Vort

d00d!!!11!! u rokk!!1!!!!!1

A little-considered fact is that "Liahona" is an anagram of "Hanoi-LA". Clearly, the Liahona was a device designed to guide Lehi's party from southeast Asia to the west coast of the Americas. Also, "A HAL ion", demonstrating its hi-tech nature as well as a prophetic reference to heuristic algorithms, electronic computing, and AI. Don't forget "Noah Ali", showing both the Lehites' naval adventure and the Nephites' later fight for survival against the Sonny Liston - Joe Frazier - George Foreman "secret" combination of the Lamanites.

You don't say? (I find self-reference abnormally humorous.)

That there is no salvation in believing a false doctrine.

Hmm. I don't think that's what we are discussing at all. Rather, I think the discussion was about those who take offense at what they are instructed to do. I can provide supporting quotes, if you like. Instead, let me take the route of reasoning. You are supposing that the discussion is about "the merit of the conditions". But how could such a thing be discussed in general? The aforementioned conditions would be applied to an individual case of transgression and repentence. Since we do not have an individual case under discussion for which we know the specifics, we could not possibly discuss whether the transgression merits the conditions. Thus, we are left with discussing the general idea of transgression, repentence, and conditions of repentence. QED. For any given serious transgression requiring Priesthood leadership intervention, we have requirements or conditions for repentence that range from no ecclesiastical punishment up to excommunication. These conditions are specified by a Priesthood leader, who by definition is authorized to determine those conditions. Therefore, if the transgressor is repentant, s/he will accept and abide by those conditions. If s/he does not, it can be concluded with reasonable confidence that s/he his not repentant enough to abide the conditions of repentance.

Upon what do you base this judgment?Understanding of covenants.So you believe your understanding of covenants to be greater than Joseph Smith's? Interesting. I disagree.

Seriously? You actually, literally could not care less? Wow. That's some impressive lack of caring. To tell you the truth, I don't think I could even identify something about which I could not care less. How would I even know I couldn't care any less about it? If you have a heirarchy of caring, I suppose there is only one thing you actually could not care less about, since you care less about that thing than any other. So I guess I'm honored to hold the position of having the feeling about which you care the least. Unless, that is, there are a whole bunch of things that you equally don't care about and could not care less about. Then mine would be but one of an enormous number of things about which you could not care less. Which brings me to the question: Do you usually write about stuff for which you could not care less? For example, "I could not care less whether the oldest lady in Tokyo is eating sushi at this moment." "I could not care less what the average surface temperature of a specific brown dwarf in the near part of the Andromeda galaxy is." "I could not care less about the exact number of molecules present in a random grain of sand on a beach in Yemen." You must keep pretty busy writing about all the stuff you couldn't care less about. Sounds like an awful lot of work. I wonder how you do it? But, truthfully, it's not like I really care, although I can't honestly say that I could not care less about it. I probably could.

MMA rules? I'll be watching!

HockeyDude, how do you get an animated GIF to work as your avatar?

Judo!! Oh, wait, NBC isn't showing any judo in the US...never mind...

I noticed no criticism by bytor2112, except to say that he thought your opinion was erroneous. In stating that, he was simply giving his opinion, which I thought you said "everyone is entitled to post".

Not really, for two reasons: 1. By mentioning up front that I was not LDS, I did not attempt to fly under the radar and masquerade my opinion on the "Christian Beliefs Board", which is specifically set aside as a place to discuss non-LDS Christianity, as a non-LDS opinion. 2. My statements were not a value judgment on non-LDS Christian beliefs, but rather an attempt to explain non-LDS doctrine, and was offered because no other explanations had yet been offered.

I have never quite understood this line of reasoning. Do you believe all opinions to be of the same validity? If so, then if it is my opinion that you do not exist, is that equally valid with your opinion that you do? If it is my opinion that the moon is made of corned beef, is that equally valid with any other opinion? If it is my opinion that God is a sea cucumber, is that likewise equally valid with all other opinions?

Did someone suggest otherwise? I did not tell you to shut up; I merely mentioned that your response was inappropriate, assuming you to be innocent of ill intent. By the way, this is a "public" board in the sense that it's publicly visible, but not in the sense that it's publicly owned. Content and members can, and at times will, be censored.

