Not what you expected?
But seriously. If 107 boys are born for every 100 girls, and given infant mortality and other factors, there will be more men than women in the hereafter. Which means that rather than those who are not married in this life looking forward to some sort of eternal polygamy, they are looking forward to eternal polyandry if everyone is married in the end.
In some countries the gap is wider.
There are other implications from other theological positions.
So, take a moment. Think about a theological position you’ve held. What implications does it really have (rather than what implications have you thought it had)?
Let me know what you think of eternal polyandry and other things. How would the fans of polygamy react to a deeper consideration of the numbers? What about other doctrines that have not been examined?
Wheat & Tares 
I came to the conclusion several years ago that polygamy was at best an experiment that turned out bad or at worst an example of those in power subjugating a whole gender. Probably a mix of both.
I think the brethren want to say it was a mistake. It sure flies in the face of the current rhetoric of “a man and a woman has been God’s plan in the past and always will be in the future.” But they can’t bring themselves to say that Joseph Smith made such a big mistake. Until just a few years ago they attacked anybody that even said his shirt was not the whitest of white.
I am not going to say that God can’t command polygamy – or any other strange combination of relationships. But I am going to say that I don’t feel that God has ever told me that polygamy was his commandment. I don’t say it only for the pure logical mathematical reasons you correctly bring up, but because one thing I have learned with being married is that it does “smooth your rough edges” better than any other relationship. If I get upset with wife #1 and can just go over to wife #2’s house, I don’t grow in that type of relationship. I can often ignore many of my issues. That limits my progression here on earth, let alone my eternal progression.
Polygamy turned Mormons into an ethnic group in about 25% of the time or less that sort of thing takes to accomplish.
All I know is that having my wife with me is the only thing that would make eternity bearable.
I have thought a lot about heaven. My concept of heaven growing up was vague. Nothing more than the cartoon concept of winged white-robed angels sitting in the clouds playing harps all day. Other than the idea of having wings and being able to fly, it didn’t sound attractive.
I think Joseph Smith imagined heaven in terms that appealed to him. Having power, ruling an entire world, populating the world himself, having eternal vigor and health, having his family with him forever, having ministering angels at his feet to serve him, never has to work, maybe having a harem of beautiful wives(?). In short, a caricature of male fantasy.
Honestly, to me, this fantasy doesn’t sound heavenly at all. It sounds like a lot of work. And it goes on forever! Personally, I don’t aspire to a heaven like that. Don’t want power, don’t want wealth, like my body just fine, love my wife (one is plenty), no interest in having servants, love my work, not interested in living forever.
I hope God in his wisdom lets us choose our own heaven… or none at all.
Polygyny + polyandry ends up being a (non) marriage network, which is a giant step closer to oneness than monogamy.
“Think about a theological position you’ve held. What implications does it really have (rather than what implications have you thought it had)?”
Ordinances for the dead. We teach that live ordinances are Plan A, the preferred way to have them done, and ordinances for the dead are Plan B – a catch-all for those who didn’t get the chance in life. But only something like 0.001% of people ever born on Earth will have a chance at Plan A. It seems like if they were really as important as the church says, God would be better at getting the word out.
I think eternity is s lot longer and a lot slower than we understand.
Ordinances are essential, but not urgent in many ways.
So God gets the word out as fast as it needs to get out.
Ask yourself why the millennium is so long.
Dialogue covered celestial demographics 32 years ago in their Spring 1984 edition. The article is titled, “In the Heavens are Parents Single?”
Was the practice of polygamy a net negative or positive for the church?
Hard to see how it was net positive, though many in the church still look for evidence which supports that assessment.
Widowed temple-worthy men are still allowed to be sealed to more than one wife so it doesn’t seem we have abandoned the doctrine does it?
Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven
http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Mark_Twain/Captain_Stormfields_Visit_to_Heaven/
The definition of polygamy is having more than one spouse, irrespective of the genders. Polygyny is one man/many women, and polyandry is one woman/many men. So if there is Polygamy in the afterlife, then the question is will it be polygyny (as most Mormons think) or polyandry (as the numbers seem to indicate).
Also, you never touched on the “died before eight, saved in the celestial kingdom” rule. If you bring this into the mix, it gets even more complicated.
