Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnnyLingo
Of course they do. But I believe it's on a whole different level than where I am.
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I know you are just baiting for fun so I have resisted jumping in to the fray, but I'll address this one ...
Why do you think the Apostles are more righteous than you? I think you sell yourself short and oversell the Apostles. I'm being serious here. The main difference between the Apostles and the typical active church member trying his/her best to live the gospel and getting it right most of the time is that they were called of God to be Apostles and we weren't. Most of them happen to be extraordinarily bright men who were highly successful in their careers and who have served in many positions of leadership in the church, but if the high local leaders I know and love (stake presidents, mission presidents, bishops, etc. who likewise have successful careers and are great men overall) are anything like the ones who eventually become Apostles, I am not surprised at all that there would be a fair amount of racism, pride, lust, jealousy, etc. at the highest levels of the church hierarchy.
The difference between you and I -- and correct me if I'm wrong -- seems to be that I'm OK with it and you aren't. SoCalCoug's points are valid -- if it's plausible that God would allow the blessings of the gospel to be taken away from all of His children for thousands of years, it's plausible that He would allow certain groups of his children to be kept from the gospel for a variety of reasons even when there are Prophets on the earth. I don't pretend to understand the full magnitude of the interplay between agency and God's desire and ability to turn the course of human events in spite of agency, but based on the many apostasy's and the horrible things that have happened to humans over the past thousands of years, it appears for the most part that He is quite willing to let people do whatever they want to do. In fact, (assuming God would have preferred to provide blacks with the Priesthood all along, as Joseph Smith apparently did) allowing His Prophets to prevent a race of people from having the full blessings of the gospel for a few generations is, in the grand scheme of things, on the happy side of the scale of unfortunate things that God has allowed to happen to His children.