The question was asked of non-Mormons. I don't qualify as a non-Mormon, but I think the practice of infant baptism derives from the belief in Original Sin, that all mankind is guilty from conception of Adam's sin. (I believe that Catholic theology teaches that Mary is exempt from this sin, but no one else.) If your belief is that every human soul born into the world is guilty of sin and will therefore be damned if not baptized, then you will almost certainly practice infant baptism.

Upon what do you base this judgment?

I'll do my best to give you a well-reasoned response. Obviously, I speak only for myself and not for the LDS Church as a whole or any other of its members, unless I specifically cite Church doctrinal sources. James seems to answer this question:James 1:5-7 "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord." Specialized knowledge, as such, is not required. Asking in faith is required. To be clear: I did not liken communication with God to knowledge of microbiology. Rather, I compared using a faulty model of communication with God and then concluding that God doesn't exist based on that faulty model with using a faulty model of microbiology and then concluding that cell theory is false based on that faulty model.Why would God require such from his children in order to give an answer? That is a very broad question with deep ramifications. Books, entire encyclopedias, could be written to answer that question. To distill my understanding down to a few lines: What does God promise his faithful (note the word) followers? In LDS parlance, eternal life. All Christians agree that God promises "all that the Father hath"; the Latter-day Saints have perhaps a bit more literalistic interpretation of this. So what does the Father have? Kingdoms, thrones, powers, principalities...such terms have been used historically to describe God's dominion and creation. Today, those of an astronomical bent might say planets, stars, and galaxies. Those of a more familial persuasion might say families, children, posterity. Those of a political mind might say nations, monarchies, complete rule. The point is, whatever it is that God has and that he promises to his faithful (again, note the word) disciples is something of inestimable worth and power. So if you had to pick the one ultimate monarch that would be the absolute ruler of the earth (couldn't be you or any of your close relatives or friends :) ), would you choose some great and knowledgeable scientist? Doubtful; being a great scientist hardly qualifies you to be a great king. Maybe the most athletic person you have ever seen? Ha ha ha. You would probably choose someone who best embodies principles such as justice, compassion, maturity, strong-mindedness, incorruptibility, love, compassion, fairness, willingness to follow through, and so forth. I submit that these are the exact qualities that God wants, indeed requires, of those who follow him. But how are such qualities to be developed? Answer: through faith. Through seeing a distant goal and determining that one will get there, indeed must get there, even if the road is unknown; planning one's route for the trip as best one can; starting the trip and persevering, even when the going gets rough or seems impossible; being willing to change the route as one finds oneself blocked; and always being humble enough to ask for and accept correction from God himself, from his chosen servant helpers, and from others who might have insight. The first baby steps one must master when starting on this path are the steps of being willing to believe there is a God who speaks to you, then seeking after him and opening yourself to hear him speak to you, even if that means (as it most certainly will) that you must make uncomfortable, even painful, changes in your life and in your very way of thinking. Anyone and everyone is capable of doing this much, though not everyone is willing to do so. How do you back up the implicit statement that billions of people believe they have spoken with God, but really haven't? I reject the statement, and therefore the construction of the question. Depends on what you mean by "get it wrong". No one, not even Joseph Smith, claimed that revelation to them made them infallible. (Okay, maybe some have claimed that, but no sane and honest person has.)To use a profane example: Suppose you are convinced of the validity of cell theory, and then go about telling your friends how everything is really constructed of cells. The wood you see is actually just cells! Your hand is nothing but a collection of cells! The hair on your head is really just cells! Your wedding ring is actually just made of cells! The sun itself is a gigantic, glowing ball of cells! The fact that you are beginning to understand cell theory does not mean that you understand it in full, or that you can correctly and meaningfully apply that understanding in all cases. There is still lots of room for misunderstanding, misinterpretation, and error. God teaches us line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little. We aren't given everything at once, because we could not possibly understand it. We are allowed to grow in our understanding as our faith and abilities grow. Hope my answers made some sense.

Is this a typo or what? I am just wondering, because it doesn't man\ke much sense. ANy help here would be great! Thanks!Royal Skousen, a scholar of the original manuscript and the printer's manuscript of the Book of Mormon, has suggested that "scourged" may be a mistake by the scribe; Joseph may perhaps have actually said "scorched", which makes somewhat better sense in context. As it now reads, we have Abinadi being beaten almost to death with faggots (bundles of sticks), then burned alive. Possible, of course, but seems a bit strange, especially since he gives his last pronouncements as he's burning, supposedly already almost dead from the whipping. If "scourged" is really "scorched", then we simply have him being burned at the stake. In either case, as others have pointed out, "faggots" just means bundles of sticks. How it took on its modern, rather vulgar meaning of "homosexuals", I don't know...though that does give a rather bizarre mental image of Abinadi's martyrdom...

