Mormon Open Forum

It’s clear that most LDS heterosexual men are clueless about how to attract gals, date and how to make that lead to finding a compatible wife. Having had several relationships, opportunitities for marriage and getting married to my soulmate before age 25 a couple of decades back, I now offer my knowhow on this subject to the present generation of young single heterosexual LDS male horn dogs out there. Warning before reading further, there’s a reason I posted this at Mormon Open Forum rather than just making it a comment elsewhere.

First, accept that men and women will never understand each other. You need to go with what works regarding the ladies and not question the why. Most women do not understand it is virtually impossible for a heterosexual guy to be close to a women without things getting sexual, and that most of us can’t maintain a close relationship with a woman who’s not interested in us in that way. So your job is to find out the gal’s intentions early on and along the way so as not to waste time on dead end relationships that never have a prayer of progressing to marriage. The game is harder for with-the-program LDS guys because they’re not looking to get in the sac by the third or forth date and dumping before getting dumped if the relationship isn’t headed in that direction. But there are ways to know if she wants you, and you already know what they are. Likewise, there are ways to find out early on if it’s a dead end “just friends” situation.

Now to attracting women who are at least superficially into you in the first place (that’s the first step): Dump the domesticated nice guy and be your own man. Most women, yes, including most LDS women, are subconsciously attracted to bad boys who challenge authority, think for themselves, can’t be bossed around, etc. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about on this. Good Joe Mormon RM submissive types are dime a dozen in the church. Break out of that mold. Push the standards, be cool, wear your hair a little longer, don’t shave so often, sprinkle in some well placed coarse language into speech, stay in good physical shape and pack it tight and to the right to let women know you’re comfortable with your sexuality, etc. Now, treating women badly is a step that can lead to lots of dates, but it’s a bad move if you’re looking for a serious relationship leading to marriage. In other words, it’s a bad boy image you want to convey, not actually become a bad boy.

As far as my advice about sticking to the image only and not actually becoming a bad boy, treating women badly, etc, there were a few years I did cross that line. You’ll get lots of dates (and more if you’re looking for/need it), but not real relationships. If you’re marriage minded, stick to the image only and save yourself a lot of time and grief.

And don’t think too hard about this. We’ll never understand women, just like they’ll never understand us. The bad boy thing works. Leave the why to the shrinks. Does it work for any woman you might want? — no, of course not. But it works really well in general, and it works extremely well in the church where there are so few bad boys.

Happy dating

Fred the Younger says:

Can Reform Mormonism work?

It strikes me that many bloggernacklers and other Mormons who crave open discourse on the Internet are really Reform Mormons or even New Order Mormons (although NOMs strike me more as jackmormons, inactive or afraid to leave for various reasons).

There are so many posts on various blogs these days on why church is boring, uninspiring, too long, too restrictive, etc.

Do you ever see a day when Reform Mormonism will be a bigger draw than the institutional church? Why, or why not?

Deborah writes:

Mormons are everywhere in the news, it seems. From converts leaving in droves to inflated membership numbers to blacks and the priesthood, they’ve been there from coast to coast.

Now here in DC there’s an article about singles wards! Single Mormons are about as peculiar as they come (and I say that fondly). Here’s a refreshing, candid account of what it’s like to be LDS and single from a smart single lady in the capital city. Read it and weep!

Cindy Jensen says:

Gay members of the Church have it bad, as they say. They can be members in good standing if they never have a fulfilling relationship. What a trade.

However, luckily, they can still function as good members if they agree to celibacy. I have a good friend (single) who’s a temple worker in his 30s and never plans to marry or change his homosexuality (good luck, R.!).

People in the Church have conflicting views on what is allowed in terms of worthiness/temple-worthiness for gays. Some say two gay people holding hands would be breaking the Law of Chastity. Huh???? Does that mean two unmarried heteros would break the Law of Chastity if they held hands?

So how far in a friendship can a gay person go without breaking the Law of Chastity? Kissing? Cuddling? Anything but intercourse?

Jenna says:

I posted a simple question on another LDS blog. It was not posted, and I was subsequently banned.

My question is merely this:

Has the Church begun to seek inactives to “discipline”, and will they continue to do so in the manner that they are going after scholar Simon Southerton?

