Just_A_Guy

I don’t know if this is happening elsewhere, but our temple president (Saratoga Springs) had apparently asked stake presidents to have their wards quit organizing youth temple trips—they’re tying up all the reservation slots and blocking families from attending together.

I certainly agree with the principle that the more we needlessly share (or otherwise trivialize/sensationalize) our revelations, the fewer such revelations we are likely to get in the future. But it seems odd to me that we would be admonished to go into the temple specifically for the purpose of getting revelation to navigate the vicissitudes of day-to-day living, but would then be expected never to share the insights gained from those revelations with those with whom we share our lives and over whom the patriarchal order gives us some degree of stewardship

This seems to contradict what @laronius says above. Are you talking about proxy work, or living ordinances specifically?

I am gravitating to the position that it is the covenants associated with the ordinances, not the physical act of the ordinances, that have eternal significance. The ritual, I suspect, is primarily a pedagogical tool that God implements to ensure that the covenants are memorable and lead us to give the covenants their due weight. In the Church we put a lot of emphasis on getting those rituals mechanically right—the right words, the right motions, doing everything in the right sequence, etc—but I am inclined to think that this is more of a token by which we show our allegiance to that God who gave us the underlying covenants, than because the rituals themselves have some mystical value that is erased if we inadvertently do them the wrong way. It is certainly tremendously important for us to follow the patterns prescribed by God and get our ordinances as nearly perfectly right as we are able, every time. But if God feels that in a particular case a person needs to make the covenants associated with the initiatory before making those associated with baptism—I don’t think there’s any eternal order that prevents Him from doing so. I tend to look a bit skeptically at writers who take a particular scriptural episode and says “oh yeah, here’s where Nephi is getting his endowment; and here’s where John the Revelator gets his endowment; and here’s where the apostles get their initiatories; and here’s where Nephi son of Helaman gets his second anointing”. The Gospel is saturated with a number of core principles that rear their heads again and again in a variety of theological, liturgical, instructional, and everyday-living contexts—divine love, creation, atonement, redemption and purification, mutual aid among the believers, obedience, sacrifice, holy living, chastity, consecration, priestly kingship/queenship over posterity, victory over/reversal of Adam’s fall, return to the presence of God, etc; and one could certainly find ways to relate each of those concepts to any and all of the priesthood ordinances we do in the Church today. But that doesn’t mean that a scriptural account of a vision or dream or coronation or anointing should be interpreted as being “basically the same thing” as any of our modern temple ordinances.

Doesn’t Royal Skousen argue that the BoM English is closest to 15th-16th century? I seem to recall him speculating that perhaps Tyndale or some of the King James translators, in the spirit world, had a role in generating the English text; which was then passed on to Joseph Smith.

I believe Don Bradley suggests as much in his book on the 116 lost pages. As I recall Bradley suggests that there was a massive apostasy during the reign of Mosiah I, and that the experience of Aminadi in interpreting writing on the wall of the temple (Alma 10:2) had something to do with it.

I suspect that Satan thought some combination of a) Father hadn’t *really* wanted to redeem His children at all; and/or b) any redemptive process the Father instituted wouldn’t really be powerful enough to be effective, because the Father wouldn’t be able/willing to make the sort of sacrifice it would take for a plan of redemption to work. In short: I think Satan underestimated how much the Father loved His children. Additionally: from the temple drama, I think there’s a dimension of Satan trying to supplant God by setting himself up as the munificent provider of secret knowledge and progression that the Father was hoarding for Himself. And again, I think Satan miscalculated how far God was willing to go to reconcile Adam and Eve to Himself; as well as the ultimate almost-irresistible nature of divine love and grace and the residual “homing instinct” that the Light of Christ would leave in the human spirit. Satan assumed that Adam and Eve and their posterity, in their fallen state, would be as incorrigibly jaded and cynical and faithless as he himself was.

My recollection of that is that Pence made a lot of points and policy arguments with which Harris mostly chose not to disengage, instead resorting to a combination of cackling or false accusations; and then a fly landed in Pence’s hair on-camera, and all we ever heard from the press after that was “Even insects know Pence is full of crap. SQUEEEEEE!!!”