This subject has been rigorously investigated with tongue placed firmly in cheek in 2008 in By Common Consent
and in 1984 in Dialogue
https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V17N01_86.pdf%5D
Doctrinally, the Church would struggle to discard polygamy entirely because:
1) Jacob 2 does include a polygamy clause,
2) There’s the whole Old Testament
3) The doctrine of eternal marriage is hopelessly entwined with plural marriage. To do otherwise would require a complete re-write of section 132
Culturally, it would be a struggle because
1) Many of those who make the rules have snagged their second eternal wives already (e.g. Oaks & Nelson).
2) Faithful pioneer ancestors would be under the bus.
3) The concept of “flawed prophets” is currently unacceptable.
This assumes that the ratio of people who will be married in eternity reflects the ratio of people born. Anecdotally, I have my doubts.
But seriously, some people have an actual testimony of polygamy. Some people have actual lived experience with it, as ordered by God. Not one discussion of polygamy I’ve ever seen online has come close to what I understand of it through study and prayer. Not one of us have any real inkling of what polygamy means, because none of us have been asked by God to live that law.
When I struggled with it, prayed about it, studied it in context of what I already knew of God and His ways, over years I came to understand it. God has taught me how it was of Him. Not a popular assertion, but there it is.
Quite frankly, if you can’t handle polygamy, don’t worry about it. You won’t have to live it. But I realized long ago that I wanted to understand God better by understanding this principle. As a result, I can’t see the eternal law as anything but a mercy.
No number cruncher or tongue-in-cheek peanut gallery can really encompass what was revealed to Joseph Smith. Of that, I’m confident. Either way, it will never cease to amaze me how the people who swear by love as the ultimate law of Heaven will immediately invalidate any love but one that looks like theirs.
This one’s not hard to overcome. You’ve no idea what the ratios are for other Earths. Could be one with the opposite ration. Could be one with even worse ratios.
Another fun thought experiment is what to do with the people who get picked last. Being one of the last 100 might not be so bad, but down to the last four? Does someone shrug and say “ok, I’ll take that one”? Almost sounds like a one act play.
But KLC — I thought of this before I was a senior in high school in 1973. Glad Dialogue eventually got the memo.
SilverRain — that is an excellent point.
Elder Anderson — I still have the copy of Letters to the Earth by Twain that I read in fifth grade.
SilverRain I have an honest question, how is it a law of mercy? I would really like to know what you are referring to.
OK Frank, we need a TW for your post. I’m starting to hyperventilate thinking about picking kickball teams in 5th grade. OK, all the *girls* are gone. Sigh. Somebody take Anderson. 🙂
Some interesting stats on the gender imbalance.
1 – At a given time, the ratio of men/women on the earth is usually around 50/50. This is because men are born at higher rates but die at higher rates overall. https://www.ined.fr/en/everything_about_population/demographic-facts-sheets/faq/more-men-or-more-women-in-the-world/
2 – The gap between men & women is widening largely due to the child restrictions and favoring of male children in countries like China, India, and Pakistan. http://qz.com/335183/heres-why-men-on-earth-outnumber-women-by-60-million/
3 – Violence against women is creating this gender imbalance where countries have access to the technology required to selectively abort female fetuses, and where this technology does not exist many resort to female infanticide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio
I can’t really address the demographic as I don’t know enough about it, but reading Jacob again recently left me feeling a little safer.It seems clearer to me now that God call his people to live the law only at certain times, but the default position is one of monogamy. DH and I are agreed that we have no wish to live that law and are therefore happy to be outside it.
I have no problem with Joseph’s polygamy as it seems to me he was a very reluctant polygamist as portrayed in’Rough Rolling Stone’, it’s Brigham who riles me with his vindictiveness and favouritism, indeed his apparent heartlessness.I don’t think this form of polygamy was right, and it appears that polygamy always did bring sin in it’s wake.
I’d really like to hear stories of women for whom it worked, but mostly it seems it was nothing but a heartbreak for women and their families
Having access to further info has really helped me to develop a less victimised attitude to polygamy, and I can live with it as still being on the statute books with greater peace. I don’t have to like it , or Brigham Young. What I do loathe are RS lessons on his teachings.
Howard’s point is an interesting one,which I can also countenance. And then again perhaps sex has nothing to do with it. I’m unsure about the heavens being an unbridled situation of indulged lust.
