But Walter raised the possibility of forgiveness, and I take him serious on that topic. I was privileged to serve as high councillor during some of his years as Stake President in my native Netherlands, so I experienced his kind and forgiving spirit first hand. I’m grateful for the conciliatory approach he always demonstrates, then and now, and I am honored to call him my friend.

So even though I’m not sure that our mormon institution can and should be forgiven, even though her individual leaders should be forgiven, I take the liberty to suggest that instead we might entertain the thought of “Forgiving ourselves”. As we know, forgiving ourselves is not always seen as a possibility in the human psyche in general, and that is certainly true for many guild-ridden church members. I would suggest that we start forgiving ourselves for years of being overly confident in the exclusive truth claims of our institution, for too blindly following our leaders, for a lack of intellectual honesty even on academic levels, and for the lack of modesty and humanity which could have resulted from all that. All with the best intentions, as we say, but mistakenly so nevertheless. If we are able to forgive ourselves through a process of repentance we no doubt will experience The Miracle of Forgiveness in our church lives. A new beginning dawns, opening the possibility of healing and positive change. On the personal level, I have decided to forgive myself for my lack of personal integrity when it came to muster the courage to balance institutional and personal revelation. But those days are gone now. I intend to more honestly and more clearly draw the lines of where I can follow, and where I cannot. As a relatively young institution our mormon faith tradition will have to get used to a plurality of spiritual approaches, as have developed within older faith traditions like the Catholic Church and the churches of the Reformation.

While for some the saying still sounds true: “When the Prophet has spoken, the discussion ends”, for me “When the Prophet has spoken, the discussion begins”. Could it be that we need forgiveness for leaning too heavily on the shoulders of our leaders, thus burdening them with unrealistic expectations which they nevertheless tried to meet as best as they could? As a liberal, progressive Mormon, I am grateful for forgiveness, and for the redeeming qualities of Restoration!

The author of the book that article is talking about DOES NOT believe people can change their sexual orientation. I’ve tried to be charitable. You refuse to directly engage with substantial criticism. One reason people do this is because it would make them feel vulnerable. It might require them to alter their perceptions. It might require change.

Rob, you aren’t interest in conversation or understanding. You are interested in your view. You haven’t yet responded to anyone here who has pointed out that the Church disagrees with you on many points about sexual orientation. Fine, you don’t have to agree with them. But please don’t construe your views as matching theirs.

For a long time I have been trying to understand LGBT issues. I don’t buy into their beliefs because true research shows otherwise.

You are a shining example of the thoughtfulness and reasoned consideration that I have come to expect from the Dutch. I work with a lot of Dutch people – our company is a U.S. branch of a company based in Veldhoven. I am continually amazed at how my Dutch colleagues make us Americans to step outside of our entrenched mentalities and see things from an equally important, yet totally distinct point of view. It is simultaneously frustrating & refreshing, and I can’t imagine how I would get such a priceless education anywhere else. I am eternally grateful for you and the rest of the Dutch people.

On my most recent trip to the Netherlands, I had two opportunities to attend the Eindhoven ward, and I will never forget the sacred feelings I experienced in those ward meetings. Keep in mind that I only know about a dozen Dutch words, so the specific content of what was said was lost on me, but the general flow & emotional content of the meetings really resonated with me. I am glad that I made time to attend the ward meetings & I am eternally grateful for the experiences that I had there.

I bring this up to point out that my experiences with your wonderful country & its people opened my eyes to a lot of the ways that we as human beings self-select and self-organize. In extreme cases means that we as dogmatize and ostracize with impunity, not thinking about the consequences of our “digital” classifications in a holistic context. i.e. We conveniently label people as “apostates” or “sinful” without first putting ourselves in their shoes to see & understand why they feel the way they feel or do the things they do, much less stopping to analyze and correct our own harmful biases and opinions.

