asbestosman wrote:Hi Tidejwe, was I the one who referred you here?
Yes my friend, it was you who got me to come here. I look forward to new discussions with new people. I've gotten to the point in most of my other forums where I've already discussed nearly everything with everyone in there that it's nearly become redundant and unedifying, so it will be nice to have new people to discuss with for a while. :)
I can vouch for Tidejwe. He really does hold unorthodox views of Mormonism. In fact, I hear that his dad told him to stop talking about the SLC mall when he was with family over the Christmas week.
Ah yes, my parents and I have a lot of tension on many such matters, though this sort of thing happens nearly every other time I go home. I've been silenced many a times on such fun matters like pornography, church finances, archives, historical contradictions, etc and best of all being anti-Romney. Heh, good times. Sometimes my mom actually starts pacing back and forth all red-faced and mad that I don't agree with traditional Mormon cultural views. I really think...er...KNOW...the way she raised me to believe Mormonism is ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE. Not sure how much of a story there is to tell on any of the examples. It goes like this: I bring up something controversial to traditional Mormonism/culture and my parents FLIP OUT. If others are present then I am quite often quickly silenced. It can be fun, but it can be EXTREMELY tedious. I've seen them slowly change their understanding in the church to be a bit more healthy interpretation though, so it's worth it. Not sure what good a whole new thread on the matter would do as that about covers it. :)
Anyhow, on topic: good question. In fact, I just talked to my wife about the question of when the prophet is speaking as prophet. She believes it is always. I said that God probably lets them do their own things at times and then brought up the black priesthood ban. She thought it was still of God, but our fault for not being ready.
Well, I must say I definitely disagree with your wife's opinion on that matter. Having baptized over 100 black people into this church I became OBSESSED with learning and collecting EVERYTHING I could find about the ban and have been working on a compiling a book on the matter for about 7 years now. Through all my research, I am of the opinion God had nothing to do with the implementation of the priesthood ban other than to simply allow it to take place. We will get around to a discussion on that topic with some of my insights one of these days, I expect.
Suffice it to say that it is IMPOSSIBLE for a prophet to always be speaking as a prophet. Let us consider:
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Example 2 of X:
B.Y. even went so far as to say that blacks would not get the priesthood until AFTER the second coming, millennium, etc had all passed and AFTER EVERY white person (at least every white person which would eventually ever receive it) has received it first. He said that if the church ever did change this policy and gave it to them ("Negroes") BEFORE any of this happened, then the priesthood would be taken away from the world again and the whole church would go to destruction and we would receive the curse of Cain upon ourselves and be in apostasy (Brigham Young Addresses, dated Feb. 5, 1852, a similar statement was also made in JoD 11:272).
So your wife is left with a couple choices now...either prophets aren't always speaking as prophets for the Lord and can have incorrect opinions (I favor this choice), and in this case Brigham Young had an opinion and was wrong; or the church is in apostasy just as BY claimed would happen when the church gave the priesthood to blacks before the Millennium; or option 3, it was never true in the first place. Those are the only realistic conclusions/choices. Either way, your wife's opinion is impossible. You can't KEEP your cake and eat it too. I really fail to see how such people can actually believe that every word that comes from the prophet is true. LDS history shows this to be impossible even when you take leaps and bounds to twist things to an unending degree of ridiculousness. I can understand when the ignorant believe it...but how can those educated in church history try to claim such a belief is even possible?
Ask your wife if Brigham Young was a prophet who always spoke for God as a prophet at all times, then look up those sources and read them to her verbatim. Then ask her if we're in apostasy now, or if it's possible that "prophets" are wrong sometimes. OK, so maybe there's a better way to convince her without it turning into a confrontation...but it could just be so EPIC!
Let me guess...they were ALL "scribal errors"... [/sarcasm]