Vort

Never heard of AMAC, but it can't be worse than AARP.

Please point out in your above quote where Elder McConkie identified a mistaken policy decision or false revelation by Brigham Young. You think that Jesus Christ judges comments based on how "racist" they are? Tell me, what does Jesus consider as a "racist comment"? What are the hallmarks of such a comment? Is it possible that Jesus judges individuals rather than comments? Is it possible that the appellation "racist" can ultimately apply only to human beings and not to sequences of sound waves or letters? And yet here you are.

@zil2 shouldn't be laughing at that. That was a joke that only men should understand.

Sara Carter agrees. Whoever Sara Carter is. https://saraacarter.com/cnn-and-msnbc-just-got-beaten-in-the-ratings-by-the-hallmark-channel/ EDIT: Apparently based on The Gateway Pundit, which was based on a Forbes article. https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/11/how-awkward-cnn-msnbc-just-got-beaten-ratings/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2024/11/27/heres-a-supersized-guide-to-all-32-new-hallmark-holiday-films-as-kansas-city-chiefs-movie-premieres-saturday/

That's what I have dreamed of: To have the best possible view of men's bathrooms. Just thinking about it makes a shiver run down my spine.

The problem in this discussion is that we are not in a court of law. We're in a discussion group. More importantly, we are a part of God's kingdom. In looking for answers to why such-and-such occurred, the most relevant piece of information is what our current leaders say about things. As far as I know, our current leaders do not subscribe to the current fad of calling Brigham Young a racist and saying that the whole Priesthood ban was just a big mistake. I see exactly zero evidence of any such belief. On the other hand, nor do our current leaders subscribe to the explanations given in the past that attempt to explain or quantify the reasons for the Priesthood restrictions, such as "curse of Cain" or "lack of premortal valor". On the contrary, they have explicitly distanced themselves ("disavow" is the word used) from such explanations, and have instead clearly stated that we do not know the reasons for instituting the Priesthood ban. On an institutional level, this is clearly the case: We don't know why the Priesthood restrictions were enacted. On a personal level, I suppose that God can make known to whomever He chooses whatever He deems fit, so there are perhaps some who understand God's reasoning and actions on a deeper level. But such people are under commandment to keep their private revelations private, so their presumed knowledge does not change the situation. I will continue to argue, forcefully and vociferously, against the ill-considered and even traitorous practice of labelling our Church leaders as racists and otherwise seeking the approval of the world—ironically and fittingly, an approval that would never come unless we literally left all truth behind and simply bowed to the world's will. On the other hand, I will not accept poorly documented opinions as the word of God. What I will accept as the word of God is what our current leaders, those anointed by God to lead His kingdom, have to say. And what they have said is not that those of black African descent before 1978 had no ability to hold the Priesthood. The opposite appears to be the case; for example, no one disputed that Elijah Abel held the Priesthood, only whether or not he should exercise the rites of that Priesthood he held.

the most corrupt administration in fifty years? That's just a real head-scratcher.

Heber C. Kimball was a true prophet.

In the US, we have a patriotic hymn called "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". Most would recognize it from its chorus or refrain: "Glory, glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on!" As a child, I loved patriotic hymns and songs—"America the Beautiful" always was and still is a favorite—and so to this day, I like "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". The Tabernacle Choir has performed it on many occasions. It is sung to the same tune as "John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave", and I believe that, like that song, it is a northern Civil War song. A week or two ago while considering the song/hymn, something occurred to me: The Battle Hymn of the Republic is about soldiers marching into death and prisoners of war who knew perfectly well that they would likely soon die. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword. His truth is marching on! What is the nature of that "terrible swift sword"? What constitutes the "glory of the coming of the Lord" that the narrator claims to have seen with his own eyes? The second and third verses, seldom sung today, answer these questions. I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps. They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps. I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps; His day is marching on! I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: "As ye deal with My contemners, so with you My grace shall deal"; Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel, Since God is marching on. The second verse appears to clarify that "the glory of the coming of the Lord" is the bitter war waged to free the slaves. God is visible in the watchfires of the encamped troops, altars to God's justice, and the fateful lightning is undoubtedly the cannon's roar and the musket's flash. In the third verse, the composer sees fit to speak for God in explicit denunciation of the South, a God whose "fiery gospel" is expressed "in burnished rows of steel". The fourth verse makes it clear that the war is God's war, and nothing but a real war of blood and death. The fifth verse demonstrates that the composer, herself a woman, wrote the song from the point of view of men who were expecting death. He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat; Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on. In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me. As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on. The last line is often bowdlerized to read "As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free", but that is not what the song's author originally wrote. Contrary to my childhood-formed lifelong impression, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" is a very gritty anthem of war and death in service of freedom. It gives me a new perspective on an old song.

