Jamie123

I originally posted this in another thread, but it was so off-topic I don't really think it belongs there - it needs another thread of its own. It has to do with this quote by Folk Prophet I tend to agree: C.S. Lewis has been such a part of my general reading experience over the years, I have to guard myself against confusing certain "Lewisisms" with Biblical teachings. Its not even as if I necessarily agree with everything the guy wrote. (I totally disagree with the "trilemma" for example.) But he has a way of casting a spell with his words - and like he says himself "spells are used for breaking enchantments". He's helped me to see many of the dogmas of the modern world for what they are. Another things about Lewis is he seems to be one of the few non-LDS Christian authors that LDS people know about, read and respect. Whenever I've mentioned my other favourite Christian authors - Adrian Plass for example, or Philip Yancey or Henri Nouwen on this forum, I've been met with blank silence. Whenever I bring up C.S. Lewis everyone here knows immediately who I'm talking about. Yet another interesting thing about C.S.Lewis is that the religious and literary "intelligentsia" of America seem to take him a lot more seriously than do their counterparts in the UK. For example, the Episcopalian Church in the USA (I believe) have a feast day for Lewis in their calendar; Lewis is not so honoured in the Church of England. American universities keep collections of his letters and manuscripts; British universities barely acknowledge his existence! And this is true also of the other Inklings authors - most notably J.R.R. Tolkien. A few years ago two surveys were performed in the UK to discover the "greatest book of the 20th Century". One survey involved the general public, the other the academic literary community. The general public put The Lord of the Rings firmly at the top of the list, while C.S.Lewis' books were not far behind. The literary academics' list did not include either Lewis or Tolkien. It was full of Graeme Greene, T.S. Elliot, G.K. Chesterton and Evelyn Waugh (all great authors, I don't deny) but not a single mention "the people's" favourites! The Inklings are not considered "high brow", but who cares? They are appreciated by the people who matter - such plebs as myself, Americans and the LDS!

[Moved this post to General Discussion - it is too off-topic to include here http://lds.net/forums/topic/57525-the-inklings-authors/ ]

I guess I'm just a mortal, short-sighted and selfish kind of person. But at least I know my limitations P.S. Having just written that, doubt now assails me... Perhaps I'm putting God into His box again! P.P.S. A random thought: if Man were intended to have more than one wife, why didn't God create Adam and Eve, Denise, Felicity, Gina, Helen, Irene and Jane? P.P.P.S. I know I'm being a bit flippant here, but now I've thought about it some more I think Folk Prophet does raise an interesting point.

I can understand why a man might want to have a woman (or women) on the side in addition to his wife, though even that might lead to a rather complicated and stressful life. But why would anyone want to have more than one actual wife? There was a TV show a few weeks ago about a "Mormon" man who had (I think) seven wives - and several sets of kids by different wives - all living together in one house. It was, admittedly, rather a big house - but all the same. How could anyone live with that level of aggravation? How much nicer just to have one wife, and all your kids by her!

I've been thinking like this for some time. There was a day when being a Christian meant more than putting on your best hat every Sunday and yawning through a sermon with a bunch of other well-groomed bourgeois*. You took your life in your hands. Bishops back then were always old men - not because old men are wise, but because they knew they had less to lose than the young. Christians - especially prominent ones - often came to nasty ends. I imagine those early saints looking down from their clouds at today's Christians wondering what most of us are complaining about. (OK there is actual persecution of the church in some countries, but not in the USA or Western Europe.) Not that I want a return to those days, but who knows? The sort of secular liberal opposition we're starting to see might shake things up a bit! *P.S. Not that I'm ever particularly well-groomed when I go to church.

Even if Iran and ISIS never ever get together you might still get knocked down by a bus tomorrow. Repentance is always a good idea.

That's very interesting! Imaginary numbers are a constant source of amusement. I remember reading this paradox a while back: -1=i^2=sqrt(-1)*sqrt(-1)=sqrt(-1*-1)=sqrt(1)=1, so -1=1 and 1+1=0. I once showed that to the head of our math school; she was stumped for a while, but later got back to me with the suggestion that you need to say sqrt(1)=-1 at the last step. (But why isn't the positive root just as valid?) Another solution I found on the web is that the rule sqrt(a)*sqrt(b)=sqrt(a*b) is not valid when a and b are both imaginary.