D&C 51:3 "Wherefore, let my servant Edward Partridge, and those whom he has chosen, in whom I am well pleased, appoint unto this people their portions, every man equal according to his family, according to his circumstances and his wants and needs." Mosiah 18:29 "And this he said unto them, having been commanded of God; and they did walk uprightly before God, imparting to one another both temporally and spiritually according to their needs and their wants." D&C 82:17 "And you are to be equal, or in other words, you are to have equal claims on the properties, for the benefit of managing the concerns of your stewardships, every man according to his wants and his needs, inasmuch as his wants are just..." Not really answering your question, but just illustrating that God doesn't always distinguish between the two, and that he wants us to have our "wants" as well as our "needs" -- inasmuch as our "wants" are just.

But what if that's a false doctrine...?

Okay, that's possible. But you never got around to mentioning where my logic was defective. Please point out my faulty logic. Yet that has nothing to do with my point. So I'm skeptical about, oh, I don't know, cell theory. I think it's bogus. I looked through a microscope once and I didn't see anything that looked like so-called "cells". Now, I'm a skeptical sort, so you have to convince me. But I ain't looking through any more microscopes; I already did that once, and I didn't see any cells. (In fact, I didn't see anything at all but a blurry mess. So much for microscopes being "fine instruments"!) I'm convinced it's a con. Now convince me otherwise. (Don't bother with your so-called "photographs", by the way. They are waaaaay too easy to fake. And if you think an appeal to authority or to number of believers in your cockamamie "cell" theory will sway me, think again.)Still waiting to be convinced... Still waiting... Well, I guess I've shown you. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and you can't produce the first piece of real evidence to substantiate your silly position about so-called "cells". Thus, I conclude that cell theory is just a crutch for the weak-minded who can't accept reality. Yes, and chocolate is different from vanilla. So what?By the way, Latter-day Saints don't tell you to "have faith because someone else told [you] to". Latter-day Saints tell you to build your own house from the ground up. They simply describe the tools to you. If you think the hammer sounds like a really stupid tool and therefore you won't use it, that's fine, but don't blame Mormons or other religious folks for giving you useless tools. This is because you don't understand what faith is. You think faith means nothing more than belief without knowing. It is true that belief in God's existence is unfalsifiable, and therefore unscientific. But then, belief in your own existence is unfalsifiable. Therefore, belief that you exist is unscientific.So does that mean you don't really exist? Now you're the one making extraordinary claims. Your proof, please, especially in regards to belief in God. Incorrect. A "carefully run" search for God will likewise yield the same, or similar, results every time. The fact that people get different results only illustrates that those people don't grasp the fundamentals. You probably wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of 14th-century people got widely varying results in post-operative recovery after, say, appendix removal. But they, not understanding microbiology or (that stupid, illogical) cell theory, would be mystified why sometimes people healed and other times they got infections and died. This would be true, even if they were very, very careful and tried REALLLLLLY hard. Yes, and also to me. Mostly that you don't understand what faith is or how to exercise it. (Which is not meant as a slam or criticism, so forgive me if that's how it comes across. But as per my cell theory example, I assume that if I actually said that, your reply would be that I understand neither cell theory nor the scientific method. That's pretty much all I'm saying to you.)

Are you sure we know that?Perhaps I phrased this badly; my apologies. When I wrote "we", I was not referring to you and me. I was referring to myself and others who know, understand, and accept the LDS teachings on this topic. What you believe about this, I do not know. Yes, you might, just as you might think that a man contacting his exwife who left him for abusive behavior is evincing a desire to clean up his act. But if he then refuses to acknowledge his deeds or do what his ex feels is necessary to restore the trust, then one might take that as obvious evidence that he has no desire to clean up his act, but merely to resume the relationship on roughly the same grounds as before.If someone wants to set his relationship with God aright and he begins the process by talking with servants in whose hands God has placed his authority, then balks and refuses to abide by the conditions set by those servants, then this is, as I wrote before, prima facie evidence that they are not truly penitent. (Btw, prima facie does not mean indisputable.)

