Jamie123

Something else has just occurred to me... The brown uniforms that the Nazis used to wear (e.g. http://www.usmbooks.com/images/ORGbk/1936OrgBk/NSOB36-5.jpg) As a kid - even after seeing many WW2 movies - if you'd asked me what colour they were I'd have said "dark green". It was only years later when I read about the "brown shirts" that I realized my mistake. I suppose it's because that's the colour I expected military uniforms to be, and that's what I thought I saw.

It reminds me of when I was at school, in physics class, the teacher was explaining Newton's "experimentum crucis" - when a beam of light isolated from the spectrum produced by a prism was passed through a second prism to see if any further divergence would occur. (It didn't - thus proving that divergence or "splitting" of white light was caused by its containing many different colours. Light of a single colour did not have the same effect.) Anyway, the teacher told us (incorrectly I now believe) that Newton wanted to see if he could split (for example) red light into other, hitherto undiscovered colours. A friend of mine said "That would have been great! He might have found turquoise! They didn't know about that colour back then." What?!! Not know about turquoise? Really? Had no one - ever - thought of mixing blue and green paint together until after the time of Newton? I didn't believe that for one second. Looking back, I think my friend must have read somewhere that turquoise hadn't been "discovered" by fashion designers - or some such people - as a suitable colour for their products until some particular time - maybe the 1960's - and totally misunderstood the meaning. As for blue though, what about the convention that the virgin Mary should be depicted in art wearing a blue headscarf? I'm no art historian, but I believe that idea goes back quite a long way!

Xavier From the "George et Xavier" stories they used to have us read in junior school French class. Pronounced "Zav-ee-er" (not "Ex-Avier", like Dr. Xavier from the X-Men). He spent his time trying to fish (while mostly falling into the water) and finding lost dogs called "Nero", accompanied by his so-called "friend" George - who was actually a total jerk and always addressed him as "Imbacile" or "Idiot".

Englebert Humperdink (His singing would keep you awake all night. Imagine hearing "Please release me, let me go!" coming from under the bed at 2am! *shudder*)

Sue (who sews hose on Joe Crow's nose)

Sue (who sews hose on Joe Crow's nose)

Harriet Harman (except she doesn't begin with a C) OK - David Cameron

Quentin Brewster (character from UK tea commercials in the late 1970s)

That's "Dawg" Emily Bishop (from Coronation Street)

Charlie Bucket (from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)

Well, as the late great Spike Milligan (in character as Eccles) once said: "Everyone's gotta be somewhere." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSU592V8WHs

Good to hear from you too! Holidays went well I hope?

LOL - I don't think anyone has ever confused Mormons with Islamic terrorists! (Well, not in the past century anyhow!) On the other hand though, one of the South Park creators (I can't remember if it was Parker or Stone) has said he has an admiration for Mormonism, and considers it to be one of the better religions. If you ever saw the episode "All About the Mormons" - although it's mocking of Smith, it portrays the modern Mormons quite positively. In the end it is Stan who is made to look petty for trying to undermine them.

Namby Pamby (one of Drop Dead Fred's "friends" that he meets in the psychiatric hospital - another one was "Go To Hell Herman")

Thanks for the reply Vort - it's good to hear from you :) This is sort-of what I was driving at in my second point. Sometimes saying that someone has been wronged (or even misquoted) while at the same time not appearing to support what that person stands/stood for is often a very narrow bridge to cross. You can of course quote Voltaire about something like "you are wrong but I defend to the death your right to say it" (I forget the exact quote) - but that gets old very quickly.

Both you and Jerome are tweaking the scenario so as to avoid the moral core of the question. It's as if I were to ask "if a man jumps out of a plane without a parachute, will he not die?" and you replied "well perhaps the plane is still on the ground", and then used that to justify that gravity does not exist. Let me propose a thought experiment: Think back to the worst sin you ever committed. Imagine that you could go back to the point just before you committed that sin, and take a different course of action. What would you do? I would reasonably (I think) assume that if you had truly repented of that sin, you would use that second chance not to commit it. OK - lets now assume that you had (like Valjean) stolen bread to feed some starving children. (And let's assume - just to close your previous loophole - that the person you stole the bread from had plenty to spare, and that the children would otherwise have died.) If you believed that was a sin, then you would need to repent of it - would you not? But let's say you now have a chance to go back and not steal the bread. If you accepted that your previous choice had been a sin, then to do the same thing again would mean that your repentence had not been genuine. Yet your only other action would be to allow the children to starve. (And before you start proposing loopholes again - like "why not try something else like begging/asking for food?" - let's assume that those possibilities have already been tried and have failed.) It seems to me that if you are correct - that all stealing is necessarily sin - there are conceivable situations in which true repentance is not possible. Would a loving God allow this? P.S. I've just thought of another possible loophole people may use to get out of this - that my proposed mechanism of "going back in time" is imaginary, and therefore the situation is not conceivable as existing in the real world. However, I don't think this changes the nature of the problem, which concerns the repented/unrepented state of the soul. What I have proposed is merely a mechanism for testing that state.