I’m not saying there’s no value to your comment—RINOS and falling in love with power and just plain getting bogged down, have been inherent struggles for the GOP. But . . . I don’t think Trump fundamentally brought about a sea change in which Republicans started winning. I don’t think Obama, as the first black Dem nominee, was beatable; so I don’t really blame McCain or Romney for those losses. By contrast I think nearly any mainstream GOP nominee could have beaten Hillary in 2016. When it came to working with the Republican-led 115th Congress to advance conservative legislation, Trump’s White House was shockingly impotent. The “victories” at the SCOTUS level come primarily from Mitch McConnell (as much a “swamp thing” as anyone Trump has condemned) bottling up Merrick Garland’s confirmation at the end of Obama’s administration.

I’m of two minds on the op. On the one hand: the VFW seems to be suggesting that one can never accomplish as much for one’s country in the civilian sphere as one can in the military sphere. As much as I respect our veterans: I disagree with this assertion; and would also add that in hindsight—while the motives of our soldiers are entirely honorable—it doesn’t seem like the expeditionary deployments of our fighting forces in the 21st century have accomplished much of anything at all. On the other hand: the Presidential Medal of Freedom has a suspicious way of getting awarded to people who have championed the pet social causes of the sitting president’s political party. In practice, if not in theory, the PMOF is not equal to the CMOH; and while I might disagree with the way the VFW expressed it—it was right for someone to point that out that there is a difference. With Trump it’s a particularly tender spot, because he already has a history of making (or being alleged to have made, by fairly high-ranking military folks who one presumes wouldn’t make this kind of thing up) some deeply insensitive statements about folks who have been maimed or killed in military service. After eight years in the public sphere and basically having come down on every side of every issue at some point in that time period, I don’t think there’s much Trump can do to alienate his base at this point. I’m not heavily into military culture, but I suspect that because it’s so meritocratic Waltz’s issues and Harris’s means of getting her earlier jobs aren’t going to make her terribly appealing. As for the rest of the country: I’m not sure the cultural mystique about US military or veterans, continues to be what it was twenty or even ten years ago; and I’m not sure the rising generation is prepared to reject an otherwise-preferable presidential candidate based on that candidate’s having said out loud stuff about military service that everyone else thought, but didn’t dare express, if/whenever they considered entering military service themselves.

I agree that religious/conservative communities have often been inexcusably slow to root out predators in their midst. But I think it bears repeating that it’s ludicrous on its face to suggest that children are in anything like as much danger in a community that condemns and suppresses fetishism, kink, and the flouting of sexual boundaries as those children are in a community that lionizes those traits. Additionally, while the etiology of gender dysphoria is not well understood (and may well differ in male —> female versus female —> male cases, or even between individual cases), the overwhelmingly common presence of an autogynephilia element among male —> female transgenders has been long established. Frankly: a high proportion of them are fetishists and exhibitionists and/or enjoy transgresiveness more for its inherently transgressive nature than because of any fundamental underlying sexual orientation or preference; and people like that shouldn’t be trusted around kids.

I’m still NeverTrump; and continue to believe that if we take D&C 98:10 and Isaiah 8 seriously, eventually the Lord will prepare the way for a candidate who meets those criteria. In the meantime: I wrote in President Nelson in 2020 and am likely to do so again this year.

With regard to home schooling done badly: I think that in cases where welfare claimants turn out to have been home-schooled in a way that left them substantially unemployable, it may be appropriate to seek recourse/reimbursement from the assets of the parents who obviously fouled up on the homeschooling. In the shorter term, speaking from my own experience in the child welfare system: yes, there are fewer eyes in the community on home schooled kids; that lets problems fly under the radar for longer with sometimes-tragic results. But frankly, I think that’s just the cost of doing business in a free society. I *want* to have the right to pull my kids out of the public education system if/when it reaches a certain level of inculcating destructive ideals in its pupils; and I don’t want to have to justify myself to some government do-gooder who thinks it’s evidence of a civil rights violation if a kid is still a virgin when (s)he graduates from high school.

While these are fair points, I think that there’s something to be said for the US offering (limited) support on behalf of a western-oriented nation that is being invaded for the crimes of a) being free, b) seeking good relationships with other free nations, and c) having resources (including women and children) that the invader wants. And in an LDS context it’s worth pointing out that Ukraine has a temple, an out-in-the-open church presence, and a government that lets us operate with a relatively free hand. Russia doesn’t. When Russian troops move into a town with an LDS presence, the LDS membership—as one Russian official (in Donetsk, IIRC) put it—“melts away”. Not that Church interests ought to be the final determinant of international legal issues or jus ad bellum arguments, of course . . . but there are certainly worse determinants being proposed. Putin‘s forces need to lose; and if they lose in a way that teaches us how not to get our carrier groups neutralized by drones—so much the better, as far as I’m concerned.

