Vort

Try looking at it this way:We must have the Spirit with us. If we have the Spirit, we can know and even do all things required of us. Our testimony grows brighter, our attachment to the world lessens, and we come unto Christ. As we have the Spirit and read (for example) the Book of Mormon, the Spirit teaches us the truths in that book, and we come to love and value it even as our testimony of its truthfulness and divinity deepens. Fornication and other transgressions of chastity cut us off from the Spirit immediately. Few things are more effective in severing the lines between us and our Father in heaven than chastity violations. So when you "overstep bounds in chastity", you deafen yourself to the voice of God and, in effect, strand yourself alone in a vast wilderness. No wonder you find your testimony wavering! Now, people who do not violate the laws of chastity can nevertheless find themselves struggling. This is the common lot of humanity and a necessary condition of our mortal existence; we are cut off from God and we must struggle to find him and come unto him. So the point is not that you are experiencing these things only because of fornication. But violating the laws of chastity does make it a great deal more difficult to feel the Spirit and hear the voice of God. My suggestion: Shelve your doubts for the moment. Continue reading your scriptures and talking with your bishop. Put your heart and soul into changing your life and your attitude so that fornications are no longer any part of you. Once this change is taking effect -- and that might take weeks or months, or perhaps even longer -- then take stock of your situation and see if you still feel the same way about the Book of Mormon. My guess is that you won't; but if you do, you will be in a much better position to pray about things and hear the voice of God testifying to you.

Is that the final word on truth, or is it just your present understanding?

I remember a PSA (or maybe it was a commercial for Arco or Esso or something) from the '70s, probably during the initial OPEC "energy crisis" during the Carter years, that featured a droop-tailed Brontosaurus*-looking animation getting sucked into the ground, along with other dinosaurs and plants, then "becoming" oil and being pumped into the gas tank of the happy car owner. I was a young teen at the time, and I wondered even then why they would put something so obviously wrong on TV (and, as is typical for me, whether I was in fact the one who was wrong, and somehow petroleum actually did derive from the flesh of ancient reptiles).*I realize there's no such thing as a Brontosaurus, but this animation was no Apatosaurus. Very much a Gertie the Dinosaur type dino.

Yet this is exactly the situation to which lack of vouchers condemns many children -- children whose parents would choose alternatives to public school (private schools, homeschool, etc.) if only they could use the tax money toward something other than the government-owned, teacher-union-lobbied public schools.

Ram and I have been hitting on each other for almost twenty years. Practically coming to blows a few times. Wouldn't you say, Ram?

If you had known how to use the past perfect subjunctive mood and the past conditional, would you have done so?

Oooh, sorry, grantstine. You made a typo. You have accidentally arrived at stinkingapostatescumbags.net. Ouch. Better luck next time.

How can you be "done" with discussion when you haven't yet begun? So far, you have stated your judgment. Others have asked for clarification. You have responded by restating your judgment. Rinse and repeat. You have yet to enter into any discussion, so I'm not sure how you can be done with it.It's like the March Hare said to Alice: You mean you can't have any LESS tea. You can always have more. Especially when you haven't had any to begin with.

Believe it or not, I have one sadder than both of those: I actually noticed that I had left one of the "O"s out of my acronym, but I was too darned lazy to insert another O. Instead, I intentionally misspelled "no one", thinking that it was so common that noone :) would care, or probably even notice.Now that's sad.

"Way"?

Wing, which is sadder: That you have bought into the linguistic conspiracy that gives that sad Pinocchio "anymore" status as a real word, or that you actually went through my acronyms to determine that I misspelled "no one"?

Just curious: Are you a girl?Are you Mormon?Are you good?

Sounds like a great plan, grantstine.

Take every atom in the universe, and reshape it to look like hungrytrash's number above. Then take each of those and arrange them in a power series, so you're taking one number to the power of the next, and so on. Then read the number presented.That many years...not even close to Graham's number. Just saying.

This is a great suggestion. Thanks. Do you have any specific scriptures that you suggest I concentrate on? It seems like there are just so many. Maybe you could help me get started. Yes, I know. Nothing about cars, meteors, or linguistic metaforms, either. What do you make of that? The conversation has admittedly been a bit one-sided, but thanks.

