My favorite argument is that I was given access to Super God when I a child. Which gives me access to Super Heaven when I die. It’s waaaaay better that regular heaven. You keep praying to regular god or whatever, you mud dwelling peasant. I’ll be looking down on you from Super Heaven and laughing for Extra Eternity.
Note that slavery was abolished in 1865 and the civil rights movement started in 1950s-1960s.
And in 1978 mormon god said that black men can have the priesthood which is mormon god’s way of saying black men are treated as equals now. (Women, regardless of race, never were treated equally and still aren’t).
The Mormon church likes to celebrate the fact that black men are treated equally but they never mention that this was 110 years after slavery was abolished and still ~3 decades after the civil rights movement started. Mormon God sure has great timing.
But polygamy is actually still alive and well in the Mormon church, and i mean the actual Mormon church and not an offshoot. The Mormons stopped practicing polygamy outright but it is still alive in how they actually treat marriage.
Under mormonism they marry you for eternity. Except if your spouse wants a divorce or they die then you are no longer married from a civil law perspective. If a woman wants to get married again then she needs to have special permission from the Mormon prophet which i believe they do to release her from the Mormon eternal sealing. To do this they also try to get the ex-husbands approval (and too bad if he’s dead). Where this gets interesting is that if the husband wants to remarry then he can. No strings attached. He can have as many eternal sealings as he wants. No permission needed from the prophet or wife. Just can have only one civil marriage at a time but if you get a civil divorce then a man can easily get another eternal marriage and a woman cannot. Basically this means that Mormons are letting men practice polygamy in the afterlife. It’s wild.
But this just one example of how women aren’t treated equally in the Mormon church. And don’t get me started on LGBTQIA+. But if you ever hear someone say mormonism likes the the gays they are gaslighting you. They believe that being gay is a sin and you can only be accepted at arm’s reach if you’re gay, but never do anything gay, and conform to your gender. Telling someone you accept them while believing part of them they can’t change is a sin is Olympic level mental gymnastics. But welcome to Mormonism!
Now imagine how much the christian god’s mind was changed by the roman government
Thousands of Christians were martyred in the first centuries after Christs death. Often they were tortured and/or crucified.
I believe that Satan has a hold of you.
I believe that the Lord God has sent me here.
And I believe that in 1978 God changed his mind about black people.
-“I Believe” from The Book of Mormon (the musical)
Why is polygamy even illegal in the first place?
Because gender bounded polygamy causes serious social issues. Look at the FLDS for examples of it in modern day. My stance is to remove the gender bounding and enforce strict minimum age to marry laws. But yeah, 18th century USA wasn’t going to let women have multiple husbands much less let men have multiple husbands and women have multiple wives.
Yup, I think we should change the whole notion of marriage. Basically, the government would provide sets of contracts that grant certain privileges for certain responsibilities, like tax benefits for sharing financial responsibility. People can pick and choose among the various contracts, and there could be a “marriage” bundle that roughly corresponds to today’s notion of marriage. Marriage than becomes a religious ceremony that people are free to define themselves, separately from any legal commitments.
This way you don’t need prenups or whatever, you only sign the documents each party is comfortable with. If you’re in a polyamorous relationship, you might combine finances with half of your partners, share hospital visitation rights with a separate half, etc, and you could marry all or some of them. Custody of children would be between biological parents or, if waived, assigned legal parents/guardians based on the contracts signed.
That’s a bit complicated, but it would make things a lot more flexible. Individual contracts could be limited in number of people involved, but you could choose to sign different contracts with different people.