Just imagine that you're a TBM again. It's been a while since you've been through the temple, so you decide to go do a session. Suddenly, you're presented once again with the "name, sign, and penalty". You realize that just as the church changed the endowment to greatly tone things down in 1990, now they've gone back to the old ceremony again, complete with the paylay-aile, and thenfive points of fellowship at the vail. Just imagine how that would go over now.

Old timers think: "wow, I wonder what brought this back".

New person: doesn't know the difference other than that something is up since everyone seems surprised.

Someone who was married or went on a mission, after 1990 thinks and acts: "What the fuck is this? I'me out of here" (probably half of everyone in the session).

You could just imagine. It would probably take only minutes after the first open session, and someone would be writing about it on this board. The media would be in a frenzy after the internet lit up with it and it became too big of a story online to not report on.

Is it any wonder why, as soon as the internet started taking off, the temple ceremony was toned way down to remove the death threats?

Add to that an over-zealous temple worker during the washing and annoying grabbing a Millennial guy's junk. "I annoint you with oil that you may be fruitful and replenish the Earth."

"Dude, what the fuck! That felt good!"

I hear that with some of the single sisters going through the endowment and working with the old geezers at the vail, that they discovered yet a sixth point of fellowship coming from the old geezer, just for them.

For those who have not been through that ceremony and didn't get the joke, you had to put your foot to foot, knee to knee (forget the wording here) and a lot more. This required a full and awkward embrace with the person on the other side of the vail as they wispered in your ear. Can anyone here remember the official wording from the ceremony, to describe the five points of fellowship?



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 09/17/2017 01:40AM by azsteve.

The five points of fellowship are: inside of right foot by the side of right foot, knee to knee, breast to breast, hand to back, and mouth to ear.

I have told of my experience with this many times on this board. It was the last endowment session I ever did. People love to think I'm making it up. Whatever. Doesn't affect me whether anyone believes it or not.

But if you want to see how it felt, get in that position with someone (as described above). Especially if it's a 6' tall guy and a short girl. Now figure out where the "sixth point" would fall if it was not exactly falling (for me--lower abdomen). Now imagine some sex-deprived geezer getting in that position with woman after woman after woman.

I know a lot of big-busted women complained about feeling like they were being felt up also. Don't tell me that wasn't the most coveted "job" in the temple.

I worked at Jordan River a short time and there was one dude in around 30 who was always first in line to do the veil. That ensured him of being with the sisters. The 5-points was gone but I'm sure he enjoyed the closeness with women. He looked like a pervert to me and I always got a weird vibe from him when he looked at me. I didn't last long doing the temple work because of all the goofy stuff. Then I resigned a year or so later.

Or back in the 1920s when you vowed vengeance upon the United States for killing Joseph Smith.

But then, there's still "Hail to The Prophet" where you belt out, "The earth shall atone for the blood of that mannnnnn!!!"

Just how is the earth gonna stone? Hmmmmmm?

They had to because watching it on YouTube is way too much information.

They need to make the temples more friendly and less scary. Have nice wedding ceremonies where all who wants to can attend...

Right when they did the death penalties i would tell them to go f#ck themselves.

I don't know how they do it today, but pre-1990, your first endowment ceremony was more like an intervention. No one who you loved and trusted would tell you what was going to happen ahead of time. Not just any member could go through the temple. Either you were there with your new bride/husband and didn't want to walk away from your marriage without at least talking to your new marriage partner about it first, or you had just quit your job and given your mission farewell speech. Either way, you had to decide whether or not to walk away from your life, within about thirty seconds or less. It was like taking bad medicine. After the first token, the others came easier. As a bonus, they didn't even threaten your life on the fourth token (nice guys huh?). At least on the fourth token, they didn't have the balls to seal your promise to give the church "all of your time, energy, talents, and resources" to the church with yet another death threat as a "penalty" if you don't keep the oath. Then, you were supposed to feel good about going before the ceremony was over and lie to everyone about how amazing it was.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/17/2017 01:23AM by azsteve.

