Vort

Joseph Smith translated an ancient record into modern English. He didn't use "G-d", "L-rd", or any other such term. He used "God", "Lord", "Jesus", "Savior", "Jehovah", and so forth. I, for one, seek to emulate the example of the Prophet of our dispensation, as well as those who have followed. To my knowledge, not a single one of them has followed this "delete-the-vowel" system.

No. There is no such tenet. Lots of things that sound reasonable are not "fair to assume". This is one of them.

Yes, I agree, it does sound Trinitarian. But please realize that Abinadi taught this in the Americas 150 years before Christ's birth, while the doctrine of the Trinity was developed and formalized in Europe three hundred years AFTER Christ's birth. So Abinadi didn't have any Trinitarian doctrine floating around that he had to combat. If we accept the name of Christ, we become his children, sons and daughters (e.g. Mosiah 5:7). It is through him that we are "born again" (e.g. Alma 7:13-14) -- that is, born unto eternal life, with Christ as our Father. This is much more than simply a word game. This is central to what the Atonement is. In accepting Christ's atonement, we become heirs to all he has -- what Paul calls "joint-heirs" in Romans, since Christ also inherits all that the Father hath (e.g. Matthew 28:18). So Jesus really does become "the Eternal Father" in a real and important sense. That doesn't mean he is identical with the Father, just that he can share that title in some sense.

mm, as HPGL, what did you do with the elders who had been asked or invited to attend your group?

I married someone who was among the most physically beautiful women I had ever known. It has been 23 years since we met, and I still look at her sleeping when I wake up in the morning and marvel at her beauty. Can't explain it. Can't justify it. Don't know what it means for all those golden-hearted women who, for whatever reason, are not considered attractive. But when things have looked darkest in my marriage and life has been Just Plain Hard, I would be lying if I said that my wife's physical beauty didn't act as a balm for anger and wounded feelings. Is this just Vort's callow immaturity shining through? Perhaps, but in any case, there you have it. (And btw, I never thought of myself as one who had an inordinate desire for physical beauty. Funny how things work out.)

Which is why I specifically mentioned that I was not singling you out. I didn't think you were saying that, so hopefully it didn't sound like I did think so. To extend your comparison: Your child may produce only childish scrawls, but he uses his hands, fingers, and eyes to coordinate his efforts. He tries to represent something meaningful to himself on paper. He is doing basically exactly the same thing that a great artist does, just not as well (yet). I have never quite understood why some people, LDS and otherwise, get all bent out of shape at the mere suggestion that sexual relationships of some sort might possibly apply to God. I believe it's unwise to dwell at length on such topics, or even to talk openly about them; but even so, I can find nothing offensive or evil in the basic idea. If our lives here are but a pale reflection of the Eternal Life of the Father, well, they are still a reflection. We may understand only in part; we may have only imperfect approximations here. But the ultimate reality still bears resemblance to our lives here and now. Surely, when we inherit all that the Father hath and see more fully our eternal lives, we will be as surprised and delighted with the familiarity of things as we will be with their strangeness. Sex is good. We say it, and we think we believe it, but somewhere in our brains, many of us still harbor ideas of the dark strangeness and "ickiness" of sex. At some point -- and sooner is better than later -- we should quit thinking as children, put off childish things, and recognize sex for the divine blessing it truly is. And when we have reached that point, I doubt any of us will be repulsed at the idea that our Father's life might follow a very similar pattern. Even if we don't believe the idea to be true, it won't hold any horror or disgust for us, as it obviously does now among many.

Did you realize you left the "i" out of your username?

Live long and prosper. And it's not just coincidence.

The New Testament makes it perfectly clear that Christ (God) worships the Father. Thus, God does indeed worship. To extend this idea to the Father and draw conclusions based on that extension is completely unwarranted. At that point, it's pure space doctrine. Better to leave such fringe ideas strictly alone and stick with the important revealed truths.

Been there, done that, have the Florentine bus ticket. Ouch. Quit it.

Why, thank you, Beefche.

Are you as mature as this woman?

Please explain how my comments could be seen as in any way "skeptical". Also, your example suggests that Elder Featherstone was given his calling as a GA as a sort of reward for passing the test placed before him by obeying his unrighteous bishop. Do you believe that the Lord uses Church and Priesthood positions to reward the faithful?

Old math joke. (Old, but very clever.) "oct "means octal and "dec" means decimal, so dec 25 just means plain old 25 -- that is, 2 tens and 5 ones. Counting in octal means base eight, so oct 31 means 3 eights and 1 one -- which is also 25. Thus, oct 31 = dec 25, proving that Halloween is really Christmas.

