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Well @Jamie123, you're ok in my book. Glad you're here.

(Though there are times when it seems clear that "soul" and "spirit" are used synonymously.)

Liars, all of them. I'm getting to hate politicians, more specifically the Democrat kind. This is not good for my spiritual welfare. I think I might need to step away.

Actually? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAG_(TV_series) 1. JAG had a healthy 10-year run, producing 227 episodes. 2. The original NCIS series is actually a spin-off of JAG, and so the same story universe is still ongoing. That being said, I quit watching JAG after a *very* badly written episode that IMHO never should have made it past the script-writing stage. edit - "People v. Gunny", season 5, 22 February 2000. The gist of it is that one character, Gunny Galendez, is exiting a Chinese restaurant when several drunken patrons of a nearby LGBT establishment decide to get in his face. Gunny tries to ignore them, but one of the men feels slighted by this and so starts throwing punches. Gunny lays him out with a single hit, then realizes that another character, Ensign Tienert, was part of the entourage. A military tribunal determines that Gunny acted in reasonable self-defense, but he gets less than 10 steps outside of the tribunal chambers before civilian police arrest him for the same crime... with a politically-minded prosecutor also tacking on hate crime charges. What the writer of that episode apparently failed to realize is that the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice) and the military court system is legally equivalent to the civilian court system, and that Gunny's arrest by civilian law enforcement thus represented double jeopardy, an offense of such magnitude that it should have ended the prosecutor's career... and that's before we factor in the fact that even if the police had somehow miraculously been allowed on base without issue they themselves would be looking at charges for false arrest. At no point does any of the cast bring this up despite it being a show about and thus full of lawyers. And speaking of ended careers, Tienert's career would have been destroyed as well due to the fact that the episode was written back when "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was still the operational standard; even though he was there because his stepbrother - the guy who threw the punches - was having his birthday party, he shouldn't have known better. Yeah, as JAG went on we started getting more and more episodes where the writing was terrible, the writers themselves were ignorant of the actual law, and drama was being allowed to happen for the sake of drama. That's probably why it's not remembered quite as fondly.

P.S. Now we're on the subject of Mr. Spock, when I was about 6 years old they started putting promotional Star Trek cut-out masks on the backs of Kellogs Corn Flakes boxes. I really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really wanted to be Mr. Spock. The trouble was, so did every other kid. My mother and I checked out every box of Corn Flakes in the entire store, but we couldn't find a single Spock. I had to be content with Captain Kirk, but that wasn't down to any fault of me Mum. She kept on going till we'd checked every single box. That's the kind of mother she was.

1. I just sort of embraced the acronym because it’s shorter (my handle was initially intended as a throwaway because I didn’t think I’d be here long). 2. @zil2 Ha! 3. @pam I expect you to remember my not taking the bait on this one, the next time you’re distributing monthly bonuses to the mod staff.

Finally got around to it. It's a good sport.

My own "humanistic rationaliy" makes me think "probably nothing". At the time I was - or had been - very excited about Mormonism, which seemed like the Holy Grail. It answered, at least superficially, many of the problems I had with mainstream Christianity, which in the years prior to that had sent me spiralling into atheism. I was thinking "can this really be?" I was always deeply mistrustful of "religious experience". As a student I had felt isolated amongst Christians - especially in "House groups" and "Bible studies" - being physically present and participating, but finding the emotional praying and arm waving had little to do with me. The doctrines, particularly those about Hell and predestination made no sense at all. (Not that most people were very big on hell or predestination, but that these things were tolerated at all was anathema to me.) And that's not all: before I even learned about the Calvinist/Armanianist "thing", there was the whole malarkey of the Gifts of the Spirit - speaking in tongues - you know the sort of thing. It bugged me how casually and matter-of-factly it was accepted, and how no one could understand why I had an issue with it. (Them: "It's the Holy Spirit, that's all it is!" Me: "What do you mean all?") My initial hopes about the Latter-day Saints were turning (I suspect) into a disillusionment that perhaps, underneath the gloss and despite the "we do not believe in predestination, it is a false doctrine" (an actual quote from a GA in a conference video, which buoyed me up incredibly when I first heard it), this was really just more of the same. And like NT says, emotions can have strange effects. I wonder too, since I'm seeing this through the fog of 33 years (it was 1991 by the way, not 1992) whether my memory has built this particular experience into something more significant than it was. But I think not.

