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Since posting this the thoughts have come flooding and I think I'm ready. Thanks to anyone who prayed for me!

1. Different church authorities have gone in different directions on this. But it really doesn’t matter to us, because the fall narrative primarily explains the fallen state of man—our own struggles with death and illness, our own spiritual natures and wrestle with sin, our own alienation from and desire for reconciliation with God. 2. At this point, I really couldn’t give three craps about what you say about other churches’ beliefs. I have no reason to believe you are representing their beliefs with any more understanding, accuracy, or honesty than you’ve represented our own. Other belief systems will ultimately stand approved of God (or not) on their own merits. But as for our beliefs: It is not Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience that Latter-day Saints celebrate. As I said to you nearly two months ago: The most handy modern-life analogue I can think of is a couple who breaks the law of chastity and, on learning that the woman has become pregnant, marry and keep the child; over the years finding joy and rejoicing in their child and in parenthood generally. The Lord turned a bad decision into something that served His purpose and, in His mercy, offered forgiveness and redemption to the sinners. But His mercy does not mean that the sin was not sin or that, were the sinners given the chance to go back in time to repeat or avoid their sin, they would not be expected to chose a more directly-righteous course. Adam and Eve repented of their sins. You seem to be doubling down on yours; and I would advise you to stop.

Initially Satan encouraged men to treat women as inferior. Then he riled up women to demand to be treated like men. And because women can never be as good at being a man as men are (and vice versa) pressure is then put on men to be less manly in the name of equality. So the end result is non-feminine women and non-masculine men. Satan then puts his hands behind his head and his feet upon his desk and laughs.

I was positively impressed by Charles' brief television address. I was touched by his seemingly sincere expressions of sorrow and love for his mother and other family members. My naive desire is that Charles himself wrote the speech, but in any case, kudos to whoever did. I thought his mention of his estranged son and especially his daughter-in-law was a kind gesture. Perhaps Charles really is ready to follow his mother's example.

good points, that is probably more accurate.

Growing up Catholic we were always told that women were more virtuous and men were…well, basically garbage. I remember a bishop (Catholic rough equal to Stake President) ranting about men will corrupt women and it’s up to women only to keep their virtue. With pearls like that it’s no wonder they can’t keep people in the pews. It’s nonsense of course. Anyone who thinks that way has never seen women tease one another into eating disorders or emotionally manipulate men. We’re all grub worms here. I knew of one guy who was an EQ president who thought that way-that men are less moral-but no one was listening so it was irrelevant.