Brother Southerton has been inactive for seven years but is being called in on charges of adultery. He has since reconciled with his wife, and was separated at the time he was living with another woman.

If the Church went after every fornicator and adulterer, membership would dwindle to maybe one million, most of them children.

Adrianne of mormondiscussion.blogspot.com says:

i have a question…it’s been bothering me for some time…

if we are supposed to obey the law of the land (AoF 12) and the law of the land says not to discriminate, then why are we as a church able to work against homosexual marriage? A (much much) more in-depth question/idea on this is at my website at but i’d be interested in hearing some reponse on why we work so hard to fight against it?

i think that would be an interesting topic. esp since homosexuality coincides with FMH’s topic.

Well, I may have ruffled some feathers over at Nine Moons with a comment I left at a great post by Ned Flanders http://www.ninemoons.typepad.com/home/2005/07/missionary_phil.html. Ned’s post focuses on the need for missionaries to know more about the culture, history, art, literature, etc of the area they’ve been assigned (In many parts of North American, that would be difficult given the diversity here, but I digress). Here’s my controversial comment:

“Great post. Let’s face it; most of our apostles aren’t up to the job of running a worldwide church. Our mission program is a pathetic joke run on autopilot with a few Band-Aids like the new discussions. Most GA’s don’t give a rat’s ass about the efficacy of the program or the missionaries. If they did, it would be on a continuous improvement program like everything else they do care about is. We really need a mechanism for old worn out GA’s to step down like Lehi did to yield to a new generation of visionary leadership that will fix these things.”

A Capt Jack concurred w/ my comment, but Rusty and Steve H somewhat took me to task for being overly critical or at least for using inflammatory language. Because my comment is a general complaint about our missionary program and fossilized GA’s, as opposed to Ned’s more focused topic, rather than threadjack by responding further there, I decided to flesh out my complaints here at Mormon Open Forum, the bleed valve of the Bloggernacle.

The essence of my negative comment above is actually positive. I am truly convinced we can do much better job rather than continue following the same failed path, generation after generation, that just doesn’t work. I have a son on a mission now. It’s appalling to me how little the program has changed for the better since I served. And the missionary program was an anachronism even then. Before my son left, I read a letter his mission pres sent him about the importance of “exact obedience” being critical to success, yada, yada, yada. You know, à la Drawing on the Powers of Heaven crap of do A+B+C = lots of baptisms. Yes, I bit my tongue, because the obedience thing is probably good advice when one is in the training phase of one’s mission. But I did explain to him that once he was into the program, being an effective and happy (as opposed to totally obedient) missionary can get complicated.

As I’ve commented elsewhere in the Bloggernacle, I loved the people I was honored to serve and led my mission in effectiveness. I openly attributed my relative success to largely ignoring mission rules and teaching methods that didn’t fit the people and their culture. I was labeled a complete but lucky pagan by many “arrow” missionaries. As an example, in July and August, when virtually the whole country was on vacation and eating dinner at 10 p.m., my comps and I would often be out teaching people until 1 a.m. as the wine flowed freely (not for us) to facilitate discussion. Obviously we weren’t out the door at 9 a.m. in the summer. My slogan was work hard, play hard, and many a Friday night “pagan” missionaries would gather to play poker and have “molaroff” parties (chocolate frosted shortbread cookie eating contests) just to maintain our sanity. Those parties were much more invigorating towards our true callings than any Zone Conference.

The point of that digression is I did things on my mission for the benefit of the people I served and my fellow missionary volunteers that were at complete odds with church instruction. Many a mission Pres would have sent me home in a heartbeat for my insubordination, regardless of the offsetting effectiveness or good intentions of my innovations. In other words, our church leaders, either through inaction or action often can thwart the very objectives they set. To those of us in the “real world” it’s obvious if we’re assigned an objective, and the plan, tools or training we have don’t fit the tasks needed to complete the objective, it’s time to immediately change the game plan. The GA’s seem perfectly content just to passively accept continued failure.

