I know I'm always complaining about other people and churches so in the interest of humility, let's talk about a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thing I did last week. I went to a linger-longer after my old ward's church service to eat soup. That wasn't the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thing because first of all, I was invited, and second, I paid tithing that I didn't know was being used to purchase Apple stock, so I feel entitled to eat food purchased with church funds. I went and this woman I've met a couple times asked me questions about graduate school because I did graduate school and she wants to do graduate school. I get a weird vibe from her that I can't really explain. Usually when pretty women talk to me I get a vague sense of benevolent condescension, like on some level they feel like they're doing me a favor, and that could be dismissed as my imagination except that once in a while it isn't there and I'm shocked. I think that's the case here. Her friendliness catches me off guard even though lots of people are friendly.

I was happy to share my wisdom and happy about her ambition. I wanted to say "Aren't you glad the church doesn't discourage women from having hopes and dreams anymore?" but it might have killed the mood and anyway, I'm not convinced it's entirely true. A lot of women in the ward seem to have career goals and that's great but I don't know how it isn't causing them hella cognitive dissonance. Or maybe it is. So anyway, I asked what she wanted to do in graduate school. She said Asian Studies. I asked what parts of Asia she wanted to study. She said China. I asked why. She said "Mostly to please my ancestors." And this is when I did the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thing. I looked at her, and I thought she looked just as white as she had a moment ago before she said that, and I blurted out, "Are you adopted?"

Yes, I committed a microaggression - not my first or worst one, but that's small comfort. I hate the word "microaggression" because usually there is no aggression. Usually, as in my case, these incidents are purely the result of ignorance and/or stupidity. I had two thoughts as I was asking my question, neither of them aggressive. First, that if she had decided to claim her adopted ancestors as her own, good for her, I had no objection, I was just curious. Second, that I wouldn't have batted an eye at white parents adopting a Chinese child, but the other way around seemed weird somehow, but of course it would be allowed because why wouldn't it? An episode of Psych had a white character who was adopted by Thai parents and people thought he was racist for speaking with a Thai accent. In any case, though, if I had stopped to think for a few seconds I would have second-guessed prying into such personal matters.

She said no, she wasn't adopted, she was a quarter Chinese, her mom was half Chinese. And just like that, I could see it. She looked exactly the same and yet my perception of her was different somehow. Maybe that means I have implicit bias. I hope not. Maybe it just means that unexpected diversity in an LDS ward in Utah is unexpected. I wanted to say "Aren't you glad the church doesn't oppose interracial marriage anymore?" but it might have killed the mood. It turns out she's really steeped in Chinese culture and not shy about bringing it up. I just hadn't interacted with her enough to notice. Anyway, she didn't seem offended at all but I have principles to uphold regardless. That evening I went to ward prayer, managing to skip the prayer and only do the game afterward, just so I could apologize to her for being an idiot. She was so not offended that she burst out laughing before I could finish. And then on Thursday I ran into her on campus and we ate dinner together and she caught me off guard with a fist bump so I think we're cool.

tl;dr: I'm not perfect, but I'm trying.

I stopped following r/latterdaysaints on reddit after I was banned for encouraging critical thinking and intellectual honesty. I was legitimately trying to help; I'm not such a jerk that I'll go into people's safe spaces for the purpose of tearing down their beliefs. For example, in a discussion about young people's loss of trust in institutions such as the LDS Church, I explained the real reasons for young people's loss of trust in institutions such as the LDS Church. One would think that anybody who wants to address a problem would want to understand the real reasons for it instead of a straw man. But no. So now I'm done trying to help and I'll just content myself with watching the church shoot itself in the foot over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. But the other day someone in another subreddit shared a screenshot of part of a post in r/latterdaysaints and I was going to write a post here explaining why it was wrong, but then I went and read the whole thing and several of the comments and I decided to just copy-paste them here and add my commentary in bold.

I was taught approximately a third of these as a convert, by several sources and leaders, and they were presented as doctrine. I understand my experience is not universal, but it is frustrating when members tell me I should have known they weren't "doctrine".

This is the top comment and I appreciate it.

I'm a recent convert (less than 6 months) and I've been taught a few of these things and yes they have been taught to me as doctrine, so I'm confused by this post.

This is a reply to the top comment and I appreciate it.

Can you list which ones you were taught? I also think this is tricky because the actual answer may be a variation of some of the statements given.

This is another reply to the top comment and I appreciate it.

Sure, and agreed, sometimes it's a variation.

