Comments on: Let’s Talk About Sorcery

By: Dave Banack

Dave Banack — Tue, 04 Apr 2017 21:48:47 +0000

Thanks for the comments, everyone. I’m going to go ahead and close the thread at this point.

By: jpv

jpv — Mon, 03 Apr 2017 14:38:31 +0000

I would say the sorcery spoken of and a concern to the church is this:
http://kutv.com/news/local/the-business-behind-christ-centered-energy-healing

Especially in light of it leading people out of the Church to Snufferism, polygamy and the like:
https://mormonleaks.io/wiki/documents/2/2e/Stake_President_Reports_Apostasy.pdf

By: BevP

BevP — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 12:31:47 +0000

Why do I repeatedly find running across my mind the old wisecrack that you have to speak quietly in the celestial kingdom to avoid upsetting the Mormons who think they’re the only ones there…

By: Clark Goble

Clark Goble — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 04:33:02 +0000

MPD is a very controversial diagnosis although there are a lot of psychologists who accept it. Usually those claiming it truly have faced a lot of trauma in their past though.

By: JR

JR — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 01:04:08 +0000

Frank, “the MPD they were living with was certainly real.” There’s really a lot of stuff that appears real to some and unreal, counterfeit, or whatever to others. Back when I was involved in litigating a lawsuit based upon alleged recovered memory of abuse, the head of the Johns Hopkins psychiatry department insisted that there was nothing real about multiple personality disorder. He said he got the hard cases after other therapists failed with them; he had them “cured” in about 3 months, simply by refusing to recognize the existence of the alleged multiple personalities. They then disappeared as the patient unlearned those behaviors because they didn’t work.

I wonder if “real” and “counterfeit” are not often labels that are attached respectively to “my interpretation of my experience” and “my interpretation of your apparently contrary experience.”

By: Clark Goble

Clark Goble — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 20:17:45 +0000

I should note that the spiritualism Pratt's likely referring to there was an issue when the large number of British saints started coming to Utah. As you might know there were actually more Mormons in England than there were in the United States for a while. When they came many brought other spiritual traditions. The spiritualist tradition included speaking to supposedly dead people for information - a traditional magician's trick. (Penn and Teller, if you're familiar with them, have written a lot on these sorts of seances since they know all the traditional methods of trickery) There was a fair bit of conflict between the 12 and advocates of these sorts of spiritual practices which then got wrapped up in centralization of authority as well. A fantastic book on this is Ronald Walker's Wayward Saints. As a funny aside, it's out of that movement that we end up with the Salt Lake Tribune.

By: Hedgehog

Hedgehog — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 19:22:01 +0000

Thanks Clark. It was specifically the use of the word I was thinking of.

By: Frank Pellett

Frank Pellett — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 19:21:29 +0000

On my mission (1994), I worked with two women who had multiple personality disorder, presumably from their experiences in the satanic abuse. I’ve no idea if their experiences were true, but the MPD they were living with was certainly real.

We have an odd history with what most could call superstition and sorcery. I think the Church’s opinion has been of the general “if it brings you closer to God, it’s of God. If it takes you away from God (or the Church, or toward following a specific person other than Christ), then it’s counterfeit, and should be avoided.

I can think of more than a few health fads that skirt the line with “sorcery”, especially when their draw is a thinly veiled MLM.

By: Clark

Clark — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 18:38:48 +0000

The idea goes back to Joseph Smith as you can see in that Times and Seasons editorial I linked to earlier. He doesn't use the word counterfeit, although I've heard that most of my life especially relative to marriage. Back then no one even considered gay marriage so the counterfeit was always common law marriages or the then relatively new trend of living together. McConkie talked of priestcraft as counterfeit priesthood in Mormon Doctrine but I'm sure it predates him too. Doing a quick search in the Journal of Discourses the same language was used commonly, like this one by Orson Pratt.

The rising generation are proud, haughty, high-minded, lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God; fighting against His people; given to whoredom and prostitution and all manner of iniquity and abominations; guilty of all the abominations named by the apostle that should characterize the false churches of the latter days, having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof. That is, denying the gifts of healing, miracles, prophecy, revelation, the ministering and discerning of spirits. All these things were denied when the Book of Mormon came forth. Of course the devil saw that it was not policy, with all the Scriptures staring them in the face, and all the Latter-day Saint Elders quoting these Scriptures to show the necessity of the gifts, to keep them denying these gifts; hence he introduced them under the name of Spiritualism. As soon as the Book of Mormon came forth, the counterfeit then spread like the counterfeit gifts exercised by the old magicians of Egypt. When Moses went down with the power and authority of Heaven, the counterfeit sprang up in order to delude the Egyptians, and make them think the power of Moses was the same in character as that exercised by the magicians. When Moses threw down his rod it became a serpent; the rods of the magicians did the same. When Moses brought up frogs on the land, they did the same; when he turned the rivers of water into blood, they did the same; and thus they deluded the Egyptian nation, and made them believe that if the power of Moses was superior to theirs, it was only because he had learned the magic art more thoroughly than they had.

