Just_A_Guy

Playing devil's advocate for a moment, though: Are regionalistic concerns as much of an issue anymore? I mean, regionalism in the Framer's day was a major issue because they were still feeling the effects of British colonial trends--the cotton growers went south while the tobacco planters went to Virginia and the Carolinas, and both developed agrarian societies; whereas the religious zealots just wanted to get away from everyone else and wound up in New England where they ultimately developed a strong industrial base because the land wasn't much good for anything else. It remained an issue for a while--the West was settled by people who were used to doing things themselves, and Utah by still more religious zealots. But to what degree do regional differences still exist, and will they continue beyond this generation as we are increasingly homogenized by mass media? Other than the logistics of governing a nation of 300 million people, will there still be a defensible basis for true federalism five or ten decades from now?

Depends on the particular hate crime statute--individual states have them, and there's a federal statute as well. As per Wikipedia (I'm too lazy to do any actual legal research on this right now), under the federal statute the crime has to be committed "on the basis of" the victim's race; so a tangential connection would not (I presume) be enough, in and of itself, to convict the perp. I think you can break hate crime legislation down into two categories: 1) Statutes intended to remedy an imbalance between the magnitude of the crime committed and the actual penalty currently inflicted by the law; 2) Statutes intended to provide an additional punishment to the perpetrator because he acted out of an especially reprehensible motive. I can get behind the first type of legislation--I think CofChristCousin's cross-burning analogy falls here. I'm suspicious of the second type, which I think is basically a backdoor method to punish belief.

I'm still not sure I'm following you, but my two cents: The issue is that, in the case of abortion, there frankly is no "common code of morality" on a national basis. If there were, there would be no controversy. I think the crux of the Framer's preoccupation with federalism was regionalism--the acknowledgment that South Carolina's populace had (in some degree) a wholly different set of mores than Vermont's, and the reluctance to force the worldview of one group onto another group. Generally speaking, there's got to be some kind of "critical mass"--a magic percentage of people who agree with a proposition, and when we reach that number we feel comfortable proclaiming a social consensus and legislating accordingly. But I think our nation as a whole is simply too big ever to achieve such a "critical mass", and therefore moral questions should not be legislated by the federal government. Such a critical mass is still attainable in at least some of the smaller states, and I suppose in such states morality-based legislation would be appropriate. I do see abortion as an exception to the above, simply because I find elective abortions so deeply morally repugnant. The above view, though, would seem to set up a classical "tyranny of the (super)majority", and frankly I'm not sure at present how to deal with that problem.

If memory serves, Paul is talking to Christians who had formerly been Jews; who had rejected the Jewish dietary laws at the time of their conversion and afterwards became ashamed of their new faith and re-embraced the old ways. Paul's point is that salvation comes through Jesus Christ and not the Law of Moses with its dietary restrictions, sacrifices, and festivals. It does not bar Jesus Himself from giving new commandments to His people as He deems appropriate--including dietary restrictions.

I think I'd need a little more info before responding: 1) Do you refer to all government regulations, or just federal government regs? 2) Would eliminating "all laws dealing with abortion" include standard health regulations of the type that govern many other medical practices and procedures?

Like this? Apologies. Let me try again: Your actions were that you entered into a discussion of Nephi (and Nephi only, at that point) and started dropping hints about how scriptural stories of violence aren't always necessarily "legitimate". The net effect of such an action is to cast doubt on the veracity--or at least the legitimacy--of Nephi's story. The assumption that I mentioned here, and you referred to here, and which I restated in the very post to which your last was intended to respond: viz, that a just and benevolent God would never order a killing.

You are aware that there are other meanings of "ignore" besides merely "to refuse to take notice of", right? You're trying to tell me that you reject--er, question--a scripture, not because you disagree with it or dislike it per se, but only because you find yourself able to poke rhetorical holes in the arguments of those who take the scripture at face value? The only way I see you getting there is if you read the scriptures with a presumption that they are not true, unless you can find a good logical reason why they are. Of course, if you want to tell me that you have subjected (or intend to subject) every verse of every chapter of every verse of scripture to the same scrutiny to which you subject the story of Nephi and Laban. Including, presumably (for example) such innocuous scriptures as 1 John 3:23. Except when you use those scriptures to cast doubt on the veracity of the scripture originally under discussion. Then, it's just a straw man. Er . . . your first post to this thread used the expression "sully his hand with murder". Later, before you ever mentioned OT stories, you spoke* skeptically of "the legitimacy of ancient behaviors". Still later, you said* "It's quite another thing to reconcile am [sic] instruction to murder with a benevolent, just God." And finally, you said*: If you make no such assumption, why were two of your three "options" rooted in that very assumption; and why have you (so far as I can tell) made zero attempt to actually reconcile it yourself in this forum? *Lest I be accused again of "dishonesty", please note that when I say "spoke" or "said", I include "wrote" or "posted".