LOL - laugh out loud ROTFLWMSOOMN - rolling on the floor, laughing, with milk shooting out of my nostrils BTDHOMPTETNECTTAIAM - beating the dead horse of my pet topic, even though noone else cares to talk about it any more SMWIAOTT - slitting my wrists in agony over this thread SMHID - shaking my head in disbelief MUMSFA - making up more stupid, fake acronyms

Interesting, then, that you're commenting on a thread about dinosaurs... Not sure what you mean. I don't know of any timelines "for basic teachings" that I don't believe, unless those timelines are spurious. Of course. That's true by definition. Or do you mean to ask if I believe Jesus was born exactly 2011 years ago? No, I don't (necessarily) believe that. I have no dispute with that statement. Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean, grantstine. Of what timelines do you speak?

Carbon dating isn't useful for things older than a few thousand years. It doesn't help at all in dating dinosaur remains. There are other radio and geological markers that serve to determine the dates of the dinosaurs.The time lines taught in Church manuals are for helpful reference, but are not considered authoritative or doctrinal. Use them as is helpful, but don't make the mistake of thinking that they represent the last word in truth, or even that they represent some sort of "official position" for the Church.

Awesome quote. I love how Zen-like it is in its quality of being simultaneously true and useless. Or maybe anti-Zen-like.Reminds me of the old joke: A guy walking through a field hears a voice: "Hey! Can you help me?" He looks around and sees nothing, then hears the voice again: "Up here!" Looking up, he sees a hot air balloon floating about a hundred feet off the ground. So he calls up, "What do you want?" The balloonist says, "Can you tell me where I am?" The guy responds, "You're in a hot air balloon about a hundred feet off the ground." The balloonist calls back, "You're an engineer, aren't you?" The guy says, "How did you know?" The balloonist responds, "What you told me was true but utterly useless. You have just wasted my time and given me no help at all. Thanks for nothing!" The guy on the ground calls back, "You're a government worker, aren't you?" The balloonist replies, "How did you know?" The guy on the ground answers, "You're surrounded by hot air, drifting aimlessly, without a clue. You're in exactly the same position that you were five minutes ago before you ever spoke with me, only now it's my fault!"

grantstine, you are right in what you say regarding what we don't know. Fyi, your time scale is a bit off. The dinosaurs are about 1500 times older than you say; they all died off almost 70 million years ago.It's also worth noting that, while the scriptures have a pretty impressive record of timekeeping when compared with secular date markers, they were not written to be the equivalent of a modern historical or scientific record. The whole creation story as presented in Genesis is a stylized and highly symbolic account of the important spiritual truths we need to know about our origins. It says little or nothing in a scientific or mechanistic sense about how mankind came to be here.

Blame Kamperfoelie for starting his "basic questions" thread in such an inconvenient forum.

I think lots of fruitful discussion can result if people dialog, as I think we're doing here. Too often, "let's agree to disagree" is trotted out when one or the other party doesn't want to put the effort into the conversation. I think that's a pity. I homeschool my children. (Well, my wife does.) I assure you, they are well ahead of their peers in all or most scholastic areas outside of proper condom usage and analyses of households with two mommies. (We generally wait until they're twelve or so to broach such topics. I know, we're such Neanderthals.) Each of my five children has learned to read before the age of five. My youngest, just turned five, reads his own verse from the Book of Mormon every day, and rarely needs help.So in your system, if one of my kids says they want to go to the elementary school, I as a parent should have no ability to impose my will on them? I should be required, under threat of law, to acquiesce to my nine-year-old's educational demands? So my discretion is that my child is better off at home. Who wins, me or the kid? Seriously? Who makes the judgment? Do we have a whole new layer of bureacracy consisting of state workers who check in on parents and quiz the children about where they prefer to be schooled?Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I am guessing you're young and childless. As a parent, I am appalled at the idea that the state (or perhaps even more absurdly, my minor child himself) should have the final say over how my child is reared. So if my daughter wants to enroll in pole dancing school, I have to let her? For a less outlandish scenario, if my nine-year-old daughter decides she wants to be a professional athlete and insists on enrolling at a school with top athletic programs but lousy academics, I have no authority AS A PARENT to make the decision that she will do no such thing? The reason we classify young people as "minors" is because we acknowledge that they are not capable of making important life decisions. Until they reach the age of majority, those major decisions are left with the parents, who are assumed to have both the wisdom/life experience to make those choices and the best interests of the child at heart.Your plan seems to take that power away from the parent and put it on the child, who by definition is not qualified to make the decision. How do you rectify this? Or do you think that minor children are indeed qualified to make such decisions, and parents have no moral authority to educate their own children as they see fit (e.g. make them learn math, practice piano, or whatever)?

That's because it's in the Adult Forum, and you're only 25.

They feel the need to counterbalance my cool rationality, incisive wit, and humble modesty.