Jaye wrote:
Check your messages Bearyb.
I did, and replied. Thanks.

Dubbs hates LDS people wrote:
Decaf wrote:
Wren wrote:
Good reply, Betz. A fanatic like Decaf who does not know the Christ and puts a leader higher than God will have a gap between the real where he lives and the ideal that is Truth. So he lashes out at others. Remember that since he does not know, his words have no power to hurt.

Tell me Saint Wren, why has God ceased to communicate with his prophets?

Because Joseph Smith isn't around to spike the wine with hallucinogens...!!!!

http://www.mormonelixirs.org/
I finally finished the above article. The proposed theory is one I had never encountered before, and is quite a stretch in my opinion. The misrepresentation of Lehi's dream from the BoM was glaring, as were some of the specifics supposedly reported by Joseph Smith in his First Vision. I suppose if some enjoy speculative theorizing about such events as the First Vision, the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, and the restoration of the gospel there are plenty of possibilities. Perhaps it is easier for some to go that route (of worldly explanations) than to consider that they happened as it was reported that they did. We each have our agency to do as we will.

Jaye wrote:
Dubbs Kitkats favorite wrote:
Jaye wrote:
Dubbs Kitkats favorite wrote:
Jaye wrote:
Percy Wetmore said:

"Yea, you know more than the current Prophets is what your saying, pretty arrogant, Pride goeth before the fall. Heed it Jaye.


Fact is, if your wine is fermented with Alchohol, it is breaking WOW, you can't deny this. Pure wine is interpreted as grape Juice, you don't use this, you use fermented, you are breaking WOW."

To which, I...Jaye reply:

I would venture to say that the current PROPHET may know more about certain things than I do...while I would also venture to say that I know more about certain things than the current Prophet does.

The PROPHET(S) is(are) certainly welcome to give counsel to the members of the faith regarding his(their) personal opinions. This is something that ALL the Prophets have done.

And as I deem their words to be wise, and their advice to be scripturally sound, and their counsel to be applicable to my own life...I have no problem heeding their words of opinion, as well as their doctrinal teachings.

But where I see that their words are only opinion, and not based upon solid doctrine...I exercise my right to free agency and free will...and the gift of discernment which our Father has gifted His children with...to decide whether I will heed them or not.

2. My wine is made in the manner in which it was made in the days of Jesus.

It is fermented, just as the wine which was made in the days of Jesus was fermented...and just as it was made by the members of the Mormon Church following the direction of Joseph Smith based upon that which he said was revealed to him by the Lord.

And since there is NO doctrine within the Bible, the Book of Mormon, or the Doctrine and Covenants forbidding the use of fermented wine for Sacramental purposes...and indeed these books all INSTRUCT the use of wine for Sacramental purposes...then wine is what I use when my small vinyard of 3 vines can supply enough grapes for a small amount of new-made wine.

Ergo...my use of homemade wine for Sacrament is NOT against the Word of Wisdom at all.

3. The scriptures which you have posted regarding wine and strong drink have one thing in common.

They warn against excess.

A wine bibber, as mentioned in the Bible, was a drunkard. A man given to excess in drinking his wine until he was passed out in drunkenness.

The Pharisees accused Jesus of being a wine bibber, or a drunkard...as well as a glutton...because they saw him sitting at table with tax collectors and sinners.

Was He a glutton? No. He ate to sustain life, just as every mortal man must do.

Was he a drunkard? No. He drank wine at table, with meals, and for social gatherings and celebrations... just as every other man did in His time. And He also turned water into wine at a wedding celebration.

Joseph Smith also enjoyed drinking wine for celebratory purposes...and at the dinner table, and at meetings with his apostles, and even in the temple in Kirkland as well from accounts by various apostles.

I use my homemade wine only for Sacramental purposes. If it is not available, as it has not been since last fall...I use organic grape juice instead.

I do not drink it by the glassful. I do not drink it with dinner, or after dinner, or to celebrate any occasion other than Sacrament...and then only by the same little paper cup which the LDS Church uses each Sunday for Sacrament.

You have no cause to gainsay me Percy. You have no cause to accuse me of wrongdoing.

Especially when you have long excused Joseph Smith for failing to heed the Lord's Word of Wisdom to the absolute letter...(as the current leaders of the Church have interpreted it to be.)

You excuse him because he was human, and nobody ever said he was perfect or infallible.

And at the same time you attack and accuse me for following the instructions regarding the use of newly made and pure wine found within Sections 27 and 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants.

In other words...you hold ME to higher standards than you would hold a man who claimed to commune face to face with the Most High.

Get over it Percy. And while you're at it...get over yourself.


blah blah blah, arrogance, blah blah prideful, blah blah blah, shouldn't have a recommend. Blah.

