Jamie123

There's the basis of a good parlour game here. Here's my contribution: "A crazy inventor's latest contraption gives his family phantasmagoric food poisoning from undercooked eggs and sausages. They hallucinate flying automobiles, picturesque child abduction and a game of billiards you can't lose!"

By whom. And where's the question mark? 10/10 and a gold star for good referencing. 0/10 and "see me" for grammar and punctuation!

It really happened too. Poor old Charles I... It's a matter of slight embarrassment to me that since the break with Rome, the Church of England has only canonized one person: St. Charles the Martyr (otherwise known as Charles I, or Stewart "that Man of Blood"). There are several shrine to him across England, including one at Carisbrooke Castle which I've been to many times. So why was he sainted? Well, he refused to do away with bishops. Had he agreed (so the Society of King Charles the Martyr argue) he would have kept his life and his kingdom. But the Church of England would have become like the Church of Scotland - Presbyterian instead of Episcopalian. No more bishops means no more priests or deacons, which means the sacraments would no longer be valid since the chain of ordination linking the clergy with Christ's apostles would be broken. And wouldn't that be sad? (Don't ask me why there's a leopard in the picture because I don't know. I expect there's a good reason for it.)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/25/oxford-student-judge-suggested-bright-prison-spared-jail-stabbing/ I'm not sure what to think about this. I know we want our brightest and best in important jobs like heart surgery, and I know top schools like Oxford put a lot of pressure on kids, making some of them turn to drugs. It's very sad for her and I don't totally blame the judge for wanting to be lenient. But to spare her jail in order to save her medical career is crazy: if med school is too hard for her to handle without taking drugs and getting stabby-stabby with the bread knife whenever someone cares enough to try to stop her, she probably shouldn't be there. And sorry though I am for her, I really don't want her operating on my heart, thank you very much. Her parents have something to answer for as well: not content with having a very bright daughter, they wanted to have a very very bright daughter and (I suspect) pushed her too hard.

It might be a thing of the past here too soon - half the students here are Muslims.

How long before they install a student bar? (A college without a student bar still seems very strange to me - but this is boozy England.)

When Her Majesty dies, I'm not going to like it very much because we'll have a king instead, and we've always had a queen ever since before I was born. Also I'm rather in the habit of singing... "God save the Queen/She's really mean/God save the mean mean mean mean Queen..." ...to the tune of Wagner's Bridal Chorus (from Lohengrin) every time she's mentioned on TV to annoy my family. I usually add something about protecting her from being eaten by crocodiles, alligators and falling out of aeroplanes too - I'm quite the royalist! But what about when we have a king? What about... "God save the King/Who don't look nowt like Bing..." (Crosby) ...? It doesn't scan very well. So here's hoping Her Maj. has many happy healthy years to come!

When I took the missionary lessons way back in the 1990s I was given to understand that it was South America, and that Lehi sailed west over the Atlantic. I daresay this was an innocent misunderstanding but it coloured my none-too-attentive reading of the BoM and I got the impression that "Bountiful" must have been somewhere in western Africa - Morocco perhaps. It's only since coming to this forum that I discovered it was a Pacific crossing - which actually makes more sense. The Pacific has many islands so the journey could have been made in short "hops" and the ship repaired en-route.

Teacher (quoting): As the lean leech, its victim found, is pleasedTo fix itself upon a part diseased.Till, its black hide distended with bad blood,It drops to die of surfeit in the mud,So the base sycophant with joy descries... Can anyone explain what Ambrose Bierce means by the word "sycophant"? Student: Let me draw you a picture...

How dare they change it without my permission – signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters?

Be a good boy and eat all your greens and maybe you'll grow up to be one!

Good old Michael! He and Thatcher were always clashing over something or other.

Hmmm....OK I'll admit it - "David" is a real person - and truth is stranger than fiction! He may have changed since, but at the time I knew him he was a Thatcherite, and the most inflexible fundamentalist I've ever met. He's a professor now at a Scottish university.

