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Everything posted by Just_A_Guy
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Well, hang on a second. If a teacher or a guidance counselor at my children’s school repeatedly told them that “to even ask if you are transgender means that you are indeed transgender”, and repeat that admonition even after my child protested that they thought they were mostly comfortable with their natal sex, and then continue to drag my child into a bunch of struggle sessions in which the child is badgered with questions such as “are you sure you’re not transgender? You seem transgender to me? Your bigoted parents are holding you back, aren’t they? Are you sure you aren’t transgender? You said you feel awkwardness about your body. That sounds trandgender. Don’t you see how great it is to be transgender? If you don’t come out and say transgender, you might hurt yourself in the long run. You might die! You’ll DIE!!! We don’t want you to die! Shouldn’t you just go ahead and tell everybody your transgender?” – not only would those school personnel not suffer consequences; but in many states, they would be hailed as providing “excellent mental healthcare“; and any efforts I as a parent made to learn anything about these conversations would be summarily shut down. And if my LGBTQ coworker made a habit of saying “JAG, you are so insistent on being ‘straight’ with your hetero marriage and your six kids and your conservative politics and your traditional religious values, that you simply must be a repressed gay man!” — I would be putting my job in real danger if I openly affirmed that “no, I’m actually quite sure I’m straight and that homosexuality is not for me.” And you and I both know that not one HR director out of ten, would subject my coworker to any kind of discipline for what they have been doing. It’s not about a truly universal right to “human dignity” by having your sexuality and your chosen gender expression be unquestioned. It’s about implementing a dizzying cat’s cradle of oft-incoherent rules (spoken and unspoken, and any one of which could result in your getting fired at the drop of a hat); tasking the enforcement of those rules to people who hate you and want to see you suffer; and then decreeing that a certain elite class of LGBTQ overlords is exempt from all those rules.
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What exactly did Elijah restore in the Kirtland temple?
Just_A_Guy replied to laronius's topic in LDS Gospel Discussion
You should read Stapley’s “The Power of Godliness”. It’s heavy stuff—I really need to do a second reading of it to get a better handle on the material; he really digs into the way that our ideas on “priesthood” have developed over the history of the Church —but for purposes of this discussion it is maybe most relevant to note that Stapley claims that early LDS anointings for health did not include a “sealing” component until after Elijah’s return. He notes that modern confirming-of-anointings-for-health are the only modern approved use of the sealing power outside of temples. -
In family scripture study this week (we are redoing the BoM), it was suggested that maybe the Liahona was coated in small writing; and maybe one would only notice it had “changed” if one made a habit of studying it closely on a routine basis. As to the pointers, I’ve entertained the notions that the second pointer may have pointed: —To “intermediate” objectives—not campsites, but hunting locations or water sources or to the current whereabouts of wandering livestock that had been left to forage; —To a cardinal direction (true north or true east); —The way back to Jerusalem.
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I’ve always thought that about Church magazines; but then every so often you stumble on some nugget online and find it’s from the 2015 Ensign or something. I have a low tolerance for schmaltz, and I tend not to read Church magazines because they seem to tend to have a lot of it. But I admit, I seem to miss out on a lot of pearls as a result.
