Oaks - Church leaders are always right.

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_Kishkumen
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Re: Oaks - Church leaders are always right.

Post by _Kishkumen »

Stem wrote:Nailed it, kishkumen. I agree with your example. I was more general above when I commented, but I will say the policy change, though claimed to be revelation, is not from God as far as I can discern.


As jaded as I obviously am, this hit me like a lightning stroke. It was devastating. Only two Mormon events have rocked me to the core over the past two decades. One was the announcement that the LDS Church was supporting Prop 8 in California. The other was the November Policy. One shoe dropped, then the other. Now I am done.

The LDS Church made it easy for me to leave. Too bad that in doing so they hurt so many innocent people.
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
_mentalgymnast
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Re: Oaks - Church leaders are always right.

Post by _mentalgymnast »

Kishkumen wrote:
mentalgymnast wrote:What are some examples that you can think of, say within the last three decades or so, where the GA's have unitedly said one thing and/or the First Presidency has done so independent of the Twelve Apostles, and the Holy Ghost has told/revealed to you something different and you are 100% sure your revelation came from God?

A personal example.


November Policy. I have absolute conviction that it is not of God. It came to me as a spiritual revelation and was confirmed by holy scripture. It was at this point that I realized, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the LDS Church was no longer guided by divine inspiration and that its authority had been taken from it.


OK. Don't take me wrong. Just trying to understand...up to that point you DID believe the LDS Church was guided by divine inspiration and had divine authority (even with your issues dealing with the PoF)...or am I reading you wrong?

Regards,
MG
_Kishkumen
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Re: Oaks - Church leaders are always right.

Post by _Kishkumen »

mentalgymnast wrote:OK. Don't take me wrong. Just trying to understand...up to that point you DID believe the LDS Church was guided by divine inspiration and had divine authority (even with your issues dealing with the PoF)...or am I reading you wrong?


Up to that point I felt like the jury was out, so to speak. I have not believed for some time that the general authorities were prophets in the sense they portray themselves, but I did feel like they were susceptible to receiving inspiration and that their position in the church made that inspiration binding, in a sense, on the members of the LDS Church. We could jump down the rabbit hole of what it is I believe or don't believe, but that would take a very, very long time and bore most people to tears.

To make a long story short, I believe that priesthood is both an offering and a form of service. You make an offering to God in the performance of service to others. I believe that this is what is really behind the restoration of the priesthood, not angelic administrations. As an offering and a service, Christian priesthood must conform to basic Christian principles. Once those principles have been violated too much, amen to the priesthood of those people.

In the LDS Church I believe that the presiding authority of the priesthood is gone. This does not invalidate all priesthood altogether. People still receive the priesthood and exercise their Christian service as they make an offering to God. What is missing is the authority to judge the members and lead the Church righteously. I imagine the LDS Church can coast on a long time in this apostasy with many people failing to notice.

This was, after all, some time in coming. The Church started down this road in the early '90s, when they decided to involve themselves in the culture wars, and now the evil fruits of that bad decision have come to fruition. Despite their more or less subtle attempts to counsel the members against voting for Trump, Mormons did vote for him in fairly high numbers. That is where the leadership of the Brethren took them. Many members sold out their Christianity in the same way the vast majority of Evangelicals did. I believe you can chalk up the mass apostasy to the very same thing.
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
_deacon blues
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Re: Oaks - Church leaders are always right.

Post by _deacon blues »

So would you say the LDS Church is following a path similar to the one taken by the Catholic Church?
_Maksutov
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Re: Oaks - Church leaders are always right.

Post by _Maksutov »

Is ecclesiolatry a word?
"God" is the original deus ex machina. --Maksutov
_Kishkumen
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Re: Oaks - Church leaders are always right.

Post by _Kishkumen »

Maksutov wrote:Is ecclesiolatry a word?


https://www.thefreedictionary.com/ecclesiolatry
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
_Kishkumen
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Re: Oaks - Church leaders are always right.