OK - I take this back - I've found the thread on this topic now on General Discussion (For what it's worth this was my original post: I was interested to see that nobody has yet posted anything on this part of the forum about the terrorist attack in Paris, or its bloody aftermath (murder of police, the seige, shooting of hostages, and finally of the terrorists themselves). There's been little else in the newspapers here in England for the past week. Two possibilities spring to mind: Events in Europe don't impinge much on this community, which (with a few exceptions such as Funkytown) tends to centre on the USA.The original attack was precipitated by people "criticizing other people's religion", something the LDS (in theory at least) consider bad, and consequently there is an unstated feeling that these cartoonists (to some extent at least) "had it coming", but since no one would be heartless enough to say this outloud, silence has been regarded as golden.Any thoughts? My thoughts are mostly with those mourning the loss of friends and family - many of whom were just ordinary people who had nothing to do with any religious satirizing. As for the magazine staff, they must have known they were poking a hornets' nest. The French have made heroes of them for paying the ultimate sacrifice for free speech. I agree - freedoms were never won without cost - but I also wonder if there's something to be said for "discretion" being "the better part of valour".)

I'm sorry to disappoint you Jerome, but the USA is not the whole world, and the early 21st Century is not the whole of time. There have been periods of history when people were faced with exactly the moral dilemma I proposed - like Valjean was in Les Miserables. And even today there are nations in Asia and Africa and South America where children will starve to death - where charities are overstretched and there is no "government welfare" to pick up the slack. To dismiss the situation I proposed as a "false dichotomy" speaks of a very privileged and parochial outlook.

Crime and sin are not the same thing. Stealing is a crime, yes, because the statute books (which are imperfect) define it as such. But sin is based on a less easily defined standard of what is right and wrong. For example, Oskar Schindler was a criminal. He broke the laws that existed in his country in his time. Do we regard him as "a sinner" because of it? It's no answer to say that the laws of Nazi Germany were themselves criminal; if they were, then it is only the judgment of history which makes them so. Oskar Schindler had no such historical consensus to guide him; he had only had his own sense of right and wrong. He knew he had a duty to uphold the law, but that he had other duties besides. And even "crime" is not absolute; to take an axe to someone's front door and smash it to pieces is in normal circunstances "criminal damage". But if the house is on fire, and people are trapped behind that door who will otherwise burn to death, will the person who breaks the door be prosecuted?

Supposing your children were starving, and your only way of keeping them alive was to steal? Would stealing in those circumstances still be a sin? Or to put it another way, supposing another woman allowed her children to die, so that she would not have to commit the sin of theft. Would you applaud her for her virtue, or call her heartless?

We sort-of celebrate Thanksgiving in our house because my wife is American. I have never actually tasted pumpkin pie, but I believe this year Jean is planning on getting some - or at least she was talking about it a few days ago. If so I'll let you know whether or not I agree with Backroads.

I don't know whether Carl Sagan would have agreed, but Richard Dawkins has admitted many times that he doesn't know 100% that there's no God. He says he's just 99% sure that there isn't - which is a less than the level of certainty many religious people (including LDS) claim to have that their beliefs are true.

Indeed - and you also can't prove for certain that your whole life hasn't really been a dream; that you're not actually Napoleon, about to wake up with the Battle of Waterloo to fight; nor that the people you consider your best friends aren't plotting behind your back to kill you tomorrow. But I'm sure you don't lose any sleep over these possibilities. (Or at least I hope you don't!)

I remember watching and loving the TV series when they showed it in the UK for the first time when I was only 16. My parents gave me the book for a present on my 17th birthday, and I remember it contained a lot more information than the TV show, but (of course!) none of the lovely music! I don't remember Sagan saying anything about the LDS church ever, but I find it hard to imagine him having much time for Mormonism. One religious argument I remember him making ran something like: "If God made the universe, who made God? If you answer 'God always existed', why not cut out the middle-man and say that the universe always existed?"

Edward Gibbon certainly blamed Christianity for the fall of the Roman Empire, but I don't think this was ever more than "his opinion". Whatever religion it practiced, the Empire was under pressure from nations arriving from Eastern Asia in Europe, who were themselves being driven by peoples such as the Huns and the Mongals. By the 5th Century the Western Roman Empire had lost control of the British Isles and the Hispanic peninsula, and maintained a nominal soverignty over Gaul by cooperating with chieftains of the Germanic tribes who had settled there. In 451 the Roman general Aetius defeated Atill the Hun, but most of his army was not Roman but Visigothic. Eventually the tribes Rome relied upon became so powerful they pretty much controlled the Empreror and and in the end abolished him altogether. The Eastern Roman Empute - fully Christianized and centred on Byzantium flourished beyond the Middle Ages. (Sorry Jerome - I rushed this off yesterday, but I realize now I misread your original post - you said it "wasn't" caused by its conversion to Christianity.)