Connie

I've heard some complain that Romola's Emma is over the top, and I totally get that and even agree to a certain extent. But I still love it. Her facial expressions are so fun! I'm glad you liked it, Vort.

Okay, so we watched the 2009 version of Emma on Friday and Saturday. And...
 
I loved it. It is now my favorite film version of Emma. (Though to be honest, the competition isn't exactly all that stiff. I enjoyed the 1996-ish version we watched a little while ago perhaps a bit better than the Gwynneth Paltrow version, which I thought was light and fluffy and more or less without substance, entertaining in the same way cotton candy tastes good.) Almost every position was exquisitely filled and played. My biggest beef was actually with Emma, though in retrospect I think she was actually an excellent Emma, just not quite the way I had imagined her. I found her very hard to like early on, but by the end of the third hour, she was growing on me.
 
So thanks to Connie for the recommendation!

I'm quiet on the topic because I don't want to give this garbage any more attention than it has unfortunately already gotten.

Bonus bonus bonus explainer: How on earth could people just "forget" the difference between thou and ye? Seriously, how is that even possible? Were the Anglo-Saxons just especially stupid or something?
 
No, not really. The problem isn't that the Anglo-Saxons were stupid; it's that they were conquered by the Normans, French-speaking people from the northwest region of France (called Normandy, surprisingly enough). With the Normans as kings, all sorts of French-based words got introduced into our language.
 
Consider animals and the meats they provide. The animals were raised by the common folk, who used the older native English terms to refer to them: pigs, sheep, cattle. But the meat was prepared and served to the royalty, who used the old French animal names to refer to the meat: porc, moton, boef. Thus we use the French-derived terms pork, mutton, and beef to describe the meat taken from the animals named with the English terms pig, sheep, and ox.
 
Not just words got imported, though. English speakers also imported some of the grammar used by their conquerors. In French spoken a thousand years ago, the king was considered of more value that just one mere peasant. So the king was not referred to with the singular pronoun tu, but with the plural pronoun vous. (This was called the royal plural, and is why a king or queen or prince or princess traditionally referred to himself/herself as we instead of I -- the famous royal We.) This came to be seen as an honorific, polite way to address others. So you would speak to your intimates using thou, but you would speak more formally or honorifically to strangers and to those of higher "station" using the plural ye or you.
 
Well, the peasants of medieval England didn't attend twelve years of school and were not instructed in the niceties of grammar. They knew what they spoke, and what they spoke was a language where you used "you" and "thou" in different but often confusing ways. So, eventually, the thou just got dropped altogether, and the subject form ye got subsumed along with the thou forms into the ubiquitous "you". And here we are today.

We mortals sure are experts at muddying the water.  We insist on stirring up the black and white until there are so many varying shades of grey.  Ultimately, it is Christ who knows all and who is the perfect judge.  We have to do the best we can with the knowledge we have—realizing that we don’t know everything the way that God does.  We rely on the Spirit, let time reveal what it will, and sometimes have to simply say “let God judge between me and thee.”  We, and everyone else, will be judged on the knowledge we have and what we do with that knowledge as well as the thoughts and intents of our heart.

Most new Church members, and many longtime or even lifetime members, struggle with correctly using the so-called "divine pronouns" thou, thee, thy, and thine. But like most such matters, it's actually very easy once you understand the basic principles.
 
First, though, what is "thou"? Why does it even exist? We already have a word, "you", so why do we need another that means The Same Thing?

Because it doesn't mean the same thing. Thou is singular, meaning you use it only when you're talking to just one person. You, in contrast, is plural, meaning you use it only when talking to more than one person.
 
So, for example, Jesus said to Peter, "Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to have you [meaning Peter and all the rest of Christ's disciples], that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for thee [meaning Peter, alone, just him], that thy faith fail not: and when thou [Peter] art converted, strengthen thy brethren [meaning all the rest of the people that Christ's initial you referred to]." We do the same thing with I (singular) and we (plural) and with he/she/it (singular) and they (plural).
 
When do we use "thou" and when "thee"? The grammatical explanation is that "thou" is a subject pronoun, like "I" or "we" or "he" or "she" or "they". In contrast, "thee" is an object pronoun, like "me" or "us" or "him" or "her" or "them".
 
So here's an easy way to tell whether to use "thou" or "thee": Recast the sentence to use "he" or "him". Which one should you use? If you would use "he", then say "thou"; if you would say "him", use "thee". So if I would thank him, then when praying, I will say "I thank thee". If I think he is merciful, then when praying I would say "Thou art merciful." Easy as that.
 
What's the difference between thy and thine? The easiest and best answer is: Use them exactly as you would use my and mine. If you do this, you will be right 100% of the time -- my / thy hand, the glory is mine / thine.
 