I never voted for her at the time, but whether I would vote for her now...? I don't know. Possibly. Even back then I had to admit she was impressive. The trouble was as time went by she lost it. John Major tried be "Thatcher Mk.II" but he was a pale shadow of her - poor guy.

Haha - I can well imagine it being considered the "South Park" of Mormon cinema.

Yes - that is about right. Perhaps its not a fair question considering missionaries are a very mixed bunch. I can of course base them on real LDS missionaries I've known. This is inevitably the way it's going to be of course (David and Peter are inspired by real people) but I don't want to overdo it because it seems a little exploitative and lazy. It's much better to borrow from reality but to mix and mingle and add rather than to copy. My main concern though is that having never actually been Mormon myself there's a lot I don't really understand and that in being creative there's a danger of misrepresentation. The only one of these movies I've seen is "God's Army", which I found quite amusing. I get the impression though that it's not universally liked by Mormons, as the guy behind it is an ex-Mormon. Another movie about missionaries I've seen is "The Errand of Angels" (which has got to be as different from "God's Army" as it is possible to get). Although I probably missed a lot of nuances, I found this quite poignant - particularly towards the end where the two sisters feel they're getting nowhere - with the "comparative religion" couple, and then the other couple who insist on making out in front of them. Anyway thanks very much - I'll check out The Best Two Years and The Other Side of Heaven.

What I said about space-time wasn't supposed to be anything to do with the missionaries - I was just musing in response to what Sunday said about origins, and the relationship between ultimate origins and ultimate destinations: whether our existence necessarily needs to have a start and a finish. This is not my area at all, but this my idea of spacetime built up from reading many popular science books and magazines over the years. The x-axis represents space as we know it (though reduced to 1 dimension - though it could have any number) and the y-axis is an additional "space" dimension representing the flow of time. Objects in this frame of reference move up the y-axis at a speed c (the speed of light). Now of an object moves along the x-axis at velocity v then it must move more slowly up the y-axis, otherwise its resultant speed would be greater than the speed of light, and thus time would be different for a person riding on that object. (From that person's point of view of course the axes would be tilted so that he is stationary and we are moving.) I dashed off a quick diagram to demonstrate: I was just speculating as there are at least three dimensions in space, and possibly many more, some of these perhaps serve as multiple time dimensions too (as the y-axis is merely another dimension of space) and thus just as different trajectories in space are possible, why not different trajectories in time also? I'm not suggesting that this is really what relativity shows. My grasp of relativity is rather flaky anyway, and I am probably talking utter hogwash - I was just speculating. P.S. Just looking at this again something struck me - if the traveler were moving to our right almost (but not quite) the speed of light, then for all practical purposes his y-axis would become our x-axis and vice versa. Therefore he would experience as space what we experience as time and vice versa.... Interesting.

Well North Korea is a necrocracy - why not the US?

I remember reading that book back in the 1990s when I was a semi-regular LDS attender. I think it was intended as a leader's manual, but our particular ward was giving out copies to everyone. I kept it for a few years, until I started dating a rather conservatively Christian girl (not my current wife) who said the sight of it on my bookshelf - along with (horror of horrors) the Book of Mormon, Bahagavad Gita, I Ching and a Jehovah's Witness Bible commentary - made her cringe. So I returned it. It's quite interesting to see it again - thanks

I agree with you - I thought it was probably better to approach former missionaries rather than serving ones.