• I had lots of discussions both in class, with the institute director, with church leaders, about how I would shape the worlds and planets that I would get to create. I was taught that the temple endowment was specifically to create such worlds.
• I was taught that I would need to have lots of kids in the eternities. Not that it would be the only thing I was doing, but that having lots of kids was part of eternal progression. I was taught that the temple sealing ceremony was me committing to having many kids both now in life, and in the celestial kingdom.
• I was taught by the missionaries, institute director, EQ pres, etc. that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri. We still have Adam-ondi-Ahman in the church manuals, which in my opinion, directly leads to this teaching.
• I was taught that polygamy was required for the highest level of celestial glory. We had several classes in church and in institute where we talked about how our feelings of jealousy were tied to our mortal constraints and weaknesses. Heck, when we talk about eternal polygamy on this sub, you see a lot of the same comments.
• I was taught that skin color was a curse in biblical times. We didn't really talk about whether the same methods of curses were used in modern times.
• I was taught that people who leave have darkness around them, and that I should try to limit my time around them.

​I was taught as a kid that I would get to create planets, by a guest speaker at a youth activity who joked that he would create a planet full of ski resorts. He never said I would be limited to just one. Then as an adult the church came out with an essay claiming that "Latter-day Saints’ doctrine of exaltation is often similarly reduced in media to a cartoonish image of people receiving their own planets" and "few Latter-day Saints would identify with caricatures of having their own planet." So even as a believing member that was kind of annoying. Just last week I found this quote on its website by accident while reading about aliens:

"Nothing is more basic in the restored gospel than these truths that, because of recent events of space travel, are so timely. The great hope of the gospel for us is that we may come to a oneness with our Lord and our Father and partake of this same work and glory and godhood. Being joint-heirs of all that the Father has, we may then look forward to using those powers to organize still other worlds from the unorganized matter that exists throughout boundless space. Creating other worlds, peopling them with our own eternal posterity, providing a savior for them, and making known to them the saving principles of the eternal gospel, that they may have the same experiences we are now having and be exalted with us in their turn—this is eternal life. No wonder this possibility continues to fascinate and inspire Saints of all ages. This hope is what inspires members of the Church to seek eternal marriage and to seek in all things to be one with our Lord Jesus Christ, because we want to be with him and participate in all the marvelous things of which Paul the apostle said: 'Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.'

Pretending for the sake of argument that this is the only quote about exalted Latter-day Saints creating worlds (which it isn't), we could say that it's a prime example of "anti-doctrine" because it's just an assistant BYU professor writing in the church's youth magazine. But we would still be well-advised to ask why the church approved it for publication and where he even got the idea that "nothing is more basic in the restored gospel" than this "great hope of the gospel for us" which "continues to fascinate and inspire Saints of all ages." Or do we just need to split hairs about the difference between creating a world and receiving a planet?

I had an institute teacher who said that Black people's skin color was caused by the "curse of Cain" as recently as 2015. The Come Follow Me manual for 2020 included this quote: "The dark skin was placed upon the Lamanites so that they could be distinguished from the Nephites and to keep the two peoples from mixing [see 2 Nephi 5:21-23; Alma 3:6-10]. The dark skin was the sign of the curse. The curse was the withdrawal of the Spirit of the Lord [see 2 Nephi 5:20]. . . . Dark skin . . . is no longer to be considered a sign of the curse” (Joseph Fielding Smith, Answers to Gospel Questions, comp. Joseph Fielding Smith Jr. [1960], 3:122-23)." After an uproar from Black members, it was replaced with something entirely different in the digital version. Setting aside the fact that they edited this quote to completely misrepresent what Joseph Fielding Smith actually wrote (hint: it was more racist), it's kind of bonkers that the manual writers apparently didn't think it would offend anyone because it says that dark skin isn't a sign of a curse anymore. They're in their own little world sometimes.

I am surprised people are still being taught that polygamy is required for the highest level of celestial glory. I've heard members offer their opinion that we'll all have to practice it because a lot fewer men will be in the celestial kingdom, but nobody asserted it as a given. On the contrary, I was blessed with institute teachers who assured us that it isn't true just because Brigham Young taught it.

This is confusing to me (as a lifelong member). I have heard many variations of the “polygamy is required for salvation” conversation. If polygamy ISNT important, than why is it canonized in D&C? I grew up being told polygamy would be happening in the celestial kingdom, and that has become something I’ve grown to include in my belief system.

[...]

Well for me, due to the lack of comment from current leaders, I chose to follow past teachings & scripture and believe that polygamy will be a huge part of the celestial kingdom. I think too many members are saying, “polygamy won’t be required” simply because they don’t want it to be. But again, past teachings and scripture seem to tell it in a much more black and white way. I’m happy to be proved wrong, but that’s just how I accept polygamy in the church.