(The slightly more complicated answer is that in Jacobean English hundreds of years ago, mine and thine were also often -- but not always -- used when the words they modified began with a vowel sound, to make it flow better. So they might say Mine eldest son instead of My eldest son and Thine honor instead of Thy honor, since "eldest" and "honor" begin with vowel sounds. But we don't really do that today, so there's no need to do it in prayer, either.)
 
And now you know.
 
BONUS EXPLAINER: We English speakers modify our verbs very slightly when we speak. For example, we say I eat and you eat and we eat and they eat, but we say he eats and she eats and it eats. Why the extra "s"? That is a special verb modification called a conjugation. A few of our verbs are fairly extensively conjugated, such as the verb to be (I am, he/she/it is, we/you/they are), and a few aren't conjugated hardly at all (I/you/he/she/it/we/they must), but for the most part, just the he/she/it verb -- called the third-person singular -- gets conjugated by sticking an -s onto the end.
 
Verbs used with thou also get conjugated, usually by adding an -st or an -est onto the end. So we say thou knowest and thou seest. A few verbs have special (or irregular) forms, and you just have to learn them. The most common and obvious is the verb to be, conjugated as thou art (also past tense, thou wast or thou wert; both are correct).
 
BONUS BONUS EXPLAINER: The word ye is the actual original plural subject form: Ye love me. The word you was the object form of the pronoun: I love you. For some reason, around the time that English speakers began forgetting the difference between you and thee, they also began forgetting the difference between you and ye. As a result, "you" sort of took over all the meanings for ye, thou, and thee.
 
So now those other words look strange and useless to us, when in fact they are all sorts of useful. The fact that we don't have them means we need to make up other ways of expressing the same idea, so that now we have "y'all" or "you all" or "all y'all" in a desperate attempt to distinguish between singular and plural. In losing thou and its brothers, we have lost a lot in our language. But we still get to use these forms in prayer; that's a minor consolation, at least.

That sounds frustrating.  I've never seen things that bad.  We have three wards in our building.  Each ward takes a turn being in charge of cleaning the building every week for one year.  Our ward had that responsibility last year.  It's never too hard to clean the building.  The people here are so good at cleaning up after activities.  The wards and parents in our area must be really good at teaching their children and ward members about reverence and respect.  The last ward in the building on Sunday is responsible for stacking chairs and emptying out trash cans.  The first ward to meet is responsible for setting up chairs and cleaning the building every week.  The ward who meets in the middle slot is responsible for clearing the walkways of snow in the winter.
 
Perhaps it's time for each of the wards in your building to have a special Sunday dedicated to learning about reverence and respect.  And for your wards to get together in dividing responsibilities that can be rotated around.  Maybe you can suggest such to your bishop.

That sounds frustrating.  I've never seen things that bad.  We have three wards in our building.  Each ward takes a turn being in charge of cleaning the building every week for one year.  Our ward had that responsibility last year.  It's never too hard to clean the building.  The people here are so good at cleaning up after activities.  The wards and parents in our area must be really good at teaching their children and ward members about reverence and respect.  The last ward in the building on Sunday is responsible for stacking chairs and emptying out trash cans.  The first ward to meet is responsible for setting up chairs and cleaning the building every week.  The ward who meets in the middle slot is responsible for clearing the walkways of snow in the winter.
 
Perhaps it's time for each of the wards in your building to have a special Sunday dedicated to learning about reverence and respect.  And for your wards to get together in dividing responsibilities that can be rotated around.  Maybe you can suggest such to your bishop.

I disagree profoundly, though I do not pretend to a deep knowledge of Roman Catholicism.
 
The great apostasy, the very existence of which Catholicism denies, was well under way by the end of the first century AD. By the middle to late second century -- that is, by about 150 AD and after -- the Church was long-vanished from the earth, and only remnants remained among the sincere and benighted faithful, only the very oldest of whom had ever belonged to a true and living church. All was confusion.
 
By the time of the great convocations from which emerged the various creeds, the Priesthood and the truths of the gospel had been lost from the earth for centuries. The men involved in these efforts may have, in some (or even many) cases, been honest and sincere men who sought God and not their own comfort. But admirable though they may have been, that is irrelevant. They did not have the Church that Christ had established. That was long gone, centuries ago. And they had lost a great many of the foundational teachings of Christianity.
 
They did the best they could, and the best they could do was to graft Greek philosophy into the tattered remnants of Christianity they had left. The result was Christianity as known in the Middle Ages and as survives today outside the Restored Church. All of this talk about ousia and two Substances and so forth -- it's all Greek philosophy. In the LDS view, it is a mass of confusion (no pun intended).
 
I have nothing but respect for honest and sincere Catholics. In fact, I have a great deal of respect for the Roman Catholic Church, which after all preserved scriptures and as much of primitive Christianity as they could figure out how to do, and shepherded Europe through its most barbarous period in recorded history, finally reestablishing a civilization of sorts and even leading the way to the Renaissance. But from an LDS viewpoint, let's not pretend for a moment that their religion is founded upon the living Christ. It is not. There is precisely one religion today so founded, whatever its imperfections.

