- Anon on Masturbation Frequency Among Members: “This is just one more topic which serves as a Rorschach test for local leaders. How local leaders deal with it reveals much about how they view their fellow human beings and what they feel about sexuality. Personally I believe that this is simply a topic that should be addressed non-salaciously, as a n encouragement towards discipline and self-control. But if the word on the street is to be believed, currently missionaries are being sent home for failing to eliminate the behavior and it gets associated with “porn addiction.” The sad part is that young men I know cannot discern the difference between “wet dreams” and masturbation. But can anyone, including an untrained Bishop or Stake President?” Mar 20, 09:43
- on Masturbation Frequency Among Members: “Just yesterday I was wondering to myself how long church leaders have to go without mentioning a topic before membership has the green light to not worry about it anymore. What’s the statue of limitations? Or perhaps a more complicated formula where every conference talk gives some doctrinal weight to an idea (perhaps weighted by the position of the speaker) which then has some sort of half-life decay rate, and once the total doctrinal weight has decayed below a certain threshold we no longer have to concern ourselves about journaling, or gardening or women having jobs. Because the church never comes out and says “never mind . . ” they just stop talking about some topics (after having spend a lot of time talking about it over and over again).” Mar 20, 09:21
- on Masturbation Frequency Among Members: “Interesting topic….some thoughts from my perspective. “factory” pamphlet : I cant find my copy to get the exact words but towards the end of the booklet it said something like “even though this is not a serious (maybe the word grievous?) sin”…. I think the leaders forgot about or didn’t read that part. IMO, they turned it into a serious sin. I believe there was an idea amongst professionals in the 70’s and 80’s that masturbation could lead to homosexuality and I think the church was concerned, hence the factory talk/pamphlet. (I could have made this part up in my mind tho) When I was bishop: from 07 to 2012, there was nothing that I recall about masturbation in the handbook and serving a mission, yet both the stake presidents that I served with would not allow kids to serve missions until they didn’t masturbate for a period of time…I want to say three months. That has been going on since the 80’s though. I dont know if that was ever HQ policy or over zealot local leaders….It seemed like every priesthood session of GC back then had a least one talk about the ills of porn and masturbation so that fueled the “serious sin” attitude I think. As a bishop, the YM that served missions (maybe 9 total) only 1 (male) did not have a masturbation habit. I personally have never heard of a missionary getting sent home for masturbation. I have always wondered if they were not getting sent home, then why the demand to stop before they go on a mission? Towards the end of my service as a bishop, I noticed an uptick in married women with porn/masturbation habits. I thought that was interesting. I also saw an increase in same sex attraction issues. So, my ward didn’t match the survey #s. Conclusion: I think 70% of non member males masturbating in the past month qualifies for the general term “everybody’s doing it” used in the Seinfeld episode. I’m out!” Mar 20, 09:02
- on Moving Beyond the KJV: Kent Jackson’s Modern Translation of Genesis: “On the one hand, students really do have to be able to explain every letter and punctuation mark of a text if they’re going to do serious work with it. On the other hand, humiliation is not good pedagogy and I’ve seen language requirements abused. And Semitic languages, ugh. It all starts out great, but my brain melts as soon as I get to the derived verb forms. I have some misgivings about packaging the JST text along with a new translation for LDS audiences.” Mar 19, 19:48
- on Did you bring an Umbrella? (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About Yesterday, 3/15)?: “We spent most of our time in Sunday School discussing Jacob and Esau. The teacher suggested that rather than tying ourselves in knots trying to justify Jacob’s actions, we could read this as a story of sin and strife followed by repentance and reconciliation (Joseph too). That makes it easier to see Christ in this part of the Old Testament. That did make wonder: if we’re not going to insist on Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob being perfect people, why did God choose them to be the founders of the House of Israel and the prototypes of exalted beings (“…sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob…”)? One possible answer is “nothing.” God deliberately chose ordinary, flawed people to demonstrate he can exalt anyone who will let him. But I think the fierce desire they had for a close relationship with God and the blessings of that relationship was part of it. That got me thinking about how that desire can play a bigger role in my life.” Mar 19, 10:40
