Comment by lolinder
3 years ago
Coffee and black/green tea are typically considered to be prohibited (I know active members who drink green tea and still participate fully), but caffeine in general isn't banned. One of the apostles even acknowledged drinking a whole lot of diet coke to help while learning to use a computer[0]:
> It took a great deal of time, repetition, patience; no small amount of hope and faith; lots of reassurance from my wife; and many liters of a diet soda that shall remain nameless.
[0] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference...
I'm not a member, just going off what they told me. From what I understand the actual edicts (maybe it's called something) else aren't really supposed to be published or talked about. So I've only talked to ex-mormons about this.
I am a member, and every actual commandment is definitely public record. Even the temple covenants are (as of recently) public record[0], and those used to be the ones that were held in the highest level of secrecy.
There are a whole lot of people who have their own interpretations of the commandments, and that coupled with our history of secrecy surrounding the temple could definitely give rise to the idea that it's difficult to know what all the requirements are, but it's all online and available to everyone at this point.
Here's the relevant information about the health code[1]:
> The Lord revealed in the Word of Wisdom that the following substances are harmful:
> Alcoholic drinks (see Doctrine and Covenants 89:5–7).
> Tobacco (see Doctrine and Covenants 89:8).
> Tea and coffee (see Doctrine and Covenants 89:9; latter-day prophets have taught that the term “hot drinks,” as written in this verse, refers to tea and coffee).
[0] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/temples/what-is-temple-e...
[1] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topi...
I've checked the website and it's easy to get lost clicking around like on tvtropes.org
> I am a member, and every actual commandment is definitely public record. Even the temple covenants are (as of recently) public record[0], and those used to be the ones that were held in the highest level of secrecy.
Great! So here's a very legit question: is there a PDF version that I could read linearly to get a good idea of the whole doctrine? (I mean something like the Talmud)
I'm just curious and want to learn.
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I'm a former Mormon (I guess you could call me an "ex-mormon"). Just some advice: be careful about getting (or propagating rather) information from ex-mormons regarding Mormonism (or rather, verify it first). There's an incredible mix of ignorance and/or antipathy that leads to extremely unreliable information. Of course there are plenty of exceptions, but it's a massively deep philosophy/corpus that not many (even active members) put in the effort to actually know it, and for some reason some people become LLMs when asked questions about it, answering very confidently with whatever sounds the most correct to them without regard to actual truth value.
That "massively deep philosophy/corpus" doesn't help things, though. With nearly 200 years of a leadership that teaches that whatever is spoken by God's servants (the highest church leadership) is to be equated as similar to the word of God (with a normal human distribution of those leaders who approach this view with a cautious humility through those who speak their musings with confidence) there's a HUGE of collection of some pretty odd beliefs. Since the church leadership almost never repudiates these past statements, preferring to have them quietly fade from the collective memory and consciousness of the membership over time, chances are that there's still some few members who are aware of these weird beliefs and can back them up with some sort of statement by a modern LDS prophet or apostle. This makes any "actual truth value" of an odd teaching or belief really difficult to gauge, and chances are there's some actual statement behind many of that unreliable information.
That's speaking of teachings and doctrine, of course. When it comes to history that's less like trying to nail Jell-o to the wall and it's much easier to find sources for more accurate history, and I agree that it's a bit sad how little accuracy in history seems to be respected by some believing and formerly-believing members.
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This is the Mormon immune response to exposure to information that causes cognitive dissonance: slander the people who left the church because the fact that they left the church means they are ignorant.
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It's actually quite public. The 'raw' doctrinal backing comes from 'Doctrine and Covenants, Section 89': https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/wor...
Clarifications as to what the 'hot drinks' section means has come over time, generally being shared during the twice-annual General Conference. The most prominent call came in 1921.
You can read more about it here: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/revelations...
It's not that they aren't supposed to be published or talked about, its that the caffeine thing was never an "edict" in the first place. The edict was no coffee or tea, and culturally that became "no caffeine" because that was a common link between the two. It became a common enough belief among lay-members over the case of many decades that the church in recent years put out a statement clarifying that caffeine is not in fact prohibited or addressed in any way by church doctrine.