Quasimodo

Not to take away from all these excellent posts, but i'm always full of book recommendations.
 
I really like anatess' recommendations to read the church manuals and Ensign magazine.  I would heartily second that recommendation.  Those are great resources.
 
You mention the temple, and a great book on that subject is The Holy Temple by Boyd K. Packer.
 
It also sounds like you've been through some trials so you could try For Times of Trouble by Jeffrey R. Holland; If Life Were Easy, It Wouldn't be Hard by Sheri Dew; When Times are Tough by John Bytheway; and probably just about anything by Neal A. Maxwell.
 
If you have any other subjects you are interested in, let me know.  As i said, i'm full of it. :)

I met my husband in high school.  I can't really say there was an instant connection, but being a shy girl i was quite intrigued by the new guy at school who didn't have a shy bone in his body.  We were thrown together quite a bit and had several classes together.  Poor guy... when he did finally ask me out i would barely talk to him.  Luckily he was patient with my diffident self.  We got married two months after he returned from his mission.

I met my husband in high school.  I can't really say there was an instant connection, but being a shy girl i was quite intrigued by the new guy at school who didn't have a shy bone in his body.  We were thrown together quite a bit and had several classes together.  Poor guy... when he did finally ask me out i would barely talk to him.  Luckily he was patient with my diffident self.  We got married two months after he returned from his mission.

Good thing the LDS church doesn't teach this then.  As others have tried to explain, it's not the black skin that was the curse.

I always thought "sons of God" vs "daughters of men" was referring to people who had entered into a covenant relationship with God versus those who had not.

I always thought "sons of God" vs "daughters of men" was referring to people who had entered into a covenant relationship with God versus those who had not.

I always thought "sons of God" vs "daughters of men" was referring to people who had entered into a covenant relationship with God versus those who had not.

I always thought "sons of God" vs "daughters of men" was referring to people who had entered into a covenant relationship with God versus those who had not.

We mortals sure are experts at muddying the water.  We insist on stirring up the black and white until there are so many varying shades of grey.  Ultimately, it is Christ who knows all and who is the perfect judge.  We have to do the best we can with the knowledge we have—realizing that we don’t know everything the way that God does.  We rely on the Spirit, let time reveal what it will, and sometimes have to simply say “let God judge between me and thee.”  We, and everyone else, will be judged on the knowledge we have and what we do with that knowledge as well as the thoughts and intents of our heart.

My husband recently had a dream about our daughter.  She was flying around, wearing a big S on her shirt.  I then had a dream about going birthday shopping for this same daughter and finding a supergirl shirt for her.
 
We have concluded that our daughter is Supergirl. 

My husband recently had a dream about our daughter.  She was flying around, wearing a big S on her shirt.  I then had a dream about going birthday shopping for this same daughter and finding a supergirl shirt for her.
 
We have concluded that our daughter is Supergirl. 

Contention is not caused by disagreement. Contention is caused by emotional reactions to disagreement. When someone posts an idea and another disagrees, all is well. When the first person reacts to that disagreement emotioinally as if it's a personal attack then things degrade quickly. That's, essentially, from my perspective, what happened in the other thread. An idea was posed. Someone questioned it (not even blatant disagreement) and that person was then attacked as being argumentative and contentious -- and downhill things quickly went.
 
Disagreement does not need to be contentious or uncivil. And, in my opinion, the holier-than-thou condemnation of the discussion process is being slung more by those who are actually causing the contention than it is by those who simply disagree.
 
It is entirely unfair to treat disagreements as if they are nothing more than contention.
 
If anything saddens me, its that -- once again from my perspective -- that there was nothing hateful said in that thread whatsoever, and yet......accusations abound.
 
Why is it that contention comes primarily from those who supposedly have a problem with contention? Why is it that judgment comes from those who supposedly speak against judgment. Why is it that those who preach love can't seem to show love to those they are condemning as hateful?
 
Maybe when the Savior taught us "first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye" there was a good reason He did so.

My husband recently had a dream about our daughter.  She was flying around, wearing a big S on her shirt.  I then had a dream about going birthday shopping for this same daughter and finding a supergirl shirt for her.
 
We have concluded that our daughter is Supergirl. 

My husband recently had a dream about our daughter.  She was flying around, wearing a big S on her shirt.  I then had a dream about going birthday shopping for this same daughter and finding a supergirl shirt for her.
 
We have concluded that our daughter is Supergirl. 

My husband recently had a dream about our daughter.  She was flying around, wearing a big S on her shirt.  I then had a dream about going birthday shopping for this same daughter and finding a supergirl shirt for her.
 
We have concluded that our daughter is Supergirl.