Vort

Bull crap. All due respect to Brother Hardy's efforts, but this is bull crap. It's an acute, perhaps terminal, case of presentism. If the Book of Mormon offends you, the problem does not lie with the Book of Mormon.

I agree. I was trying to point out that in our application of principles (e.g. things on earth are an echo of things in heaven) we take care not to err by taking things too far. "Too far" can be defined only by the Spirit. Maybe there really is a tight relationship between our modern 21st-century penal system and God's spiritual segregation of the covenant from the unwashed.

The things of God and of the kingdom of God in our earthly experience are patterned after heavenly things. I do not believe that the modern prison system is patterned after divine things of eternity.

I pretty much agree with what you wrote. Jesus the Christ is a fine book with some really good information, but frankly he could have used a strong editor.

👍👍 I had not noticed that Preach My Gospel particularly dumbed down anything. It has seemed to offer clear and accurate, if not always complete, explanations. I'm curious to know what you find those good reasons to be.

"Hell" is an overloaded word with false connotations, e.g. forever burning and never consumed. "Outer darkness" is normally used in LDS circles to describe the "kingdom of no glory" inherited by those who are forever condemned, those who love and serve Satan. "Spirit prison" is an accurate and concise description that, IMO, works very well for us today.

I think the closest American equivalent might be the infield fly rule.

No. The Supreme Court is textualist and more or less originalist, with the notable exceptions of Sotomayor and Jackson. A probable majority appear to have conservative social and/or political views, but their judgments that have engendered such plaintive breast-beating among those of the Left have been almost completely well-reasoned arguments about what the law actually says. Even Roe v. Wade falls into this category. If you remember (assuming you're old enough to remember events in 1973, when I was ten, or have read the discussions that went on at that time), Roe v Wade was considered a terrible decision at the time, even from many of the more honest left-leaning lawyers who otherwise supported abortion "rights". By the time the court was reasonably sane again, the justices were too afraid to break with stare decisis on that particular decision. Took almost 50 years for justices honest and courageous enough to come along and return the decision on abortion provision to the states, where no reasonable and knowledgeable person can deny it belongs. In short, the supposed "conservative" bent of the Supreme Court is not relevant, though the media certainly wants to claim it's the only relevant point. They are just sore that their kings have been put down, at least for the moment.

Great site. I tried ground.beef, ground.round, ground.peppercorns, ground.truth, and ground.wire, but just got Google searches.

Ha. The McDonald's Principle. I love it.

The man simply cannot help himself. I have maintained for years that, barring exceptional revelations, I will certainly vote for Trump over whoever the Democrats can dredge up, and especially over Biden/Harris. But if Trump maintains this "called-of-God" attitude, I will not vote for him. I will vote for Kennedy. Not that my vote makes a particle of difference, but enough is enough. Selling Bibles for profit is distasteful enough. This Jesus Complex thing is several steps too far. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-breaks-silence-assassination-attempt-im-not-supposed-here Trump, reacting to images of him raising his fist and being surrounded by Secret Service agents in the seconds following the shooting, said, "A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen." "They’re right and I didn’t die. Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture," he added. "I just wanted to keep speaking, but I just got shot."

I'm deeply grateful that I'm not like those stupid leftists you mention above.

I had what I thought was a principled discussion with another Wikipedia editor, which seemed a good discussion to me (and one in which I certainly had the stronger argument) until I found myself suspended without explanation. The bias is pretty shameless.

Nothing supposed about it. But any publically editable site will suffer from the same problem.

Yep. I have never advocated for the dismantling of public education, though I have recently lost all faith in public schooling and despaired of it actually improving. Our fundamental problem is not the failure of public schools, but the failure of parents. And our society keeps insisting on removing both authority and accountability from parents, insuring the continuation of the death spiral. I see no other solution than that parents insist on accepting both the power and the accountability for that power. At this time, that option looks to me like alternative schooling, including and especially homeschooling.

Exactly. The very best teachers are generally not those who know the most, but those who understand what the student is experiencing and what the student's impediments to learning and understanding the material are. That is exactly where parents should excel. We already have, freely available, the most amazing learning invention of all time, an invention that literally overcomes limitations of space and time and allows human voices thousands of years old to speak to us today. We can learn at the feet of Jesus, of Homer, of Einstein, and the rudiments of this greatest of all learning abilities begin to be within the grasp of most people by age eight or sooner. We have vast collections of materials, again freely available, produced to disseminate this knowledge, with huge buildings dedicated to providing this material to the public. With the advent of networked computing, these collections are brought literally into our living rooms. A good homeschool needs only a caring, loving, competent adult, a reasonably well-disciplined child, and an inexpensive connection to the internet with minimal tools to access it (preferably a desktop/laptop computer, but even just a phone). The rest is limited only by imagination.

Boeing has been the greatest aerospace company that this world has ever known. Boeing's precipitous plunge starting in the 1990s is truly one of the great business tragedies in US history. Boeing is now a laughingstock in some areas, e.g. its unbelievable string of failures and bunglings regarding its Starliner space capsule, not to mention the criminal horror of its 737 Max fiasco. Why corporate executives at Boeing have not gone to jail for that latter thing, well, I don't understand. Boeing executives have blood on their hands, and they're apparently walking away scot-free, at least in this life. I wonder how different it would have been for Boeing if Americans rather than Indonesians and Africans had been the victims.

A secret MAGA warrior, attempting to blow his idol's head off. Will anyone actually believe that? Outside of the lunatic left, I mean.

Welcome home. Until very recently, I assumed that everyone in Houston glided through the hurricane like my son and his family did. Obviously I was mistaken.

@pam: We are missing the vomit icon.

Ugly truth: I often find myself cheering against US Olympic teams or other teams in international competition. Women's soccer comes to mind. Get some team of true excellence, e.g. the original US basketball "Dream Team", and I'll cheer wholeheartedly for them. But I don't support egomaniacal, politically correct virtue-signallers no matter what flag they fly (or openly disgrace) when they play.

The answer. Or at least, an answer. Public schools are an open sewer. My observation is that private schools are usually not much better. If the parents are honest, open, and truly well-intentioned, homeschooling is as close to a sure thing as you can get. If parents are not honest, open, or truly well-intentioned, then it really doesn't matter much, which is why our public schools are as they are. FTR, from what I have read in media accounts, it's not just us. It appears that the UK is as bad as the US, and possibly even worse in many cases. I don't see many (or any) countries that provide a really good public education system. So I think this homeschooling observation is applicable worldwide.

So are we all. I think that those who realize and acknowledge this fact are several steps ahead of the game.

If people do not talk about these scriptures, it is because they do not understand them. From an LDS viewpoint, the meaning of these scriptures is obvious (well, to me, at least): God's word is heard only by those with ears to hear them, and understood only by those with a heart open to understanding—that is, to those who hear and heed the whisperings of the Holy Ghost. Nothing in religion "makes sense" to those who have no conversation with God. It's all sounding brass and tinkling cymbals to them. Their very deafness is their condemnation, or at least a sure sign of it.