Disclaimer: I am not a Catholic, nor do I play one on the interwebs.The Catholic religion has a large number of set prayers that believers recite in order to gain favor with God or with his intermediates, called "saints". The greatest of these saints is Mary, the mother of Christ; as one faithful Catholic explained to me, "She is the mother of God, and therefore the mother of us all." The primary prayer to Mary is based on the angel Gabriel's words to her about being the mother of the Savior. The original Latin prayer goes (this is from memory, and I've never been Catholic, so it may not quite be right): "Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tuii Iesus. Sancta Maria, mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen." "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the time of our death. Amen." When a Catholic confesses to a priest, the priest usually assigns a "penitence" that the person must complete to be forgiven. This typically consists of saying various prayers, as well as other things. So the priest might tell the confessor, "Say three "Hail Mary"s and three "Our Father"s*", referencing the prayers by name that they are to repeat. *The "Our Father", or "Pater noster", is another set Catholic prayer, this one based on Jesus' exemplary prayer that begins "Our Father which art in heaven..." Rosary beads are a mnemonic device that allows a Catholic who is praying to keep track of which prayers he has said and how many are left. When you "pray the rosary", you recite each prayer represented by each bead of the rosary. As far as I know, they don't directly relate to confession, unless perhaps the priest tells the penitent to "pray the rosary".

It's all about the Benjamins, baby.

Agreed. Religion and faith are not immune to philosophical reasoning. But as with all things, you need to know how to apply the tool to the problem. When used as a methodology to all aspects of life, the scientific method is deeply defective. In fact, it is useful only for the most trivial and unimportant of life's facets, like chemical reactions or physical laws. It is of no use in defining or explaining a parent's love for a child, or whether loyalty is right, or how we should treat our fellow man. Once you have accepted that the scientific method is not sufficient for important questions of existence and action, you can start exploring whether other methods give good results. In researching this, you begin to realize that the scientific method is more an illusion than a reality. For example: Have you actually used number theory to validate the premises of mathematics?Have you, yourself, proven that the square root factoring method is valid for all real numbers?Can you demonstrate the truthfulness of the fundamental theorem of calculus?Can you rigorously show the validity of each DQ method in your differential equations "bag of tricks"?Have you actually worked through the calculations required to define universal gravitation, and can you explain why it leads inexorably to the predictions of general relativity?Can you derive Maxwell's Equations?Can you produce and explain the mathematical evidence for the existence of black holes?Can you show the foundational physics and mathematics that demonstrate the existence of electron and nuclear energy levels?Can you expound on the fundamental principles of laser physics and use that knowledge to construct a working laser?Can you substantiate the elements of crystallography and use its results to demonstrate the helical nature of DNA?Can you provide convincing experimental evidence of the nature of the lipid bilayer?My guess is that, like 99+% of the human population, you cannot do even one of these listed items. (If you can do one, I'd bet it's the laser one.) I seriously doubt that anyone can do them all. And yet these are all things that we believe, and most of them are things that we claim to "know" are true because of -- drum roll, please -- Science. In fact, we merely believe them to be true on the word of others.How is this much, or any, different from religion? Many have claimed to have spoken with God. They have laid out a path by which you, too, can speak with God and hear his voice. If you tried to reproduce an experiment to prove the idea of heat capacity, for example, and the experiment failed, would you then loudly proclaim that you had disproven the laws of thermodynamics? Or would you assume that you had done something wrong and then work very hard to isolate your error and do the experiment right? What level of confidence would you require before you finally concluded that you had indeed demonstrated that the laws of thermodynamics were incorrect? Yet look how many people, even those who call themselves "scientists", are only too willing to dismiss the claims of revealed religion after they fail in their first crude experimental attempt. God will indeed manifest himself to all who sincerely seek him. But seeking sincerely, or as James puts it, asking in faith, involves a whole lot more than just throwing the question out into the ether and waiting for an angel to stand before you. It involves investing yourself and showing your willingness to humble yourself and do God's will. It involves making very real, though private and internal, sacrifices. It involves doing what you need to do to bring yourself into the presence of God. At that point, you receive what you most seek after, just as surely as your carefully prepared, carefully run physics experiments will show you what you seek.