Just realized I wrote Moses, not Abraham. Oops. Write slower and think faster.

I would point out that it's easy to read the book of Abraham's account of Ham and Egyptus as stating that those of African (Egyptian) heritage with dark skins are descendants of Cain through Ham, son of Noah and a wife of Cain's lineage. In fact, it's difficult to read that account in context and not arrive at that conclusion, though I admit it is not openly spelled out in so many words. Since I don't understand how God counts lineage, I do not know the answers here—though I would point out that, genetically speaking, the idea that the Priesthood cannot be conferred upon anyone who has "one drop of the blood of Cain" in his veins likely disqualifies every human being, given the nature of how descendancy works. Whatever is going on, our contemporary way of viewing things is clearly insufficient to yield a good explanation. Having said that, I reject out of hand the all-too-easy and IMO cowardly and dishonorable notion that we are to just claim the former prophets were "racist", and then go about signalling our virtue by saying that the "Priesthood ban" was all a mistake and things are just dandy now among us more righteous people. I may not understand how things work or why things are as they are, but I will stand with the prophets and against the disloyal and cowardly who would speak evil of them in order to gain status in the eyes of the world and the worldly.

I seem to remember a quote attributed to President McKay to the effect that, regarding the question of Priesthood ordination of those of African descent, he felt that the heavens were a brass dome over his head.

Jerks. I hate people like that.

You may choose to view it however you wish. The facts do not change. And the facts are that God will forgive all who sincerely repent and grant them place in His kingdom, and will cut off everyone else. That's not revenge; that's the nature of reality—or, if you prefer, eternal law.

Ananias and Sapphira were killed, not because they lied or didn't consecrate, but because they broke their covenants. Death, spiritual and (if unrepented of) eternal, and in their case physical, is the inevitable result of covenant-breaking.

This wording is nonsense. God gives life and God takes life away. Do you call God a "murderer" when an infant dies? When a coastal town is swept away in a flood? When an earthquake kills thousands? Life is God's to give and to take as He sees fit. He cannot "murder". He cannot be "genocidal". This is akin to complaining that God "raped" Mary, since she had His Child. (A claim which I have heard forwarded in all seriousness.) Such meaningless statements make good-faith conversation impossible.

This is not my understanding of the matter, either for Elijah Abel or for his sons. Do you have references supporting this?

It boils down to this: Whence truth? Latter-day Saints claim to "have it", and furthermore that, in the expansive usage of the word, the truth preached by the gospel of Jesus Christ in the Church encompasses all truths, even mundane scientific models. I believe it was Brigham Young that expounded this view. In day-to-day reality, the gospel we adhere to does not hold opinions on scientific theories (except, I suppose, that the earth orbits the sun) or political positions (other than the general idea that freedom and liberty are good things). Here's a thought: If a gun "aims true", that means it hits what it points at. And here's a corresponding metaquestion: How can we know whether our knowledge is true? Truth by (scriptural) definition is a knowledge, specifically a knowledge of things as they really are, as they really were, and as they really will be. Yet what we call "knowledge" is based on synaptic chemical patterns occurring between neurons in our brain, itself an almost infinitely fallible organ. When viewed in this manner, all knowledge appears to be a very large house of cards, waiting only for a gust of wind to topple the whole thing. Yet we can know truth, and we can know that we can know truth by carefully observing how our knowledge corresponds to external reality. In matters of material reality, physics and chemistry and engineering and perhaps biology and supposedly psychology and sociology (if anyone is naive enough to believe that), we can modify our ideas and explanations to conform more closely to observed reality. This process is generally called "science", based appropriately enough on the old Latin word for knowledge. In matters of the Spirit, which we probably agree are even more important, it gets trickier. That is not because we are incapable of spiritual understanding; we were literally created to understand things of the Spirit. The problem is that we need an external reference to guide us, to tell us whether what we think we're seeing is actually what we're seeing. In our brains, we have an intellectual model of what's true. That model is not perfectly correct—obviously, because we make mistakes all the time. But as long as that intellectual model leads us toward good, desired outcomes, we accept it as "truth". It's perhaps not real, fundamental Truth, because in many instances that foundational Truth is beyond our comprehension in this state of mortal existence. But it's small-t "truth" in that it points us in the right direction. An example I have used before is to imagine that you are guiding a beloved friend, someone who is utterly ignorant of microbiology, pathogens, infectious diseases, and the like. Your friend is to open and walk through one of two doors. Behind one door is a simple path that leads to freedom. Behind the other door is a sumptuous feast containing deady bacteria, so lethal that even opening the door guarantees doom. In your attempts to explain what to do to your beloved but ignorant friend, you tell him, "Open the door on the right. That door leads to happiness. Don't even touch the door on the left; opening it will release a dragon that will utterly consume you." Another being, pleasant of voice but malevolent, says, "Nonsense. The door on the left leads to a wonderful, delicious feast. There is no dragon. That is a lie, a deception designed to prevent you from getting what is rightfully yours. The door on the right leads nowhere. There is nothing there. Trust me and take the door on the left." Who is telling the truth? In the example above, I argue that you (the dragon guy) are telling the truth. Your "dragon" does indeed exist in literal reality, though not as a rapacious, fire-breathing lizard; you call it a "dragon" only because you have no better words to describe what the evil threat is. The malevolent voice, which many would claim is giving a much more accurate picture of "reality", is the liar, because he is attempting to deceive in the important fundamentals of the situation. The voice of God pronounces truth, only and ever truth. The voice of the world seeks to sate its own lusts, and in almost every case is untrue in the deep and meaningful sense. The world's voice speaks truth only when the world thinks that truth will lead people to do what the world wants them to do. Our duty as children of God and living mortal beings is to detect the truth and cling to it. This is challenging because, so often, deception and falsehood are made to look true, and truth itself is ridiculed and mocked so as to make it seem false and foolish.

