A product of his time

[Hagoth]

Question: in what way does the Mormon church claim EVERY one of its members are superior to EVERY other person on earth?

We will answer this shortly, but please consider the following:

In part two of the Mormon Stories Rodney Meldrum interview, Meldrum repeatedly fell back on the old apologetic standard, "he was a product of his times." Why did Brigham Young endorse slavery and deny black people the blessings of the priesthood and temple ordinances? He was a product of his time. Why did modern apostles and prophets say that dark skin is a punishment for pre-mortal iniquity? They were products of their time. Why did Mormon, Abraham, and Moses say dark skin is a curse for sinfulness? Even they were products of their time. Why did Joseph Smith marry 14-year olds? Yup, everybody was doing it (entirely untrue, by the way).

So...

Question: in what way does the Mormon church claim EVERY one of its members is superior to EVERY other person on earth?

Answer: although others have the Light of Christ to nudge them in the right direction from time to time, ONLY Mormons have the full-time companionship of the Holy Ghost to take them by the hand and definitively guide them in the righteous path.

So, assuming that racism and slavery are wrong, how is it possible for a person who not only has the companionship of the Holy Ghost, but is also the foreordained mouthpiece of God on earth possibly be a product of their time? How could such an enlightened person who knows the mind of God say something like, "Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so" (Journal of Discourses 10:110).

Of course, you can always fall back to blaming the scribes, which Meldrum also does. So, the God-appointed scribes (sometimes even via scripture), who also have the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost, manage to write down the exact opposite of what the prophet meant. It then gets reviewed and published by church leaders and bound into handsome leather volumes to be quoted as scripture from then on. And somehow God had no control over any of that. Nor could the Holy Ghost be of any assistance.

Please tell me what I am overlooking.

Meldrum interview: https://youtu.be/n_xhvTHev6E

[græy]

I don't think you're overlooking anything.

Prophets have been wrong on some of the most meaningful and basic parts of being Christlike to some of the most vulnerable groups of people for centuries now.

If they can't do any better than the people in society around them, then they are no better, no more enlightened, no more guided, no different than anyone else around them. They do not deserve to be lauded and should not be blindly followed.

[stuck]

Yeah, I guess that's the rationale that those who still believe have to do rather than really think critically about things. Believers continue to believe because of special experiences that they had. For Meldrum it was his spiritual witness that he got in the MTC when he prayed about the Book of Mormon. Mine was sort of a "miracle" of when 2 investigators that we were praying received answers to their prayers after we fasted and prayed for them to get answers to their prayers and want to be baptized. Some things (coincidences) are hard to explain--but it is possible that we prepared them to receive those answers and it could have been just a product of that. Meldrum and others really wanted to know if the BoM was true and when they got their "answer", it satisfied them. Some of these experiences are so powerful that it totally convinces them that it was from God. Yet, it is also possible to feel elevated emotion in non-religious settings such as movies and so on.

Any other thoughts on Mormonism's epistemology of knowing truth by the Spirit?

[moksha]

I've suspected Mormons are out of synch with the current time. More like they are artifacts of the past. The Brethren seem to have sensibilities ranging between the time of Cotton Mather and the witch trial in Salem, clear up to 1930.

[deacon blues]

I was taught to think that prophets were supposed to be ahead of their time. LDS prophets are not. Even Joseph Smith, who had some progressive ideas, seemed to focus on the the Old Testament world for his inspiration. That's where some of his kookiest ideas come from. For example: why does the restoration of all things have to include polygamy and the sons of Aaron offering sacrifices- animal sacrifices??
Brigham Young was good at organizing things, but his thinking was based on older models; Camp of Israel, Reformation, etc.

[nibbler]

If they can't do any better than the people in society around them, then they are no better, no more enlightened, no more guided, no different than anyone else around them. They do not deserve to be lauded and should not be blindly followed.

Do any better is a higher bar than what the record shows. "If they can't lag only three decades behind the people in society around them..." may be closer to what I've seen.

If the church were out ahead of the world, people would reject the church. It only makes sense that the revelation comes after the world has done the heavy lifting and the saints are prepared by society to accept change*.

*Acceptance of change may require kicking, screaming, doubling down, tripling down, a threat to the church's overall survival, and two to three decades.

[alas]

If they can't do any better than the people in society around them, then they are no better, no more enlightened, no more guided, no different than anyone else around them. They do not deserve to be lauded and should not be blindly followed.

Do any better is a higher bar than what the record shows. "If they can't lag only three decades behind the people in society around them..." may be closer to what I've seen.

If the church were out ahead of the world, people would reject the church. It only makes sense that the revelation comes after the world has done the heavy lifting and the saints are prepared by society to accept change*.

*Acceptance of change may require kicking, screaming, doubling down, tripling down, a threat to the church's overall survival, and two to three decades.

You left off “the death of some of the men who sit in big red chairs.”

[nibbler]

You left off “the death of some of the men who sit in big red chairs.”

"Science progresses one funeral at a time."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

Perhaps it rings even more true for the church than it does for science because the church is not allowed to progress any faster than the one man at the top allows.

[blazerb]

I don't think you're overlooking anything.

Prophets have been wrong on some of the most meaningful and basic parts of being Christlike to some of the most vulnerable groups of people for centuries now.

If they can't do any better than the people in society around them, then they are no better, no more enlightened, no more guided, no different than anyone else around them. They do not deserve to be lauded and should not be blindly followed.

Even more than being no better, their confidence in the rightness of their views and the inability to hear what anyone else might contribute makes them considerably worse than most around them, in my opinion.

[Not Buying It]

"A product of his time" never works for me when I know there were people who rose above that who were living at the same time. In a time when there were abolitionists who risked a lot to fight slavery, I'm not giving Brigham Young a pass on this. God has a weird aversion to revealing things to his "prophets" that will keep the Church out of trouble 100 years down the line. But He seems to have no problem getting them to sleep with lots of women or stockpile piles of cash.