Sunday in Outer Blogness: the Book of Mormon Edition!
This past week we’ve had tons of great discussion inspired by The Book of Mormon! The musical, that is. It’s so dangerously fun that even Mitt Romney is going to see it! I especially like Andrew S’s piece about the relevance of religion (or lack thereof), and don’t miss Dad’s Primal Scream’s overview of all of the accurate/inaccurate points of the musical. He also discussed the portrait of niceness. Roger Hansen and Atheist Dad used the musical to discuss faith, which was another popular theme this week.
Then, in a bit of a redux of the religious brainwashing topic, there was a series of contrasting atheist and Mormon parenting posts. (Can you tell atheists from Christians by the empathy they have for one another?)
On a related note, what are we teaching the kids about modesty, body image, sexiness, sexual tension, and (obviously) porn?
Due to how hard it is to pin down Mormon doctrine, we had a bit of a dispute here over the whole get your own planet doctrine. I think in such cases it’s important to keep in mind that that belief is not nearly as hilarious as the Bigfoot is Cain doctrine. In other policies, it turns out that the CoJCoL-dS is cracking down on family sacrament meetings! This is news to me because I never knew that family reunions were ever allowed to organize their own sacrament meetings — I thought that vacation was also (blissfully) vacation from church. Well, now it is. See also how LDS temple worship has evolved. Oh, and if any of you are still in a position to extend LDS callings, please pay special attention to the guidelines on extending callings to women.
This was also an interesting week for missionary and fellowshipping discussions.
In exmormon videos, I hope you’ve watched this story, or — if you’re LGBT — tell your own story! For everyone: How do you feel about your pioneer heritage and experience (or lack thereof)?
I hope you all are having the opportunity for a little fun in the Summer sun, like I am! (Actually, I’m starting to worry that I may have major affective disorder, pleasant type.) If you’re not, there’s plenty of interesting stuff in this batch to keep you reading for the rest of today. Have a great Sunday and a great week!
Popped over to Amazon to check out that Tim O’Brien book that Holly mentioned and took away this line: “Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.” And that got me to thinking about Mormon conformity while taking in GR’s secular Sunday School lesson and reminded me that there’s gonna be some new polling coming out of Utah in the next day or so that apparently shows that “63% of non-Mormons in Utah support gay marriage. But only 13% of Mormons do.” So, to answer your question, I suspect that my pioneer ancestors were the sort who were so obedient that they wound up doing stuff for Joseph Smith and Brigham Young that looks mighty brave 150 years later, but they were so humble that hardly anyone has ever heard of their exploits. Fast forward to today, the same impulse to conform looks like cowardice. Where was Romney on the priesthood question pre-1978? I’m guessing he was exactly where 87% of the LDS membership is today on the question of marriage equality … it’s wherever the LDS leadership says to be.
So, if the state is 62% Mormon, then…
(13% of 62%) + (63% of 38%) = 31 percent of Utahns support gay marriage. (The margin of error is big, though, since only 30% of those polled were non-Mormons. And yes, I’m proud of myself for remembering how to do that math.)
That’s higher than the 22 percent of Utah in that nationwide poll earlier this year that put the majority of Americans in support.
Who knows. Gay marriage seems to me to be inching its way across the country because of lots of money from behind-the-scenes libertarian GOP donors. That’s not exactly the greatest way, but well, that’s the politics of this country.
Apparently, that MOE would be around +/-6.6%. I don’t remember how to do that math, but I just read this latest post from PPP and it’s got some very cool Utah polling stats.
BTW, regarding the modesty topic from last week, I just want to save here this great comment link that Chino saved in the sidebar. Actually, read the post itself — I really like Tracy M.’s ideas about modesty.