Just_A_Guy

Good to see you back, @MarginOfError. I hope you stick around; I always feel smarter after reading your posts (even when I don’t agree with your extremist radical pinko-commie ways! )

You could have, sure. But now you don’t have to! Just one more service I provide . . .

I remember reading an account by a woman who was a little girl in the early 20th century when the sacramental water was drunk from a communal chalice. Seems a lot of the mustachioed brethren didn’t always clean their facial hair very carefully, and if you were one of the last ones to take the sacrament—suffice it to say, there’d be a lot of debris in that chalice.

Maybe. And of course, this is all presuming that there is no progression between the kingdoms—a position I still hold, but not as strongly as I used to. But it does seem to me that if it is possible for people to attain exaltation while staying out of the LDS Church and the “covenant path” for their entire lives—and even willfully rejecting the opportunity for membership and priesthood covenants when it comes—then what in Sam Hill is the point of there being an LDS Church at all?

Handbook section 18.9.2 doesn’t seem to contemplate non-priesthood-holders passing the sacrament. The lawyer in me likes to ask questions like “well, when we are in the center pew and the tray has gone down through all eight members of my family and there’s an eight-foot gap between my 10-year-old-son and Brother Johnson sitting all alone on the far end of the pew, does that mean my son can’t walk the tray down to Brother Johnson? He has to pass it back through all of our family to the deacon who gave us the tray, and then that deacon has to walk to the other end of the pew where Brother Johnson is? What’s the difference between passing the sacrament tray, and Passing the Sacrament? And where in scripture is it written that deacons are responsible for Passing the Sacrament in the first place?” I think that as a church, we could hypothetically get to a point where Passing the Sacrament is seen as something that can be done by non-priesthood-holders. But for the time being, it seems like the intent of the current (and historical) Church leadership has been that it be considered an exclusive duty of the priesthood.

I think missionaries generally are given more latitude to maintain individual social media presences to keep in touch with both family and friends back home, and converts/investigators they have met in the field. I don’t know if there are missionaries who are specifically assigned to be online and *only* online. I do know that I’ve seen LDS missionaries within the last year or so commenting in various discussion fora (the Facebook group for fans of “The Chosen”, for example).

I appreciate what you’re saying and would like for you to be right. On the other hand, I sort of get the vibe from you that you’re proposing a paradigm where before God reveals us the Truth, we are not penalized for rejecting it; and once He does reveal it, He always does it in such an unambiguous and even overpowering way virtually no one of any decency will reject it. I’m not sure that the reality is quite that black-and-white. D&C 76:75, and the New Testament’s parable of the sower, seem to indicate that there is a caliber of person who gravitates towards truth but can be distracted by external influences, to their everlasting detriment. Alma 32 talks about a faith-building process that is triggered by a desire to believe—but what happens when a person doesn’t want to believe in our brand of the Gospel because they are so caught up in what they already have?

As I recall the ones we attracted tended to be really spammy/repetitive, and they posted more personal info about themselves than the mods were comfortable with given site rules at the time (links to personal blogs and social media pages, etc). Relatively minor stuff, really; but then when the mod staff asked them to adjust their style they got into a big-headed “You can’t correct me—I represent Jesus and His Apostles and you internet nobodies need to get in line with the Brethren!” sort of schtick.

Oh my gosh, the internet missionaries! I’d forgotten. Good times . . .

I think the vast majority of bans are done on new members—some who are out-and-out anti, but many who are just spammers. But when new members who banned they typically haven’t been able to make many posts, so they don’t leave much of a paper trail (at least, not one that’s visible to non-mods, AFAIK). We’ve had a few long-time posters eventually go anti; but I think most longtime members who get banned tended to be overly abrasive/combative/personally contemptuous towards other board members. Sometimes when a person has a long history of posting on the board and is generally compliant with site rules, a single post that would raise eyebrows if it came from a newcomer might get a bit of leeway from the mod staff—the mods know so-and-so, they understand the point he’s trying to make and they get that he’s not deliberately trying to be a jerk. But over time people don’t tone it down and feelings get hurt and rifts develop and “bluntness”, unchecked, degenerates into “toxicity”; and at some point the mod staff has no choice but to do a ban in order to end the drama.

I would respectfully disagree. My dad grew up out of the Church—he converted, but my aunts and uncles on that side are still non-members while also being some of the most decent, honorable, good-hearted, Christ-loving people I know. But they are also fiercely devoted to their own churches—they have no beef with Mormonism; but they’re content where they are, and our more unique doctrines don’t particularly resonate with them. I would love to see them embrace the Church; but as it is D&C 76:75-77 describes them very well.

Migration to Missouri (“Zion”) during this period was supposed to be carefully controlled—you got a recommend from a bishop (usually at Kirtland) before you left, or you weren't supposed to go at all. And when you arrived, you were expected to consecrate your goods to the bishop in Missouri, who would give you a plot of church-owned land which was then deeded to you. This was supposed to keep the Church in Missouri on a solid economic foundation, keep them living together in very close and easily-defensible settlements, and also alleviate concerns from non-Mormon neighbors about the settlement growing too large too quickly. But what happened in practice was that many Church members went down there whenever they darn well felt like it, obtaining land directly from local speculators and/or the government. Still others went down there utterly destitute, with nothing to consecrate, and simply expecting that the Church in Missouri would take care of them. In the opening of D&C 85, the Lord is here reiterating that moving to Missouri while flouting the laws the Lord had established for the settlement of Missouri was a big deal, and potentially grounds for excommunication. However . . . we know from other scriptures that the bishop/clerk can’t arbitrarily expunge someone’s name from the church rolls; there’s still a process of councils that has to be followed and a member enjoys the privileges of membership unless/until that process is complete. In practice, it seems very few people were actually excommunicated for moving to Missouri prematurely (William McLellin got made an apostle, for Pete’s sake!). And as for keeping genealogies . . . this revelation came before the Church was doing proxy temple work of any kind, let alone keeping the sort of genealogical database it now keeps.