Then by the same standards...Joseph Smith and his apostles and followers, Brigham Young and his apostles and followers, and every other Mormon who CONTINUED to drink beer, wine, coffee, tea, and used tobacco AFTER the Word of Wisdom was revealed can kiss the Celestial kingdom goodbye as well.


No, because it wasn't made a recommend question until the early nineteen hundreds, course how would an LDS man know this?

It was never intended to be a recommend question. It was never intended to be a commandment.
It was intended only to be a greeting to the Saints, expressing God's suggestions for their health and well being.

And while Joseph Smith never adhered to the restrictions on alcohol...he stated that any man who did not adhere to the principles of the Word of Wisdom was not fit to wear the mantle of leadership within the Church.

Joseph's approach to the Word of Wisdom, in stating that it was not a commandment, but a salutation to the Saints, when viewed in historical perspective seems rather sensible and quite rational.

In the late 1830's, the Kirtland Stake had dissolved due to apostasy, the Missouri Saints were being driven from the state with accompanying hardships, and Joseph himself was imprisoned.

At a time when the Church was struggling for mere existence, it would seem small and petty to quibble about a drink of tea or coffee. Similarly, after a comparatively comfortable initial existence in Nauvoo, Mormon society was torn apart by internal dissension and by the controversy and persecution which resulted from the promulgation and practice of peculiar religious doctrines. Emphasis on a rigid interpretation of a health code during such a period of turmoil would seem ill-timed and inappropriate.

Moreover, there is some evidence that Joseph sought to avoid needless dissension among the Saints by urging moderation and charity. It would appear that some Mormons had been influenced by the fanaticism that characterized sermons of some of the radical temperance reformers, and tended to be intolerant of those with professed Word of Wisdom weaknesses.

The Prophet, recognizing that the revelation must be seen in perspective with other matters and doctrines pertaining to the growth of the "Kingdom," urged them to be slow to judge or condemn others. Joseph's rather curt reaction to a talk advocating "temperance in the extreme" was illustrative of his desire to teach the Saints to be charitable and merciful, rather than vindictive and unforgiving.

As for Brigham Young...I found this quite enlightening:
Bibliography
"An Economic Interpretation of the Word of Wisdom" by Leonard J. Arrington, Published in BYU Studies 1959, Vol. 1, No. 1, p.37.

"The Word of Wisdom in Early Nineteenth-Century Perspective" by Lester E. Bush in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Autumn 1981.

"I have always wondered why it was that abstaining from 4 or 5 specific things is the only part of the Word of Wisdom that is enforced, when most of those 4 or 5 specific things aren’t even prohibited in the revelation? The second question is: how did a "not by commandment" revelation turn into a commandment?

The most satisfactory answer to these questions is Economics. A major goal of Brigham Young was Economic self-sufficiency--he wanted his people to thrive independently of the rest of the nation. He didn’t want the Saint’s scarce and hard-earned dollars leaving the territory of Utah to import the unneeded luxuries of alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and tea. Thus, more and more emphasis was placed on abstaining from these things as time went on. Brigham Young said:

How much do you suppose goes annually from this Territory, and has for ten or twelve years past, in gold and silver, to supply the people with tobacco? I will say $60,000. Brother William H. Hooper, our Delegate in Congress, came here in 1849, and during about eight years he was selling goods his sales for tobacco alone amounted to over $28,000 a year. At the same time there were other stores that sold their share and drew their share of the money expended yearly, besides what has been brought in by the keg and by the half keg. The traders and passing emigration have sold tons of tobacco, besides what is sold here regularly. I say that $60,000 annually is the smallest figure I can estimate the sales at. Tobacco can be raised here as well as it can be raised in any other place. It wants attention and care. If we use it, let us raise it here. I recommend for some man to go to raising tobacco. One man, who came here last fall, is going to do so; and if he is diligent, he will raise quite a quantity. I want to see some man go to and make a business of raising tobacco and stop sending money out of the Territory for that article. (Journal of Discourses, Vol.9, p.35, Brigham Young, April 7, 1861)"

So...on the one hand, I have seen claims from Brigham Young stating that 'ANY WORD THAT COMES FROM THE MOUTH OF GOD IS BINDING UPON THE MEMBERSHIP.'

And on the other hand he apparently decided to disregard the words that came from the mouth of God because it made good economic sense to grow their own tobacco.

And not only did the Saints to the South of Utah in St.George attempt to raise tobacco to provide the Saints throughout Utah...but they grew their own vinyards to make their own wine as well.

A Mormon (one that was oft accused of killing people) started the first Utah brewery. Indeed, the infamous Orrin Porter Rockwell established the Hot Springs Brewery Hotel in 1856 (Valley Tan; November 6, 1858).