Rather than seeing people on a multidimensional continuum / spectrum, we tend to clump people together on broad-yet-narrow classifications. It’s something that humans do almost instinctively in order to quickly model & approximate scenarios for the purpose of decision making in business, and engineering scenarios. In those cases, it works out well enough because the business is detached enough from the market that consumer preference & acceptance ameliorates much of the imperfection. However, the digitized classification of human conditions doesn’t work so well when it comes to religious dogma that plug into our most deeply held senses of self-worth. It is made that much worse when large sectors of the organization apply bad apologetics to put the cart before the horse and hold up a divisive policy as proof that their narrow-minded position is the “mind & will of God”.

I don’t have any solid answers to all of the big questions that the POX brings up & all of the stuff that it calls into question, but I am grateful for those who are willing to step outside of the cultural norms & take a compassionately motivated look into the human condition and courageously point out where we as a group can use improvement.
To that end, I look forward to a time when the Church acquires a better, more complete & more in-depth way of describing the human condition & the TRUE reason behind the spectrum of possibilities to which we are witness. And along with that, I wish the Church could TRULY & COMPREHENSIVELY map out how all of those possibilities translate into stepping stones (or stumbling blocks) in the road of eternal progress. Currently, there exists too much cultural bias & false ideology to make that happen. Which is why on one hand I DO believe that we need to forgive our leaders and compassionately make it known that we disagree with some of their policies, otherwise we will be forever locked in a dogmatic stalemate.

Met vriendelijke groeten,
-nate

Admittedly, watching this along with some of my own personal choices, I have shaped my beliefs into the belief I have today regarding sexual preference as a choice. I am of the firm belief that you could take almost any man or woman, under the right circumstances, that if they were given an opportunity to have some type of gay experience, small or large, would induldge and enjoy at least the thought of it. It’s just a fact that the natural man, by itself on senses alone, would enjoy almost any sexual experience. The difference is how the brain learns to associate sexual feelings with other aspects or feelings from other aspects of sociality in community. This is why you sometimes get the extremes of people being sexually attracted to the strangest of things such as cars or objects that aren’t typically natural. Now it would be absurd to believe that a person was born with the sexual attraction towards a car. The point here is to show that sexual feelings are associated with other things in our mind that help to shape our perceived attractions. I watched a hypnotist once that convinced his small group under a hypnotic trance that they were sexually attracted to their shoes. needless to say, for one it almost got R rated because of his absolute belief of his attraction towards his shoe. He actually cried when the hypnotist told him to stop and his shoe was forbidden to touch. After his hypnotic trance he was told this and it was completely a shock to him that he could think that way.

I can’t say for sure what triggers there are, early or late in life, that causes the brain to associate sexual feelings with gender type, but I do “know” it happens and as such can be changed or conditioned to believe and spark new sexual feelings towards different gender type.

I find it interesting that a large portion (not all, just the majority) of actively gay males are promiscuous and view pornography. Why is that? Were they just born that way? Is it part of the gay culture or is it part of their genetics? Help me understand. I’m also curious that I read lots of studies that show sex attraction is made by choice more than any other factor be the person, gay, straight, bi, trans, etc.

I am not however suggesting that being gay is solely a choice for some. I do believe that various factors and influences at very early ages can have a large impact on sexual attraction choices later on in life. Don’t judge me for my beliefs, I am trying to understand.

The second issue is moral and ecclesiastical authority. That is a breathtaking burden to bear, especially if they go together. The leadership needs some way of feedback on their decisions (even if they do not always like it, the old conundrum of Aristoteles), not in order to break down the system, but to prune it. That is what I mean with ‘criticism within bounds’. Raising our voices when something goes wrong – and between the first draft, the second corrected version and the half-hearted claim of revelation something clearly has gone wrong – the best service we can render the ones in charge is to raise our voices, well reasoned and with all the respect due, to make clear that not all is well in Zion. And not simply to correct the leaders, but in the realization that we all are the church, that we are part and parcel of an organization whose heavenly mandate is not dependent on the notion that leaders never make mistakes. And then, indeed, forgive.