NOM

alas wrote: ↑Sun Jun 11, 2017 9:12 am

Thoughtful wrote: ↑Sun Jun 11, 2017 7:49 am

Give It Time wrote: ↑Sun Jun 11, 2017 6:11 am

Good points about mastery and magic, thoughtful. The area where bishops have ten thousand hours of practice is in serving the church.

Another thing, I believe possible to get a spiritual prompting about something, but I believe the prompting is more easily felt and understood by someone who already has the capability. For example, a surgeon needing to solve a thorny medical problem. I think inspiration is more likely to come to the surgeon than to the farmer.

It seems the church encourages 10,000 hours of "obedience to leaders". Imagine leaders having 10,000 hours of counseling, management, human rights, or some other relevant training for clergy positions?

Besides experience in obedience to leaders, bishops do get some training (very little, but once a month training meetings) on how to help people repent by using shaming and the church promising that if you are more obedient that the church will forgive you and everything will be hunky dory.

So, when a rape victim, a child abuse victim, or battered wife wants to know why God would allow bad things to happen when he/she was being obedient, his only tool is to shame them into repenting.

We really don't talk much in the church about why bad things happen to good people. Someone from another religion can write a book about it, but Mormons are really hung up on the idea that if you are obedient, then God will protect you. So, the bishop sees his job for someone that life has just poop on, he sees his job as to find out what they did wrong so he can help them repent. But the abused child, the abused wife, the rape victim has probably already been searching for what they did wrong that God would let something terrible happen. So, since they are already looking for how this was their fault, it feeds right into what the bishop sees as his job. The bishop can intellectually know that victimization is not the victim's fault, but there is still the idea of what they did that "allowed it to happen."

It is like when someone's car is stollen and the cops ask if the victim left the keys in the ignition. Then, if that was the case with theft, the cops says, "well, that was stupid." But he STILL treats it as a crime. With theft, people recognize the difference between stupid and deserving it. They don't tell the car theft victim that he must have let the guy borrow the car, so there was no crime. But if it is a battered wife, who burned the toast, and her husband beat her for it, breaking her ribs, then that same cop will tell her to go home and try harder to be a better wife (true story) She deserved to be beaten, while the guy with the stollen car was stupid but didn't deserve his car to be stollen, the beaten wife deserves it.

It is still the difference between stranger rape and acquaintance rape. If the victim knows her rapist, then there is an assumption that the victim did something to "lead him on" or even "to piss him off". One of my clients was 90, and her rapist was someone who often did deliveries, because she was house bound. But she KNEW him. So, after he broke into her home and raped her and beat her and left her for dead, (details have been changed) the cops asked her what she had done to piss the guy off. They assumed, that because this serial rapist had beaten her so badly (he also had killed one victim) that it was her fault that he picked her as his next victim. Had nothing to do with the fact that he knew she was disabled and couldn't fight back.

If the cops who ARE trained do things like this, imagine how untrained bishops act and the things they say.

My first task with many of my LDS clients was to undo the damage and self blame that the bishop had done. Bishops literally went looking for what the beaten wife or rape victim had done to deserve what happened, and then advised her to repent. Well, it is impossible to repent of something you didn't choose. So, most of my clients had struggled with it for a while, before they figured out that talking to the bishop was only making them feel worse. A person might be able to repent of "stupid" but with battered wives, the batterer will find some reason to be angry. They invent reasons then justify their anger, so no matter how perfect the wife is, the batterer will find some reason, because it is often stress other places in his life he is upset about and he takes it out on the wife because she is there, and if he hit his boss he would get fired, so he hits his wife instead. Or the rape victim can repent of going to his room, but she can't repent of the sex because she didn't choose it. And she can't repent of the physical violence done to her. Trying to just digs her in deeper to the feelings of helplessness. She can't heal the breach of trust or the trauma of physical violence while trauma and violence are being denied in the bishop's efforts to get her to repent. The bishop is essentially telling her, or the battered wife, that she SHOULD be able to control things that are not under her control. If she should be able to control things and fails, then she is a horrible person. So, the self blame and feelings of helplessness spiral out of control, until she can say to herself that her bishop is full of it, and go get some real help.

Ask me how much working as a social worker in Utah destroyed my faith in Mormon bishops. All of my Mormon clients had self blame issues that were compounded by Mormon attitudes of God protects the righteous and/or those feelings further coumpouned by bishop's poor attempts to help. My nonMormon clients never had those issues (even one who was molested by her preacher father.) even when I was laughed at by military people for not drinking, I never felt so embarrassed and ashamed to be Mormon.

SeeNoEvil wrote: ↑Sat Jun 10, 2017 2:41 pm I was in a ward in Ca. once years ago where they called a man to be bishop and his wife (who I visit taught) to be RS president and they had been inactive for years. He was a salesman and she was a SAHM to 5 kids, 5 and under. Zero training or qualifications.

Grace2Daisy wrote: ↑Sun Jun 18, 2017 8:42 am

SeeNoEvil wrote: ↑Sat Jun 10, 2017 2:41 pm I was in a ward in Ca. once years ago where they called a man to be bishop and his wife (who I visit taught) to be RS president and they had been inactive for years. He was a salesman and she was a SAHM to 5 kids, 5 and under. Zero training or qualifications.

I was on the HC when the SP asked us to sustain a young man in his late 20's had SEVEN kids under the age of 11. I questioned the calling but sustained it. A week later the new bishop asked for two counselors to be sustained, both in their 20's, one with five kids and the other with four kids (that's right - 16 kids under the age of 11). I emphatically fought the sustaining, for several reasons (the response I got):

- All three were elders and needed to be ordained HPs and it would leave a hole in the EQ. (there are always new elders to take up the slack)
- None of them have ever served in a bishopric, can we at least have a counselor who has? (many times this is the best)
- There was no experience in dealing with teens. (it was not long ago they were teens)
- There is no experience in dealing with the older members. (they can take care of themselves)
- The hardship this will place on their wives is unconscionable. (their wives are strong and will do just fine)

This bishopric was a six year disaster for the teens, for the elderly, for the bishoprics families, for the entire ward. The bishop asked to extend his time served to six years rather than five, and it was granted. This bishop basically disfellowshipped four YM for sexual impurities, and yet he got his YWP pregnant and he was excommunicated (that's another story for another time).

I can tell you from experience, these callings are not from God. . . . . . he is not that self-absorbed in wanting to punish members of a ward and families.