It would be difficult to overstate the centrality of polygamy to LDS doctrine in the nineteenth century. The prophets and lay members of that era would unequivocally reject the church's current stance that the Lord's standard is monogamy and he only commands exceptions on rare occasions. For example, in August 1862 the Deseret News reported Brigham Young preaching, "Monogamy, or restrictions by law to one wife, is no part of the economy of heaven among men. Such a system was commenced by the founders of the Roman empire…. The scarcity of women gave existance [sic] to laws restricting one wife to one man. Rome became the mistress of the world, and introduced this order of monogamy wherever her sway was acknowledged. Thus this monogamic order of marriage, so esteemed by modern Christians as a holy sacrament and divine institution, is nothing but a system established by a set of robbers…. Why do we believe in and practice polygamy? Because the Lord introduced it to his servants in a revelation given to Joseph Smith, and the Lord’s servants have always practiced it. 'And is that religion popular in heaven?' it is the only popular religion there..." This wasn't the first or last time he denounced traditional marriage. But I'm sure the current prophet is entirely trustworthy on that subject.

Interesting post. One issue is when those points still correspond to scripture in canon still I don’t think it can be classified as “Anti”. Like D&C 107:53 which says adam lived in the valley of Adam ondi Ahman which is in Missouri and can be found on the church website:

“Spring Hill was named Adam-ondi-Ahman by the Prophet Joseph Smith, as indicated by the Lord in revelation (see Doctrine and Covenants 116). Five weeks later, on June 28, 1838, the third stake of Zion was organized there. An 1835 revelation identified the valley of Adam-ondi-Ahman as the place where Adam blessed his posterity after leaving the Garden of Eden (see Doctrine and Covenants 107:53–57).”

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/learn/historic-sites/missouri/adam-ondi-ahman?lang=eng

Leaders don’t really talk about this anymore but it’s still there. So what do we do with it?

[...]

​The issue isn’t the garden it’s that Adam the first man lived in Missouri when the rest of the Bible narrative was in the Middle East. When did he get over? You have believe in the literal flood to get them over there or some other migration and a lot of people want to believe that’s metaphorical or regional but it doesn’t work if Adam lives in Missouri. Next if there was a flood when did the native Americans from Asia get over to this land and how did they get here if not for the Bering straight? It makes sense if the Book of Mormon is the story of all the descendants but science puts the Asian migration at 15 thousands plus years ago.

Joseph Smith caused a lot of problems for his church by doubling down on the literal historicity of people who didn't exist and events that didn't happen. Adam and Eve, Noah's flood, and the Tower of Babel are all myths and were understood as such by the people who wrote them down. Joseph Smith misunderstood them through his nineteenth-century American worldview and codified his misunderstanding as doctrine. Many members today take more nuanced views of them, but the other three books in the LDS scriptural canon (and some other supposedly  prophetic teachings) fall apart if they aren't literal history. No Tower of Babel = no Jaredites.

Well shoot if I was there thousands of years ago, I could tell ya. Stories from the old testament have been passed down over thousands of years surely with details forgotten and others exaggerated.

To be honest, in the bigger picture, it doesn't matter whether or not the garden of Eden was in Missouri or not. It has no bearing on our eternal salvation, and is likely why 'leaders don't talk about it anymore'.

Even as a member I hated when other members fell back on "That's not important to my salvation" as a way to avoid thinking about legitimate questions or issues. How many hours a day do you spend on things that aren't important to your salvation?

Do you consider (up-to-date) instructions in the church handbook to be doctrine? As a transgender person, I know some members who have rejected handbook instructions regarding trans people as being church teachings/doctrine (both to claim the church is more welcoming or less welcoming to trans folk, in fact).
​
Though to be fair, I think in most cases they simply refused to believe I was telling them the truth about what's in the handbook.

I just thought it was cool that a transgender person was participating in this thread. I bet fifty thousand dollars they'll be out of the church within five years.

If "doctrine" means "teaching," then there really is no separation between policy and doctrine. Handbook instructions, letters from the first presidency, and the like might all be considered doctrines.

But we must not put too much weight on the word "doctrine." Too many people treat that word like it means "eternally true forever and perfect" when it still just means "our current understanding"

Elder Maxwell used to speak about this occasionally, suggesting that there is clearly an as-of-yet unrevealed hierarchy of truths, ranging from the "true but unimportant" to the "true and of eternal significance." To say "the handbook is doctrine" doesn't really solve anything unless the person saying it and the person hearing it have the same understanding of what the word doctrine means.

Here, OP rejects the useless circular logic definition that annoys me so much, and I appreciate it. I also agree that the supposed distinction between policy and doctrine is pretty pointless. Supposedly they both come from the Lord.

