Vort

@MarginOfError's buddy?

I'm not a fan, exactly, but he played a big part of my early- to mid-teenage musical life.

Just what we need: A sport that looks similar to baseball but is even more boring. What Cricket Means to Me:

Yes, I think so. I believe the John 9 example is outstanding because it clearly implies a premortal life, where people might possibly sin and be born blind as a result. Funny how other religions seem just to glide right over the obvious implications of this verse.

I tend to remember General Conference addresses pretty well. Elder Bednar's pickle talk was a classic. Generated lots of conversation in 2007, and not a little mockery. But I always thought the mockers were idiots, so whatever.

No, but isn't a girl born with like 3,000,000 ova? I don't think menopause is caused by a woman's ovaries running out of eggs. The fact that a post-menopausal woman could become fertile again from hormone treatments suggests that she still has potentially viable ova. Unless 60+-year-old women who get pregnant do so solely through IVF.

Far be it from me to lecture a practicing physician, but... I believe the average young woman has around 300,000 viable ova at puberty. If she had 24 (!) periods per year for 100 (!!) years, releasing ten (!!!) ova per menstrual cycle, she would not make a significant dent in her supply of ova.

Sounds like a miraculously convenient excuse...

Aircraft have strict altitude requirements for flight, with airlanes typically thousands of feet in altitude and minimum operating altitudes around cities of something like a thousand feet above the highest point or obstacle in the area. I imagine delivery drones fly at an altitude of no more than a few hundred feet. I also assume that drones will not be allowed anywhere near airfields, so there will probably be no overlap between the airspaces where the two types of vehicles/devices operate.

When we talk about God, we know not whereof we speak. I'm not too concerned about the Trinitarian God being mathematically inconsistent. My problem with it is that it's not a good model of reality. As for the mortal Christ being 100% God and 100% man, I think the use of a fraction like "100%" is rather silly; but as the two things measure different quantities (if you can really call "Godliness" or "man-ness" a "quantity", which BTW you cannot), they need not sum to 100%. So if saying Jesus was 100% God and 100% man is false, it is false not because of mathematical inconsistency, but because the percent measure is absurd, like saying you love your daughter two cups and a tablespoon. (Or a bushel and a peck.)

Replace my use of "vector" with "tensor". I did not mean to limit the idea to three spatial dimensions, or indeed to spatial dimensions at all.

It reeks of conspiracy (the tin-foil hat kind), but I agree with #2.

I have heard this many times. However, as a trained mathematician I cannot connect it to any logic that makes sense to me. It makes sense if you consider mortality and Godliness to be mutually orthogonal vectors, or perhaps not even sharing the same vector space, occupying separate non-mapping vector spaces (which I guess would be called "orthogonal vector spaces"). The statement that the mortal Jesus was both mortal and God is indisputably true, so somehow those two things must harmonize. Count me as one who considers this stuff and nonsense, or to be more specific, heresy of the most damning sort.

His, too.

There is a reason that President Kimball oversaw lyrical modifications that changed one of my favorite Primary hymns from "...teach me all that I must KNOW to live with him someday" to "...teach me all that I must DO to live with him someday."

I agree with all of this. Here's another thing I agree with: The sexual act is not dirty or debasing or disgusting, unless we ourselves make it that way. People seem to have a huge "ick" factor with the very idea of divine sexuality. (People today, I mean. The Greeks seemed just fine with it, which frankly is one aspect of the otherwise often-perverse Greek ideas on sexuality that I rather like.) There should be no such "ick", regardless of one's conception (NPI) about divine sexuality.

Elder Bednar gave a good talk on this subject back in 2007.

I meant something closer to "the socially and politically conservative electorate", but I think "the kingdom of God" is a nice interpretation. I did not mean "Republicans".

When you put it that way, then well duh. Now it all makes sense.

I have said this my entire adult life. Recently, I realized that I can't name many reasons why I should hope this, other than general platitudes about unity and so forth. The truth is that the political Left hates us. With a burning passion. Despises us. We are contemptible to them. To quote Hillary, we are "the deplorables". So why is it better to stay in a society with such people? How does it benefit us, or for that matter, them?

Has someone ever said it did? Perhaps not in this particular venue, but I grew up hearing the common LDS idea that the act of partaking of the sacrament cleanses us from sin as a sort of rebaptism. For that matter, the physical act of baptism does not cleanse us, either, though we teach our children, new converts, and even each other that it does. Christ's atonement cleanses sin, and as far as I understand, nothing else does. The baptism itself is the formal making of a covenant. Through the covenant we receive Christ's atoning blood. Salvation lies not in being baptized and partaking of the sacrament, but through being baptized and partaking of the sacrament. This distinction is very often lost.

What do you find irritating about it? The idea that Christ is our brother? The idea that He is elder? The affection? A perceived excess of familiarity / lack of respect or devotion? Or....? Mostly just curious. <not mikbone> I am sometimes irritated a bit by it, but not because I disbelieve the doctrine. I have pondered why I should be bothered by people proclaiming Christ as our elder brother, and I think I've decided that it feels like the term as often used constitutes a diminution of Christ's true role in our existence. The Savior is reduced to being our Big Buddy, the cool and reliable guy who's always there sticking up for us. I mean, it's true, but does that really convey the grandeur and perfection of God himself who condescended in the most literal sense to live among us? Does it emphasize our eternal indebtedness to him for his atoning grace and mercy? Used in a particular context, "elder brother" is a perfectly true and valid description of the Christ. But when people tend to think about their Redeemer primarily in terms of Big Buddy, I think there's a problem there.

No, not at all. This plea has been made every few years at General Conference throughout my life. It has in fact been taught since the beginning of the Restoration. But President Nelson put the issue front and center, telling everyone to quit dancing around it and just buckle down and do it. I appreciate President Nelson's firm guidance in this area.