism, Catholicism, or non-Christian religions.

Dexter, apparently a rationalist, probably argues that the very unreliably of having consistent experiences among people argues against their reality. Yet that doesn’t even exhaust the rationalist probabilities. For example, just as the first eyes were pretty unreliable in evolutionary models of the development of life, theists who believe in evolution (or Mormons who believe in progression) can simply argue that our sense of the spirit is still pretty primitive, allowing even prophets to misperceive. There was physical light before we developed the senses to perceive it, so one can argue that there is spiritual “light” before we develop the senses to perceive it without that being an “irrational” argument.

Perhaps the more interesting discussion is not whether our individual interpretations of the external facts are correct, but what is it about us individually that leads us to interpret the external facts one way or another.

So, AdamF, the “F” wouldn’t stand for “Fischer” would it?

Daynes also said that among BY and the 12 Apostles at the time of Joseph’s death, nine had “received the fulness of the priesthood ordinances” and seven “had already taken plural wives.” “A majority of the apostles remained loyal so that these legacies from the founding prophet would continue after his death.”

By the way I thought your “Gee, bud, I didn’t mean for you to blow a tire over it” was a classic.

If we extend your view, then we can’t know anything about anyone so what is the point of even trying to discuss any of these issues?

Well, we can discuss them in some level of context, but we can’t really know for sure. You can’t know someone real thoughts. Even if they write down and say “these are my thoughts,” they may or maybe not be. they may not be able to fully express their true thoughts or emotions on paper. Perhaps their writing skills were not good. Not everyone was literate back then.

And the stories about JS doing good things don’t seem to have the same caveats. Why is that? Why are we so ready to label his good deeds as good? Shouldn’t we say we don’t know if they were good because the times were so different?

Not sure exactly what you are getting at. Perhaps his real motives for doing good were not always pure. That might be the case. Again, we can take it at face value and examine the available evidence and make a judgment. But, you and some others are not willing, at least it appears so, to accept the fact that Joseph’s Polygamy might have been ordained of God and that those who participated were mostly OK with it.

You’ve chosen to reject it, because it appears, you don’t like it or the idea of it. But, that is not really a good argument for rejecting it. It was clearly NOT the norm of the day but neither was associating with people not of the same race.

“I don’t understand it completely by any stretch, but some of my own ancestors and those of my wife wrote of incredibly powerful spiritual experiences convincing them that it was of God – even some who never practiced it themselves because they didn’t like it and wanted to avoid being asked. I just can’t get past that simple fact – that many members reported independently obtained manifestations that they should accept it, both those who lived it and those who didn’t. I don’t like to call them duped idiots, so I just can’t reject it out of hand.”

Do we accept the same argument today while watching the FLDS, etc., women interviewed that claim the same? Whether inspired, or not, people can be convinced to do many things within an authoritarian religious environment that are outside accepted social norms. If the Church had stayed back East, I think polygamy would have died out far earlier than it did in the isolation of Utah.