Some of these things were certainly fringe ideas, but others were accepted beliefs taught and understood by most of the church at one point or another.

Fringe:

• People live on the moon and sun
• Women are destined to be making babies for eternity
• You HAVE to be a polygamist in the next life
• Women should not speak in church (with a caveat - for a long time there were people who held beliefs around women and prayers. My wife and I were asked to pray and we were told that stake leadership had dictated that all meetings be opened by a priesthood holder, the woman could only give the closing prayer. The first woman praying in general conference happened in 2013)
• Members are expected to shun those who leave

​Once widely accepted:

• Mormons believe they will get their own planet
• Blood atonement
• The Garden of Eden was in Missouri
• You HAVE to be a polygamist in the next life to make the highest degree of the celestial kingdom
• Skin color is a sign of a curse
• Members are expected limit contact with those who leave

Questionable:

• Adam is God - Brigham Young fought pretty hard for this one, but others within the Q12 didn't buy it. Not sure how much of the general church body bought into this teaching.

Between 1967 and 1978, a churchwide policy (as opposed to a fringe idea) based on the First Presidency's interpretation of scripture (as opposed to, oh I don't know, revelation or something) prohibited women from praying in meetings at all. It seems the church was "inspired" to remove this policy by ERA activist Sonia Johnson, who wrote in her memoir, "​Apparently what happened was that my testimony before the Senate subcommittee - in which I quoted church leaders' affirmation of the 'exalted role of woman in our society,' and pointed out that they considered women too 'exalted' to offer prayers in sacrament meetings - began circulating immediately and widely underground in Utah, alerting many Mormons for the first time that women had been officially cut off from such prayers for a long time.... Most Mormon women, accustomed to having so few rights in the church, had not even noticed, and besides, not allowing women to pray in sacrament meeting had been well on its way to becoming standard practice in many localities of the church before the directive....

"One woman in Provo, Utah, read the testimony and vowed that she would not sing in church until prayer privileges were restored, because 'the song of the righteous is a prayer unto God.' Several faculty members at Brigham Young University were shocked into action and demanded an accounting from church headquarters. In the end, so much hue and cry was raised that President Kimball was forced to admit that the policy was not in accord with scripture and could not stand..."

I’m sorry if this comes off wrong, but I have to be blunt concerning the quote from Elder Neil Anderson. It has bothered me since he said it at General Conference. His definition of ‘doctrine’ is not straightforward. Theoretically, in order for his definition of ‘doctrine’ to be taken seriously, all members of the Q15 need to repeat this teaching, right? But which Q15? Is it all living 15 at one time? Is it all 15 over a certain period? What if 14 have repeated the teaching, and the remaining one passes away? Do we hope the next one continues the tradition? Does everyone need to start over then? Are we all supposed to carry little notebooks with running tallies of who taught which doctrines when hoping we reach BINGO on our score card? Is this how we identify God’s doctrines? What do we have to hold onto that has been revealed by all members of the Q15? This list has got to be short and I would love it if anyone who has done the work tracking the individual teachings of all members of the Q15 to share it with me.

I am more inclined to follow the well established definition of ‘doctrine’ in our theology: a teaching conveyed by a member of the Q15 (prophet, seer, and revelator, witness of the name of Christ, whether in public or private, in the right context). Yes, this definition provides a litany of contradictions and forces us to conform nuance, but we are at least left with some doctrine to interpret. The ‘doctrine’ described by Elder Anderson leaves us nothing to hold onto.

It's especially silly when you consider how many LDS beliefs are based on one or two verses of scripture.

Mistakes are a certainty.

Science has shown over and over again that our politics are a greater predictor of our moral stance than our religion, and that's pretty obvious. Tell me you're a "Christian" and I know less about your view on some moral issues than if you tell me you're a staunch Republican or Democrat.

By implication, then, we can't rely on our own ideas of "church" or "doctrine" to keep us grounded. We will tend to either read our own philosophy into the scriptures (like when one person in my ward started blabbering about how capitalism is at the heart of the Proclamation on the Family) or we will have thoughts like "that's not doctrine, it's policy" or "that's just his opinion, not speaking as a prophet" or "They're just a local leader, not a general authority," or "the prophet made a mistake."

Our political and ideological bubbles are so thick sometimes that we are actually unable to recognize when we're the ones drifting on the wind. Has the world drifted to the right or the left, or have we? Has the church changed, or is it us? Our psychology, in a self-defense overdrive, tries to protect us from "being wrong" by making it impossible for us to consciously see what the truth may be.

