I can accept all that.

Perhaps the LDS will in time come to relax about those things which cause it problems and are not really important to its message.

For example, I saw on You Tube a TV program, Q&A, from Australia last week, in which the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal Pell, a notorious conservative, was questioned with Richard Dawkins, on his personal religious beliefs.

He conceded among other things that I don’t remember that:

• original sin does not make sense in relation to children;
• that many intolerably disgraceful things are advocated in the Old Testament and must be ignored;
• that Genesis is merely a story designed to give a message about the requirement for redemption to an unsophisticated Hebrew people;
• he did not believe in eternal souls, but a ressurection of the body in the future;
• that atheists could go to heaven;and,
• that homosexual unions should have all the recognition, rights, obligations and privileges of marriage, but without that name.

I am not a fan of Pell, mostly because of his recalcitrant attitude to women and paedophiles in the church, and I expected Richard Dawkins to wipe the floor with him intellectually. But he didn’t, although the professor won the debate on reason in my view. While Pell had to stick to the core catholic doctrine ( he failed to convince on transubstantiation) he made these concessions which I think most catholics would regard as enormous. These are not by any means new ideas to progressive Catholics, but it was really something to hear them coming from Pell.

I think this is an example of a church adapting to modern realities, without giving up its principles. The alternative would be to be consigned to oblivion.