THIS is exactly how they get you to just quietly sit there with a stunned look on your face. Your family and his or her family are all sweetly smiling like, isn't this just the most special amazing thing? I've heard of people who never went back, but I've never heard of anyone saying, get me the hell out of here. If that's happened, I'd love to hear the story.

People kept telling me to sacrifice to pay tithing so I could go to the temple. I'd been. It was a stick, not a carrot.

badassadam Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Right when they did the death penalties i would
> tell them to go f#ck themselves.

Adam, were you married in the temple or did you go through as a single adult?

badassadam Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Right when they did the death penalties i would
> tell them to go f#ck themselves.

one of the biggest regrets of my life that I did not do that, at least after having endured the entire Hellish ordeal to see the entire thing so that the lying deceitful POS MORmONS could not say that I missed the good part that made all of it worthwhile.

I so regret that I failed to tell my MORmON male parent to shove those MORmON temple garments, his MORmON temple ceremony, and his beloved MORmON religion right up his MORmON ass, right after seeing all of the stupid BS MORmON temple ceremony for myself.

What a huge disappointment !!!

I told an LDS friend about the throat-cutting ritual of the pre-1990 Temple Ceremony, and his response was:

"I DON'T BELIEVE IT! THAT'S JUST PLAIN EVIL! THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN IN THE TEMPLE!"

He's a post-1990 participant.

Yep, you got that right. It's just plain EVIL.

Yes it is evil and was a big factor of telling me what i was really dealing with and to get the heck away from it.

I can remember when my first endowment ceremony headed in to the throat-cutting jestures. I felt real horror, and thought "this isn't right". A few seconds later, I was going through with it. Immediately afterward I thought "that didn't just happen". Then I blocked it out. I could still remember what happened. But the feeling of horror didn't return until decades later, when I was working really hard to deprogram myself after resigning from the church.

I thought it might be worth starting this thread when something reminded me earlier today, what the world was like with no internet. Those sociopaths that run the church could get away with a lot more when there was no internet to help keep them in check. No legitimate media source would write about it either, and even now (2017), the traditional media still will not write about this.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/17/2017 01:26AM by azsteve.

Hooooly sh#t thank you for sharing this.

I like to refer to it as the "Throat-cutting murder and suicide ritual". Or the "Murder and suicide death oaths". (For revealing a handshake, no less).

In the case of the temple tokens that included death threats, it wasn't necessarily the secret itself that the church valued and that was abusive to the human soul. It was the fact that there was a secret at all, and that you had consented to your own murder in the event that you did not remain loyal to the church in general. The handshake was simply a token of that unholy contract and the secret lifelong threat that you couldn't talk about either.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/18/2017 07:17AM by azsteve.

AND, to think how I and thousands of others, suffered for years, wearing garments. And for what? PROTECTION? from what?

AND I even believed no piece of garment could be seen by the human eye, and wear more clothes to cover these goofy garments???

OMG! They were to protect me from having sex? Sure, as you strip down to garments everyone is laughing so hard, the BONER shrivels from all the laughter and Mr. Softy comes out! Garments work!! They inadvertantly prevent sexual activity.

cutekitty Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> OMG! They were to protect me from having sex?
> Sure, as you strip down to garments everyone is
> laughing so hard, the BONER shrivels from all the
> laughter and Mr. Softy comes out! Garments work!!
> They inadvertantly prevent sexual activity.

I can't of course speak for everyone, but as for me...
I never had a problem getting a hard-on and keeping it, garments or not. 19-21 year old biology still reigns supreme, even in the face of ridiculous magic underwear.

Of course, I never got hot & heavy with a female only to find HER wearing said holey-magical undies. That may have cause some wilting, but I'll never know...:)

You reign supreme living in sunny southern CA.