- on Probabilities and Biblical Studies: “Aragorn, that is a sparkling gem. I addressed the notion of probability in biblical studies as part of my recent FAIR presentation. It’s just the wrong way to think about most of what that field is doing. The ability of scholars operating with a specific positivist paradigm to generate narratives of biblical history and find reasons in the text to support their narratives, does not make those narratives any more probable than anything else. The lack of extrabiblical attestation for the existence of Job does not make his existence improbable, and references to him in the bible do not make his existence probable. There is no mechanism for calculating probability for the vast majority of the output of biblical studies. In the words of Alan Torrance, “the assessment of probability is in no small measure a function of one’s epistemic base.”” Mar 19, 09:36
- on Probabilities and Biblical Studies: “Given the other comments, I don’t know if this is on topic, but the post reminded me of a comment made in this past Sunday’s Gospel Doctrine class, where a well read member said that after reading a particular book, he believes that Joseph’s coat of many colors was really the garment made for Adam when he was kicked out of the Garden of Eden. I wasn’t going to encourage the class to go down the rabbit hole, but to me that sounded like someone stacking improbabilities on improbabilities to hear what they wanted to hear.” Mar 19, 09:20
- on Did you bring an Umbrella? (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About Yesterday, 3/15)?: “In the spirit of you post, which was lovely, I’ll share my experience from Sunday. I received a doozy, although well-intentioned, of a talk about how if we read anything even slightly uncomfortable about the church online, even if it by a church member, historian, true, backed-up, etc., the moment we recognize anything negative or that causes us stress we should close down the computer/phone and go read our scriptures until the feeling is gone because that is Satan working on us. There are times in the past I would have found this deeply upsetting because I find God by working through cognitive dissonance not ignoring it. But I know the speaker to be a extremely good, dedicated, generous person who has on a regular basis given the shirt off his back to help others. So I can accept that this is true for him, and isn’t it wonderful that he has found a path that works so well and has given him such great ways to help others. He’s living the right life for him. It used to be painful to me that I have to accept that his journey of faith is right for him while he sees mine as being influenced by Satan, since cognitive dissonance is a growth opportunity for me. I didn’t feel that way on Sunday though. I’m happy for him and beyond that I’m kind of apathetic about it all.” Mar 18, 22:23
- on Probabilities and Biblical Studies: “On chained probabilities, I suspect people are especially likely to overestimate the certainty of proposition X if it was taught to them as the consensus when they were undergrads (or earlier) and they didn’t have the tools to really evaluate it for themselves. I almost finished a physics major before switching to economics, and there was absolutely no disagreement among experts in the field about anything I was taught. I imagine I would have been well into grad school before I encountered anything where there was. Economics was rather different, to say the least, and biblical studies even more so. We all do the best we can with the evidence that’s actually available in our fields, but humility is needed. Hoosier and Aragorn, thanks for making my day. :)” Mar 18, 16:57
- on Probabilities and Biblical Studies: “@Mark Ashurst-McGee: I wouldn’t be surprised if Set Theory gets us closer to the realm of the Gods than almost any academic endeavor, and if Georg Cantor wasn’t a prophet in some way–even if he did go crazy. @Jonathan: One item on my ever-expanding get-to-it-before-I-die list is to run a survey of ancient historians/biblical scholars and have them give some kind of expert probabilistic estimate for the various theories in their field, and then hopefully have a large enough sample size that I can run interrater reliability statistics, etc. Not to make some kind of point, it would just be fun. And yes, while I think anti-evolutionist types sometimes abuse the “and then we found this one bone and it overthrew everything!” Sometimes we really do find a bone and it overthrows (nearly) everything (within limits). Aragon and Hoosier: I second the lol; that was beautiful.” Mar 18, 12:42