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The context of Ether 3:23 had led me to believe that the Jaredite U&T was just two of the clear stones the Brother of Jared had previously created. But you're right, the text doesn't explicitly say that. The U&T that Joseph Smith recovered from the stone box as shown to him by Moroni, seems to have been the Jaredite U&T. See D&C 17:1. And yes, I don't think the Church has ever come out and said (or even hinted) that it still has that relic. So, this is Rough Stone Rolling, p. 70: Lucy Smith said that Joseph received the interpreters again on September 22, 1828, and that he and Emma did a little translating, but the need to prepare for winter intervened.46 [Footnote 46] [cites Lucy Mack Smith, Biological Sketches of Joseph Smith the Prophet and his Progenitors for Many Generations. Liverpool, Eng.: S.W Richards, 1853., 125-126. Although the assertion clashes with other accounts, David Whitmer said Moroni did not return the Urim and Thummim in September. Instead Joseph used a seerstone for the remaining translation. Kansas City Journal, June 19, 1881, Omaha Herald, Oct 17, 1886; Interview (1885), in Whitmer, Interviews, 72, 157, 200. Of the translation process, Emma said, "The first that my husband translated, was translated by the use of the Urim and Thummim, and that was the part that Martin Harris lost, after that he used a small stone, not exactly black, but was rather a dark color." Emma Smith Bidamon to Emma Pilgrim, Mar 27, 1870 in EMD [Dan Vogel. ed. Early Mormon Documents, 5 vols. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1996-2003], 1:532 I don't recall the BoM suggesting that the Liahona led Lehi or any Lehite to a pair of Nephite interpreters--am I missing something? It does seem like a pretty safe bet that the Nephite kings had some sort of interpreters, because Mosiah I is able to read the Jaredite stone (Omni 1:20) and Ammon later tells Limhi that Mosiah has one and is therefore a seer (Mosiah 8). Maybe that was the Liahona, maybe it was something else--I'm not aware of the text specifying. But Mosiah still chooses to use the Jaredite interpreters (which Limhi's people had found along with the 24 gold plates) to translate the Jaredite record (Mosiah 28). Joseph seems to have evolved to the point where considered any sort of physical media to be an inferior means of receiving revelation.
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That was Sally Chase. IIRC her brother or uncle was a Methodist minister, and it was while digging a well on their property that Joseph had found one of his stones in the first place. IIRC, there's a quote out there from Brigham Young to the effect that Satan is a master of natural law (including that which appears supernatural) and is capable of generating whatever apparently-miraculous manifestation he wishes, unless a higher power intervenes. (If you compel me, I'll look it up; though I'm lazy at the moment). I'm not sure that it's as easy as saying "this means of revelation is always spurious"--that there's a discernible difference between a "Urim and Thummim" versus a "seer stone", and that the former is always godly and the latter is always satanic; or that the former is capable of doing things that the latter intrinsically cannot do. We know that God has given revelation through glass created by the Brother of Jared and touched by God's finger; we know He did it through the throwing of stones ("casting of lots"); we know He could give it through the Hebrew U&T (however they worked); we know He could do it do it through Oliver Cowdery's use of a divining rod; and the record seems pretty clear that (whether or not it was the source for some/all of the BoM text) Joseph Smith did receive true revelations through his seer stone. Further, he seemed willing to label other people's seer stones as "Urim and Thummim"--for example, per the autobiography of Wandle Mace, we have that instance where seer stones are brought to Nauvoo by some British saints; and Smith reviews them and "pronounced them to be a Urim and Thummim as good as ever was upon teh earth but he said, 'they have been consecrated to devils'". Ultimately I think it's the source of the power, not the means through which the power is manifested, that makes the difference. Another thing worth noting is that we have references to Joseph Smith having/using/showing people his "Urim and Thummim" well into the Nauvoo period (see generally, here). If that was the Jaredite interpreters, and Joseph never did return them to Moroni . . . then where are they now? And if the Church really does have them hidden away in the First Presidency vault, then why would they go along with this dog-and-pony show about some other seer stone being the instrument of translation? I've said it before and I'll say it again: Be really, really careful with the JSF. Their founder was not a good guy. Key personnel involved in the foundation today are not honest people. I'm sorry, I can't elaborate. I would almost never refer someone to the cesspool that is Reddit, but . . . there's a thread on the JSF's founder over there; and among the other nonsense that usually abounds in Reddit, someone has actually posted something that's pretty close to the truth. So, the true story about them *is* out there and can be discerned by a healthy combination of skepticism and revelation. Back to the primary sources, though: FWIW, both Emma Smith and David