Jamie123

I started reading on Tuesday this week, and I've now nearly finished 1 Nephi. I think this may be a bit fast though to do it very thoroughly. Maybe perhaps we could try to average 10 chapters a week? However some parts will inevitably be denser than others, so it will need someone with a good working knowledge allocate material for each week.

The biggest problem in "cookie smuggling" was getting the lid off without making a noise. This was easy in principle, because the biscuit-barrel lid - though it was metal- rested on top of the barrel and only had to be lifted (gravity providing the only resistance). Fortunately, the knob in the middle of the lid had long come off and been lost, so you had to get your fingernails underneath to lift it. Fortunately though, the lid had been dropped so many times that its edge was bent and buckled, so there were plenty of places where you could get a purchase. The trick was not to let it "clank" against the side as you lifted it. The absolute disaster was to let it slip completely and have it clatter on the floor, telling everyone in the house that you were after the cookies. (This happened often enough to cause the aforementioned dents around the edge.) It was another matter in my grandparents' house. The biscuit barrel there was a spherical beaten-brass affair, with a lid that fitted snugly and tightly, and needed quite a tug to remove. It was no use asking for permission, because although grandparents are always indulgent enough to say "yes", parents (if they are within earshot) have a way of chipping in with "Why don't you have an apple of a pear instead?" (As if the answer to that question wasn't obvious!) The grandparental biscuit barrel was always on the sideboard in the dining room. The trick was to wait until all the grownups (parents and grandparents) were in the sitting room, with with the sitting-and dining-room doors both closed. My grandparents' always had Crawfords' Cheddars, which I loved: you had to make sure you didn't take enough of them for their reduction in number to be noticed. Our biscuit barrel would have looked something like this when it was new: However, I do not remember it being new. It must have been acquired long before I was born. Which is about all I have to say on the subject of biscuits and biscuit barrels. I now need a new excuse to avoid doing something useful...

OK so three of us so far! I suggest we start, and maybe others will join in as we go. I think one of you should lead the group, since you have both read the entire book before. (I have only read about a third of it, and a long time ago.) Maybe we could work on a week-by-week basis, with a set number of chapters each week (set by the leader). At the end of each week, we share what we thought of what we have read, and share anything we think might be helpful to the others. Or it either of you have a better idea we could go with that! (I think Vort and Zil know me well enough, but others may be looking at me suspiciously: you are correct, I am not an LDS Church member, and have no plans of becoming one. I may possibly change my mind some day ("never say never!") but at the moment that is my position. However, I am not interested in talking anyone else out of their beliefs. For the purpose of this exercise I am going "inside" the world of the BoM, and trying to understand what it means to those who believe in it.)

That sounds excellent - thank you We can perhaps fill the gaps in each other's knowledge where necessary! P.S. We'll wait a bit in case anyone else wants to join. If it's going to be just the two of us, perhaps you could lead it and set the pace? (Since you know it far better than me.)

Is anyone else reading The Book of Mormon at the moment? A couple of days back I thought I'd give it another go. And then I thought it would be nice to start a reading group to go through the entire book in stages and exchange thoughts. On one occasion some missionaries on comeuntichrist.com threw me out of the chat (with the usual "we respect your thoughts but... blah blah... we have a testimony..." etc.) because I dared to suggest that the BoM was written in King James English rather than the language of ancient America. It would be nice to have a free and open dialogue without fear of that sort of thing. Would anyone be up for it? P.S. I have only barely started - I am on 1 Nephi 18 so it's no trouble for me to start over.

Lol I didn't understand a word of it!

I do agree with you - it's eerily close to the vague wooly unvoiced ideas many of us have about God for it to be recognizable, and the crass way he puts it makes it funny. (Not like Calor Gas!!!) It's rather like the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where they meet God along the way. At 14, having vaguely imagined God as an irritable white-bearded guy on a cloud, I found this quite disturbing and also VERY funny!

And while we're on the subject of pooh-pooh...

Fine by me too. I won't attempt to shut down Kingston Spiritualist Church any more than I'll interfere with congregations who pray to a six-armed elephant-man. I'm treading on thin ice here I know, so I'd better stop digging*. *And mixing my metaphors.

Chocolate chip ones?