"Caesar ad sum jam forti Brutus et erat Caesar sic in omnibus Brutus sic in at" "Latin is a language As dead as dead can be First it killed the Romans And now it's killing me!" Isway Igpay Atinlay anyway oodgay ootay ouyay?

(Sorry - repeated post by mistake)

Thanks Vort! It's great to hear from you :) You are quite right - the value for n=0 is 0.20788, not 4.810... as I said. I did my calculations in MS Excel and I missed the minus out of the formula. The true values are the reciprocals of the values I listed. (My suspicions should have been aroused by the values increasing instead of decreasing with n - but oh well...) Having said that though, what you quote at the start is not Euler's *equation* per se, but Euler's *identity*. The full version of Euler's equation is: exp(i*theta)=cos(theta)+i*sin(theta) which simplifies to exp(i*pi)=-1 (Euler's identity) for the special case of theta=pi. But if theta=pi/2*(1+4n), the right-hand side of the equation remains equal to i irrespective of n (so long as n is an integer) since all angles are modulo 2*pi. It therefore follows that the LHS, exp(i*pi/2*(4n+1)), is always equal to i, so i^i must be exp(-pi/2*(1+4n)). This takes a different *real* value for each n. I'm not really suggesting that God or Man are really representable by number systems; it is just an analogy. I can imagine a simplistic Unitarian argument running something like this: Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all God, but Father is not Son, Son is not Holy Spirit and Holy Spirit is not Father (as represented in the Trinity shield). But if Heavenly Father is God, and God is the Son, then Heavenly Father is the Son. Reductio ad absurdum - Trinity disproven. One might of course say that "God" is more like an adjective than a noun - that more than one individual might "be God" (just as more than one person may old, fat, ugly etc.) but this is straying close to polytheism, which most Trinitarians reject. I have had this very argument with Jehovah's Witnesses who claim that all Trinitarians can say about the Trinity is that it is "a mystery" beyond human understanding - which explains nothing. But this may not be the case - this example shows shows something well within the field of human understanding which behaves exactly as the Unitarian claims the Trinity can't. P.S. An additional thought; another possibility is Monarchianism which maintained that God is one being but has separate "roles" as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, just as I am a father, a husband and a son....though now I think about it maybe that's not such a good analogy because I am these three things to different people. OK - so maybe a teacher has his own son or daughter in his class - he is a father and a teacher to that kid, but the roles are compartmentalized. I have heard a Baptist minister I used to know teach this idea to his young people's class - and only years later read that it is considered a heresy (the "Monarchian Heresy"). Maybe someone learned in theology could explain why this is.

Quite right - it's incredibly hard. But is it any harder than "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."? I don't think many of God's commandments are actually going to be obeyed in this life!

There is also Platonic pre-existence. I once read a book by an LDS author (I forget who - it might possibly have been Gordon B. Hinckley) which argued that William Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality was an attempt to express the truth of pre-existence which he instinctively felt: "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting..."

Try reading some of Adrian Plass' "Sacred Diary" novels, and see if you keep that opinion!

I think what bothers me most about the "no beginning" thing is that if I always existed, why do I not remember anything before my own birth? Now I know that Mormonism has an answer to this; that a "veil" was pulled over my pre-mortal memories. But let's suppose we go back to before that time (or forward to the time when that "veil" is removed) what would I remember? Would I not have an infinite number of memories? Would that make me an infinite being? If not, then I can only suppose that while existence may be eternal, memory is not. Perhaps memories fade with time (or whatever serves as "time" outside this earthly existence). And the upshot would be that even God does not remember the entirety of His own existence!