From an LDS perspective, the first human was a “Latter-day Saint”; and he taught his kids to be “Latter-day Saints”. But some of those kids rejected the “LDS Church” to varying degrees. Over time other churches arose—some as the result of deliberately rejecting the truth and trying to make hard doctrines more palatable; but others as a good-faith effort to pursue truths that their founders sensed had been lost. Would the world be better off if no one had ever apostatized in the first place? Yes. Do these other churches, by virtue of their ministry to people who would otherwise be unchurched, make the world a better place and bring people closer to the Divine than they would otherwise be in those churches’ absence? Also, yes. Can those generally-good churches turn into liabilities to the extent that their members become so attached to them as institutions that they reject greater light and knowledge when it is finally presented to them? Also, yes.

My understanding is that the NIH is saying that mRNA vaccines appear to give “immunity” [I use air quotes here to acknowledge that to some extent different people will react to the vaccine differently] against a broad panoply of potentially mutant COVID strains, whereas natural immunity seems directed towards the single strain of COVID that the person actually had.

I wasn’t. I’m seeing Facebook posts in that vein that are quite serious.

But how do you know that any unvaccinated soapbox megaphoners who may die in the hospital, will have actually died of COVID? What if they were . . . deliberately silenced? #Epsteindidntkillhimself I’m being a little tongue-in-cheek, but we’ve actually got people suggesting that the four Capitol Hill PD officers who committed suicide in the last few months, were deliberately killed because their testimony would bolster the Trumpling narrative that January 6 was just a harmless walk in the park. I fear at this point people are irrevocably entrenched in their opinions; data are being replaced by a sort of factual-nihilist mantra of “we can never know the truth, but we do know those guys are out to get us.”

1. As it pertained to the individuals Ephraim and Manasseh, I presume it would have had to do primarily with inheritance. As it pertained on their progeny—I mentioned above, as time went on the material benefit of being a member of the birthright. 2. As authors—not much, as far as I know. Again, the significance to Lehi isn’t that he is of the tribe of Ephraim; it’s that he is of the seed of Joseph. But when it comes to the book being translated and published in our time—Joseph Smith was of the tribe of Ephraim.

Nuance schmuance. Why do you hate science?

You know, Just_A_Girl and I often toyed with the idea of getting a rental property to augment our income and as a savings vehicle; but after what I’ve seen the last year and a half—not a chance in Hades. I shudder to think how many small-time landlords have been absolutely ruined by being compelled to keep up mortgage payments on properties that they aren’t allowed to collect money on. Do you like the housing shortage? This is how you get more housing shortage. The really irritating thing is that many will call this a “market failure”, when in fact it’s a “kleptocracy failure”.

Umm . . . Law school?

Wait—aren’t the Gators the FSU mascot? I’m confused . . .

So your question isn’t whether the vaccine is effective, but how effective it is? You agree with me that the vaccine is, to a significant degree, effective?

Sure; but it also goes back to issues of whether their questions are running counter to commonly-known evidence or based in improper logical assumptions and presumptions. And frankly, yeah; I probably am not being terribly charitable here. When NT posits data showing that 96-99.9 of current COVID deaths are from unvaccinated folks even though nearly 70% of American adults have now been vaccinated, and someone comes back and says “but we don’t know for sure that the vaccine is effective”—I’m sorry, but unless you can attack the quality of the data (which @Colirio apparently insists he’s not doing) then that’s just a “who are you gonna believe, me or your own lyin’ eyes?” situation.

1. Hmm. You did say “If the vaccine was effective in keeping the vaccinated from catching the sickness, then there would be no further need of masks or social distancing once vaccinated.” That’s setting up a pretty absolutist definition of “effective”. And frankly, I think we are all experienced enough to understand that a person who claims they’re “just asking questions” and then proceeds to ask a series of very loaded questions, is generally going to be seen as pushing an agenda; whether they care to admit it or not. 2. That being the case, I wish you had engaged with the numbers @NeuroTypical offered rather than just saying [and yes, I’m paraphrasing here] “but there are other apparent statistical conflicts that I presume ab initio to be irreconcilable, ergo your data is meaningless”. Assuming that “these numbers of deaths have dropped more significantly than the percentages in which people have been vaccinated” is even a fact in evidence here, two possible explanations could be a) the efficacy of the vaccine amongst the entire population is bolstered by the presence of recovered Covid patients who also have now have natural immunity, and b) the disease transmits ar something other than a 1:1 ratio (in other words, the average COVID patient manages to infect more than one other person), which would naturally mean that over time we would expect to see an exponential relationship between vaccines administered and the decline in actual Covid cases.

Wikipedia says that Caster is intersex, with an XY genetic makeup and having experienced the hormonal surges that males go through at puberty but apparently having been raised as a female from birth (I would presume, due to external genitalia that manifested as female). Frankly, I think the running authorities made the right call; as it doesn’t seem right to have people who got the “male” advantages of puberty compete on par with people who didn’t. But . . . whatever. It does seem to me that the whole point of women’s athletics is that in most sports, due to physiological makeup, the best of the women just can’t compete at the same level as the best of the men; and thus need to form their own “no boys allowed” club to have a fighting chance at “winning”. If women want to lay the groundwork for their eventual banishment from their own institutions, then who am I to stop them?