Truthfully, I don't think the internet was very common in 1990-91 when the ceremony was changed. I myself (resigned 1989-90, left in reality years before) got most of my info from the public library (despite the missionaries removing it, mis-filing it etc) I also think the Mark Hoffman saga opened some eyes. I do believe some members got uptight about certain aspects in the ritual, the 1988 survey confirmed these misgivings, and voila, Heavenly Father made yet another accommodation like 1978 and 1890*

*or was it 1904 (The Lord works in mysterious ways) :)

Just my 2, make that 1.8, cents

The internet wasn't very common back when the endowment ceremony was changed to remove the 'penalties'. But it existed and was growing quickly, and that is the point. In the mid 1970's, I was a young teenager. I remember taking a bus for several miles from where I lived, to the Seattle Science Center, which had a terminal connection (text only) to the University of Washington's computer mainframe, which was a part of the internet. I remember using text-based chatrooms, even then. For me, it was a novelty. For others, it was becoming a society-altering tool in its infantcy. By around the early 1980's, many educated people were starting to get internet connections at home through telephone modems connected either to a university or to an ISP. Even without facebook or twitter, people were communicating freely within groups of others about things that significantly affected their lives.

Concurrently in the early 80's (if not sooner), Ed Decker and Sandra Tanner and othere hard-core anti-mormons were fiercely attacking the church, both through printed materials that were distributed through any means they could find, and with lawsuits against the church. The convergence of the internet and these attacks on the church had to make it obvious to the church leaders that their throat-slashing secrets were being discussed publicly, in the virtual presence of anyone who cared to listen-in (cyberspace). Not only that, but it was primarily educated people who had access to these communications. The church had a clear five to eight year notice, to see how the internet was about to affect them, before the internet really took-off mainstream. So in 1988, the church leaders knew that the jig was up, and that their so-called eternal ceremony had to be changed to remove the offensive parts. Unlike any other time in the church's past, they took surveys, as though the mormon church was suddenly a democracy. I am pretty sure that the church leaders knew before the first survey was returned, that they were going to be changing the temple ceremony to remove the death threats from the ceremony.

Without the internet, the church would have had no reason to remove their ghoulish death threats from their temple ceremony, anymore than they had previously.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/19/2017 10:02AM by azsteve.

The Masons did away with the death oaths 4 years before TSCC did away with them...

19 years I had heard about the glories of the mysterious temple. 19 years of awe and wonder. The most special thing on the planet.

There was my dad doing it and my mom doing it and other people I knew doing it, so I did it. Slit the throat and the gut. why not?

I was slightly surprised, but I figured we were about to see some pretty amazing and spectular heavenly stuff after we made those promises. The drastic oath made sense to me because I figured we were about to see heavenly angels or something, if not Jesus himself. So you've got to promise to be "all the way in." What's a little dis-emboweling when miracles are about to happen?

Who knew that what followed could only be called, trite, stupid, and boring? Getting into Jimmy's secret tree house back home was more fulfilling. Health in the navel? Really?

Cha cha cha at the veil? That is what I get for promising to kill myself in a bloodthirsty way? Man. We were had.


And as we all thought in the end: Is that all there is to the temple? Take it away Peggy.

You want your mind blown? Go back and read the versions that preceded our generation's. They have made big changes several times Since the Nauvoo days. They make the pre-90s version feel tame.

I remember how extremely devout I was in the faith. I was about to surrender my life to a man I had known only a few months, mainly to please my parents, fulfill my life-long dream of having children, and receive all the joys that Mormonism fake-promised.

When the blood oaths began, I started to pray silently, "God--I don't mean this! I don't want to die, God!" I actually crossed the fingers of my left hand, hidden beneath the costume, and my right hand pantomimed the horrible deaths.

In all my sincerity, and my respect for my parents, I still felt the presence of evil in the temple. Before going to the temple, I was told that evil could not enter into a Mormon temple, because all temples were dedicated by a prophet of God. At first, I was confused by my feelings, but they were so strong, that I could not deny them. I went to several different temples, after that, and each time, Satan was there, as threatening and frightening as ever.

My temple marriage was the biggest mistake of my life, and has scarred me forever. Some of those scars are physical. I still struggle with PTSD. I felt Satan's presence, long before there was any indication that my new husband was a psychopath, and long before I discovered that Mormonism is a cult. The blood oaths were certainly red flags....

My parents raised us on the Holy Bible, and I had memorized a lot of it. The sacred, secret temple ceremony was just Genesis, which I knew pretty much word-for-word. So much for "new knowledge."