I find it a lot easier to imagine the future extending from now to eternity, than the past stretching back to eternity. This would mean that whatever point in the past we go back to there was always a "before that". The mind reels at the thought - we feel there ought to be a start - an origin. But the mind reels at that idea too; we ask what caused that origin? In other words we start demanding a "before that". This reminds me of when I first read the novel The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle. (Hoyle, who was well as being a novelist was also a physics professor at Cambridge and co-originator of the "steady state" theory of universe. It was he who coined the phrase "the Big Bang" to ridicule other physicists who believed the universe had an explosive beginning; little did he know these "other physicists" would soon start using the phrase themselves!) Anyway (*SPOILER ALERT*) in The Black Cloud Earth's Solar System is visited by a huge interstellar dust cloud which settles around the sun and causes the Earth to freeze. Scientists studying the cloud discover it is actually an intelligent living organism and find a means to communicate with it. The cloud-being is equally surprised to discover anything so bizarre as intelligent life on a planet, but nevertheless permits sunlight to return and humanity is saved from a frozen grave. The scientists question the cloud for some months, during which they ask it about its origins; they learn how the cloud-creatures reproduce, but when they ask how their species began the cloud disagrees that it ever had a beginning. The main character (a Cambridge professor and thinly-disguised fictionalized Hoyle) then does a metaphorical victory-dance over the Big Bang theory. But of course it's now (almost) universally accepted that Hoyle was wrong; the universe did have a beginning and it was a Big Bang. Furthermore the very idea of time before the big bang is shown to be meaningless. But who knows? Maybe there was another kind of time which ended when our time began. Or maybe there is a kind of "Time" that transcends and contains what we know as "time" - that is occupied by Gods, Spirits etc.. Interestingly though, as for any future "end of time" the evidence of cosmic inflation is against it. It was once believed that the expansion was slowing down - that it would one day reverse and end in a "big crunch". But not a bit of it - the universe is not only expanding but it is expanding faster all the time. It would seem that time had a start, but will never have an end. So it would seem....but who knows. I wonder whether cosmologists will still be saying the same thing 100 years from now? P.S. Another really great novel by Hoyle is Inferno - in which the cloud-beings also make a brief appearance.

This has been discussed here before, but no one this time has mentioned Moses killing the Egyptian. On an earlier thread someone came up with a convoluted argument that this wasn't really murder because Moses was doing what he had to do to save the Israelite that the Egyptian was beating. Let's face it (and please excuse the sarcasm): what other option would a prince of Egypt have? There's also the matter of David killing the man who brought him the crown. OK - so this man had just killed the king, but only because the king had told him to do it. (I always felt sorry for that guy.) And then there's Joab killing Absalom, after David has expressly told him not to. (Though I suppose Joab did later come to a sticky end because of this.)

I don't have a bucket list either, but there are a few things I want to do: 1. Ride a penny farthing 2. Get a black belt in karate 3. Become a full professor 4. Go inside the Great Pyramid of Giza 5. Walk my daughter down the aisle on her wedding day 6. Go up in a balloon

I was talking to a mathematical colleague the other day about the curious "fact" that the sum of all natural numbers from 1 to infinity is -1/12. (If you've never heard of this Google it - it's quite a source of distraction!) Anyway, he came up with an interesting factoid of his own - namely that i^i (where i as usual means sqrt(-1)) is real. It took me a while to get my tiny mind around this, but eventually the penny dropped: Euler's equation gives us i=exp(i*pi/2) so i^i=exp(i*i*pi/2)=exp(-pi/2)=4.810477381 which is indeed real number! But when I googled this online I found I had missed something: there is a more general version i=exp(i*pi/2*(1+4n)) where n is any integer, so i^i=exp(-pi/2*(1+4n)). Each n, i.e. ...-2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3... generates a different value. All values are real, none of them are equal to each other but all of them are equal to i^i. 1.67758E-05=i^i 0.008983291=i^i 4.810477381=i^i 2575.970497=i^i 1379410.706=i^i but 1.67758E-05!=0.008983291!=4.810477381!=2575.970497!=1379410.706 What does this remind you of?