Whitmer supported the idea that the U&T (Jaredite interpreters/"spectacles") were used on the 116 pages; and the seer stone following the loss of those pages. But they are, of course, relatively late recollections. Still, the notion that the story of the seer stone's role in the production of the BoM was intended to discredit Joseph Smith strikes me as problematic for several reasons. First, David Whitmer didn't think seer stones were shameful. He, and his family, loved the idea of seer stones. Shortly after Joseph Smith gives his brown stone to Oliver Cowdery in spring of 1830 following completion of the Book of Mormon translation, Whitmer family son-in-law Hiram Page starts getting revelations through his own stone--and most of the Whitmer family is initially firmly in support of him, until D&C 28 reins them all back in. Whitmer's diminishing confidence in Joseph Smith's leadership coincided with Joseph Smith's resorting to the seer stone as a means of revelation less and less often. For his part, David Whitmer had his own seer stones; which he passed on to his descendants and which they used with some regularity. For David, citing the role of a seer stone in the origin story of the Book of Mormon does not diminish the book's credibility or miraculous nature; it enhances it. Second, I think it's assuming facts not in evidence to suggest that either Whitmer or Emma Smith "hated" Joseph to the point that they were willing to deliberately publicly lie about him. Yes, they disagreed with him--loudly and stridently, at times. But they were both fiercely devoted to Joseph Smith's early status as a prophet and the cause of Mormonism. Emma lionized him to the end of her days; and Whitmer--from what I see of his statements--tended to look back on his associations with Joseph with more regret and "pity" than actual animus. Third, both Whitmer and Emma were fierce proponents of the Book of Mormon to the end of their lives. I don't think there's anything in their histories suggesting that they would have deliberately tried to undermine or bring shame upon the authenticity of that book as an authentic, ancient, divinely-restored record. The fact that people disagree with Joseph Smith about various things, does not render them wholly dastardly. Fourth, the seer stone-as-translation-instrument account was confirmed by Martin Harris even when at times when he was quite friendly to the Utah church and would have no motive to tell an origin story that he thought would somehow debase the Book of Mormon or Joseph Smith's ministry. And, finally: A lot of this pooh-poohing of any source who didn't cross the plains with Brigham tiptoes around a rather uncomfortable truth: Most of the people who were involved with the Smith family when the Book of Mormon was being written, didn't come to Utah with President Young. The BoM witnesses didn't. (Harris, of course, came decades later). The Smith family, didn't. Those of the Hales who converted, didn't. The Whitmers didn't. The Stowells didn't. The majority of the Twelve (as originally constituted in 1835) didn't. If we dismiss the accounts of all the people who were there and saw the BoM being translated, on the grounds that they failed to stay faithful to the Utah Church and are therefore somehow suspect in their recollections; then on this topic we're forced to retrench into a sort of historical know-nothingism. Because Joseph Smith himself isn't telling: He flat-out said that "it was not intended to tell the world all the particulars of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon". Yep. There have have been a number of articles about this; and not all of the accounts perfectly reconcile. There are a *lot* of inconsistencies--how many stones were there, what did they look like, when and where was each one acquired or used or given away (see, e.g., here). But I think the all-too-common response to simply throw all of it out and say "It was the Jaredite interpreters, and nothing but the Jaredite interpreters, all the time" is just not correct.
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I think I’m slightly upwards of the solid middle at this point, especially for public sector lawyers my state. But, spending most of your 20s and 30s earning $50K or less plays heck with your retirement planning. If I live long enough, I will probably retire around 69. 67, if we’re willing to economize.
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1. To clarify, I meant the BYU humanities programs specifically. I understand that a lot of its STEM-type programs are very well regarded. But as a history major who flirted with a postgrad degree and going into academia; I was pretty bluntly told by several history department folks that a BYU BA in history was likely to be a liability if I pursued that career path. 2. I actually wouldn’t recommend going into law if you didn’t a) completely love/geek out over arcane points of law, b) have *certainty* that you’d be in the top 10% of your law school graduating class (including at least a 170 LSAT), or c) know someone who was prepared to offer you a job on graduating from law school. The employment situation (at least in Utah) is just too tight; and AI is going to gut the job market (especially transactional practice). My understanding is that “mean” salary figures for practicing lawyers are goosed by the top 10% making $250K+, while the bottom 40-50% are making under $70K (often, significantly so).