Many of the comments to date regard speculation and theorizing about how polygamy will work in the hereafter. Another tack is to theorize about how it won’t exist at all–both Joseph and Brigham, and many since then got it wrong…
I have long argued that polygamy and D&C 132 were not from God and that David and Solomon’s (et al) practice of it were cultural and not from God.
Beyond the convenient timing of Section 132 (so that Hyrum could finally be convinced and then work to convince Emma–as Bushman states in Rough Stone Rolling) the whole concept of such plural marriages violates a basic (as in “before the foundations…”) and psychological, eternal/uncreated truth: Humans are improved and aided in their desires to behave better (righteousness) if they bond with a partner. It is vaguely referenced in the creation myth where the aspirational admonition “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” appears. (Side note: Why would a father and mother be referenced to a man just made out of dust and to his wife, made from his rib = no belly buttons?)
This admonition is repeated in the D&C, but that isn’t what makes it a true principle. It is true because it works. The thorough bonding of two people develops in each of them more love, charity, motivation, etc. They, therefore, become more happy, more full of joy (the object and design of our existence, according to Joseph Smith)–a natural consequence, not a blessing from a supposed omnipotent God.
So, positing that principle, it would make no sense for God to command plural marriage thereby making such close bonding a practical impossibility between any of the possible pairs in such a relationship. Ergo, Joseph (in the best supposition), inundated and somewhat overwhelmed as he had been with a great deal of amazing new information via revelation, jumped to the wrong conclusion about copying David and Solomon. And, where did all that baloney in Section 132 come from about how more wives and children equals higher thrones and bigger kingdoms that Brigham Young and his contemporaries preached?
Finally, IMO, the 132nd’s promise of exaltation (aka: calling and election made sure) for any participating in this new and everlasting covenant (barring only murder and/or denying the Holy Ghost–unclear which) is, like the condemnation of Emma, a “red flag” indicating this was Joseph, not God speaking.
Many more women will qualify for the Celestial Kingdom than men making polygamy necessary.
I think the “doctrine of mercy” stance comes about due to poly[whatever]’s ability to provide an eternal marriage for those who do not find it in mortality. That’s not hard to understand. It may, however, be hard to accept emotionally, or to believe fully. For me, the jury is out.
I think SilverRain’s point about total demographics being irrelevant is important. In Six Sigma terms, we’re looking at total quality output – output after defects are removed. That is, who makes it to the highest level of the Celestial Kingdom? That is not necessarily equal to the entire population. 🙂
If your numbers are right, however, it means that all of my missionary efforts at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit shoot are for naught.
Three words: Hilbert’s Grand Hotel
I am starting to think of temple work as busy work. I mean, it does keep everyone REALLY busy.
Or maybe the theological version: angels on a pin. 🙂
I plan on being celestially celibate. As far as I’m concerned, spirit babies are an SEP*.
*Somebody Else’s Problem
A mathematician says “Pah! Engineers know nothing about real math! You don’t even understand limits. For example, if you start here, take a giant step, then half that step, then half again, and so on, you’ll never reach my girlfriend over there.”. The engineer tries it. After a few steps, he’s almost on top of the girl, but moving only a fraction of an inch each step. The mathematician exclaims, See! I told you! You’ll be no closer even in an infinite number of steps!” The engineer replies, “Close enough for all practical purposes.”
Oh come on Elder Anderson. Mathematicians and Engineers don’t have girlfriends! he he he(I can say that since I am an Engineer). Joking aside, remember that Mathematicians and Engineers can be women, so they can have boyfriend. Now that I think about it for a second, even some women have girlfriends (but I didn’t think this post was going there).
How can you spot an extroverted engineer?
He looks at *your* shoes when he’s talking to you.
Indeed. My husband and I both have engineering degrees.
My fluid mechanics lecturer loved that joke… There were quite a lot of women on the course.
I’m retired now, but I remember talking with my colleagues at lunch one day about whether high functioning autistics were somehow attracted to engineering and scientific fields. I always felt that I have some of those characteristics. I still cannot stand a lot of noise and confusion, but as I aged, I gradually became less introverted and more comfortable connecting with people. I think marrying an extrovert helped. 🙂
When I was in school decades ago, female engineering students were rare. The last place I worked (more of an R&D environment) the mix of scientists, engineers, and managers approached 50/50.
Remember limits. Zeno just needed a good calculus class.