I generally stay away from the "God and sex" threads, since I see little good that ever comes from them. But I confess I have never understood why human sexuality is so often viewed contemptuously, as "a pitiful and lower form". At best, this is like claiming that human language is "just a pitiful and lower form" of the way God speaks. Perhaps this is true in a very literal sense, but I don't view the divine gift of language as a fallen, debased, ugly thing, even if many of its users make it so. (To be clear, I am not pointing fingers at anyone, least of all Ammonite. Rather, I am using her post as a springboard for discussion.) Are we not taught that the procreative power is of God, and that the exercise of that power is among the most sublime experiences available to us in mortality? Sure, I can see why the world thinks of sex as degraded. For them, it is. It's all fornication and self-pleasuring and pornographic movies. They refer to sex as "doing the nasty". They truly revel in the idea of perverting sex to a degraded thing. So of course they (that is, those of the world) will think of sex as nasty, ugly, and degraded. That's how they like it. But we are of the covenant. We have received divine guidance. We have, or should have, a clearer vision of the true nature of things. I can think of no excuse we could provide to justify thinking of sex as anything less than a wonderful, even miraculous, gift from God to his married children. Why would any Saint even suggest that the sexual union of a married couple was somehow pitiful or debased, or that sexual congress between a husband and wife was anything less than a taste of the celestial glory? My guess is that there would be a whole lot more joy and a whole lot less heartache among the Saints if they (including, perhaps especially, the sisters) would quit viewing sex through the worldly, evil lens of "doing the nasty" and start viewing it as God intended. (Disclosure: In this, I don't speak from personal experience. My wife does not share the attitude of sex as bestial perversion, thank heavens. But my conversations with and observations of the Saints suggest a much different reality for most members.)

Why not? A fornicator is actively sinning, just as much as a thief.

My understanding is that Paul was contrasting faith, hope, and charity (love), three virtues that were to remain, with prophecy, tongues, and knowledge (i.e. testimony), three virtues that were to be taken. Note in 1 Cor 13 how Paul explicitly contrasts prophecy, tongues, and gnosis (translated knowledge, but according to Nibley more accurately rendered testimony) as departing virtues ("vanish away") with faith, hope, and charity as abiding virtues, i.e. those that would remain. I believe that Paul's first epistle to Corinth was written at least in part to prepare the minds of the people for the great apostasy that was to come within the lifetime of some of those then living -- that in fact had already begun in some parts of the Church where the apostles could not regularly minister. 1 Cor 13 is obviously a sermon on the importance of charity as a crowning virtue of Christianity, but the subtext of impending apostasy seems fairly clear.

Thank you, Snow. This was actually useful. (And believe me, I am as surprised to be saying this to the likes of you as you are to be hearing it from the likes of me.)

This sounds right to me. The phrase "to do violence to" has a well-established meaning in this context, and does not imply that homosexuals are going around beating up married people. Redefining marriage to include marital status between same-sex partners, as between humans and vegetables or planets, would indeed do violence to the traditional concept of marriage. It's a perfectly valid use of the phrase. You are, perhaps, conversing with exactly the wrong person on this topic. It seems that no matter how precise I am in phrasing my responses (or questions), someone is sure to misunderstand me and attribute malice where none was intended. If I try to explain myself using careful word choice, people just get madder and madder. When I ask for explanations of what they mean, even if I provide exhaustive documentation of what they said and when, they just continue to get more angry, usually without ever bothering to actually respond to anything I am asking. (Note that this is true even, or especially, when I take great pains to answer all of their questions or points in detail.) So I understood Br. Otterson's phraseology and found nothing objectionable in it. I have to think that even if I were on the other side of the fence, I would not find the use of that phrase objectionable, since it accurately reflects exactly what he meant. But then, I will never get elected president, either. If this is literally true, then such people are too ignorant to get involved in public conversations with adults. But of course, such legalization would unarguably do great violence to the very idea of traditional marriage, if not to the actual individual marriages themselves. To say you don't like a stated fact because you don't like how it sounds seems absurd to me. From a purely pragmatic and political point of view, you may be absolutely right. But if our ability for public discourse is so broken that it becomes politically incorrect for someone to use a well-established and well-understood phrase in exactly the way it is appropriate to use, then our problems go far deeper than a few hypersensitive souls taking offense where, very clearly, none was intended.

What other answer is possible? "I deserve to live in the celestial kingdom because I am meritorious"? The only possible answer is, "I deserve to live in the celestial kingdom because I have been invited by one who has authority to invite me." I can see no other possible answer. Certainly, the idea that you have earned exaltation because you served a mission and paid your tithing is an absurd conceit.

Weird. It seems like I see that number twice a day! Except when I go to bed early.

I suppose I consider being instructed by the bishop to leave one's spouse to be an immoral act, and thus outside the scope of the question. This poll question is based on some other threads, where I suggested the scenario where a bishop asked or instructed a ward member to sign his/her house over to the Church. Some opined that a bishop has no such authority, while others seemed to suggest that the Lord would always tell you through revelation what you should do in that situation. This question was designed to discover the thinking and opinions of the site membership on that latter possibility. Is it the case that the Lord will always provide revelatory confirmation or denial of any major request your bishop might make?

It's called "conversation on a discussion list." If you have answered N times, I was hoping for N+1. Huh. Didn't expect that from you.

LDS only, please: Is it possible that the bishop might tell you to do some life-changing (BUT NOT OVERTLY IMMORAL) thing -- something that definitely has ramifications for the rest of your life, and perhaps your children's lives, too -- and when you ask the Lord for confirmation, God neither tells you that the directive is from him nor that the bishop is a loose cannon that should be ignored? Or do you believe that the Lord is always obligated in every such instance to give you confirming guidance one way or the other?

I asked my mom when I was four, and she pulled out a pencil and a pad of paper and started drawing pictures. To this day, I have never told her this, but it was TMI. A simple explanation like, "A baby grows inside the mommy's body from a seed that both the daddy and the mommy give" would probably have been much more useful to me at that time, and much more understandable. But my point was, questions mean different things in different contexts and require different types of answers.