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Statehood for Canada and Greenland would mean four more Dem seats in the Senate, and half a dozen reliably blue votes in the electoral college. Probably more; since I can’t possibly visualize Candy agreeing to be *only one* state. I don’t think it’s right to deprive Canadians or Greenlanders of the right to take part in electing their national government; and I frankly don’t want either culture having a say in *my* elected national government.
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The story I was told about BYU as a history student there 20 years ago was that BYU’s STEM majors were so rigorous that they tended to have high drop-out rates; and since BYU admin wanted to keep students moving along and have them out in 4 years, their solution had been to have a number of not-obnoxiously-difficult humanities/social sciences programs that could be completed in under 3 years so that the STEM dropouts could switch majors and graduate with a degree in *something*. Which sort of makes sense—being a Church school and in the wake of the September 6 thing, BYU was never going to get a ton of academic respect in those sorts of fields anyways. And I think BYU generally wants its degrees to translate into employability and stable income, which—let’s face it—isn’t something that humanities/social sciences degrees have the best track record of doing. I suppose it makes sense for them to focus on STEM and the professions, even if it means we mathematical dullards are sort of left to our own devices.
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Two semi-random observations: 1) Sanderson has “to-heck-with-you-and-the-horse-you-rode-in-on” kind of money. He doesn’t have to write a dadgum thing that he doesn’t want to write. 2) There is currently something of a minor reformation going on at BYU. Whether Sanderson is still employed there when the dust settles, is anyone’s guess.
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Did anyone notice that the rendition of “Be Still My Soul” played at President Carter’s funeral sounds an awful lot like the Mack Wilberg/Tabernacle Choir arrangement?
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This isn’t my speciality, which leads me to point 1: 1. Lawyers who practice primarily state-court trial law are often staggeringly ignorant about most federal constitutional issues. (That’s not meant as an insult-I am also staggeringly ignorant about most constitutional issues. But we have a tendency to read some bat-shizzle crazy law review article about a theory that *might* work, and our eyes light up like we found a “get out of jail free” card; and our egos take us from there all the way to an appellate-level bench-slapping. 2. Trump, frankly . . . doesn’t tend to pick good lawyers (remember Michael Cohen, and most of his 2020 election litigators?). It’s relatively rare to have a person who both looks to a layman like a good lawyer, and is a good lawyer; and I think Trump has a weakness for picking people who merely look competent. (On a personal note: I love it when a private defense attorney in an expensive suit walks into my juvenile courtroom. Bless them. They know nothing. They pick stupid fights, make bizarre motions, tick off the judge (but are too dumb to see how mad the judge is getting), I stand there in my frumpy fat-guy discount suit and calmly cite the procedural rule (which Mr. Armani didn’t know existed), and the judge rolls their eyes and rules for me. It’s great.) (Seriously, guys—unless you are looking at spending 10+years in prison and are sure you are actually innocent, you probably aren’t going to do better than the appointed public defender who’s in the courtroom 25 hours a week and gets invited to the judge’s bimonthly courtroom team lunches and annual Christmas parties.) 3. Appellate courts do, with some regularity, become randomly mesmerized with issues that all of the attorneys involved thought were quite irrelevant; and request further briefing and argument on those additional issues. I don’t know if SCOTUS’s current rules/procedures are more rigid about that kind of thing; and I don’t know that we have time for that kind of back-and-forth in Trump’s case. But speaking generally, I’ve seen my state’s appellate courts do it a few times on cases I had handled at the trial level.
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Isn’t the Post the paper that had its pre-Musk Twitter account suspended (allegedly at the FBI’s behest) for saying stuff about Hunter Biden that turned out to be true?
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Likely daguerreotype (photo) of Joseph Smith discovered.