Would I be correct in thinking the LDS position is that "something" always existed, and that we were all included in that "something" - though in a much earlier stage of our development? Many Christians take it for granted that we came into existence at birth (or possibly at conception), but insist that we go on existing for all eternity thereafter. But if if our existence doesn't have an end-point, why should it need to have a start point? And If we do have a start-point, why should we not also have an end-point? I think a lot of us "need" the concept of soul-survival because we cannot imagine not existing. But if time and space are the same (as the theory of relativity requires), what's the difference between saying "I won't exist in the year 3,000" and "I don't currently exist in Tokyo or New York"? And another thing: why should time even be a single straight line? There are multiple directions in space - and time is just another manifestation of space - why should there not be multiple timelines? Perhaps at death we sort-of "turn a corner", and indeed do cease to exist in the timeline we previously followed. Ditto at birth.

A few years ago I took a course on The Enlightenment, for which I had to read David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. I was very impressed with this - I love the three-way interaction between Demea, Philo, and Cleanthes - how often two of them, however different, seem to be in alignment against the third. By comparison Plato's dialogues seem quite flat - with everyone just being a foil to Socrates' wisdom. Anyway, for a few years now I've been thinking of writing a book of my own along similar lines to Hume. Unlike Hume I will have many characters, though there will be three central protagonists who bear some comparison to Demea, Philo, and Cleanthes. All three of them are doctoral students who work in a physics or engineering lab, and who meet together for coffee and talk about their thoughts and ideas - especially about religion and the meaning of life. They are: David - a fundamentalist Christian, Biblical creationist and Thatcherite conservative. He roughly corresponds to Demea. Peter - a lapsed Catholic and atheist. Rather left-wing and anti-monarchistic. He corresponds roughly to Philo. James - a lapsed Anglican and agnostic. He corresponds very, very loosely to Cleanthes, but is more a depiction of myself as I was in the early 1990s. A lot of the debate will be about free will and agency and the nature of good and evil, and the relationship between science and religion. But at one point Peter and James (who are roommates) take the LDS missionary discussions. David refuses to attend these meetings (saying that the Mormons are "heretics"), but Peter and James nevertheless debate Mormon ideas with him - particularly on the nature of grace. The point is, I want to be as fair as possible in my depiction of the LDS missionaries, and not have them say or do things that real missionaries wouldn't. I know a lot of returned missionaries post here: It would be great if (assuming I get around to doing this) some of you guys could read over what I write and give me some feedback? I should stress that this is not going to be an anti-Mormon book. Although neither Peter nor James actually join the LDS Church (or at least not within the scope of the book), they go some way to defending Mormonism against David's criticisms.

As I understand it, Roman Catholics consider marriage one of the Seven Sacraments: Baptism Confirmation Communion (what the LDS call "sacrament") Holy Orders (priesthood) Marriage Unction (anointing) Reconciliation (confession/absolution/penance) To Anglicans it's debatable: High Anglicans (Anglo-Catholics) will say yes it is, but not one "generally necessary to salvation". Low Anglicans (Evangelicals) would say no: the only two sacraments are baptism and communion. Most other protestants would I believe say no.