I don't suppose many of you are familiar with Alan Partridge. Alan Partridge is a comedy character on British TV, played by Steve Coogan. He is the worst chat-show host imaginable: he is rude, ill-informed, badly researched, self-important and foul-tempered. He only has two real friends: Liz and Michael, who are about the only people stupid enough to put up with him. In the later series he also has an Eastern European girlfriend with an obsession for teddy bears. Anyway, in one memorable episode Alan is interviewing a Christian lady. It went something like this: Christian Lady: Alan, do you believe in God? Alan: Er... (thinks about it for a moment) ...yes I do. CL: How do you see God? What is he like? Alan: God is... God is... (temporarily stumped, but then has a sudden inspiration) God is a gas! CL: What??? Alan: Yes! Well... he's not a little gas. He's not like Calor Gas. He's a Big Gas... Like Oxygen! Or Carbon Dioxide. Oh no... that's bad isn't it? That's the Devil! I always think of people who pooh-pooh the idea of a personal God as the "God is a Gas" crowd. A few years ago my wife really wanted to go to the spiritualist church in Kingston, so I took her. I hated - not least because it had all the trappings of a church (including the Stations of the Cross and Holman Hunt's "Light of the World" above the altar) but hw many times do you think Jesus was mentioned in the service? Not even once! Anyway, afterwards I went out into the little garden at the back and started talking to this bloke who was sitting there. When I asked him if he saw God as a person, his attitude was definitely "pooh-pooh" - as if he couldn't believe anyone could be so backward as to believe such a thing. Then he started driveling on about how "God" just means the same thing as "good"... and how the two are really the same thing. This is exactly what I mean by "God is a Gas": if all God is is "good", what's the point of God? We already have (if you'll excuse the pun) a perfectly "good" word for "good" so why do we need "God" too. We might just as well say that the Smurfs are God because they were good and Gargamel was bad...etc. Anyway, I told all of this to our vicar at the time. As well as being our priest, she was also moderately famous on the radio - though I don't think I ever listened to her. I was surprised to find that she was "God is a Gas" too. She seemed momentarily shocked I should believe God was a person... but then checked herself and said (rather patronizingly I thought) "Well OK I guess if that's how you want to see God..." That helped me put a few other things she'd said into context too... about the "afterlife" being no more than the memories our friends and families have of us. There was something else she said too about how she was convinced of the existence of "God" (whatever the word "God" actually means to her) by pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope and "Oh the colours! The beauty!) Well just as much beauty is to be found in the Mandelbrot Set and yet that is just z=z^2+c. And the Golden ratio? Just the limiting ratio of terms in the Fibonacci sequence. Is God merely mathematics? Is that all our Heavenly Father amounts to - just numbers? He might just as well be "A Gas"!

In the UK, it is possible to go straight into med school at 18 (though I believe in practice a lot of med school entrants actually do have degrees already). A basic medical degree MBBS, which is actually two bachelor degrees* (MD means something totally different in the UK) takes five or six years to complete, after which you have the courtesy title of "Dr." but cannot do much except under close supervision. This is followed by another 9 or 10 years of clinical training - as a "foundation doctor" (what used to be called a "houseman") and then as a "registrar" - so I suppose it would be possible to be fully qualified at 32. * Medicinae Baccalaureus and Baccalaureus Chirurgiae. Medicinae Doctor (MD) is a "higher doctorate" and is awarded for research contributions (similar to a PhD only a bit more prestigious).

Did you actually forbid them from taking the cookies? (Your post doesn't make that very clear.) As a kid I was forever taking cookies out of the cookie jar. (We'd have said "biscuits out of the biscuit barrel", but it means the same thing.) Taking cookies was not forbidden exactly, but if a grown-up saw you do it they would say something boring like "don't ruin your appetite", which spoiled the enjoyment. So you tended to do it surreptitiously. I can well remember the pleasure of getting a bunch of cookies from the cookie jar to my bedroom with no grown-up knowing about it. Cookies always tasted better when they'd been "well smuggled"! P.S. Did you know that John Wayne based his on-screen persona on Wyatt Earp, whom he met in 1928?

To equate this with physical death would imply that the story is literal. I've always taken "death" in the story to refer to alianation from God - the breaking of the relationship between Man and God, which required Christ's atonement to restore.

I don't think that's so very different from what I suggested.

I don't think I asked a question in this thread. Are you sure you don't mean someone else?

This is tangential to the subject, but it's interesting that in Revelation 22, only the Tree of Life is mentioned. No mention of the Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil, as in Genesis: I've long wondered if the Tree of Knowledge represents the Law and the Tree of Life represents Grace. Prior to the atonement Law was needed, but as a temporary measure. In the world ruled by Christ, the Law (and hence the tree that represents it) is no longer needed.

I've struggled with this for many years. As a teenager I stumbled across Leibniz's "monadism" and the concept of "preestablished harmony" and utterly hated it. Years later I learned about Calvisnism* and hated that too. Predestination seemed to create a world which was dead - sterile - empty of joy. It reduced God from a loving Father to a mere clockmaker, with humans as mere cogs and gears and springs. Passages like Romans 9 gave me a nasty feeling that was what the Bible taught, which made me very irritable of people who quoted them with joy - like it was somehow a cause for rejoicing that we were "predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son" - while those horrible reprobates "in the World" were predestined to roast forever and no one could do anything to stop it happening. Ugh! When I encountered the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints I wasted a good many missionary-hours debating with them about predestination (with them repeatedly telling me "this isn't what we're here to discuss!") I recall one Elder (who had never actually taught me) giving me an encouraging smile and saying "You're doing well aren't you, Jamie? You're Elect, aren't you, eh?" I mumbled something about "I don't know about that" but I really wanted to yell in his face "EVERYONE'S TOLD ME YOUR CHURCH DOESN'T BELIEVE IN ELECTION!!!!! AND NOW YOU ASK ME THAT?????" In some ways I wish I had - though it would have been mean. But at that time, I still somehow had the idea that "free will" was merely a stochastic process. I was only just beginning to wonder why a stochastic process was any more "free" than a deterministic one? Once that thought did come, I learned to be a bit more cautions: I had a vague idea there might be something else that was neither deterministic nor stochastic: the only word I really had to describe it was "spiritual" though I never really understood what this word means. We use it to describe so many different things: there are certain combustible chemicals called "spirits", some of which are served in bars. There are the phrases "Show some spirit!" or "That's the spirit!" of "Spirit of the Age" (or Zeitgeist as the Germans say). There are the "spirits" of dead people that mediums (supposedly) communicate with through crystals and Tarot cards and other such tosh. (My inability to take such codswallop seriously was one reason (I suspect) why my wife left me.) And then there is the Holy Spirit. But the word originally it comes from the Latin "spiritu", which essentially means "air" (though with secondary supernatural meanings) - and is a translation of the Greek "pneuma" (same meaning) or the Hebrew "ruach" (same meanings). I can't really finish this post, except to say that I still don't really understand what free will is. *To be totally fair to John Calvin, what is currently bandied about as "Calvinism" isn't quite what he taught. He was never (I believe) very strong on the idea of predestination.

Not exclusively an LDS idea: from the 15th Century hymn "Adam Lay Ybounden" we have: I remember singing that in the church choir many years ago and thinking "So the Mormons aren't the only ones who think that!"

One theory I've heard is that the "sin" was not so much the original disobedience, but the fact that afterwards they blamed each other: the man blamed the woman and the woman blamed the snake. If Adam had said "Sorry, God, I messed up!" everything would have gone on as before. I remember seeing a beaten metal depiction of the scene. (I've not been able to find a link, but I think it's in the Vatican art collection.) It shows a very stern God (depicted as Christ, with a cruciform halo) pointing accusingly at Adam, who is pointing at Eve, who is in turn pointing at the snake. (God: "What have you done!!?" Adam: "It's not my fault, God, it's hers!!" Eve: "Well, HE told me to do it!!" God: "Well then, you're ALL in trouble!!") (I doubt anyone here will agree with this: I think Latter-day Saints believe in "the fortunate fall" - that Adam's disobedience was part of God's plan from the start.)

Anyone considered this dilemma before?

The ending was fine, except they should have added a bit where she says "your slippers? Oh, I shoved them down the toilet and now it's blocked! Good luck fixing that, Prrrrrr...*blows raspberry*....rrrrofessor Higgins!" and storms out.

He could always write something with the pencil he's holding!

Also there was a chapter epigraph in Children which interested me. I think it was something about whether changes in environment drive evolution, or whether evolution drives changes in environment - or some such thing. (With all the clutter in my house it could take me years to find the book, so can anyone supply the exact quote?)

I think that must have been where I read it too. In another place he talks about Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales - again from ancestral memories.