I think it will not be exponential. For one thing, I don't think that it even makes sense to talk about a computer modifying its own code in ways that improve its output but that we cannot understand. Maybe I'm naive in the extreme, but at least at this time, I don't buy that.

I think it's self-evident that they are. And I have no doubt that we have yet to discover many emergent properties of AI. But AI will never even approach the complexity of a human being, certainly not in our lifetime.

My daughter received her endowment a year or two ago, at about the age of 22. She was not preparing either to marry or to serve a mission. She just became convinced that it was a good thing for her to do. And it seems to have been just that. She continues to date* and remains faithful to her covenants, including her temple covenants. One day she will marry, but she has already received her endowment. *In LDS parlance, "to date" means "to court", not "to casually hook up with". Faithful Latter-day Saints do not "hook up" with anyone except their spouses, not with girlfriends or boyfriends or even fiancé(e)s.

Well, no wonder.

Ether, the prophet, was a descendant of Jared, the original leader. Coriantumr, the leader, was a descendant of the brother of Jared, the original prophet. Of course, surely all of these people were descendants of all the original group members, and we must be seeing a patriarchal line to determine which are "Jaredi-tes" and which are "Brother-of-Jared-ites". But I've always, since I was a very young man, found it curious that the last leader of the Jaredites was a descendant of the first prophet of the Jaredites, and the last prophet of the Jaredites was a descendant of the first leader of the Jaredites, as if the roles had switched between the two lines. In fact, Moroni abridged Ether's abridgment, and I know of no way to determine exactly where Ether (or Moriancumr, for that matter) leaves off and Moroni takes over, except for obvious places like Ether 12 where Moroni overtly says "Here I am". We may assume that the earliest history was recorded by Moriancumr and compiled by Ether, and likely abridged by Moroni when included in the brief summary. I think we may also safely assume that each man was guided by the same Spirit, and thus the imporant elements of the history were preserved for us.

He literally braided a whip with which He drove them out of the temple like the beasts they were.

My guess is that Moriancumr was known in life as "Jared's brother", and that's how he identified himself. His brother was the leader of the people, after all, and our modern Western attitude toward a name as a personal, unique identifier is probably not what most cultures through the ages have thought. Consider a landowner's heir who, upon the death of his father, becomes "Lord Fauntleroy" or "Lord Pemberley" or something like that, now being called after the land of which he has become lord. Or consider a women of ancient Rome, identified as her father's daughters by taking the feminine form of his name (Augustus' daughter was called Augusta) until she married, at which point she took her husband's name (Julius' wife was called Julia). So Moriancumr was perhaps known primarily as Jared's brother. Note that the place name "Moriancumr" appears in the Book of Mormon (Ether 2:13). The so-called Jaredites apparently recognized Jared's brother as a mighty prophet, enough to name their dwelling place after him.