I'm not LDS, so you may want to take anything I say with a pinch of salt, but this is my experience has told me. Firstly pornography and masturbation go hand in hand. (They're not called "w**k mags" for nothing!) Looking at porn will lead towards masturbation. It may not lead to masturbation straight away - you may be able to resist the urge (for a while) but the drive will be there, and sooner or later you you will probably yield to it. So you can find yourself in one of three categories: You can keep away from porn and masturbation entirely and for life. You can indulge - then have an "awakening conscience" moment, destroy your stash and delete your online accounts. You think you've beaten it. But then comes Temptation. Temptation is, as Ignatius of Loyola once said (**political incorrectness alert**) "like a nagging wife" - it gets inside you and niggles at you and never gives you a moment's peace. Eventually you decide - in a weak moment - to have a "day trip back to the pigs" (a lovely expression coined by Adrian Plass). "Just a quick never-to-be-repeated peek," you think. "No harm will come of it! I can always repent!" But the trouble with "a day trip back to the pigs" is that it turns quickly into a weekend break, then a week's vacation and finally a two-month sabbatical. Then (hopefully) comes the "awakening conscience" again, and the cycle repeats. You can indulge wholeheartedly and to hell with the consequences. Now the problem with this is that sooner or later you will lose interest in "ordinary" porn and will crave something more extreme and more shocking. You will sink deeper and deeper, seeking ever more perverse material. Even real sex with your partner will lose its savour. (There is a scatological British comic called Viz, which used to feature a strip called "Morris Day the Sexual Pervert"; the protagonist was always pushing aside his very attractive wife in order to indulge in his own bizarre perversions alone. It was intended as ridiculous humour, but it had more than a grain of truth in it.) Eventually nothing will satisfy you at all - you'll be like the man with the lizard on his shoulder in C.S. Lewis' "The Great Divorce" (if you don't know the book, read it!) - not even lustful but desperately craving lust - and at the same time hating every moment of it. Now I'm not saying that getting yourself into Category 3 will necessarily turn you into a violent child-raping monster. (There is a world of difference between indulging in violent sexual fantasy and acting it out for real, and I fear that criminalizing the viewing of extreme porn, as has happened in the UK, punishes the families - who often are the real victims - as much as the porn-viewers themselves. But that's not relevant to what I'm saying here.) I suspect there are many people in this situation who seem to all outward appearance quite normal, but who are inside treading the borders of hell; both longing for salvation and hating the thought of it. The trick is to get out of Category 2 and into Category 1, before the cycle descends into Category 3. One approach (and this ought to be the simplest thing in the world, but for some reason isn't) is to immerse yourself in scripture. Read it every day - several times a day. Don't content yourself with those little books that reproduce carefully chosen passages of non-challenging scripture, together with bland "explanations" of what they (supposedly) "mean". Read the entire Bible cover to cover - OT and NT concurrently - and at the same time (maybe a half hour set aside in the mornings) concentrate on particular books, especially the four Gospels. Try to read it prayerfully. Read it even (especially!) when you don't feel like reading it. Even if you don't understand the point of what you're reading - and you're certainly not alone there - some parts of the Bible are very strange! Scripture is anathemic to pornography - if you have both in your life they'll fight like cats till one is gone. (This includes erotic scripture like Song of Songs - that's the "real thing", of which pornography is a twisted counterfeit.) And pray too - again even when it seems pointless, and you feel no one is listening, keep at it. It may sound trite, but "Satan trembles when he sees the weakest Christian on his knees". Another thing: close all your porn accounts online. If the sites don't have a "close account" feature, then write an unmemorizably complicated sequence of characters on a piece pf paper, change your password to that, then tear up the paper. If you have an e-mail account to recover your password, go through the same procedure with that too. Now if the fit takes you, you will need to create a new account, and a new e-mail, which these days requires a complicated procedure involving your cellphone. So if later on you decide a "pig-day-trip" is in order, you will be faced with a complicated rigmarole of procedures, at some point during which you will hopefully (and by God's grace) see reason. Yet another thing: take Communion (Sacrament, Eucharist, Mass, Lord's Table...whatever you call it in your denomination.) Don't shy away from it because you feel "unworthy". I have made that mistake many times, and for far stupider reasons than either masturbation or pornography. If you know you are a sinner, know you need God's forgiveness, desire God's forgiveness, are willing to follow Him - though you might doubt your resolve to go through with it - then as far as that goes you are worthy. That's what it's there for - so that your sinful body may become purified through Christ's body. As for "telling other people", I have at times in the past confessed masturbation to my priest at confession, but I've always been a half-hearted Anglo-Catholic; deep down I'm a protestant, and I believe we all have a "direct line" to God. (The "Priesthood of All Believers" and all that.) But communion with other members of the Church help us to know we are not alone in our struggles. (BTW I'm talking here about the "Universal Church" here - not any denomination - but I'm straying into an area where most LDS would probably disagree with other Christians - so I'll say no more.)

Thanks a lot Maureen. That's not the song I'm thinking of, but I do love Joni Mitchell