As social pressures shape various churches and believers, we have something to anchor ourselves to: Prophets. Our prophets, speaking as a united quorum of diverse backgrounds and political leanings, can become an anchor during perilous times. Will they be wrong sometimes? it is a certainty. Will they be wrong less than you? Almost certainly.

But most important, they will continue to hold the keys of salvation.

I've been wrong about many things, but I try to keep an open mind so I can eventually realize when I'm wrong and change my beliefs. LDS prophets don't do that. Like, ever. They don't back down, they don't retract, they don't apologize. Therefore I consider myself a much more reliable spiritual guide for myself than they are. The current prophet and his wife have doubled down on perpetuating the falsehood that he speaks for the Lord every time he opens his mouth, and even though members are allowed to say "prophets aren't infallible" in an abstract sense, they're told that they can't pick and choose which of the church's teachings to follow, and they're told that if they ever receive personal revelation that the church is wrong about something, their personal revelation is wrong because the church said so. Members who argued against the priesthood and temple ban on Black people before 1978 were wrong until suddenly they weren't. The lack of an honest and coherent solution to the serious problems of prophetic fallability was the final straw that drove me out.

My grandmother, one of the most faithful people I’ve ever known, very much believed that she was destined to make babies for eternity and she was not looking forward to it. She even wrote a poem about her dissatisfaction with the prospect of “eternal increase”.
​
I’m not saying that means it is doctrine. But I am saying she did not get the idea from “anti-Mormons”.

I'm sure this was an isolated anomaly, right? Right?

I’ve been in the church 40 years and many of these were definitely taught as doctrine, even by Elder Anderson’s definition. I’ve been surprised that many now see some of them as ‘not doctrine’

Others, I agree we’re [sic] never doctrine, and other still, we’re [sic] definitely taught as doctrine, again, by elder anderson’s definition, but are no longer doctrine and in fact have been renounced by the church.
​
Anti-doctrine definition may help you, and that is great, but clearly this has seemed to create significant confusion over what is really doctrine.

Not much to add here, but "by the mouths of two or three witnesses" and all that.

There is a fairly clear precedent in the history of the church on how the church has made significant changes in doctrine.

In 1835, Joseph Smith and the general assembly of the church voted unanimously to print the “Lectures on Faith,” in the Doctrine and Covenants, in order to provide a sure foundational doctrine of the Godhead.

Almost 100 years later, in 1921, a council of leaders in the church felt the doctrine laid out in “Lectures on Faith” contradicted the then current acceptance of the teaching that man becomes like God, so with the new printing of the D&C, the lectures were removed.

​Today, it is rare to find someone in the church that is familiar with Joseph’s Lectures on Faith.

I read the Lectures on Faith for the first time last year, having heard that they were really profound or something. They were okay, I guess. And yes, they do contradict current LDS doctrine, for example by asserting that the Godhead has only two members, the Father and the Son.

By definition, doctrine is what is generally taught by a religion. Granted, most of these things are not acknowledged as “doctrine” today, but at one point many of them were taught. My parents, in their mid-70’s still believe we’re all going to have to trek to Missouri. When I told my mom that isn’t taught anymore, she couldn’t believe it! Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s a lot of these were taught to me.

My sixty-something bishop in a YSA ward in a college town in 2021 had missed the memo that married women are allowed to have careers now. Kidding, there was no memo.

The idea that women will be eternal baby makers is unsupported. We have no evidence that pregnancy is required to make spiritual bodies. We have no idea what that process entails. Its a farce to claim mormons believe women will be eternally pregnant in the CK.

I know firsthand that some mormons believe it and some don't. I had an institute teacher who asserted that this is the reason why men can be sealed to multiple women but not vice-versa. I've seen a guy claim that his wife looks forward to it. I agree that it's an absurd and disgusting belief, but it's a pretty logical extrapolation from the church's doctrine that physical bodies and heterosexual marriage are requirements for exaltation in the CK. That's not "no evidence." On the other hand, Brigham Young taught it, so that's pretty compelling evidence that it isn't true.

Yeah that one drives me crazy as well. The ultimate, core doctrine of all our beliefs is, as best I can tell, "God is Love." If God loves his daughters perfectly, would he ever turn them into machinery or in any way seek to turn them from whatever path each of them wants to travel through the eternities? Would a celestial husband, seeking to be like Jesus Christ, be a part of making his other half a mechanism for fulfilling this insane idea of doctrine?

It's literal nonsense that preys on fears and exploits our inability to understand what awaits us in the life to come.