“Sure, we can do the tent thing. But there will be blood. And smoke. And the screeching of livestock having their throats slit.”

I think a big liability that Kamala has with her party (at least the semi-reasonable ones) is that people are going to ask how it was that she, as VP, whose one job is to take over for the president when he’s incapacitated, failed to notice or raise the alarm when he was clearly incapacitated. Either she was part of the cover-up, or Biden (when he was still competent) and his staff considered her so dotty that they made a point of keeping her out of the loop. Neither makes for a very reassuring presidential nominee.

This particular controversy was amusing to me because the current lot in its undeveloped, desert-y state appears (at least, from Google) to be a rather spectacular eyesore; and the landscaping of the nearby houses is pretty barren. I’m sure the temple will employ some degree of xeriscaping, given its location; but it’s hard to imagine a temple doing anything but improving the aesthetic of the neighborhood. Next time people raise phoney complaints like this, the Church should immediately concede and donate the proposed site to the city on the condition it be developed as high-density, low-income housing.

We had the legacy of those disputes in my mission in Brazil 20 years ago. Missionaries were doing crap work at prepping investigators, baptizing them, and then abandoning them; and then blaming ward leadership when they went inactive. Ward leaders were pleading “we have sixty active members, and you’re about to baptize ten children because you schmoozed them into saying they’d be baptized, and we do not have the capacity to minister to these people’s needs!” And the DLs and AP’s would literally tell the bishops “you have no authority over us, and if you can’t retain converts that’s on your head, not ours”. On the spirit prison thing: I was taught that spirit prison had a subcategory (“Hotel Hell”, as one teacher called it) of people who were being purged of their sins; but that others in SP were where they needed to be spiritually except that they were still waiting to have their proxy ordinances done. My inclination is that these sorts of distinctions are largely artificial—either one is in spirit prison, or one isn’t; and the reasons an individual is in spirit prison, the pain or frustration (s)he is experiencing, and the things that need to happen before that individual can “cross over” into the realm of the righteous are tailored to the individual. (And frankly, I’m not even convinced that the difference between the spirit world/spirit prison is physical/geographical. It may simply be a matter of one’s state of mind, the degree of communion they are able to enjoy with the Spirit, and the degree to which their memories of premortal events have been restored.)

1. I just sort of embraced the acronym because it’s shorter (my handle was initially intended as a throwaway because I didn’t think I’d be here long). 2. @zil2 Ha! 3. @pam I expect you to remember my not taking the bait on this one, the next time you’re distributing monthly bonuses to the mod staff.

Yep. Unless there are thunderstorms this evening, I’ll be out sailing on Utah Lake.

I think Biden is probably a bit more mentally “there” than we’ve been led to believe. (I still have concerns, but I don’t think he’s a complete vegetable). I think he’s slyly lowered expectations to the point that if he utters three coherent sentences and doesn’t soil himself on national television, it will be a strategic victory for him.

14th Article of Faith: “We believe in meetings; we hope for meetings; we have endured many meetings and hope to be able to endure all meetings.” As I get older, I find myself having less patience needing more charity for Church leaders who set meetings that have no discernible purpose or do not substantively accomplish the meeting’s stated objectives.

I’m not sure the Hebrew text, or the Jews or Christians who read it up until the last century or two, recognize that distinction. My understanding is that Christians even into Elizabethan times considered charging interest to be morally suspect, if not exactly verboten (which is why the protagonists in the Merchant of Venice have to seek out Shylock the Jew). Banking was supposedly one of the few professions open to Jews, because many good Christians just couldn’t imagine earning a living that way.

Just to be a smidge contrarian: there’s nothing wrong with being a “gold digger” per se. Women have a right to expect a husband who can support them; and if they are initially a bit unrealistic about the style in which they can expect to be supported—well, if you don’t aim for the moon, you certainly won’t hit it The trade-offs, as has been discussed, are positioning oneself in a place where suitable potential mates are actually likely to be; striking the right balance of idealism and realism as one gets increasingly exposed to the dating pool; and in being the sort of wife who’s worth supporting in any kind of style.

Plus they’re basically getting a $180K education for $24K, with the Church’s tithepayers making up the shortfall. The entitlement boggles the mind.