Just_A_Guy

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?

One needs to be a little careful about absolute statements as recorded in the scriptures. For example, Jehovah tells the brother of Jared very clearly that never had man seen His body. Yet, we know from the book of Moses that Enoch (who lived before the brother of Jared) also had the privilege of seeing Him; and it's a pretty reasonable supposition that Adam had the same privilege. There's a pretty good body of work out there--I'll try to find you some links--that support the idea that in the scriptures, "all" does not always necessarily mean all.

I don't recall where I first became aware of it--probably volokh.com or Instapundit--but see, for example, this Time article. For all its faults, Bybee's August '02 memo was very clear that it was applicable only under specific circumstances as had been described to him by CIA personnel.

All of the scriptures you cite, IMHO, refer to the availability of eternal gospel blessings to all those who will keep God's commandments regardless of their personal situation. God can--and does--give different sets of instructions (and even different temporal blessings) to different sets of people according to their personal circumstances; the Mosaic Law, polygamy, consumption of meats offered to idols, and caffeine consumption being a few examples of this principle in action. Neither did I, until today! I'll defer this argument to others. My point isn't necessarily that God orders us to lie; it's only that it's not necessarily sinful in all circumstances.

Right . . . my bad . . . substitute "Bradbury-esque". I agree that taking the scriptures as (forgive the bad pun) the "gospel" version of history is problematic in general. On the other hand, the major problem with such sources is that they often tend to be tremendously self-serving to the author--either as towards his individual actions, or as to the actions of his culture. That Nephi included his execution of Laban in the narrative at all, violates this pattern. I don't see how you can make a straight-faced argument that Nephi's inclusion of the story of his execution of Laban raises him or the Nephites generally in the estimation of the average reader. To anyone who hasn't been conditioned by decades of singing in primary about how "Nephi was obedient", it's a gut-wrenchingly horrifying story. There's just no reason to disregard Nephi's narrative here as historical fact while accepting the Book of Mormon in principle, except that the story is highly inconvenient to our preferred worldview.

This is a very elegant idea, though it sounds faintly Orwellian. Don't like something that is in the historical record? Fine. Repeat "it never happened" often enough, and it's no longer an issue.

Please note that I said from the Lord's standpoint. Not from man's. What is that supposed to mean, in this context? That God doesn't make judgment calls about whose lives should be prolonged, and whose should not? Einstein famously said that God does not play dice. Somehow I don't think He plays "Gotcha!", either. The above argument strikes me as a mere technicality: Abraham knowingly and deliberately misled Pharoah.

Da---t, Jim! I'm a lawyer, not a grammarian!

This is an awesome question, and I'm having trouble developing a pat answer for it. My inclination at present is that it revolves around the purpose of an individual's life. If the purposes of an individual's life are not going to be fulfilled in this mortal sphere, then from the Lord's standpoint there's no reason for not sending that individual on to the next stage of existence--particularly when that individual poses a threat to the purpose of the lives of others. So, I would venture to say we are at least justified in (if not commanded outright to) saving the lives, at the very least, of individuals to whom the above-stated conditions do not apply.

Always? I would say that promulgating and acting on false revelations do. If the instruction Nephi received to kill Laban was in fact a false revelation--then yes, he is a false prophet; and so is anyone who repeated that revelation as a true revelation from God. Maybe awkward . . . maybe not. There are worse things than death.