If the LDS Church's view of women is meant to be representative of God's view of women, they have good reason to be afraid. For most of its history it's treated them as little more than baby-making machines. The first quote that pops into my head is this gem from Spencer W. Kimball that was quietly deleted from the Eternal Marriage institute student manual last year: “Supreme happiness in marriage is governed considerably by a primary factor—that of the bearing and rearing of children. Too many young people set their minds, determining they will not marry or have children until they are more secure, until the military service period is over; until the college degree is secured; until the occupation is more well-defined; until the debts are paid; or until it is more convenient. They have forgotten that the first commandment is to ‘be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.’ (Genesis 1:28.) And so brides continue their employment and husbands encourage it, and contraceptives are used to prevent conception. Relatives and friends and even mothers sometimes encourage birth control for their young newlyweds. But the excuses are many, mostly weak. The wife is not robust; the family budget will not feed extra mouths; or the expense of the doctor, hospital, and other incidentals is too great; it will disturb social life; it would prevent two salaries; and so abnormal living prevents the birth of children. The Church cannot approve nor condone the measures which so greatly limit the family” (Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball, 328–29).

Perhaps most pertinent is Doctrine and Covenants 132, the section of canonized scripture that coincidentally outlines both polygamy and exaltation as if they're somehow related, wherein the God of Love references women as objects that are given to and taken away from men as he sees fit. If he has the slightest concern for their agency or happiness, he chose a strange way to show it. Now of course, the scriptures themselves may contain anti-doctrines, but I'm not sure that can apply here seeing as this entire section is attributed to the Lord himself in the first person and wasn't even translated from another language. We'd better pray that Joseph Smith made it up.

Antagonists will do this intentionally. Many people may simply be misinformed and think they are true. I’m confident many of our members also share anti-doctrine about other faiths. It’s also difficult to say some of these things were never presented as “doctrine” but your point on frequency and recency is well-noted.

Yep, I've been in multiple Sunday school lessons where we mocked mainstream Christians for supposedly believing that God the Father and Jesus Christ are the same person and that Jesus prayed to himself. That's not how most of them understand the Trinity at all. In fact, as I've said before, I can't understand how three persons in one substance are significantly different from the LDS doctrine of the Godhead. The Book of Mormon states multiple times that there's one God, most Mormons would insist that they only believe in one God, and most Mormons would also say that Jesus is God just as much as Heavenly Father is God. But that's none of my business.

I fall into this conceited mindset that the music I like is objectively good, and therefore everyone else should like it, and therefore everyone else should be interested in my Spotify playlists. In my defense, based on reddit posts I see of people showing off their playlists and their most played artists and albums, I think this is a widespread tendency. I want to get over this mindset because it makes me dislike myself a little. And yet, as I've now curated about 1,605 hours of music on my chronological playlists with no end in sight, it's been weighing on me that I simply won't have time to listen to all these songs as many times as I would like before I die, and so in order for my efforts to really be worthwhile, other people need to derive joy from them too. So I hope they do. When I made a post about my playlists from the 1920s to the 2010s, someone did go through and follow all of them, so I hope that person is reading this post too because here are the others that have been born since then.

As mentioned, I started with the eighties, was satisfied with that for a while, and then kept pushing my boundaries. I hesitated to go too far back because replicating the effort I put into making my eighties playlist as large and diverse as possible would get harder with each preceding decade. I wasn't going to go past the fifties, but then I needed to have "Civilization (Bongo Bongo Bongo)," and then I needed to have "Lady Play Your Mandolin," and then I needed to have an EP by the Florida Normal and Industrial Institute Quartette, so hello forties, hello thirties, hello twenties, and I'm sure nobody else finds this as fascinating as I do so I'll just go ahead and say that since my last post I've gone back to the tens and then the zeroes and then, just a week ago, the nineties. Not the tens and the zeroes and the nineties that I already had, but different ones.

Song that broke my resolve: "Steamboat Bill"

Song that broke my resolve: a 1909 version of "Shine on Harvest Moon"

I think this is really, definitively the farthest back I can go. Song that broke my resolve: an 1898 version of "Jingle Bells"

Oh yeah, and I also made a playlist for the other twenties that is, of necessity, a work in progress, and for all I know may remain very incomplete if I don't happen to survive until 2030. Right now it has a disproportionate percentage of religious music because that's practically all I listened to in 2021 as I struggled to draw closer to God with the help of my playlist Closer to God, so I hope to rectify that eventually.

Song that broke my resolve: "Bang!"

First and foremost, these are meant to be lists of music that I actually want to listen to, but I've also grown to think of them as time capsules, museum exhibits, tributes to the human race. I have weird thoughts about how cool it would be if the Earth vanished and these were somehow the only artifacts alien xenopologists had at their disposal to learn about us. And they could somehow understand all the human languages through alien magic. They aren't serious thoughts. Making them diverse has indeed been a challenge, but a thrilling one that makes me giddy when I have any success. I would like to get on my knees and praise God for Smithsonian Folkways, which has provided hundreds of albums of obscure and/or anthropologist-recorded music from countries that weren't doing much commercially until recent decades. Thanks to these recordings, my fifties playlist just might be the most diverse one.

