Was polygamy ONLY for raising more children??

[_Polygamy Porter]

According to one of the MANY feel good Mormon spam websites from A Wyatt and friends, it is.

Meet Mormon Missionaries website says so:

According to Jacob, only when God commands it can people practice polygamy and He will do so in order to raise more children. The Mormons practiced polygamy as commanded by God and did so for a limited time until God commanded the Prophet to end the practice.

Earlier on that same page he condemns the Muslims for their practice of polygamy:

The Book of Mormon clearly explains that sometimes God commands people to practice polygamy and other times he forbids it since only very righteous people can handle it.

I find it odd that LDS Inc is allowing such websites to proliferate. Information like this will not be found on Mormon.org or LDS.org.. Won't this just confuse the unwitting possible investigator?

[_harmony]

What makes you think LDS.org knows? And what exactly are they supposed to do about it? Ex them?

[_SatanWasSetUp]

According to one of the MANY feel good Mormon spam websites from A Wyatt and friends, it is.

Meet Mormon Missionaries website says so:

According to Jacob, only when God commands it can people practice polygamy and He will do so in order to raise more children. The Mormons practiced polygamy as commanded by God and did so for a limited time until God commanded the Prophet to end the practice.

Earlier on that same page he condemns the Muslims for their practice of polygamy:

The Book of Mormon clearly explains that sometimes God commands people to practice polygamy and other times he forbids it since only very righteous people can handle it.

I find it odd that LDS Inc is allowing such websites to proliferate. Information like this will not be found on Mormon.org or LDS.org.. Won't this just confuse the unwitting possible investigator?

If it was for raising children, why did Joseph Smith practice it?

[_Dr. Shades]

Funny you should mention that website; I visited it just this morning. Anyway, here's a funny little Freudian slip I caught:

The Book of Mormon clearly explains that sometimes God commands people to practice polygamy and other times he forbids it since only very righteous people can handle it. . . The Mormons practiced polygamy as commanded by God and did so for a limited time until God commanded the Prophet to end the practice.

So he's admitting that it was only during a "limited time" that the Mormons were "very righteous people"? Bwahahaha!

[_Some Schmo]

Funny you should mention that website; I visited it just this morning. Anyway, here's a funny little Freudian slip I caught:

The Book of Mormon clearly explains that sometimes God commands people to practice polygamy and other times he forbids it since only very righteous people can handle it. . . The Mormons practiced polygamy as commanded by God and did so for a limited time until God commanded the Prophet to end the practice.

So he's admitting that it was only during a "limited time" that the Mormons were "very righteous people"? Bwahahaha!

LMAO

You know, it's just so funny when people try to rationalize this stuff. It's like a field of land mines. You think you're stepping in the right direction when you say something only to realize you just blew your leg off.

I've noticed that apologetics must include the art of backpedaling (even though it's really hard to do with only one leg).

[_Yoda]

Funny you should mention that website; I visited it just this morning. Anyway, here's a funny little Freudian slip I caught:

The Book of Mormon clearly explains that sometimes God commands people to practice polygamy and other times he forbids it since only very righteous people can handle it. . . The Mormons practiced polygamy as commanded by God and did so for a limited time until God commanded the Prophet to end the practice.

So he's admitting that it was only during a "limited time" that the Mormons were "very righteous people"? Bwahahaha!

To follow up on this....This is a blatant contradiction of "the most righteous being saved for the last days". If WE are the most righteous, then why are we being forbidden from practicing it?

Land mines are going off in all directions! ;)

[_Sethbag]

I'd like to know how Mormons reconcile themselves with the idea that God would command Joseph Smith to marry and boink some other man's wife, when that man is not sterile nor impotent, with the justification that the Lord needs to raise up more children. What's the matter with the children these women were already having with their real husbands? Not good enough, perhaps? They didn't have the really awesome, super-cosmically great DNA of Joseph Smith?

And then, to top it off, Joseph was either shooting blanks, or else aborted the children, or else circumvented pregnancy using some form of birth control or technique, such that to this day the number of "seed" attributable to this practice, as commanded by the Lord, is woefully short given all the women he most likely had sex with.

This whole explanation is absurd on its face.

[_Who Knows]

Weird. On my mission, we told everyone that the reason for polygamy was because of the shortage of husbands to take care of all the women. That's even what the online missionary told me.

[_asbestosman]

I'd like to know how Mormons reconcile themselves with the idea that God would command Joseph Smith to marry and boink some other man's wife, when that man is not sterile nor impotent, with the justification that the Lord needs to raise up more children.

Sorry to disappoint, but I don't think that polygamy was because the Lord needs to raise up more children. In fact I did a biology report (at BYU) on a research paper showing that the fecundity of polygamists was lower than that of monogamists, If I recall correctly.

Perhaps raising up righteous seed had more to do with making the pioneers separate from the getiles in a very strong way--one that kinda forced them to bind together. So God set them up for their own persecution which in turn made them stronger? Yeah, it sounds crazy to me too and I'm not certain I'd justify it either, but I suppose it possible.

[_Sethbag]

Abman, you know there's a perfectly obvious way of looking at this that makes total and complete sense, unlike all the twisting and turning and mental gymnastics trying to justify it. What makes perfect sense is that Joseph Smith wanted to get in the sack with a lot of different women, and he had the example of the Old Testament prophets who practiced polygamy to give him the justification he needed.

At some point people need to step back and see the big picture, which is that the proposition that Joseph Smith made this stuff up makes total sense, and a lot of the evidence looks like we would expect it to look if he had really made it up. A lot of the apologetics, on the other hand, require mental gymnastics of the Olympian kind in order to kinda sorta make this look like it makes sense. At some point the lightbulb will go off in one's head. For me it was about two years ago. When will the lightbulb go off in your head?