(I'm not an expert on Mormonism, or on theology in general, so my apologies in advance if anything in this post is grotesquely wrong.) Aspects of Mormonism I don’t really care about one way or the other: 1. Joseph Smith 2. The Restoration/Priesthood 3. A Living Prophet 4. The Temple All of these things really hang together: the Restoration of the Priesthood and the Temple came through Joseph Smith, who was first of a line of “Living Prophets”. This intrigues me somewhat, and that it happened (or supposedly happened) during what historians would call "the Modern Period" lends it a certain credibility over things that were said to have happened 2,000 years ago. But my overall response is (as some would say) “Meh!” Aspects of Mormonism I do care about: 1. “Man is that he might have joy”. God is the literal loving Father of all humanity. He loves and desires the happiness of every human being living or who has ever lived, regardless of whether they believe in or even know about Him. Not everyone will necessarily achieve salvation, just as not every child of the most loving earthly father will necessarily live a happy life; failure to achieve happiness would not be due to any plan by the father. But there was never any person born for whom God did not intend salvation. Contrast this with the view that God’s Fatherhood begins only when a person comes to Christ, and that a person can only come to Christ through God’s favour. There is no libertarian “free will”; individuals are “free” to act only as a clock is “free” to strike the hour. (Some people call this “compatibilist” free will.) Humanity is therefore divided between the Elect (those who have or who are scheduled to come to Christ) and the Reprobate (those who have not and will never come to Christ, and are therefore scheduled for eternal suffering). This view is sometimes called “Calvinism”, though it is not (I believe) what Calvin originally taught*. Others would call it “Hypercalvinism”. It includes the idea of “limited atonement” – that Christ only died for the Elect. (What would have been the point of His dying for anyone else?) I’ve always had a deep-seated dislike for this idea, and you’ve no idea how it bugs me that it’s enshrined in the Articles of Faith of my own denomination. You do of course have the alternative view of Arminianism – though I must confess I don’t really understand this: some would see it as almost identical to what the Mormons believe - with the proviso that God desires all come to Christ, and in doing so become His sons/daughters. But that's really not quite it: if I understand rightly it still includes the concept of perfect divine foreknowledge; that God knows in advance what path any individual will take. If God is omnipotent, and if He desires happiness for all, then why did He not program each individual to take the correct path? (This was of course Satan’s plan – but with libertarian free will ruled out what other path was there for a loving God – even if it would have made the history books rather boring?) The only answer is that He did not intend to – and thus we are back to Calvinism. But what if God is like a Father – a loving perfect father – to all humanity? What if He hopes, suffers, fears, weeps for and takes joy in all His children.....guides them, but allows them to make their own mistakes? Then…well then there’s hope for everyone! Could it be true? * My knowledge of Calvinism and Arminianism comes primarily from having read The Lion Concise Book of Christian Thought (300 pages covering St.Paul to Billy Graham) so I can hardly claim to be an expert. But from what I understand John Calvin himself was never overly keen on the idea of predestination, and he's been somewhat unfairly "blamed" for it.

Congrats! I married quite late too - I was 39. It came as quite a shock after all those years of being able to do what I liked! (jk )

Indeed...good news for the villains!

The way things are going in the UK we're soon not going to have any cops at all, good or otherwise. (That may be a slight exaggeration, but we've already lost some 17,000 police officers in the last 5 years, and with the post-election budget cuts we're soon going to lose more.)

I didn't say that there wasn't a cogent argument - only that I would be hard-pressed to present one myself. To me laying a fleece out to see if it collects dew sounds uncannily similar to balancing a pencil and seeing which way it spins. But of course I'm no expert on such things.

It seems astonishing to me, but according to Wikipedia it took about 25 years for anyone to see anything "wrong" or "sinister" about the Ouija board. I'd never heard of Charlie Charlie before reading this thread, but I tend to view this sort of thing with suspicion. My wife has a bit of a thing for Tarot cards which I'm not totally happy about either (though I do think the pictures on some of them are pretty cool). I'm not totally sure what to think: as a scientist it bothers me that children should be encouraged to put their trust in pseudoscience. As a Christian....well I can't help thinking of Gideon and his fleece. And of course the LDS have the story of the Liahona. Yes...these things were (supposedly) "of God" but who's to say that Charlie Charlie isn't "of God" too? (I don't believe for one moment that it is, but I don't know that I could present a terribly cogent argument why not.)

This puts me in mind of the Duke University lacrosse scandal of a few years ago, where an exotic dancer complained she had been gang-raped by a bunch of (admittedly rather badly-behaved) lacrosse players. This spurred (quite correctly) a police investigation and (somewhat more dubiously) a well-organised harassment by Duke University students of their own lacrosse team. This in turn prompted 88 Duke academics to publish an open letter "thanking" the students for (what amounted to) expressing their disgust immediately without waiting for any of the facts. You might think these 88 academics would have been embarrassed by the subsequent finding that the "victim" had been lying through her teeth. (I'm not saying that false rape accusations are common, but on this occasion even the state prosecutors declared accused boys to be innocent.) Not a bit of it though - instead of apologising they came out with a raft of excuses as to why their original response had been quite reasonable. All I can say is that this woman (in the Darth Vader selfie case) seems to have a lot more integrity than certain Duke University professors.