In a sense it feels like I'm cherry-picking the best of history - the seventies may have sucked, but it left behind a lot of great music that will last long after the sucky things have faded. And yet I'm not trying to pretend the sucky things didn't happen. I have songs that acknowledge atrocities and various forms of bigotry. The farther back I go, though, the more I have to decide how much problematic content in the songs themselves I'm willing to tolerate for the sake of historical accuracy. (I hate using the word "problematic," but I'm too lazy to think of a less overused one right now.) The eighties already had its share of political incorrectness, of which "Illegal Alien" and "The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun" are tied for first place in my book. Then of course the farther back you go the more you find stereotypical portrayals of non-American cultures. I'm speaking from a position of privilege and may be totally wrong, but I feel like in most cases these songs aren't overtly bigoted, and while they rightfully wouldn't be acceptable to write today, we don't need to resent their existence. I also feel like having any acknowledgment of non-American cultures in music from early decades is better than nothing.

But then I've had to consider actual racism on a case-by-case basis. In the 1890s there's a song called "The Whistling Coon." I included it because the artist, George W. Johnson, is believed to be the first African-American to ever record music. It's a shame that he had to indulge in stereotypes against his own race to pander to white audiences, but he deserves to be recognized regardless. There's a song by a white duo in the 1910s called "You'll Find Old Dixieland in France," which likewise uses the word "coon" and indulges in racist stereotypes. I included it because it's a tribute to the African-American contribution to World War I. Its lyrics aren't okay, but they are at least meant affectionately. There's in the song in the 1900s called "The Ghost of the Banjo Coon" that I rejected because it just plays on the perception of African-Americans as something exotic, frightening, and barely human. Maybe someday I'll rationalize including it for the same reason that Warner Brothers has released racist cartoons on DVD, but for now I'd feel too guilty about it.

If I had a nickel for everyone who's asked me if I have a Christmas playlist, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it's happened twice. I hadn't actually bothered to make one because I feel like I hear enough Christmas music without making a concerted effort to do so, and I had some Christmas music on some of my other playlists and that satisfied me. But I made one just to make these two people happy. The title is a placeholder for something clever that will probably never come to me. The picture is from "The Shanty Where Santy Claus Lives" (1933), a really great cartoon if you can look past the racist bits, which I admit is easier for me because I'm not the subject of them.

After last week's post it should come as no surprise that I'm agnostic about Jesus. Not about whether he lived - scholars are almost unanimous in the affirmative on that point - but about whether he said and did the things the Bible says he said and did. I don't want to be agnostic about Jesus. I want to love and follow Jesus. But if I'm honest, I have to hold everything to the same standard of scrutiny right now. The Christmas story itself has some issues that I once regarded as little more than interesting bits of trivia but now must take into real consideration. Apparently nobody had ever heard it until it was written down decades after Jesus' death, the timing of the Roman census doesn't line up with his birth, and the word translated as "virgin" in Isaiah 7:14 really just means young woman. None of these disprove his divinity, of course, but they raise questions. How important is it for the details that have been passed down about Jesus to be accurate? Can we really know him if they aren't?

These last couple days, I'm unexpectedly believing in him more after I read Return from Tomorrow, George G. Ritchie's account of a near-death experience. I've heard that near-death experiences can be explained by hallucinogenic chemicals flooding the brain. He explains why he doesn't believe his was a hallucination but acknowledges that one can never know for certain, that there's still an element of faith involved. In any case, it was powerful to read and the world would be a better place if all of us hallucinated such things. I'm not going to make it the foundation for my spiritual views but I do take it quite seriously. I love his initial description of Jesus: "He would be too bright to look at. For now I saw that it was not light but a Man who had entered the room, or rather, a Man made out of light, though this seemed no more possible to my mind than the incredible intensity of the brightness that made up His form.

"The instant I perceived Him, a command formed itself in my mind. 'Stand up!' The words came from inside me, yet they had an authority my mere thoughts had never had. I got to my feet, and as I did came the stupendous certainty: 'You are in the presence of the Son of God.'

"Again, the concept seemed to form itself inside me, but not as thought or speculation. It was a kind of knowing, immediate and complete. I knew other facts about Him too. One, that this was the most totally male Being I had ever met. If this was the Son of God, then His name was Jesus. But... this was not the Jesus of my Sunday School books. That Jesus was gentle, kind, understanding - and probably a little bit of a weakling. This Person was power itself, older than time and yet more modern than anyone I had ever met.