Post by _Kishkumen »

deacon blues wrote:So would you say the LDS Church is following a path similar to the one taken by the Catholic Church?


It sounds kind of like Mormon propaganda about the apostasy of the early Christian Church, but I think that propaganda is bad history.
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
_mentalgymnast
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Re: Oaks - Church leaders are always right.

Post by _mentalgymnast »

Kishkumen wrote:
mentalgymnast wrote:OK. Don't take me wrong. Just trying to understand...up to that point you DID believe the LDS Church was guided by divine inspiration and had divine authority (even with your issues dealing with the PoF)...or am I reading you wrong?


Up to that point I felt like the jury was out, so to speak. I have not believed for some time that the general authorities were prophets in the sense they portray themselves, but I did feel like they were susceptible to receiving inspiration and that their position in the church made that inspiration binding, in a sense, on the members of the LDS Church. We could jump down the rabbit hole of what it is I believe or don't believe, but that would take a very, very long time and bore most people to tears.

To make a long story short, I believe that priesthood is both an offering and a form of service. You make an offering to God in the performance of service to others. I believe that this is what is really behind the restoration of the priesthood, not angelic administrations. As an offering and a service, Christian priesthood must conform to basic Christian principles. Once those principles have been violated too much, amen to the priesthood of those people.

In the LDS Church I believe that the presiding authority of the priesthood is gone. This does not invalidate all priesthood altogether. People still receive the priesthood and exercise their Christian service as they make an offering to God. What is missing is the authority to judge the members and lead the Church righteously. I imagine the LDS Church can coast on a long time in this apostasy with many people failing to notice.

This was, after all, some time in coming. The Church started down this road in the early '90s, when they decided to involve themselves in the culture wars, and now the evil fruits of that bad decision have come to fruition. Despite their more or less subtle attempts to counsel the members against voting for Trump, Mormons did vote for him in fairly high numbers. That is where the leadership of the Brethren took them. Many members sold out their Christianity in the same way the vast majority of Evangelicals did. I believe you can chalk up the mass apostasy to the very same thing.


Thank you for revealing a bit more about yourself. Sometime I would be interested in knowing what you actually believe in somewhat more detail.

Regards,
MG
_Analytics
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Re: Oaks - Church leaders are always right.

Post by _Analytics »

mentalgymnast wrote:Thank you for sharing, Analytics. I read this through a few times. Interesting.

You do believe it was God that told you to leave the church then? I can think of others that believe this to be the case. One of the high profile folks being Lynn Wilder and her family. She believes they were led out by the Holy Spirit.

http://christiannews.net/2013/10/23/for ... istianity/

Did you remain a Christian?

Regards,
MG


You’re welcome.

I don’t like labels. I could say I believe “God” led me out of the church, but what does “God” even mean? A guy who turns knobs to fine-tune the creation of universes? The light within each of us? A glorified homo sapiens that lives near Kolob?

Semantics aside, I’ll do my best to answer your question and will refer to God in the sense that God is real and meaningful to me. God gave me conflicting mesages, just as he gave conflicting commandments to Adam. It took some time to realize the true nature of my situation. I wasn’t a sheep who needed to follow a shepard to be protected from the wolves (until being led to the slaughterhouse at the time of the sheperd’s choosing). I was a man who needed to take responsiblity for his own life, make his own choices, and own them. I realized the purpose of life wasn’t to spend my days and nights as a sychophant trying to figure out what God wanted me to do so I could snap to it. I needed to take responsibility for my own life—I had the full authority to define my own life’s purpose. In fact, I had the moral obligation to do so.

Adam’s dilema is the perfect metaphor for how I felt. Adam didn’t receive a direct revelation telling him to eat of the fruit. Instead, he had an epiphany. He saw what he needed to do, and then he did it.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

-Yuval Noah Harari
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