Just_A_Guy

As I recall, the plat for the city of Zion included very large, deep lots (something like 1/4 acre, IIRC) with the idea that each resident would have quite an extensive garden. Outside of the central complex of twelve temples (with “temple” here probably encompassing worship houses as well as administration buildings and infrastructure such as tithing yards and the like), I don’t think the plat anticipated anything like a modern urban core.

It’s funny, I grew up on grilled cheese with butter. Tried it with Mayo for the first time in the last 5 years, and I was immediately converted.

That cheese was visibly *not* melted. IMHO, a proper grilled cheese sandwich is made with two slices of American cheese between two slices of a dense white bread coated with mayonnaise, garlic salt, and Italian seasoning. (Butter is acceptable in lieu of mayonnaise, but the result is more bland.)

Question 1 - unanswered: Is it your interpretation of the Christian tradition in which you were raised, that God’s statement to Eve in Genesis 3:16 meant that Eve must never be thereafter experience joy, or understand the nature of good and evil, or comprehend and wonder at the nature of the redemption God had offered her, or take delight in parenthood? Question 2 - unanswered: And if so: do you regard it as the moral duty of all human beings to experience mortal life as an uninterrupted parade of mental and physical suffering, and to regard the fact of their very existence as an overall curse from God? Or, is it just women who have that duty?

Well, she’s looking into something . . . Not sure exactly what, but from what I can gather it involves my life insurance policy, a shovel, a Hefty bag, and my back yard. I just love surprises!

I’ll forbear making any jokes about your residence being an archaeological site. @pam, however, has no such assurance.

It’s a boomer thing; you wouldn’t understand. (Or, would you?) But seriously: yeah, my parents and aunts/uncles have done a number of multi-day historic sites tours by bus. Here’s an example of a similar BoM Heartlander tour: https://bookofmormonevidence.org/tours/ And here’s another site profiteering off of purported church history tours: https://truthseekersfoundation.com/adventures/joseph-smith-foundation/

To the contrary, I understand that many travel agencies and tour guides do very well by peddling bus tours of sites around North America that are of particular interest to one niche group or another. Some of these tour guides, I hear, make a very handsome profit by marketing to the BoM heartlander crowd in particular.

Very nice, but I don’t see where you have answered my question.

I remember cigar boxes in school. Quite handy little things, really . . .

This was my experience as well—we were expected to outfit ourselves, but teachers didn’t go begging for extras for the entire class. We are also in Utah, and teachers now almost always send out wish lists for various items. This year crayons, construction paper, Clorox wipes, and ziploc bags seem to be especially in demand.

I want to be careful about what I say here. I deal with warrants out of state juvenile court—mostly civil investigative warrants and child custody warrants. I don’t know how much of that translates over to federal/criminal procedure. I know that with the warrants I handle, we submit a sworn “probable cause statement” to the judge explaining why we want the warrant; the judge then grants (or declines) the request. The warrant is served on the property owner at the time of execution, but the PC statement is not—it remains confidential for a brief period of time in order to give the investigators time to lock in their case, get witnesses on the record and take steps to ensure their safety, etc. So it strikes me as at least plausible that the agents who executed the Trump warrant did not tell Trump the basis for their search, or precisely what they were looking for. That information should come out in due course. As far as a warrant covering an entire building: I suppose that breaks down into the question of whether the owner of the building could reasonably be said to be in current control of the entire premises. That could get dodgy really quickly with an apartment complex/hotel/private club; and I have no idea how that will shake out in Mar-o-Lago’s case. The only other observation I’ll make is that I don’t believe for a minute that Biden wasn’t told about this. I recognize the importance that the DOJ be able to independently go where the evidence takes them without White House micromanaging; but this wasn’t just a law-enforcement decision. It was a political decision, and the White House simply has to be involved; a president can’t lead the country effectively if his AG is going around prosecuting political opponents all willy-nilly. Biden’s a fool if he didn’t explicitly tell Garland, some time ago, to not raid Trump without explicit White House authorization.

Agreed. And frankly, it’s looking like the magistrate judge who signed the warrant was an Obama donor; which stinks to high heaven.

Am I weird for having never, ever seen any of this before?

1. I agree with @MrShorty. I think it could be most succinctly be described as “Joseph Smith’s Bible study journal”; the result of such gave us a mostly-inspired and partially canonized commentary. Beyond that, I don’t think one can really generalize. You’ve got to take each correction, addition, or deletion as an individual case—it may be the direct result of either a vision, a revelation, an inspired hunch, or a purely intellectual/academic process; or, it may simply be an “educated guess” from a prophet whose spiritual education exceeded that of anyone else in his dispensation. 2. I regard the uncanonized parts of the JST the way I would regard any other isolated statement by a prophet/apostle: always worth considering, probably true; but also not canon and possibly flawed (though probably not). I guess you could call that “partial deference”.