Palin was woefully underinformed and generally made a buffoon of herself, but other than having Alaska-secessionist connections how exactly was she an extremist? She wasn't anti-contraception in schools; she was federalist on the issue of abortion . . .

Which issues? How is the Republican Party of 2009 more conservative than the Republican Party of 1980 or 1996? What social positions does it embrace now that it did not embrace then? It strikes me that almost every material difference between the past and present positions of the Republican Party demonstrate a trend to the left: on foreign intervention, on spending, on relative power of federal versus state governments, on health care. On "social positions", they're largely the same as they ever were in the last three decades: distrustful of labor, distrustful of illegal immigrants, anti-abortion, anti-SSM (but increasingly in favor of civil unions), and anti-affirmative action.

Oh, I don't think for a minute that Snow agrees with the scriptures he cites.

Per the Morgan Stanley CEO:

To that end, I would be interested to hear whether Snow agrees with the gender roles as outlined in the Proclamation on the Family?

I suspect President Obama's over-reliance on the teleprompter reflects his acute awareness of what happens to Presidents who go off-script. People who speak off-the-cuff frequently are bound to make a couple of howlers here and there. President Obama's constituency made such effective use of Bush's, that Obama will probably never again feel comfortable with extemporaneous speaking as long as he remains in office. It's like the guy who, having killed someone by poisoning, never eats another meal in peace. Poetic justice, IMHO.

Mitt Romney will never be President of this country. Huntsman is a nice guy (Scott Matheson, of all people, once introduced me to him), but he represents a nascent Republican effort to out-Democrat the Democrats that, I think, is doomed to failure. Besides, his dad is a reasonably highly-placed member of the Church hierarchy. The objections you saw to Romney's religion will pale in comparison to the anti-Huntsman vitriol that would start coming out.

Generalities are always dangerous, and as a guy I can't claim to know what goes on inside a woman's head. But I would venture to state that in our culture, women do tend to display more emotion and are generally better all-around with kids. Now, whether this is an instinctual thing or merely a byproduct of generations of social conditioning--I wouldn't venture to guess.

You're thinking of Jim Jeffords of Vermont, Jenamarie. I'm hearing that Specter is offering refunds to donors to his last campaign. Who'da thunk our Senators come with a money-back guarantee?

Per CNN, Specter's up for re-election next year--and the pollsters are saying that he wouldn't have made it past the Republican primary.

Maxel, may I recommend that you invest in GospeLink? I got the 2001 version on CD-ROM sometime ago, and it has been invaluable.

I don't think there's any one single source. I try to check the following daily, in no particular order: CNN Drudge Report Instapundit RealClearPolitics Salt Lake Tribune Volokh Conspiracy For LDS news, I check the sidebars at timesandseasons.org and bycommonconsent.com.

Unfortunately (but understandably), the Church-owned media outlets aren't usually the first media outlets to break controversial news relating to the Church. They'll only run it when it becomes too big to ignore. The result of this is that you'll hear about more events by monitoring the Trib, but the Deseret News' coverage will be more sympathetic and, because they've had more time to analyze the issue, generally more thoughtful and thorough and less sensationalistic.

Now you are just making things up. Why is that? . . . .Can't you make your point honestly? What was dishonest? The Nephi account challenges one of your core assumptions about the nature of God (see below). Of course you don't like it. I wouldn't either, if I were convinced of the same assumption that you seem to have made. This isn't about any of those other scriptures, for which you have rightly set up a separate thread. This particular discussion is about Nephi. Bringing in other scriptures strikes me as little more than poisoning the well. And since the scriptures you cite are all in the Old Testament, you aren't even poisoning the right well. You assume, at the outset, that a just and benevolent God would never order a killing. I questioned this assumption (in general terms; not directed towards you specifically) earlier, and don't recall you responding to it directly. Feel free to prove me wrong--I could very easily have missed one of your posts--but it strikes me that at least in this particular discussion you've never tried to make the type of reconciliation you claim to have attempted.

It was warm-ish and slightly cloudy yesterday when we went into church. By the time church was over it was freezing and, as one wag remarked, "there's two inches of Global Warming on the ground!"

Moksha, I've seen that picture before, but it gets more awesome every time I see it!

As I admitted in my Post #140. What would you call it when someone ignores a segment of the scriptures that has been confirmed by living prophets, just because that segment says something that the person doesn't like?

No kidding! I'll need to do more looking, but a simple Google search yields this non-Mormon essay which points to the problems of taking "all" as an absolute in certain New Testament contexts. Whether this type of over-use of "all" spilled over into the Book of Mormon is, of course, an open question at this point. :) By the way--a bit more food for thought--the first time Moses came to Pharoah, I believe he only asked for permission to go three days' journey into the wilderness to offer sacrifices? Was he lying, if his intent all along was to lead Israel back to Canaan?