[GCFL-discuss] Poygamy

Sat Nov 11 00:19:09 CST 2006

And the religion that seems most unlike Mormonism (at least as far as polygamy goes) is/was the Shaker Communities.  They were not permitted to marry.  Guess which faith has basically died out (only 4 living members) because of that belief?
Jeanene

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies List 
  To: Red 
  Sent: Thursday, November 09, 2006 7:11 PM
  Subject: Re: [GCFL-discuss] Poygamy

  Frank, I doubt that very much. Most societies that practice polygamy justify it, in part, by the need to take care of single and widowed women. When only men can own property, that can have a certain back-handed truth to it. Among the Puritan and Pilgrim settlements (two different things, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay) any single person, man or woman, was assigned a family to live with, if they had none, simply because it was not good to be alone. (This was not necessarily marriage, but placed them within a household).

  As Lance mentions, polygamy was a doctrine from the very beginning, for which Joseph Smith cited explicit instructions to himself from God, via the angel Moroni, the golden plates inscribes with strange runes, and whatever other revelations he told his followers about. It was a duty for a man to have as many wives as possible.

  Nearly every church, not only in modern times but back to colonial times, has had more women than men, sometimes six times as many. But I know of few societies where the only way to provide for them is for each man to have six wives.

  Siarlys

  P.S. Kateinmo, the U.S. had not recently outlawed polygamy when the Mormons decided to remove it from their doctrine. None of the 13 colonies, nor any subsequent state, made any provision for polygamy in its code. Mormons were persecuted for, among other things, polygamy, while still in Nauvoo, Illinois. What the U.S. had just done is sent the Seventh Cavalry to enforce federal jurisdiction over Utah Territory, where the Mormons had thought to establish the independent State of Deseret. The Mormons basically had the choice of being subjugated, or of accepting federal law and becoming a state on terms accpetable to the rest of the U.S. Which does, as you say, make the "revelation" suspect.

  Christianity certainly has some gross skeletons in its closet, as does Islam. Jesus would never have been a Christian, Karl Marx declared during his lifetime that he was not a Marxist, and Joseph Smith would never condone the modern Mormon church (or possibly even Brigham Young's reformulation of it).

  On Wed, 8 Nov 2006 20:26:50 -0800 (PST) "Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies List" <gcfl-discuss at gcfl.net> writes:
    By way of information for those who may not know,  one of the reasons the 'Mormons' practiced  polygamy was because in the early days of the church there were many more women than men in the church.  This was a way to help provide for and take care of these women.  
    Frank

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Cheap Talk? Check out Yahoo! Messenger's low PC-to-Phone call rates. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  _______________________________________________
  GCFL-discuss mailing list
  GCFL-discuss at gcfl.net
  http://gcfl.net/mailman/listinfo/gcfl-discuss
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://gcfl.net/pipermail/gcfl-discuss/attachments/20061110/01a33de3/attachment.htm 