Just_A_Guy replied to mikbone's topic in Current Events
It’s interesting to me how humans (myself included) can look at two pictures and conclude “nope, not the same”, but then computers and mathematical/geometrical analysis say “it’s the same guy”. I’m still skeptical; though frankly my major issue remains as it did in 2022: I just don’t believe JSIII could have been in a possession of a photograph of his father and not shouted about its existence from the rooftops (or at minimum, had duplicates made). FWIW: I got to meet Brent Ashworth a couple of months ago, and he’s a believer. So, there’s that. -
https://www.cartercenter.org/news/pr/2022/carter-center-statement-on-roe-v-wade.html
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No, no—it takes one to know one. That’s why I’m ideally situated to comment.
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Interestingly, one of the things I saw recently was a transcript of an old video where someone asked Carter what he thought his greatest failure as president was, and his answer was “letting Ronald Reagan gain the presidency”. I mean—what a petulant little snot. Seriously.
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Sadly, his response to Dobbs contained none of that. 😞
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Carter also publicly denounced Trump as an illegitimate president elected via Russian interference. More to the point, IMHO, he offered full-throated support to Roe and to abortion-on-demand. Hearing all these conservative paeans to him is a little surreal—like hearing people praise Arthur Zander for his service as an LDS branch president and completely gloss over the fact that Zander supported Naziism and excommunicated Helmuth Hubener. Carter may have been a complex character who did some nice things and succeeded in making sure that a camera was there while he did them. But I would venture to guess that when the eternal balances are weighed and self-deception becomes impossible, his role as a powerful and consensual apologist for elective baby killing will weigh heavily on his conscience; and the Grace he spent a lifetime seeking will only come after much more pain than he thought possible.
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Considering Dehlin’s own history with women, it appears that Dehlin can’t recognize a groomer even when it stares back at him in the mirror every day.
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Brian Hales is probably the leading expert on Joseph Smith’s plural marriages and he recently did a couple of episodes with “Mormonism With the Murph” on YouTube where he addresses a lot of this. IIRC, as to Section 132 itself: in short, we have a number of contemporaneous accounts (including from people who rejected it, like Marks and Law) of Joseph Smith having shown it to them or otherwise teaching it. Hales also points out that JS basically took plural wives in three “waves”, if you will: 1) Fanny Alger. That situation blows up so badly that JS abandons plural marriage for years. 2) Following a threat from an angel with a drawn sword, JS begins marrying plural wives—but nearly all of them are women who are already married to other men. Hales posits that he deliberately chose married women because, out of respect for Emma as well as Joseph’s own feelings, he planned to have these be sexless “eternity-only” marriages. 3) The angel with drawn sword comes again, basically saying “that’s not what I meant and you know it. Now, do it right.” At this point Smith’s future brides are single women, and several of them later affirm (as genteelly as Victorians ever would) that there was indeed a sexual element to their marriages with Smith.
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I mean . . . if one accepts human evolution, unless one believes that (after billions of years) two full humans evolved within a couple of decades of each other and miraculously managed to find each other and procreate, then one is interpreting that humanity is the result of bestial relationships (and even then, not ruling out incest for the first couple of generations of “full humans”, either). The more interesting question to me isn’t “why does our doctrine tell us that humanity arose from incest?”. The question is “why did God feel we needed to be warned so powerfully against incest, when anciently it apparently played such a major role in the human story”?
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More evidence that the Priesthood ban began with Joseph Smith
Just_A_Guy replied to Maverick's topic in LDS Gospel Discussion
I think we sometimes forget what a statistically infinitesimal portion of Church membership African-Americans comprised during the periods in question. I don’t believe *any* AA Latter-day Saint is recorded to have received the Nauvoo endowment (Abel apparently did receive his initiatory ordinances in Kirtland). Nauvoo apparently had 22 black residents as of 1843, out of a total population of between 12,000 and 16,000 people—not quite two thousandths of one percent of the Nauvoo membership. I’m not convinced that the notion that the Church might attract large numbers of black converts—let alone the necessity of developing a consistent, uniform policy towards them—was really on anyone’s radar screen at that point in time.