I think it a very useful definition *on an individual level.* Is anyone here really suggesting that someone who finds a once a year Sports Illustrated issue particularly sporting should avoid it?

I just don’t think “Hey, it’s not p*y, it was just sports illustrated!” is a great excuse to offer God,,,

It’s been a long time. The man was knowledgeable as could be about the gospel and how wards, testimonies, Mormon culture, et cetera, work. I was convinced he was who he said he was. On the other hand, I wondered how a bishop had time for internet buddies…and, I hadn’t been a member very long, and most of that time, I was pregnant on bedrest, nursing, or chasing a toddler around. I have to say that in many ways I’m still a clueless convert. I still smack my nose against things I didn’t understand, the way one walks into an unexpectedly closed door in the dark.

He could well have been posing. His right name (which I have forgotten) was attached to the LDS-GEMS article he had submitted that started the whole thing, so…..

Well, there’s no way at all to prove anything on the internet, really.

Thank you.

Even so, I fear that I misspoke or you misread me (or both). I didn’t mean to imply that he couldn’t be a bishop. Sadly, my own personal experience does not bear out that priesthood leaders are always good people. I’ve seen men use their priesthood authority to destroy other people’s lives. And I’ve seen their priesthood leaders repeatedly look the other way. It’s a very ugly thing, and that makes it especially challenging to see otherwise decent people get in trouble for (say) just doing controversial history.

That said, there are many, many more predators posing as people in authority than there are predators in positions of authority. And the way I read the story that Sheri Lynn relates, it smacks of posing.

I’m fairly sure that nearly everything you dislike reminds you of the Catholic Church and Ptolemy, etc. I am otherwise unable to account for you thinking there’s any resemblance.

When your reading of a definition leads to results that everyone agrees are absurd, viz., that being aroused by one’s wife is p*rn, you should conclude not that everyone else is ‘fitting the data to the hypothesis’ but that you have missed much of the shared social and belief context that is implicitly qualifying the definition. IN this case, things like Of Symbols and Sacraments. You have probably missed even the context supplied by the original article. Do I assume correctly that you, like me, are arguing based off of what you’ve read in this thread and not off of having actually read the Ensign article?

That is called “fitting the data to the hypothesis”. It reminds me of the Catholic Church insisting that the universe moves around the earth and that we must fit the experimental data into Ptolemy’s model. The Ensign p*rno definition, as it stands, reflects a twisted view of human sexuality, even viewed charitably (at least by myself and the few people I have talked to about it.)

The church of today as a whole, is profoundly uncomfortable with sexuality in almost any form. The church of Joseph Smith was just the opposite. Both were twisted.

At 12 years of age I was herded into a bus, along with everyone else from Mutual, for a drive to the stake center where males were separated from females and we males were instructed that to look on a woman to lust after her was to commit adultery in ones heart. Even at the time I felt that the giving of this message to me, a 12 year old, was really screwy. That’s because it was screwy.

It sounds to me like the guy you found who claimed to be the bishop of a small ward was a predator and not a bishop. It is a common predatory technique to get someone to accept borderline behavior out of sympathy. His claim that he got released was probably a ruse to get you to feel the need to minimize the wrong doing of the borderline behavior he was trying to sell. In any case, good move in ditching the silly cad.

I find this incredibly twisted – and an insult to the Creator of our bodies.