Since I know you all are searching for more and more things to do with your fountain pens, I've made another logic puzzle, which you can print and complete with your fountain pens. Intro: Liz is a horrible pen pal! She’s months overdue responding to five of her pen pals - each originating on a different platform. But she’s decided to tackle one letter per day this week. To help her get it done, she’s picked out one pen and ink per letter. Help her get organized by matching up the day on which she’s going to write, the platform where she found the person to whom she’s going to write, and the pen and ink with which she’s going to write! (NOTE: This is a moderately difficult puzzle that will require some deductions once the clues have been initially processed.) Here's a link to the puzzle (PDF file). If you need the answer, let me know and I'll reply with it later... Hope you enjoy. -zil2

Please do this first.

Not that the following advice is easy, but I see a spiritual opportunity:

Secret Service shot and killed the suspected shooter.

ground.news

Democrats sent well wishes to Trump following the apparent shooting and bemoaned it as an act of political violence: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said on X there was “no place for political violence in this country, period.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said on X: “My thoughts are with President Trump and everyone impacted at the rally today. Sen. Chuck Schumer, of New York, said in a statement that he was “horrified” by what had happened and was "relieved that former President Trump is safe.”

Liberal headline “Trump rushed offstage at Pennsylvania rally by Secret Service after loud popping noises heard” Even if you hate Trump, he was our president. This was an assassination attempt. I can’t even imagine what would have happened if he had been killed. We would have had some serious civil unrest.

One vintage "free mask on the back of the package!" promotion for Star Trek masks on the back of a serial box had six masks. It was Kirk, Spock, Bones, a Klingon, a different alien race, and a so-called "android" that was basically a generic human face with minimal details. Photos from the promotion, including the advertising copy, occasionally turn up on various social media sites. I want to say it was from Kellogg's.

I've thought about this a little more. Perhaps in a sense I was wrong. Logically, the Church is either true or else it is not true. If it is not true then it follows that anyone who claims to know it is true must be mistaken. So if I claim not know myself that the Church is true, I am admitting to the possibility that it is false. I am therefore suggesting - albeit indirectly - the possibility that anyone who "knows" it is true is mistaken. (This is what I meant - though I didn't see it quite as clearly then - by my first post on this thread.) A few years ago there was a thread where people were arguing that disagreement with Church authorities should be forbidden on the forum. I attempted to argue that this would be tantamount to banning nonmembers, whereupon Prisonchaplain was held up to me as a shining example of a nonmember in good standing. I wanted to point out that Prisonchaplain, being a member (in fact a cleric) of another denomination was - by his very religious stance - disagreeing with the Church, and therefore with Church authorities. I couldn't though because the thread was shut down by mods. It would have been peevish to have started a new one just to get my point across, so I let it drop. I do still think that "nonmembers welcome but disagreement with the Church forbidden" is not a tenable policy; it's one or the other, not both. And (to give everyone due credit) I don’t think this is the case. The forum is by and large a safe place to voice your honest thoughts and get others' honest thoughts back. I stumbled into this forum many years ago and have always found it stimulating and enjoyable. About ten years ago I had a wobbly period when I deliberately got myself banned, but I cant blame anyone but myself. (It was when my wife miscarried what would have been our second child - but no one here was to know that.) Estradling helped me through it. I'm very grateful to everyone I've ever interacted with here. Thank you all. P.S. I miss Anatess. She was always knocking me off my perch - sometimes most deservedly. I hope she's doing OK.

