Vort

Speaking of eggs, did anyone see the latest Jimmy Kimmel travesty, where he asked parents to give awful Christmas gifts to their kids and record the reactions? One parent gave her daughter a carton of eggs and her son...a hot dog. Years of therapy for those kids.

Just don't push. Easy as that.

Thank you for sharing that amazing and beautiful testimony.

I think there is a way to control it.

Some mod removed the offending post, so now neither of our responses make sense. D'oh!

A self-portrait:

I am the original poster of this thread. If I had wanted to point out "one or another specific references to abuse that [i find] unreliable," I would have done so.

I have no proposal. My purpose in starting this thread was not to dictate suggested actions. Rather, I wanted to point out that many people are bandying about the term "abuse" in what often seem less that truly abusive situations. From the experiences of some people close to me, I know that some charges of "abuse" are overblown or even wholly invented. Doubtless you are right. But that does not mean the rest of us should view claims of abuse through those same glasses. Especially in a situation like an anonymous public discussion board, I think we do best to take people's claims at face value but maintain a healthy skepticism. Numerous times on this list alone, I have taken people's claims and statements at face value, only to have them change their story or claim later on with some sort of "well, that isn't really what I meant" hedge. And when the popular lexicon labels yelling at your kids "verbal abuse", the term simply does not have much useful meaning. In fact, it becomes a dangerous term when "abuse" is thought of as a harmful and even criminal activity. If everyone agreed that "abuse" meant certain despicable and harmful things, and if everyone would always use the term only in that way, that would be fine. But since some people use "abuse" for everything from forcible rape to making a sarcastic comment, and since some people are prone to cry "abuse!" for relatively trivial offenses that no reasonable person would agree rises to the level of criminal abuse, I think we are better off not accepting just anyone's claim of abuse as gospel truth.

I am offended at your offense. How dare you! Of course you post to be judged. Judgment does not imply condemnation. The alternative is that you post to be ignored, which is abusrd.

Several problems with this, the most obvious of which is: How can we not judge what is said? That's what we do when we read about situations; we judge them. That is the whole intent of sharing stories, so that others can make value judgments. But there is a deeper problem (at least one). You think no one should complain when someone cries "abuse!" Do you feel the same way about rape? If someone claims to have been raped, then later discloses that she did consent to sex, only she felt like her husband/boyfriend wanted it so she sort of felt like she had to put out -- is that rape? No, of course not. Should she call it rape? No, of course not. She does violence to the meaning of the word. She viciously abuses the man she accuses. She also betrays every person who is the victim of actual rape. When making claims of grave and momentous crimes, people should be careful never to exaggerate. And abuse is a grave and momentous crime.

"Nephite" is used as a convenient political identifier throughout the Book of Mormon, encompassing people who considered themselves from various clans or social sects and called themselves Lamanites, Lemuelites, Ishmaelites, Nephites, Jacobites, Josephites, Zoramites, and people of Mulek (and possibly others not mentioned). The word also appears to mean a third group: Lehites who were not Lamanites. The three senses are: 1. Children (descendants) of Nephi 2. Children of Lehi who stayed with Nephi (Jacobites, Josephites, Lamanites, etc.) 3. All those who supported Nephi (including Zoramites and, later, Mulekites) Note that when groups rebelled against the Nephites, they often rejected the label "Nephite" and called themselves by another name, often "Lamanite". Noah's priests may or may not have been Nephite by ancestry. But when they fled the land of Zeniff and were hunted by their former subjects, they were no longer seen as or considered Nephites. Their children -- the ones they left behind to be slaughtered by the Lamanites along with their wives -- still identified themselves as, for example, "children of Amulon". Soon after their reunification with the main body of Nephites in Zarahemla, this group formally renounced their ancestral ties with their fathers, asking to become Nephites in name and rejecting their fathers altogether. In an ancient society, this would be a momentous proclamation. You never turn your back on your ancestry without real reason. Makes me wonder if the full extent of the treachery of Amulon and his "brethren" was not really known until that point. The important verse is Mosiah 25:12, which reads: And it came to pass that those who were the children of Amulon and his brethren, who had taken to wife the daughters of the Lamanites, were displeased with the conduct of their fathers, and they would no longer be called by the names of their fathers, therefore they took upon themselves the name of Nephi, that they might be called the children of Nephi and be numbered among those who were called Nephites. Note that the part in red above does not specify the children of the Lamanite wives; rather, it specifies the children of the priests of Noah, and identifies them by their infamous act of kidnapping the Lamanite girls. This is why their children no longer wished to be identified with them, and instead took upon them the general name of "Nephite", without respect to their immediate fathers. The only other reading for this verse is to suppose that the children of the priests up and left their Lamanite homes and traveled to the land of Zarahemla -- without the Book of Mormon bothering to mention this little fact -- showed up at king Mosiah's doorstep, and said, "We don't like our fathers, so we want to abandon our mothers and family, adopt alien Nephite customs that we have been taught all our lives are awful and stupid, and live among people a hundred miles from our homeland whom we don't know and who probably don't like us." In my estimation, this is nonsensical. In fact, we learn the fate of the descendants of Noah's priests and the kidnapped Lamanite girls in Alma 25, telling what happened a generation later. In verse 4, we learn: And among the Lamanites who were slain were almost all the seed of Amulon and his brethren, who were the priests of Noah, and they were slain by the hands of the Nephites; The surviving remnant fled, then began putting to death the Lamanites who wanted to be peaceful with the Nephites. The result, in verses 8 and 9: Now this martyrdom caused that many of their brethren should be stirred up to anger; and there began to be contention in the wilderness; and the Lamanites began to hunt the seed of Amulon and his brethren and began to slay them; and they fled into the east wilderness. And behold they are hunted at this day by the Lamanites. This is, I believe, the last we hear of Amulon and his descendants.