According to an October 1995 History Blazer article, it was in 1861 that Brigham Young established the Cotton Mission in a little place called Toquerville, its ultimate goal being for Church members to raise enough cotton for Utah to break off its expensive importing ties. Yet the fertile fields that the Church members worked in soon provided something more: grapes. Lots of grapes. In fact, the wine that was derived from these grapes soon became hoarded by the LDS Church, largely because they were still using wine in their sacraments until the 1870s, when the teenage boys of the Aaronic Priesthood became allowed to prepare the sacraments themselves (soon replacing wine with water for their own protection, citing D&C 27:2 ["… that it mattereth not what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink when ye partake of the Sacrament"] as the reason for the switch). The Mormon-owned and operated Zions Cooperative Mercantile Institution outlet (ZCMI for short) soon began selling wine and beer to the general populace at its downtown location, providing much joy to the hard-working residents of Salt Lake City.

Yet there is more to this story than just buds drinkin’ suds. According to Mark Twain’s hilarious 1871 Wild West travelogue Roughing It, "Valley Tan is a kind of whisky, or first cousin to it; is of Mormon invention and manufactured only in Utah. Tradition says it is made of (imported) fire and brimstone." Indeed, the Mormon-curated Valley Tan was soon sweeping the west by storm, with prominent figures like Twain and Porter Rockwell drunkenly singing its praises. Yet the big turning point for Utah’s brew dance came in the form of an 1873 session of the (Mormon-dominated) territorial legislature in which a motion was passed that gave Brigham Young and only Brigham Young the right to manufacture and distribute "spirituous liquors" in Utah. Though this wasn’t the first time that an individual or group has tried to monopolize the Utah liquor market (a decade prior, the Provo City Council petitioned to be the only group responsible for Provo’s liquor output, but their petition was ultimately denied by the Utah County Court [J. Marinus Jensen’s Early History of Provo, Utah]), it was the first time that said individual succeeded. Now why, pray tell, would Brigham Young do that?

Though we can only theorize about what motivated Young’s wheelings and dealings to qualify the statement, it’s safe to make the assumption that Young – already known as a smart businessman – was in it for the money. The whole point of establishing Utah breweries (and cotton missions and factories) in the first place was to cultivate business and – more importantly – to prevent Utah from wasting money by importing valuable items like beer, whisky and fabrics. Young saw an economic opportunity and immediately seized it, even though he never drank the stuff. So, in an unofficial sense, the Church controlled all of the liquor in Utah; an 1874 edition of The Gazetteer of Utah even has a listing for the Salt Lake City Brewery being housed in Salt Lake’s Tenth Ward! Yet beer and whisky weren’t the only dealings that the Church had with "spirituous liquors". It wasn’t very long until the Valley was swarming with beer and wine. There was so much, in fact, that some Mormons actually began paying their tithing in wine (a report from the St. George Tithing Office [later republished Leonard J. Arrington’s 1966 book Desert Saints] showed that the office had collected more than 7000 gallons of wine by early 1887). Everyone had their own idea of how much wine constituted a full tithing payment, eventually leading a Church tithing-clerk to issue instructions on how to standardize the wine/tithing process in a letter dated September 20, 1879."

Now...the Mormons were brewing their own beer, and making their own wine...and public drunkenness became an issue.

And this, along with a growing temperance movement throughout the United States is what inspired the later outright ban on alcohol altogether.

This is what inspired the next three successors of the LDS Presidency to declare that the Word of Wisdom was now to be considered as a commandment.

One of my favorite Sacrament hymns still states:


"O God, the Eternal Father, who dwells amid the sky, In Jesus' name we ask thee to bless and sanctify. If we are pure before thee, this bread and cup of wine, That we may all remember, that offering Divine."
It surprises me that you did not give due credit to the source of paragraphs 3-7 of your above post (starting with "Joseph's approach..." ). I'm not sure where you got them from, but I found them word for word at
http://www.fairlds.org/Mormonism_201/m20114.html

Well...good for you.

Jaye wrote:

The LDS Church has long endeavored to fit in with Mainstream Christianity...to the point that they have surpassed them in their conservatism.
I would think it more correctly said that the LDS Church has long endeavored to be understood by, but not necessarily "fit in" with, mainstream Christianity.

And if the LDS Church happens to appear increasingly more conservative, perhaps the others have done most of the changing.

bearyb wrote:
Jaye wrote:

The LDS Church has long endeavored to fit in with Mainstream Christianity...to the point that they have surpassed them in their conservatism.
I would think it more correctly said that the LDS Church has long endeavored to be understood by, but not necessarily "fit in" with, mainstream Christianity.

And if the LDS Church happens to appear increasingly more conservative, perhaps the others have done most of the changing.

Well of COURSE you would think it more correctly said in your manner...we ALL prefer our own beliefs...wouldn't you agree on at least that much?