Some other complaints: I’ve never met an RM who served in India, a country of over 1 billion living souls! If we have any missionaries there it’s far too few. Yes, I know there’s religious violence there, but since when did that stop us before? I’ll tell you what, rather than this “raise the bar” BS, we could just take all the former fornicating youth and send them to the hazardous duty countries like India. I was one of those bad boys, and I made a great missionary baptizing several people and finding several others that joined later and that was in Western Europe, considered a mission hell hole by many LDS. And then there’s the other super populous country, China. Yes, the Chinese government isn’t yet enlightened enough to move toward freedom of religion, but there are many things we could be doing to encourage the process. Then there’s our completely ineffective methods we use in the countries we’re already in like having our bike riding missionaries wear that dorky white dress shirt w/ tie and sometime w/ suit jacket. Honestly, would you want to talk to two cultish looking weirdo geeky dorks about anything? I’m all for some kind of missionary uniform that fits a particular country’s culture, but we’ve locked into really stupid period clothing for our poor missionaries. I remember finding more people to teach on the golf course in Europe on P-day than any other day of the week; I wonder why? In short, the GA’s are just a sleep at the switch and brain dead when it comes to running an effective missionary program.

So there it is, a missionary program frozen in a time wrap when so much else about the church has continuously improved. This is so much better a church overall than it was a generation ago. It’s obvious to me the GA’s care about some stuff and not other stuff. But missionary work is the primary responsibility of the apostles, and they are failing at their core responsibility.

An effective missionary program is a very high mental energy thing, that has to take into account a lot of local/national issues, etc, and old men of understandably diminished capacity just aren’t up to the task. The best missionaries add to the faith of others w/o tearing down what they already have. Saint Patrick, for example, converts an entire nation to Christianity in one generation, but would his methods have worked anywhere but Ireland at that time? I doubt it. So, to cut to the chase, my real beef is we have no retirement tradition for worn out apostles.

To the older apostles: early in the BofM father Lehi sets an example of stepping down to yield leadership to a new generation. So we already have a precedent for what you need to do. If you’re waiting for some word from the Lord, he has already given it to you. In other words, it’s ok to retire when you’re no longer up to the task. Draw a pension; you’ve more than earned it. You can do light duty church service if you care to, but yield the authority to younger people with the energy and vision the Lord needs to get the job done.

Owing to the recent Gospel Doctrine lesson on D&C 89, the Word of Wisdom, there have been various discussions regarding its history and application. Here are a few additional historical points of interest regarding the WofW that didnt end up being discussed.

1) Why did colonial Americans drink tea, coffee, and fermented drinks in the first place? Well, obviously, there were stimulant effects associated with the caffeine or alcohol. But, aside from that, there is a less obvious reason: the water simply wasnt safe to drink. Today, clean water is taken for granted. Back then, clean water was not common. They had no understanding of microbiology, and did not undertand what was making them sick until the 1870’s.

Cholera and typhoid dysentary, as well as other waterborne pathogens, were major killers, and remained so until the early 1900s when municipal water treatment became commonplace.

Boiling the water to make tea or coffee killed waterborne pathogens, and the alcohol in fermented drinks killed waterborne pathogens as well. The colonials knew full well what made them sick and what didnt, and they acted accordingly. It was common practice at the time to mix some fermented drink with water and fruit juice, creating punches or “slings”. This serves to explain why Johnny Appleseed was such a popular guy, as apple cider ferments very easily and the climate and environs of colonial America were particularly well suited to growing apples.

Sure, people could get a kick or a buzz off the stuff if they drank enough, but it was also a simple matter of survival. Dirty water kills people, and boiling it or adding a little alcohol takes care of what was killing people. We know now that boiling water kills the pathogens, but back then people didnt know that, so the only time they boiled it was to put something into it, like coffee or tea.

2) The first three verses of D&C 89 were not part of the original revelation. Note the “Thus saith the Lord…” part starts in v. 4. The preceding verses 1-3 were an introduction, presumably added by Smith, which appeared in the 1835 D&C separately in italics. It was incorporated into the versified text by Orson Pratt for the 1876 edition D&C, nobody is really sure why. It may have been because the heading was concatenated with the text of the revelation in the Kirtland Revelation Book, or it may have been because of the lenient attitude the early Church took towards moderate consumption of the proscribed substances.

As such is the case, it is plain the introductory part of D&C 89:1-3 is in fact NOT part of the revelation, it is a comment by Smith letting early Church members off the hook as far as strict observation of the prohibitions is concerned. The revelation from the Lord is a strict prohibition, it was Smith who moderated that strict prohibition, not the Lord.