Thanks, Ram. I started writing exactly this, but before finishing it, I had to run off to an early-morning meeting. Glad someone else has noticed this.

Seriously? The man should be put to death. If he were a woman and had done something like this, you can bet he would already have been executed. Thirteen years and two thousand lashes is far, far less than he deserves for raping his own daughter over a seven-year period.

Raw morphine. OTC means on the corner, right?

In my view, covenants are sequential but not heirarchical, at least not in the sense of importance or profundity. Temple covenants are no "deeper" than baptismal covenants, though they are more specific. Since you cannot have or keep temple covenants without the foundational baptismal covenants, I don't think you can characterize them as "deeper" or "shallower".

Probably because American Indians don't look Chinese. They don't look particularly Indian, either, but their eyes generally lack the epicanthic fold that we associate with East Asians. So "Indian" explained both the dark skin coloring and the lack of distinctive eye shape.

Neither I nor anyone else that I saw accused you of "attempting to mislead anybody" by preaching false doctrine. I understand that you were simply offering your insights and opinions as possibilities. I also understand that, in your own mind, you were not doing violence to the doctrine of God's perfection. You seem to be missing what I tried so hard to say, though. I objected to the general tenor of the conversation because it seemed to be trifling with sacred things, offering no concrete benefits but risking that readers might take the ideas as LDS teachings (or something close to it). While I admit to getting irritated at such (as I see it) naive and credulous speculation, I can simply ignore threads that bother me. My objection was not founded primarily on my irritation. Rather, I objected on two points, taken together: The ideas being presented were wildly speculative, nothing like mainstream LDS doctrine; and,The ideas being presented had, in my judgment, a high probability of being taken as an offensive denigration of God's might, power, or majesty.For those reasons, I thought to raise a voice of caution and try to give a word to the wise. You have clearly taken deep offense at this, which baffles me but for which I am sorry. That is, I am sorry, not that I raised the voice of warning, but that I could not find a less confrontational way to do it.

Probably would not be in the HoI, since it is neither a doctrinal point nor a firm policy. If the need for seminary graduation for some missions is true, it is simply the Church's reaction to various laws that individual countries might require. If and when those laws change, the Church's response would doubtless change, as well.

That makes more sense. I thought you were talking about photorefractive keratectomy, and did not realize there was an entire discrete community of people who had undergone corneal laser surgery.

In general, speculation is not necessarily bad. But some things ought not be speculated about in public. Some doctrines are too hazy, and their potential for misunderstanding too great, for wise Saints to be publicly bantering them about. In my estimation, questions having to do with the supposed state of the Father "before being God", as if such a thing even makes sense or is defined, fall very squarely in that category. IMO, many questions about the specific nature and individual destiny of the Holy Ghost are also in this category. Pondering is always fine, and I can see that it might not be harmful to pursue some general questions on such topics in a forum such as this. But I am of the opinion that persistent public digging in these so-called "deep" areas -- which are actually no such thing, but rather are the shallowest of speculation, betraying a naive understanding of the nature of eternal life and God himself, and thus indeed tending to portray God as something less than he is -- almost always leads to no good end.

Devil bunnies! I snort the nose, Lucifer! Banana, banana!

...did you hear something?... Me either.

My wife rented this movie for us a year or so ago. We loved it. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. She's a big Sandra Bullock fan, me somewhat less so, but we agreed it was a great movie. Better for being BOATS.

As far as I know, we happily proselytize American Muslims, Canadian Muslims, English Muslims, French Muslims, etc. We do NOT proselytize Arab Muslims, either in their home countries or abroad. We don't proselytize them at home because it's illegal, and I assume we don't proselytize them abroad because they would be subject to execution when they returned home, and the Church is not about bringing death to people. On the other hand, if an Arab Muslim wished to convert while abroad, I assume he would be welcomed into baptism, but probably strongly encouraged not to return to his native country.