I'm going to lay out a bunch of propositions without justification, because I'm too lazy to look them up. But this illustrates how I think about the issue. It isn't entirely scripturally backed, but because I'm me, it's obviously correct Premise 1: Returning into God's presence is contingent on obeying his laws. Those who fail to do so cannot be exalted. Premise 2: God, knowing the unlikelihood of anyone living up to standard set forth in Premise 1, proposed a plan where an intermediary could absolve others of their guilt, allowing them to regain eligibility for exaltation. The condition to be an intermediary was completing a life completely obedient to God's laws. I think these two premises are relatively uncontroversial. You can nitpick them if you want, but at their core, I think most of would agree to the basic concepts. There is one thing that isn't addressed here, however. Premise 2 establishes the conditions for eligibility to be an intermediary. But it doesn't establish the terms for becoming an intermediary. This is at the very heart of @Chainsaw's question. And as other have stated, there is no definitive scriptural answer to this question. I think it is common for people to assume the Penal Substitution model. This, by my understanding, makes the assumption that every sin or misdeed is attached to a penalty. And Christ would have had to feel the weight of all of those penalties. As an adult, this model never felt right to me. In some ways, it feels like it multiplies the penalty of sin. Christ had to experience the cumulative penalties of the sins of some 40 billion people (or whatever), but all of those people would experience those penalties at least up until the moment of their repentance? In the case of natural consequences, perhaps even further? It just didn't feel right to me that God's plan to give people the option of exaltation was to increase the cumulative load of suffering in humanity. @Just_A_Guy proposes a Penal Substitution-lite model, where maybe it isn't quite so cumulative, but operates on a similar idea. There is a certain amount of suffering required of each sin, but maybe not an additional penalty on top of the natural consequences. (I may not be fully understanding him). But I think this ultimately has the same flaw in that it marks a multiplication of a fixed amount of suffering based on the actions of each individual. I don't feel good about it. I tend to view it more like this: Premise 1 gives God the rights to judgment--and his judgment is strict. Premise 2 establishes that he is willing to yield the right of judgment to another. Once the right of judgment is yielded to the intermediary, the intermediary is free to set the terms on which a person is exalted. The unanswered question, then, is what are the terms of sale of those rights. In my mind, I suspect the terms were that Jesus, having lived all of God's laws, would be given the rights to judgment so long as he felt all of the pains that are inflicted by the sins of a person on themselves and also on others. To rephrase it, the rights to judgment were sold on the condition that Jesus would be able to have perfect empathy for anything that we feel. So Jesus didn't have to suffer a certain amount of pain for every loaf of bread stolen. Instead, he suffered the pain of hunger, the pain of desperation, and the pain of having the loaf of bread stolen from him; and he only needed to suffer each of those pains enough to have empathy for us. He needed to understand what makes us hurt, what makes us tick, and what factors might lead us into sin. With that empathy, he could then judge if our hearts had returned into a state of being where we no longer have a desire to do sin. Ultimately, even this view increases the cumulative amount of suffering. But it does so in a way that minimizes that total suffering required to reach exaltation. And the idea of a God that is interested in minimizing suffering appeals to me*. It also makes sense to me in the context of the New Testament. We read the Jesus suffered in Gethsemane through the Atonement, and we largely think of that as where all that suffering was borne to purchase the right of judgment. But then he was tortured, mocked, ridiculed. The suffering kept going on for several more hours. But there is this one poignant moment where, hung on the cross, Jesus cries out "Father, why have you forsaken me?" For the first and only time in his existence, Jesus was cut off from the presence of his Father. It was the one thing He had never experienced. And it was so awful, that shortly after he declared "It is finished" and allowed himself to die. In my interpretation, He didn't experience that separation once for every person that lived. He experienced it once, and exactly once. And that was enough to understand how it feels. As a general principle, the price to exchange the rights to judgment can effectively be reduced to "whatever terms they agreed to." And there's a lot of interesting twists and turns you can take on that if you want to liken it to our legal system and contract law. But in the end, I don't think the specifics matter a great deal. I think it ought to be sufficient to recognize that an agreement on the transfer of those rights was struck, and part of that agreement is that we must live up to the expectations of Jesus. These expectations are that we live God's law, and repent of our failures to the best we are able. * With the obvious caveat that what someone believes about God usually says more about the person than it says about God.

Since @Carborendum is going to pull me into this, I'm going to suggest that the incredulity might be somewhat misplaced. It doesn't look to me that Tai is trying to reinvent calculus, because her notational development doesn't include any attempt to generalize to formulae. Her method is focused on curves. The difference being that a formula has a known and well define structure. A curve may just be the line that goes through a set of observed data. When looking for the area under an empirical curve for which you have no defined structure, your options are to estimate a curve or to break the curve into shapes and add up the areas of the shapes. The two general approaches both have advantages and disadvantages with respect to what kinds of biases they introduce. (bias being the mathematical term for "difference from the true value"). When measuring something like glucose tolerance, the end point can be affected by diet, enzyme activity, food and liquid intake, etc. And with inconsistencies in when a person eats from day to day, you might have to develop a new equation for each person every single day. It would be absurd to do this for a lot of reasons, so working with the empirical curve is the most practical thing to do here. Tai's method, then, is an approach to getting the area under the empirical curve (as opposed to the theoretical curve). Her approach is an algorithm for forming the regions, areas, and their sum from a set of known points on a cartesian coordinate system. That is to say, she isn't proposing the trapezoidal rule as being novel, but the algorithm for processing it may be novel. Objectively, her algorithm is working better than the algorithms she compares against. Therefore, it would appear to have some interest in the field. Why would it have interest in the field? Probably because the software available to people in this field is limited in what it is able to do. (you can complain about this if you like. Certainly, there is software in the world that can do these calculations already. But a lot of them require programming experience, which may not be accessible to physicians or the software programs being used). So here's the point I'm trying to make. It looks like Tai is trying to solve an industry problem, not a mathematical problem. Side note: There was some talk about the difference of trapezoidal rule vs rectangular rule. The difference between the two only matters with empirical curves. But once you start taking the limit as the width of the shape goes to zero, then the solutions converge to each other.