So the rhetoric is pretty old and probably pre-dates Mormonism.

By: Hedgehog

Hedgehog — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 06:55:04 +0000

Where did the counterfeits narrative originate, does anyone know? I recall it being big in CES venues (seminary & institute classes, particularly the latter in the late 80s) but I don’t recall really hearing anything about it in other church settings growing up.

Mary Ann’s context for the Ensign article is very informative I think.

On the discussion of sorcery… well I’d go back to the good fruits argument, which seems pretty in line with john f.’s excerpt above. I do think it is a bigger thing in society than we would perhaps like to imagine. There are occasional news reports of ritual killings discovered. But with less hype and hysteria than the reports of the 80s and 90s Jean refers to, so maybe that’s lessons learned…

By: Clark Goble

Clark Goble — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 01:46:27 +0000

I think a lot that happened in the 90’s was setup in the 80’s. It’s just that in the 90’s the idea of false memories started arises as psychologists noted how easy it is to impart a false memory or lead people on. The big thing was that all these things were investigated and there just wasn’t anything behind them. It was rather like the Salem Witch trials in some ways.

But I think it does highlight how rumors can spread and how people will leap unnecessarily to other worldly explanations.

KM, at least as I read the article, it was more focused on counterfeits with sorcery just mentioned as an example of a counterfeit. I don’t think you can read Elder Lawrence as tying gay marriage to sorcery. Rather he’s more just suggesting counterfeits as a major problem. I think anyone who uses this talk to be emboldened to say inclinations are all just a choice need only be pointed towards the recent church resources on homosexuality which pointedly go the other direction. Unfortunately the church doesn’t really have any answers for what a person with such inclinations ought do to be fulfilled in this life. Hopefully they are fasting and praying on that so they can offer what the Lord wants people to do.

Related to the article, I think speaking of satan as real and as having the ability to tempt us is pretty mainstream. But I don’t think it’s important enough to make a big deal out of. If you think it’s all placebo effect (or its inverse) and misinterpretation that’s fine.

By: Jean @ Howling Frog

Jean @ Howling Frog — Wed, 29 Mar 2017 22:16:37 +0000

Dave, thanks for that link! Fascinating. I’d never heard of the Pace memorandum. It doesn’t seem to bear on my own question, but it’s certainly related.

By: Jean @ Howling Frog

Jean @ Howling Frog — Wed, 29 Mar 2017 22:09:23 +0000

Clark Goble, you’re right about its later permutation — recovered memory of Satanic abuse was a big thing in what, the early 90s? I was thinking of the part before that (looking at it I see I was pretty unclear, sorry) in, what, 1984 and on where people worried about Satanic child abuse in nursery schools and daycare. It was false accusations and hysteria, but when I was a teen, as far as I knew it was a legitimate thing for adults to worry about. A family in my ward — one I considered sensible and not obviously loopy as several were — believed that one of their children had been abused by a neighbor belonging to a cult. The family moved away, and over the years moved several times in order to get away from the nationwide network of Satanists who would eventually find and target them (luckily the dad was highly employable). Some 10-15 years after they moved, their relatives still would not talk about *where* the family lived, to guard against leaks. At the time, I believed it. Now I don’t know WHAT to make of this. What actually happened? What would they say now?

(Told you my hometown was loopy. I have so many stories like this.)

By: Dave Banack

Dave Banack — Wed, 29 Mar 2017 22:07:20 +0000

Jean, for some details on the LDS experience with such allegations, see this link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pace_memorandum

By: KM

KM — Wed, 29 Mar 2017 22:01:15 +0000

I’m surprised that no one yet seems to be bothered by a discussion of gay marriage in an article on sorcery. Even if it makes up only a small part of the article, to say that it is counterfeit is bad enough, to embed it in an article with all manner of satanic occurrences is inhumane, at best, and potentially very, very dangerous.

In my own family a great and heartbreaking rift has been caused by the response to one beloved niece’s coming out. She is still a minor, but the response to her by one part of the family has been that being gay is a choice, and that she can use her gift of agency in another way.

The family members who have addressed her in this way will surely feel greatly emboldened by Elder Lawrence’s article, and they will fear all the more for her salvation. This will not cause them to reach out to her in support, but in fear for her soul, which will help no one.

This article is destructive.