I agree. I think God will start sending us better candidates, when we show Him that we are actually faithfully waiting for them. If I may co-opt CS Lewis: D&C 98:10-11 is not idealistic gas; nor is it a command to do the impossible. Trump can at times be adept at “owning the libs”, which is always fun. But we knew long before 2016 that he just wasn’t a good guy; and beating the Hildebeast didn’t suddenly make him into a good man.

I’ve seen the play. I don’t recall any specific reactions to it except that overall I wasn’t impressed.

I’m not exactly sure why I dislike Grease so viscerally; but I do. I see it as a major step backward in the country’s morality; and its appeal to teenagers made it particularly insidious. ONJ was part and parcel of that culture (“Let’s Get Physical” was deeply problematic); and while I hope she finds repentance—I can’t say the world is a worse place for her absence.

You told me on Facebook that you love Nickleback.

Matteo, just so I can answer your question better, let me ask you first: Is it your interpretation of the Christian tradition in which you were raised, that God’s statement to Eve in Genesis 3:16 meant that Eve must never be thereafter experience joy, or understand the nature of good and evil, or comprehend and wonder at the nature of the redemption God had offered her, or take delight in parenthood? And if so: do you regard it as the moral duty of all human beings to experience mortal life as an uninterrupted parade of mental and physical suffering, and to regard the fact of their very existence as an overall curse from God? Or, is it just women who have that duty? I mean, the subtext of your question seems to be “how dare those heretical Mormons suggest that Eve ever found happiness when Dah Byble says she and the rest of her satanic seductress seed are supposed to be perpetually miserable!” Is that the worldview from which you’re asking your question? Or is something getting lost in translation here?

Burke has a (more-faithful-than-he) sister on Twitter who doesn’t think too highly of him. Apparently Burke is quite the piece of work; there’s talk of him having made a perjured accusation of domestic violence against a parent or some such thing.

We have no record of Adam and/or Eve ever partaking of the fruit of the tree of life. To the contrary, we are told that cherubim and a flaming sword were sent specifically to create a physical barrier to Adam and Eve’s doing so. The “tree of life” is a common ancient near eastern motif; and while Nephi was familiar with the Israelite creation narrative, the tree Nephi calls the “tree of life” is first and foremost a symbol of the love of God, to be eventually embodied in the form of Jesus Christ. I wouldn’t necessarily “retcon” Nephi’s vision to try to extrapolate notions about the tree of life we read of in Genesis. I have some private concerns about the way Moses 5:10-11 is phrased. In general my notion of the decision to partake is that it was the right thing, done at the wrong time and (from Eve’s standpoint, at least) for the wrong reason. The most handy modern-life analogue I can think of is a couple who breaks the law of chastity and, on learning that the woman has become pregnant, marry and keep the child; over the years finding joy and rejoicing in their child and in parenthood generally. The Lord turned a bad decision into something that served His purpose and, in His mercy, offered forgiveness and redemption to the sinners. But His mercy does not mean that the sin was not sin or that, were the sinners given the chance to go back in time to repeat or avoid their sin, they would not be expected to chose a more directly-righteous course.

One of the difficulties in a “modern English” BoM would be rendering it in a way that preserves the ways the BoM interacts with other sacred LDS writings. Much of 2 Nephi acknowledges itself to be a rendition of various chapters of Isaiah—but there are subtle-yet-often-important differences between the Book of Mormon’s text and the KJV text. Similarly, much of Moroni 7 draws on 1 Corinthians 13. The Doctrine and Covenants, and innumerable LDS general conference addresses, in turn draw on and repeat Jacobean syntax from the Book of Mormon. A simple-English Book of Mormon might be somewhat useful for an absolute novice; but sooner or later students and believers who want to get the most out of their study are going to have to get comfortable around the “original” English text. (I shudder to think what kinds of quandaries our church’s translation department has to deal with. I think that in many ways, we cannot help but deliver a very watered-down version of our religion to non-English speakers; because so many of those glorious little nuances and interconnections just don’t make it across linguistic/cultural barriers.) Another issue is that when it comes to scripture, part of its very charm lies in some of the textual ambiguities and vagaries. The layers of meaning, the potential for “likening” various passages to our individualized circumstance, often vanish if we start with a text that is specific, direct, and of deliberately narrow application.

The church released a video a few years ago based on the story of Esther, that I thought was brilliantly done:

It will be interesting to see if other facial recognition experts can/do replicate these results. I respect your medical knowledge, but I continue to maintain that the eye shape (especially at the outward corners) is different and the bulbous nose tip on the death mask creates some doubt for me. Without verification and near-consensus by additional facial recognition experts and/or a convincing theory as to why Joseph III didn’t have the picture published, I think I’m going to remain skeptical at this point. Here’s Bertha Madison, by the way: