Jamie123

I vaguely remember you mentioning MU at some point

Exciting game though. I thought it was going to be the usual story of nil-nil right through to the end of extra time, and then England losing on penalties.

We lost. Boo hoo.

Ugh. Spain scored again...

Equaliser. 1-1 now

...is 1 nil down. Less than 20 minutes to go...

Another theory I've read is that Jesus did not want too many followers early on, because if everyone had become a disciple there would have been no crucifixion and therefore no atonement. He would have grown old, died an ordinary death and returned to his Father, and his whole life would have been pointless. After the crucifixion - and particularly after Pentecost - the number of believers skyrocketed, and these probably included many who had initially rejected him.

I thought there was something about his voice! It reminds me a bit of the poem The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson. (I keep a copy of it on my desk.) This is how I always hoped it would be, but I am always being perplexed by scriptures like Mark 4:11-12 or Isaiah 6:9-10 - that people hardly ever talk about. P.S. A quote from THoH: So totally true.

Hmmm...those aren't quite the lyrics I remember!

https://youtu.be/jL1dEyDMA-o?si=9SO3uS3BNx7V8Lt_

I mean claim not to know. If I claimed I did know the church was true, then I would not be admitting to the possibility that it was false. But if I claimed not to know, that would imply that I was open to the possibility that it was false.

It doesn't sound like what I remember. I think our masks were Spock, Kirk and Bones. Possibly Uhura was there too (for the benefit of girls) but I certainly don't recall any others. Still I was only 6 - or maybe only 5. EDIT: Looks like you're right... Perhaps the UK release didn't have all of them.

I've thought about this a little more. Perhaps in a sense I was wrong. Logically, the Church is either true or else it is not true. If it is not true then it follows that anyone who claims to know it is true must be mistaken. So if I claim not know myself that the Church is true, I am admitting to the possibility that it is false. I am therefore suggesting - albeit indirectly - the possibility that anyone who "knows" it is true is mistaken. (This is what I meant - though I didn't see it quite as clearly then - by my first post on this thread.) A few years ago there was a thread where people were arguing that disagreement with Church authorities should be forbidden on the forum. I attempted to argue that this would be tantamount to banning nonmembers, whereupon Prisonchaplain was held up to me as a shining example of a nonmember in good standing. I wanted to point out that Prisonchaplain, being a member (in fact a cleric) of another denomination was - by his very religious stance - disagreeing with the Church, and therefore with Church authorities. I couldn't though because the thread was shut down by mods. It would have been peevish to have started a new one just to get my point across, so I let it drop. I do still think that "nonmembers welcome but disagreement with the Church forbidden" is not a tenable policy; it's one or the other, not both. And (to give everyone due credit) I don’t think this is the case. The forum is by and large a safe place to voice your honest thoughts and get others' honest thoughts back. I stumbled into this forum many years ago and have always found it stimulating and enjoyable. About ten years ago I had a wobbly period when I deliberately got myself banned, but I cant blame anyone but myself. (It was when my wife miscarried what would have been our second child - but no one here was to know that.) Estradling helped me through it. I'm very grateful to everyone I've ever interacted with here. Thank you all. P.S. I miss Anatess. She was always knocking me off my perch - sometimes most deservedly. I hope she's doing OK.

Android? I think you're confusing Spock with Data. Edit: I get what you're saying though. I remember years ago the supermarket toy shelves being full of Callisto dolls (the Xenas presumably having sold out the first day!) The supermarket buyers probably had no idea who either Xena or Callisto were and goofed up badly! Callisto (in case you'd forgotten her):

Thanks - this story is new to me. The only mention I could find in the Bible to anyone called Clement is Philppians 4:3 (though apparently Clement was a very common name.) I did find your story here here https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/080401.htm. I've often thought I needed to study the church fathers more. Thanks.

I was wondering whether to mention that usage of the word. I wonder if it comes from the legal term "malus animus" (bad motivation).

I don't think the idea would have occurred to me if I hadn't encountered it elsewhere - but it's there if you look for it. I gave two examples: Wordsworth and Philip Pullman. Wordsworth is a tiny bit ambiguous - we have "the soul that rises with us" but later "trailing clouds of glory do we come". There's Psalm 42: "Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me?" Is the Psalmist talking to himself, or to some spiritual companion? (Or perhaps in a sense both.) Another (much sillier) example: in the Simpsons, Bart "sells" his soul to Millhouse for ten bucks, but then dreams that all the other children (even Nelson the bully) have companion selves, while he is all alone. Millhouse meanwhile has not only his own companion self tagging along, but Bart's*. Its a joke of course, but I think it illustrates a particular way souls are perceived. *Spoiler: Millhouse eventually gives Bart's "soul" to Comic Book Guy in return for pogs. (Bart: "You sold my soul for pogs????!!!!") But Lisa kindly buys it back for him, so it all ends well. EDIT: found a clip...

It makes sense: we have - Wife/wives Elf/elves Shelf/shelves Hoof/hooves I Googled it too. It seems that "rooves" was largely replaced by "roofs" some time in the 18th century, but is still used somewhat (though not often enough to be "considered standard"). There is some discussion about it here https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13183/plural-of-roof#:~:text=Apparently both roofs and rooves,is used more than another. A partially relevant parallel: The plural of dwarf always used to be dwarfs (as in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) but J.R.R. Tolkien started a trend when he used dwarves in The Hobbit and later in The Lord of the Rings. Nowadays nearly everyone says dwarves - though only when referring to the mythological beings, not people with dwarfism.

The existence of air was not always obvious. Empedocles, who lived about 450BC, discovered it by lowering an inverted bucket in a tank of water and showing that the water did not rise inside the bucket. He reasoned the bucket must be filled with some ultra-fine substance that held the water back: what we now call "air". (Although he didn't know it at the time, he had also invented the diving bell.) Prior to that (I suppose) people must have known about wind. After all, they had sailing ships long before that. But maybe they just considered it a "phenomenon" and left it there. They knew by experience that by hanging up a sheet of fabric they could propel a boat across water, and the same force (whatever it was) sometimes knocked trees over, or pulled the rooves off houses. But they didn't know it had anything to do with "matter" - like the liquids and solids they could see and feel. Along with fire, these make up the four "classical elements" - it seems quaint now (the sort of thing New Agers talk about) but at the time it was really quite a scientific breakthrough. But I wonder - if Joseph Smith was right, perhaps we're now in a similar position regarding what we call "spirit". Like air, it could be everywhere only we don't know it - except of course when it moves or does something. And if it is really physical, perhaps one day we will build apparatus that can detect it. A fictional account springs to mind: Dan Brown's novel The Lost Key. The scientist heroine (you'll remember that Professor Langdon - like James Bond - has a different female companion in every novel) performs an experiment on her dying mentor, whereby she monitors his weight during his death. She finds that he gets slightly lighter as he dies, proving that his spirit/soul has mass. (Of course the evidence is lost when her laboratory is "exploded" by the bad-guys, but that's typical Dan Brown.) It's trashy pulp-fiction of course, but it shows the idea is out there!

P.S. Now we're on the subject of Mr. Spock, when I was about 6 years old they started putting promotional Star Trek cut-out masks on the backs of Kellogs Corn Flakes boxes. I really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really wanted to be Mr. Spock. The trouble was, so did every other kid. My mother and I checked out every box of Corn Flakes in the entire store, but we couldn't find a single Spock. I had to be content with Captain Kirk, but that wasn't down to any fault of me Mum. She kept on going till we'd checked every single box. That's the kind of mother she was.

Spirit is a funny word - you rarely see it defined. But most of us (okok - some of us including me) have an intuitive idea what it means in this sense. But the origins of the word are interesting: Spirit comes from Latin "spiritus" which literally means breath or wind. It's where we get the word "respiration". The NT Greek word is "pneuma" which has exactly the same usage. From it we get "pneumatic" and "pneumonia". Both have "movement of air" as their primary meaning, used as an analogy for the supernatural sense. I know nothing about ancient Germanic, but the modern German is "geist". Hence poltergeist, and in English ghost. I was tempted to compare it with the English gust (as in a gust of wind) which would again suggest a "moving air" analogy, but now I look it up I find "gust" comes from the Old Norse for "apetite" (cf. gusto). Are gust and geist really false friends? Something to look into. We use "spirit" to mean other things like hydrocarbon compounds (including gasoline and alcohol) and attitude ("That's the right spirit!"). Geist is also used in the latter sense, as in "zeitgeist" - the "attitude of the age". It's also worth mentioning the Latin word "animus" (feminine "anima"), though this is usually translated as soul rather than spirit*. This implies motion, as in "animation" and "animal". So you could say animals do have souls because that's what the word means - though it probably just means that they move, whereas plants generally don't. *I don't understand the difference between soul and spirit. I've read somewhere that LDS believe the "soul" is the spirit and body combined. But there's a persistent notion elsewhere that the "soul" is something separate that accompanies us. A bit like conscience: your soul is to you what Jiminy Cricket was to Pinocchio. Wordsmith wrote "The soul that rises with us, our life's star". There were the "daemons" in Philip Pullman's novels. Etc etc etc.

There was a James Bond movie (I can't remember the title) in which the female protagonist is called "Goodnight". At the end, when Bond is having amorous alone-time with Goodnight (as he usually is with his leading lady at the end of every movie) M is trying to contact them on the radio. He says "Goodnight. Can you hear me Goodnight? Come in Goodnight. Goodnight. Goodnight." Eventually Bond picks up the microphone and says "Good night, sir." Cue credits. That sent everyone in my family into hysterics the first time we saw it. I meanwhile was thinking (in my usual cynical way) that that was the whole reason why she was called "Goodnight" in the first place. Her name was a setup for a joke in the last ten seconds of the movie! P.S. I just looked it up. It was The Man With The Golden Gun. James Bond was Roger Moore and Goodnight was Britt Eckland.

My own "humanistic rationaliy" makes me think "probably nothing". At the time I was - or had been - very excited about Mormonism, which seemed like the Holy Grail. It answered, at least superficially, many of the problems I had with mainstream Christianity, which in the years prior to that had sent me spiralling into atheism. I was thinking "can this really be?" I was always deeply mistrustful of "religious experience". As a student I had felt isolated amongst Christians - especially in "House groups" and "Bible studies" - being physically present and participating, but finding the emotional praying and arm waving had little to do with me. The doctrines, particularly those about Hell and predestination made no sense at all. (Not that most people were very big on hell or predestination, but that these things were tolerated at all was anathema to me.) And that's not all: before I even learned about the Calvinist/Armanianist "thing", there was the whole malarkey of the Gifts of the Spirit - speaking in tongues - you know the sort of thing. It bugged me how casually and matter-of-factly it was accepted, and how no one could understand why I had an issue with it. (Them: "It's the Holy Spirit, that's all it is!" Me: "What do you mean all?") My initial hopes about the Latter-day Saints were turning (I suspect) into a disillusionment that perhaps, underneath the gloss and despite the "we do not believe in predestination, it is a false doctrine" (an actual quote from a GA in a conference video, which buoyed me up incredibly when I first heard it), this was really just more of the same. And like NT says, emotions can have strange effects. I wonder too, since I'm seeing this through the fog of 33 years (it was 1991 by the way, not 1992) whether my memory has built this particular experience into something more significant than it was. But I think not.

I remember that show. It was very funny. Les had an "office" consisting of tape on the floor around his desk, and everyone who came to see him had to pretend to go through the "door".