It makes sense: we have - Wife/wives Elf/elves Shelf/shelves Hoof/hooves I Googled it too. It seems that "rooves" was largely replaced by "roofs" some time in the 18th century, but is still used somewhat (though not often enough to be "considered standard"). There is some discussion about it here https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13183/plural-of-roof#:~:text=Apparently both roofs and rooves,is used more than another. A partially relevant parallel: The plural of dwarf always used to be dwarfs (as in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) but J.R.R. Tolkien started a trend when he used dwarves in The Hobbit and later in The Lord of the Rings. Nowadays nearly everyone says dwarves - though only when referring to the mythological beings, not people with dwarfism.

PDF attached. Here's a screenshot, if you would rather use that. And yes, I'm seeing a typo already. You'll just have to deal with it. Besides, mordorbund deserves a definite article. It sets him apart from all the other mordorbunds. THLogicPuzzle.pdf

Genesis tells us that God breathed into Adam the breath of life. Another way of putting it is that God placed Adam's spirit into him. I understand the term "God-breathed", common in larger Christianity (at least in the US), to mean "of the Spirit [of God]". In modern society, "spirit" has come to mean "driving force" or "essence". Distilled beverages concentrate the essence, or spirit, of the substance; thus, we have "spirituous liquors". Animals are generally distinguished from plants by the fact that animals move on their own volition, while plants generally do not (at least not with an easily observable speed). It's interesting to me how this basic root from Latin is shared with the English borrowing directly from the Latin in the term "animus", meaning ill will or hostility. Doctrine and Covenants 88:15 "And the spirit and the body are the soul of man." You are correct that in LDS usage, the term "soul" refers to a physically living (mortal or immortal) being. I think that Latter-day Saints often use the term "soul" as a synonym of "spirit", as is widely done in public usage. I myself have never heard the idea that a person's "soul" is something outside himself or some accompanying essence à la Jiminy Cricket.

The existence of air was not always obvious. Empedocles, who lived about 450BC, discovered it by lowering an inverted bucket in a tank of water and showing that the water did not rise inside the bucket. He reasoned the bucket must be filled with some ultra-fine substance that held the water back: what we now call "air". (Although he didn't know it at the time, he had also invented the diving bell.) Prior to that (I suppose) people must have known about wind. After all, they had sailing ships long before that. But maybe they just considered it a "phenomenon" and left it there. They knew by experience that by hanging up a sheet of fabric they could propel a boat across water, and the same force (whatever it was) sometimes knocked trees over, or pulled the rooves off houses. But they didn't know it had anything to do with "matter" - like the liquids and solids they could see and feel. Along with fire, these make up the four "classical elements" - it seems quaint now (the sort of thing New Agers talk about) but at the time it was really quite a scientific breakthrough. But I wonder - if Joseph Smith was right, perhaps we're now in a similar position regarding what we call "spirit". Like air, it could be everywhere only we don't know it - except of course when it moves or does something. And if it is really physical, perhaps one day we will build apparatus that can detect it. A fictional account springs to mind: Dan Brown's novel The Lost Key. The scientist heroine (you'll remember that Professor Langdon - like James Bond - has a different female companion in every novel) performs an experiment on her dying mentor, whereby she monitors his weight during his death. She finds that he gets slightly lighter as he dies, proving that his spirit/soul has mass. (Of course the evidence is lost when her laboratory is "exploded" by the bad-guys, but that's typical Dan Brown.) It's trashy pulp-fiction of course, but it shows the idea is out there!