"Above all, with that same mysterious inner certainty, I knew that this Man loved me. Far more even than power, what emanated from this Presence was unconditional love. An astonishing love. A love beyond my wildest imagining. This love knew every unlovable thing about me - the quarrels with my stepmother, my explosive temper, the sex thoughts I could never control, every mean, selfish thought and action since the day I was born - and accepted and loved me just the same."

At a minimum, Jesus is real in the same way that Santa Claus is real, and I don't mean that derisively. I mean that he represents something good and beautiful and inspiring. And I frankly feel that the idea of Jesus surpasses what's actually in the Bible. We have no record of Jesus advocating social change. Some scholars argue that as an apocalyptic preacher, he saw social change as a waste of time because the world was about to end anyway. Yet now many of us take for granted that because he loves everyone infinitely and equally, he would support sweeping measures - not just individualized acts of kindness - to make life better for marginalized people. We believe we're following him when we do so. The nineteenth-century abolitionists believed they were following him even though, so far as is known, he never once spoke against slavery. I, for one, see social justice and true religion as inseparable. I think it's pretty useless if not straight-up dishonest to preach that all people are equal before God without being actively concerned about police murders of Black people, sexual harassment and assault, or anti-LGBT hate crimes. I hope Jesus is, after all, more than a symbol for the best impulses of humanity, but I can't say he is with the certainty I once could, so I have to take as much as I can get.

My youngest sibling is far more tech-savvy than I'll probably ever be. My family didn't even have a computer until I was in second grade, but by the time my sibling was four they were drawing better with the mouse than I could with a pencil. Nowadays they collect old TVs and VCRs and VHS tapes, and recently they got a device that allows them to digitize VHS tapes and put their contents up on YouTube, which so far they've done with two. As a good brother who loves them and wishes them success in everything they do, I hereby promote these videos to both of my blog readers without being asked.

This is a simple narration of a simple children's book that my siblings and I watched multiple times well after we'd aged out of the target demographic. Our dog Milo (to whom the video is dedicated along with me) didn't watch it as attentively but he did react to the barking dogs in the little live-action interludes. Now it appeals to me for the nostalgia. I don't remember why it appealed to me back then, but it was probably for the song at the end. If nothing else, watch the song at the end. It starts at 18:42. In a just world it would have won a Grammy.

I anticipate that this one will be of interest to more people. My sibling's friend found this at a thrift store, and there's no information about it online. It's always fascinating, sometimes infuriating and sometimes refreshing in a weird way to stumble upon an unexpected gap in the internet's virtual omniscience. A lot of effort seems to have gone into this video for it to simply disappear from humankind's collective memory. For starters, ten children recite lines about Martin Luther King at a public gathering. Most or all of the children and some of the adults in the audience should still be alive to remember it. Then there are appearances of varying length by Dr. King's widow, Dr. King's sister, Rosa Parks, the Great American Mime Experiment, the Ebenezer Baptist Church Choir, ventriloquist Willie Tyler and dummy Lester, the hip-hop group Full Force, and a group of "friends of Dr. King" including Bill Cosby (awk), Sidney Poitier, and Stevie Wonder. So it's not the fanciest production ever but I would have expected it to be a slightly bigger deal than it is. In any case, I'm grateful that my sibling has rescued it from the dustbin of history.

This video is from July but a page I'm following shared it the other day and I just have to talk about it. Two women in Italy are kissing for a TV show, and a nun physically separates them and yells, "Jesus, Mary and Joseph! It's the devil! It's the devil!" I would just roll my eyes at her being a crazy old lady who's probably jealous because she's not allowed to kiss anyone, but what really alarmed and sickened me was the cavalcade of commenters who lauded her behavior and condemned the women for laughing at her. Yes, a lot of people exist who think it's admirable to harass strangers for not believing as you do. I don't believe that God cares if two women kiss - like, at all - but unlike the people who insist that he does, I don't claim to speak for him, so let's assume for the sake of discussion that I'm wrong. Two facts still remain. First, nobody on the planet is going to repent and change their lifestyle because a stranger physically accosted and yelled at them. Of course they laughed at her. They would have been justified in doing worse. (Not a lot worse. I'm not saying they should have beat her up or anything.) Second, I'm not sure what Bible these people have been reading if they think this kind of behavior emulates Jesus in any way. He spoke his mind when people asked for it, but he didn't go around publicly butting into their business and trampling on their right to live as they chose. Sorry not sorry but I can't wait until the generations that think this way are extinct.