Nauvoo Neighbor

Be Kind

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This is the 451st week, and we’re covering the priesthood session of the April 2006 General Conference.

This session is a good followup to last week’s session, where I talked about Latter-day Saint masculinity and it’s emphasis on the welfare of women and children. Patriarchy, at its best, is not about policing women. It’s about men policing other men for the benefit of women. Such as when you have the leader of an organized religion lament “hatred… closer to home” with one and only one concrete example: “fathers who rise in anger over small, inconsequential things and make wives weep and children fear.”

Latter-day Masculinity

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This is the 450th week, and we’re covering the Saturday afternoon session of the April 2006 General Conference.

There are very, very strong stereotypes of what a social conservative, patriarchal, hierarchical religion like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is supposed to teach about masculinity. And those stereotypes cannot survive contact with what our prophets and apostles actually teach us. Case in point: Nurturing Marriage, by then-Elder, now-President Nelson.

He opens the talk with this anecdote:

New Game: Ridiculous Fundamentalist Apostate Scripture Interpretation

Our objective in this game is to become what Joseph Smith called “accusers of the brethren.” We are going to apply fundamentalist logic to scripture so that we can formulate accusations against God’s ordained servants.

On polygamy-denial and autism

One of my favorite YouTube content creators is nuclear physicist Kyle Hill, and some time ago he posted a great video about his autism:

Years ago I listened to a psychologist’s review of autism markers, the lengthy questionnaire that psychologists use to assess whether someone is on the autism spectrum. I was amazed at how many of the markers applied to me, though many significant markers didn’t. I’ve never personally gone in for an assessment, but if I did, I imagine I would be told that I have a significant number of traits in common with autistics, and if I’m not on the spectrum then I’m very close to it.

Another Advantage of Church Government

Dan’s recent article referencing the Chad Daybell/Lori Vallow trials makes some excellent points, and one of them is how the Church council system helps moderate and focus leadership, especially how the seniority system acculturates any Prophet-President into this system to moderate any cult-like behaviors that we do see in certain Evangelical and even non-Christian communities. (See: James Jones’ People’s Temple, Heaven’s Gate, Antifa—all “secular” religious cults, in my opinion.) But there was an additional point that occurred to me when I was talking with a friend this morning who was closely following the trial.

Multiple Mortal Probations, and Lack of Discernment

The following are some YouTube clips that give some context to the fabulist false-prophetic culture that led to the crimes of Chad Daybell. If you’re not familiar with his story, it is covered in the Netflix documentary, Sins of Our Mother.

Warning: it is a very twisted rabbit hole that will mess with your head.

How it began

Eric Smith was a member of Chad Daybell’s inner circle, along with Julie Rowe and others.

Here, Eric recalls going “outside the box” before his excommunication for teaching the idea of multiple mortal probations:

The iceberg of the Saudi gold plates

Conversations about the Saudi gold plates are like any conversations where there are mismatches in context. To illustrate, I have created the iceberg of this particular controversy.

The mental gymnastics of revelation denial

Church leaders aren’t receiving revelation!

Lol.

Here are the gymnastics involved in accepting that claim:

The Imaginary Deuteronomists

I enjoy Margaret Barker’s work, but I take it with quite a few grains of salt. One of the basic assumptions of her work is that the Hebrew bible was corrupted by a group of people called the “deuteronomists.” This is derived from a theory in biblical studies, articulated in the work of Martin Noth beginning in the 1940s.

Noth imagined that a single deuteronomist was responsible for producing an ideologically slanted history from the book of Deuteronomy to 2 Kings. Later scholars ran with his idea and found “deuteronomic” influence elsewhere, eventually seeing a deuteronomist conspiracy in the time of Josiah and beyond.

Like anything in biblical studies, what started as a simple discrete theory was turned into THE GRAND EXPLANATION for huge numbers of things we see in the bible. And again, it’s a core assumption in the work of Margaret Barker.

But is it true?

David Butler, Margaret Barker, and the scam golden plates

“How could the recently-found gold plates reflect so much of the findings of David Butler?”

The answer is, the forger probably doesn’t know the work of David Butler. But people who are attached to the work of Margaret Barker will tend to see her narratives validated in the work of the forger.