Today, people like to point out that the revelation is not a commandment of the Lord because of v. 1-3. Thats simply not true. It is a commandment. Its just that Smith knew the people couldnt observe it so it was “adapted to the capacity of the weak and the weakest of all saints, who are or can be called saints” (v. 3) rather than completely gut the Church of everyone who couldnt observe it, and destroy the Church in the process. There was also the simple practical utility of some of the proscribed substances, as discussed in part 1 above. Now, today, we have no need for this application. Our drinking water is safe, and we understand why it makes us sick.

3) Jeffery Gillam posted some comments on the WofW regarding Smith brewing his own beer as being evidenced in his own diaries or journals. I have not been able to find anything that indicates that is the case. I am presently reading through Faulring’s book, which is supposed to be a comprehensive document with respect to all of Smith’s diaries and journals, and I see nothing to suggest Gillam’s statement is accurate. Granted, I am only about halway though, but I went through the index as well and there is nothing there. If Gillam, or anyone else, would care to provide a citation for the alleged statement on Smith’s part, I would very much appreciate it so as to save me the time of reading through the entire book. Thanks in advance.

Kurt

It is an honor to be a co-blogger on this fantastic anything goes blog born out of a thread jack of one of Aaron B Cox’ posts over at Banner Of Heaven (a great LDS site, BTW).

Now in that thread jack I commented “Like I’m on the East Coast and we’re in a tropical air mass, high 80’s F and light rain (100% humidity). Where can someone do a post declaring that only an extreme sicko masochist would be wearing their G’s in this weather and saying they’re comfy going to the temple and only putting on their G’s once they’re inside in the AC?”.

So here in my debut post at Mormon Open Forum, I’d like to start with that timely summer topic for endowed members. (at least those living in the northern hemisphere, you downunder folks will get your turn soon enough). That is, when are you comfy being a regular temple goer and not wearing your G’s?

As reflected above, for me it’s pretty much whenever I sweat, the G’s come off. I’ve even gone to the temple in the summer and not put the G’s on until I was inside and comfy in the AC of the temple locker room. Now I’m comfy w/ this practice under the rationale that we don’t have to wear them when playing sports, swimming , etc. So not wearing them when you’re sweating like a pig makes senses to me too. (yeah, I know pig’s don’t actually sweat). At work I have AC in my office, but I’m frequently outdoors too, and just can’t handle wearing G’s in this weather.

I also sleep naked w/ my wife. I mean all the time, any night I’m home or she’s with me on the road, which seems outside the instruction we’re given. In our second year of marriage (our temple marriage followed marriage by a bishop) my wife would come to bed with the G’s on and put them back on afterward, but after a while she began to follow my lead. Also, like a lot of guys, I prefer mornings so waking up nude w/ the wife facilitates things. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll do it any night, if that’s what she wants.

So in practice between coming home from work, taking a backyard evening swim and going to bed, etc, there are some summers my G’s stay in the drawer for a several days at time. When the weather breaks, it’s seems like a hassle to get back into the G’s, but my wife kind of stays on top of the situation keeps me w/ the program. When I travel in the summer, which is often, I always pack some G’s just in case the weather breaks, but to be honest, I do that more to keep wifey happy than out of any personal motivation.

This all leads me to ponder the next step in temple garment evolution. From the long version, to the shorter one piece to the present two piecers, I think the next logical step is to forgo fabric entirely and move to a symbolic pendant wore around the neck a kin to crosses and crucifixes common with other Christians. This would maintain the symbolism of the garment but avoid the problem of weather related garment hiatus. We could even wear and receive protection from the pendant during sports, swimming, etc. Of course, I leave it to the GA’s to designed a suitable temple pendant to replace the garment.

So, what do others care to see as the next trend in temple fashion?

Steve (FSF)

Elmo says:

The young Amish have a kind of grace period they call Rumspringa, where they can party, goof off, have sex, drive cars, go wild, and then decide if they still want to be Amish.

Do you think Mormon young adults should have the same thing? Many, if not most, do this already, whether or not they confess it to their leaders. The Church is losing its youth and unmarried members left and right. Should there be a “grace period” where unmarried members can do what they want?