Spirit is a funny word - you rarely see it defined. But most of us (okok - some of us including me) have an intuitive idea what it means in this sense. But the origins of the word are interesting: Spirit comes from Latin "spiritus" which literally means breath or wind. It's where we get the word "respiration". The NT Greek word is "pneuma" which has exactly the same usage. From it we get "pneumatic" and "pneumonia". Both have "movement of air" as their primary meaning, used as an analogy for the supernatural sense. I know nothing about ancient Germanic, but the modern German is "geist". Hence poltergeist, and in English ghost. I was tempted to compare it with the English gust (as in a gust of wind) which would again suggest a "moving air" analogy, but now I look it up I find "gust" comes from the Old Norse for "apetite" (cf. gusto). Are gust and geist really false friends? Something to look into. We use "spirit" to mean other things like hydrocarbon compounds (including gasoline and alcohol) and attitude ("That's the right spirit!"). Geist is also used in the latter sense, as in "zeitgeist" - the "attitude of the age". It's also worth mentioning the Latin word "animus" (feminine "anima"), though this is usually translated as soul rather than spirit*. This implies motion, as in "animation" and "animal". So you could say animals do have souls because that's what the word means - though it probably just means that they move, whereas plants generally don't. *I don't understand the difference between soul and spirit. I've read somewhere that LDS believe the "soul" is the spirit and body combined. But there's a persistent notion elsewhere that the "soul" is something separate that accompanies us. A bit like conscience: your soul is to you what Jiminy Cricket was to Pinocchio. Wordsmith wrote "The soul that rises with us, our life's star". There were the "daemons" in Philip Pullman's novels. Etc etc etc.

There was a James Bond movie (I can't remember the title) in which the female protagonist is called "Goodnight". At the end, when Bond is having amorous alone-time with Goodnight (as he usually is with his leading lady at the end of every movie) M is trying to contact them on the radio. He says "Goodnight. Can you hear me Goodnight? Come in Goodnight. Goodnight. Goodnight." Eventually Bond picks up the microphone and says "Good night, sir." Cue credits. That sent everyone in my family into hysterics the first time we saw it. I meanwhile was thinking (in my usual cynical way) that that was the whole reason why she was called "Goodnight" in the first place. Her name was a setup for a joke in the last ten seconds of the movie! P.S. I just looked it up. It was The Man With The Golden Gun. James Bond was Roger Moore and Goodnight was Britt Eckland.

All Elite Wrestling. Their flagship television show, AEW Dynamite, airs on Wednesday nights here in the United States. It's 2018, the very first year their show is on the air. It's the night before Thanksgiving. One of their factions of wrestlers is known as the "Best Friends". Two of the members, Chuck Taylor and Trent Baretta, have a tag match. A third member, Orange Cassidy, is at ringside. ...In a turkey costume. During the course of the match, Orange Cassidy gets on the edge of the ring and dives off of it, deliberately slamming into some other wrestlers (most likely the other team; it's been years since I saw this episode). Cue the announcers making a WKRP joke. Cue the realization that whoever booked this match set the entire match up *just* to make that joke.

I haven't thought about this too carefully but I suspect that there is no matter without spirit, and since animals are a form of matter, there would be some spirit mixed up with that matter.

This is profoundly true in a technical sense. A "mystery" is something which can only be known by revelation (for instance, "Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed"). There is often a ritual component which places us physically and mentally in a state to receive such revelation -- baptism being a good example of a physical act meant to get us pondering this very subject (among others). In two short sentences you've hit on what LDS scholar Hugh Nibley refers to as the "terrible questions". These are the weighty matters that we so often dance around. We'll argue over how three persons identify as God but there remains yet one. We'll laugh and poke at glowing stones, dancing bones, and other oddities that come from the old stories. But once we get serious, these are the answers we want. Religion is supposed to have the answers, but in many ways have fallen short. Science and Philosophy have placed these questions outside their domain. When pressed on it, they'll often come up with nihilism which yet remains unsatisfactory. Spiritual-but-not-religious have come up with their own brands of mysticism and ritual which provide meaning and purpose, but they never get to the meaty questions: Death is a mystery to me; so is life. We return to Religion pleading that it does what it's supposed to. Ritual (including baptism) can give us comfort from the familiarity of it, but if it is not accompanied by revelation it is merely pageantry. Scripture and Tradition can get us closer to the matter, as they may claim that someone once had the answer from personal experience. But once again, it becomes an issue of trust. Assuming a perfect and true transmission history, can we really trust this other guy's experience. Institutional revelation may record the answer and provide the words for it, but it can't truly be accepted until it is personally experienced. Without a revelation that tragically means death, with all the anxiety until then. Clement in his Recognitions shares this same arc. He was in the same boat you are. He searched everywhere for answers and found the schools unsatisfactory. The best they could give him were someone else's words, who was long dead. He was on his way to Egypt to see if a seance there could satisfy him. Barnabas shows up on the scene and explains that his answers come from what he has seen and experienced. They travel to Peter where Clement is introduced to him and Clement receives answers to the terrible questions from someone who actually knows. Jamie, I do not pretend to speak as an apostle or to carry the same weight as Barnabas or Peter. I have had experiences (I can think of 4 at the moment) that answer clearly for me that we -- who we are, what it means to be I -- continue after death, and family relationships still play an important role there. On the Internet I will not go into more detail on this, but I did want to share my witness on this matter. I can accept that I'm just an anonymous voice in the aether, but I wouldn't want you to just take my word for it anyway. I would ask that you simply consider that this stranger on the computer seems really convinced from real experience, and take that matter to God for your own experience. Personal prayer can feel funny when we're out of practice with it. Feel free to use Lamoni's father as a template.