I'm sure you are right. Elizabeth II ascended to the throne on the untimely death of George VI, her father, in 1952. Elizabeth reigned for 70 years, so only those over the age of 70 (closer to 71, actually) were alive when her father was the king of England and the UK. I believe the world's 70+ age bracket comprises about 8% of the world's population, maybe a bit less. That means that until today, about 92% of the world's current population had never known another English monarch besides Elizabeth II. I assume the statistics would be very close to the same if you counted only the population of the UK or only the population of Commonwealth countries (most of whom accept the UK monarch as their own, at least in a figurehead position). I'm not an avid follower or lover of the English monarchy, but FWIW, I thought Elizabeth brought intelligence, common sense, elegance, and extremely good manners to a position which, while having little or no real executive or legislative power, certainly holds important sway in international and domestic (UK) affairs. (No pun intended on the "affairs" part.) She will be missed. We can only hope that her son, King Charles, will rise above the conduct he has displayed for most of his adult life and instead follow his mother's example.

1. I have (twice) asked what you think God intended for humankind after the fall, and your answer focuses on what He intended before the fall. Fortunately, you finally sort of get around to answering my question 1 in your latest response to question 2. 2. When you say “They experience happiness in their life but also experience misery due to consequences which began with the Fall”—I agree with this. And that’s what changed between Gen 3:16 and Moses 5:10-11: experience. That’s why Eve came to understand that the fall was not an unmitigated disaster. It is interesting to me that you ask @person0 what “the curse of Adam” in Moroni 8:8 refers to, and then—without waiting for a response, and in your very next post, carry on as if you know exactly what it means. Your question to person0 is especially interesting when you have proven in the past to be so industriously resourceful at finding obscure LDS pedagogical materials—but are somehow ignorant of the church-published youth seminary manuals that define this term as the separation between man and God that was a result of the fall. What I am concerned about in this particular thread, is that even though Mormonism pretty clearly describes the Fall as a mixed blessing you seem heck-bent on straw-manning the Mormon teaching as pronouncing the Fall as being either all good or all bad—and then you try to play “gotcha” by confronting us with LDS scriptures, sermons, and teaching materials that don’t line up with the caricature of us that you’ve created using hyper-technical semantic interpretations of a language (English) that is neither the original language of the most of the source documents, nor (as I believe you’ve freely acknowledged) is even your own first language. It all comes across as deeply disingenuous. So, let me try to put this as clearly as I can: The fall of Adam had both positive and negative effects. Positive and necessary long-term effects included: enabling procreation, permitting spiritual growth by introducing an element of opposition, and heightening humankind’s ability to enjoy the good by making it possible to actually experience the bad. Negative short-term effects included allowing humankind to experience pain, despair, and sin; wresting humankind from their innocent state, and bringing about an alienation from God that—if one does not repent and turn to Christ—can become permanent. Different scriptures, sermons, and church instructional materials will focus on different aspects of the fall, whether positive or negative; depending on the attitudes, priorities, and praxis that a particular speaker is trying to elicit within a particular audience at a particular moment in time; and may be influenced additionally by whatever secular/literary traditions (whether accurate or errant) that the speaker’s particular culture may have ascribed to the story of the fall.

Last year, we spent the Thanksgiving week in a house in south Orem, Utah, where we all gathered with our BYU student children to celebrate. The AirBnB we rented was very large, with lots of sleeping space. It was perfect for our needs. As an added bonus, the main floor bathroom was a wonder. I thought I had taken this picture; it only took me ten months to find it. Behold this bathtub, complete with working shower! Fancy, huh?