So this wont make me very popular on either side, but Im ok with the excommunication of Kate Kelly from a governance perspective. She advocated for a change thats out of line with the earthly powers she wanted to submit herself to. One of the talking points that Church leaders cited was the Pew study showing 90% of Mormon women dont want the priesthood right now. So you could argue that the leaders are exceedingly democratic--how can you fault them for that? Its also not out of the realm of possibility that some day leaders might get a revelation that women should be ordained (will it be when that figure hits 51%?), just as blacks were ordained later than their brethren of other races. The guys in SLC respond to internal and external pressure and external and tweak accordingly. Thats human nature, a function of self-preservation in the same way that the Church banned polygamy to avoid extermination by the Feds or altered grotesque temple ceremonies to fit refining sensibilities. Once you accept that the priesthood is real, which Kate Kelly seems to believe, then you must live under those who supposedly own it--until they say otherwise. That said, I dont think Kate Kelly should give much weight to said Church powers, since they are contrived by man as some artificial form of speaking for a specific god, God or gods that may or may not exist (as opposed to some natural force or collective intelligence) and none of us leave or enter this earth with actual knowledge (despite how many million testimony-bearers say they know) about our origins or our destinations. So in that sense, this action by the Church is purely symbolic and I hope that she doesnt let it affect her psyche--we choose our response to exogenous situations and I hope she chooses light. Im more concerned about a Church that knowingly forces its members to lie about the origins of the Book of Mormon, DNA, the Book of Abraham, the philandering and dishonesty of Joseph Smith, hides the history of MMM, drives gay people to suicide, etc. In my mind, these explicitly unethical behaviors--which defy everything we know from the gifts of reason and rationality--take precedence over a question that hinges on something that is ultimately unprovable, i.e. that the Mormon version of priesthood is even real. Thanks to science and The Enlightenment, our civilization has infinitely progressed beyond when we crawled out of a pool of slime and evolved into homo sapiens. Religion is a product of our evolution as social beings. The Mormon priesthood is a social construct. This one religious action against Kate Kelly has no bearing on her worth as a human being, and whether Mormon women get the priesthood or not is fairly irrelevant compared to the massively more consequential progress we see around the globe. Im sorry she didnt get what she wanted, but Im sure shell adapt and perhaps someday get her wish. But if she doesnt, then either way her life will still have meaning and she lives under the authority of her own intrinsic power, not some man-made, external concept. deseretnews/article/865605646/LDS-bishop-excommunicates-Ordain-Women-founder.html
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 17:19:04 +0000
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