Jack, the Pump King's Kin

Happy Halloween! Thanks Angela, for the nudge in the right direction (well, this direction and I'm happy where I wound up at any rate).

Reaching into the Current

I posted the following paragraphs on Facebook earlier this morning (last night from my point of view as it was just before I went to sleep). Earlier in the discussion, I'd said that what made Packer's talk dangerous was not any part of the message he intended, but that his words were regrettably easy to misconstrue. One response to that was that the HRC actively wanted to misconstrue his words to further their own devious purposes and, while I suppose that could be possible, I rejected the notion thus:

I wouldn't say that the HRC are jumping at the chance either, but I would agree that they are jumping. A small, but vitally important distinction. As none of us are either part of the HRC group that drafted the article or Elder Packer, we are forced to make assumptions based on what information we do have as to what ends they intended to achieve by making their statements. I currently assume that both parties are laboring to improve the lot of humanity.

As I followed it, Packer said that God doesn't make mistakes; therefore, homosexuals are, like everyone else, fully capable of attaining the highest degree of salvation - a requirement of which is a heterosexual temple marriage. Homosexuals can, through God, become heterosexual.

The HRC’s position, again, as I follow it, is that homosexuality cannot be cured. They fear that when LDS homosexuals attempt to pray themselves hetero and fail, they will come to the conclusion that since they can’t make themselves straight, Elder Packer must be wrong and God must have made a mistake creating them after all. Obviously, this reasoning is insane (on the part of the hypothetical LDS homosexual), as if Elder Packer is wrong on one count he’s probably wrong on the lot, but, it’s in line with typically observed behavior of depressed people. The HRC’s fears are not totally unfounded.

Elder Packer’s message seems to be (to me) that no one needs to settle for the small rewards offered by the world; everyone is capable of achieving exaltation through Christ. It takes a lot of boiling down to get to that, though. While I’m not sure that it would be possible to rework Packer’s talk to the point that the HRC would be really happy with it (without reworking major points of doctrine), I’m certain that he could have found better ways to put the things that he wanted to say.

The message a speaker intends ceases to exist at the moment he speaks; it is forever lost in the endless sea of messages received. Effective speakers account for that sea’s currents and steer accordingly. While I can appreciate the argument that those currents are hardly enough to in any way shift the course of an almighty God, that hardly justifies blind sailing. The object, surely, is to pull people free of the currents and into understanding. This, necessarily, entails reaching into the currents.

The Natural Man

The Natural Man: sounds like a good name for some sort of gay website or magazine, doesn't it? The kind of thing with lots of fit young men out in the woods putting up tent poles. But perhaps you prefer your fit young men to start out neatly dressed in a suit and tie. Perhaps you prefer the sort of thing that a cheeky pornographer might entitle Elder Packer. Not that it matters to me what you get up to; I've got my share of quirks too, to say the least.

Anyway, before I allowed the aforementioned quirks to lead me astray (will I still respect that first paragraph in the morning?), what I wanted to remark upon was Boyd K. Packer's total failure to refer to Mosiah 3:19 in the little talk he gave the other day which has since set the blogosphere alight:

For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.

Instead, he flew in the face of reason, declaring homosexuality to be unnatural. As if everything that is natural is good. The urge to separate us from them seems, unfortunately, to be natural. If we ever want to build ourselves some kind of heaven we'll have to get over it, though; the natural man is an enemy to God.