Not sure what to make of it. My spiritual training and religious education tend to make me think of evil influences as the (or at least a) root cause. My humanistic rationality wonders what other things were going on in your mind that might have led to this weird, not-very-rational state of anger and resentment. I echo NT: What do you think it meant?

You should check this out then. She is the wife of the Bishop in the Ward I recently began attending: https://mercedesmyardley.com/

Finally, here is the long-awaited Zarahemla 4th Ward Ward Conference logic puzzle: Intro: The Zarahemla 4th Ward had their first Ward Conference last Sabbath. Alma assigned seven different speakers, each with a different topic. Each man decided to start his talk in a unique way. The conference went better than anyone had a right to expect, but the Ward Clerk (Lachoneantum) dropped his tablets and his notes are all jumbled. Help him figure out the order in which the seven speakers spoke, the speaker’s name, the topic each spoke on, and the starter he used. PDF attached. (This is also not an easy one, but not too hard, as long as you don't skip a clue... ) Zarahemla4thWardConference.pdf

Puzzles and stats aside, we're happy to see you whenever you do have the time!

What do I mean by this? Well, some of you may recall a tv series about naval "judge advocates" from the office of the "Judge Advocate General". Naturally, this is abbreviated as JAG (perhaps @Ironhold can weigh in on why NCIS seems to have the staying power that JAG hasn't). Our own @Just_A_Guy purports to be a lawyer, but I don't believe I've ever heard him pretend to military service. Additionally, JAG seems to be a nickname others have given him (he seems to have used it himself a few times, but the vast majority comes from others), so it doesn't seem to like he was forming a backronym from the initials. From this I conclude that he wasn't aiming for the title JAG but it seems to be thrust upon him. So, why do you call him JAG? Is it because he is a lawyer and there was a lawyer show called JAG? Or, and I shudder to think this, is "jag" an slang form of "jack" and his nickname is far ruder and cruder than I previously conceived? Is he the reason the chat* was shut down? So, why do you call him JAG? Really, I started this thread because I got stuck and needed some help. I'm watching closely to fill in more of my grid. * I mentioned the old chat feature so watch @pam and see if we need to start a new thread about her mental state.

Don't feel bad. I didn't make the cut, either.

I love it when my predictions come true.

Twas not @mordorbund who thought that. You need to re-examine the clues in @Vort's puzzle.

I don't care why we call him JAG. I want to go back to the part where Mordorbund seems to think there is a problem with my mental state.

Well, as I recall, that one time I met him (and other ThirdHour folk), he looked exactly like David James Elliott. (Or it might be that JAG is easier to type than Just_A_Guy.)

https://www.kvor.com/ All Vort. All the time.

Why would you be engaged? I thought you were already married.