[KirinDave]

A cousin of mine explained the dietary restrictions to me. For the full effect, please indulge me as I enter a brief bit of real dialogue with the names stripped:

Me: "So how is BYU, _____? Enjoying your first semester away from home?"

Her: "It's great, I'm having a lot of fun. But I don't think you'd like it very much."

Me: "Why not? I went to college too, you know. Is it because I'm not mormon?"

Her: "There's that." pauses to open a can of Coke "But you're also required to abstain from things like tea and coffee. You'd have to give up caffeine, and I know you'd hate that."

Me: looking pointedly at her can of coke "You have to give up drinks with caffeine in it?"

Her: pausing again to drink her soda "Yes. The Honor Code says we can't drink tea, coffee or anything with alcohol in it."

Me: "But soda is okay?"

Her: "Yeah, unless it has, like, drugs in it or something."

I checked the BYU website. Coffee and tea are verboten, Soda is not. I even found pictures of people drinking coke on campus. Way to go, BYU. Your dietary restrictions are super-good.

[sofal]

It does get pretty silly sometimes. There are only a few things that are "outlawed", and therefore people think that as long as they abstain from those substances, they're in total compliance with what their religion expects of them. The root reason of the dietary restrictions is a principle of respecting the body and keeping it clean, but people misapply it by interpreting it verbatim and then gorging themselves on junk food, soda, or anything that isn't healthy but isn't technically "forbidden".

I think it's a good thing that the church doesn't forcefully regulate which sodas we can or cannot drink, because that would be controlling and ridiculous. However, these slightly arbitrary rules can end up encouraging a group of people who do the minimum required just to remain in good social status. That will be the case anywhere.

Another example of this is R-rated movies. There was a church leader a long time ago who at one time at a general conference warned against viewing R-rated movies. This seems perfectly acceptable, except that it ended up creating an unwritten rule of sorts among LDS members. The principle is that we should avoid movies that don't meet the standards we're expected to have, but it inevitably created a group of people who were perfectly okay with seeing any movie regardless of the content as long as the MPAA didn't put the magic 'R' on it.

It's hard to know where to draw the line when you know that some people are just going to get as close to that line as possible. You just hope that most people are listening to the underlying principles rather than the base requirements.

I occasionally drink caffeinated sodas if there isn't anything else available. I don't consider this to be especially damaging to my health. I think that whether or not I drink a caffeinated beverage has very little or nothing to do with what I consider to be my spiritual standing.

[KirinDave]

> I occasionally drink caffeinated sodas if there isn't anything else available. I don't consider this to be especially damaging to my health. I think that whether or not I drink a caffeinated beverage has very little or nothing to do with what I consider to be my spiritual standing.

The point of my story wasn't to say, "Haha. Here are these goofy mormonians." I think you can pick out goofballs from any religion. My point was, "Here is someone going to college that doesn't seem to be able to read the ingredients on their soda can." Or more directly, "BYU is a school that seems to be failing at teaching students how to think and reason."

[LogicHoleFlaw]

My point was, "Here is someone going to college that doesn't seem to be able to read the ingredients on their soda can."

Ahahahahahahaha. I knew several folks at BYU who could recite, in milligrams, the caffeine content of various soft drinks. Caffeinated sodas are left to the discretion of each individual.

I went to both the University of Wisconsin and BYU, and honestly I much more prefer the atmosphere of "Dr. Pepper as excess" to "Alcohol to excess."

[litewulf]

Huh, I thought she just thought the rules were stupid, but was abiding with them out of respect. That is, the rules required her abstaining from tea and coffee, but since they didn't mention Coke she drank it without guilt.

And the bit of "abstaining from caffeine" sounds like she thinks your caffeine intake is purely from tea and coffee. But I don't know you at all, so I'm probably misinterpreting her. :)

[ewanmcteagle]

That's a common mistake. Most Mormon's aren't bothered by sodas, caffeinated or not. They are specifically opposed to tea and coffee which gets interpreted as caffeine. No, it doesn't make sense and a caffeine prohibition would at least seem to have some type of logic behind it (some of them do that)... but it's religion it's meant to make you at least a little stupid.

[noonespecial]

The rules are the first derivative of the intent. This haunts all religions. You will always get a special group of people who follow the rules without considering the intent, usually with the goal of feeling superior to everyone else.

Its called "legalism", and it leads to all kinds of nonsense.

[biohacker42]

Dum dum dum.