Imho, not even a “nice sentiment;” it’s a great excuse to wriggle out of paying for a female to be educated and trained to support herself and thus be truly independent of men. Are there really women who swallow this crap? (Purely rhetorical question; of course I know there are – it just continues to boggle my mind!)

Of course, it was a temple wedding so we weren’t allowed…at our best friend’s wedding. It’s a little known fact, but she told me that during the temple ceremony she would pledge to obey her husband on penalty of death. Any religion requiring you to pledge allegience to someone or face death should send up warning signals (though it will be obvious to you guys). The big day came, she was married in the temple, she had a reception for those who couldn’t attend the wedding, and that’s the last I’ve heard from or seen of her. Literally. One of my friends said she is moving to South Carolina, to live near her husband’s family. These are all classic signs of spousal abuse. And there’s nothing I can do. She is entirely brainwashed into believing that this is all a good thing.

If raised in that system, the belief that this pledge was binding would be real. And perhaps in the FLDS (?) it wasn’t a threat of death, but a fact. Spousal abuse runs rampant in religious families, especially Mormons. Nothing would surprise me about them. I went to her church a few times to better understand my friend and they seemed harmless, but there was an underlying, ever-present creepiness during the service. And not just the normal icky feeling religious services give-off.

Anyway, once I had a seminary teacher tell me that the reason fossils were here is because this earth is “recycled” and gawd created it out of bits of his other projects, and dinosaur fossils are just pieces of his last creations–which doesn’t make the least bit of sense, since if this planet was created out of chunks of other planets, then the fossils wouldn’t be in such nice, progressive, chronological layers. We also wouldn’t be able to trace the lineage of dinosaurs into modern creatures, but we can–crocodiles are still remarkably similar to their ancestors from several million years ago, and we can trace the small changes all the way back to those old fossils, which we shouldn’t be able to if gawd just magicked them there and created crocodiles from scratch.
When I called the seminary teacher on that and asked the dreaded, “why”, he said I ought to pray about it. Since this was back when I was just barely questioning church lessons, I actually did go and pray about it, earnestly even. I didn’t get an answer, though, so I asked the teacher again and he pulled the famous cop-out: “You just don’t have enough faith”. When I wasn’t satisfied with that answer, he said, “Maybe gawd’s just testing you.”
Moronic.

uhhhh… yea.

When you ask why… well gaud don’t like to be tested, is the stock answer. Never mind that he sees nothing wrong with testing us with things like fossil records.

“God put those fossils here to test our faith. ” Well, I flunked out again.

As to the subject of “plural marriage”. The “Mother” Church changes its history like the Ministry of Truth in the novel 1984. NOW the offical word is that Uncle Joe married those women for thier protection. It was the custom then to marry widows so there would be a big strong man around to protect them.

The record seems to show that an awful lot of women became widowed between the ages of 14 and 16.

And still do.

As anyone with reasonable intellegence will tell you, it’s never good to find out the details after you’re committed – but that’s what LDS would like you to do. So question them at every turn and make those naive 19 year old guys that show up at your door squirm with a good atheistic debate. (Mess with them really well and they will mark your house off as hostile). And if they offer to help have them clean your gutters – And point out to them while they’re up on the ladder that that may be as close to heaven as they’ll ever get.