Jamie123

Members
  • Posts

    3226
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    31

Everything posted by Jamie123

  1. I think I understand what you're saying - you're supposing that in my view it is the Prophet who is the prime mover, while in your view it is God. I don't totally agree with this. For one thing other churches make much the same kind of claim about the decisions they make (or perhaps I should say "revelations they receive"): for example I remember when the Vatican were deciding whether to beatify Mother Theresa, one Catholic commentator pointed out that it was God who was the main actor, and the cardinals were merely trying to divine His will. But it would be difficult for a non-Catholic like me to take that view of the proceedings. Now as well as being a non-Catholic I'm also a non-Mormon, but I'll try to look at this from your perspective (if I can - no promises that I'll get it right). It seems to me that even if your view is correct, "revelation" still comes through prayer, answers to prayers, and through the study of the commandments given in scripture. I remember a while ago reading what one of the Apostles wrote about the circumstances leading up to the admission of blacks into the priesthood in 1978 (I'll try to find the reference later). The way he described it this momentous decision (or "revelation" I should say) came through prayerful reflection by the General Authorities rather than through the apparition of angels, or disembodied hands writing on the temple wall. It was still a decision made by human men....but given the authority of those men - not to mention the basis on which their decision was made - I don't see how it wasn't also an action of God.
  2. Is pretty much what I conceded to Jerome, wasn't it? (OK - I guess my version could have been paraphrased "a prayerful decision must have been made not to send missionaries to North Korea". You might argue that it was "divine revelation" but it still comes down to the same thing: a decision based on prayer.)
  3. Sorry for the long delay - I've been too busy the last day or 2 to make much of a response to anything anyone's written here. Firstly thanks everyone for your well-wishes. My wife is back home now, getting very irritated with my fussing, badgering her about where various cooking utensils are kept and smoking the entire house out yesterday trying to cook her spaghetti bolognaise for lunch. So I'm back in my office this morning with a pile of work to do, but not before I've made a few responses: I pretty much agree with you nowadays: when I said that I had barely turned 20 and there was quite a dichotomy in my mind between God in books and God in reality. (Gandalf's "there never was much hope" meant a lot more to me on the pages of a book than in reality.) As I've got older I've learned to see that life is finite anyway, and given the inevitability of death (and whatever lies beyond) there might be something to be said for chasing even the most unlikely victories - if only for the sake of "points for trying"! But then of course I think of North Korea... I've always taken the expression "putting God in a box" to mean assuming practical limitations on His powers. The sting was that that was exactly what I was doing: but I think most of us are (if we're going to be honest about it and not make excuses) guilty of this to some extent. I wasn't suggesting any such thing. I was merely asking why it wasn't being done, and whether the Church's decision not to constituted (to some extent) putting God in a box. Neither was it intended to be a guilt trip (especially as I have no intention of going anywhere near North Korea myself, nor sending any of my children there, nor recommending that anyone else send their children there either). I don't suppose Abraham had much hope of seeing Isaac again when he bound him to the altar - but of course that's just something that happened in the Bible.... I say hastily as I imagine myself as Abraham and my daughter as Isaac (and back into the box goes God). Here we do have a valid point: but to hold up "subject to kings" as a universal principle that must never be violated is nonsense. Let's say for example you were shipwrecked off North Korea and taken to Kim Jong Un, and he ordered you to renounce your allegiance to Christ. What would be your correct course of action? Many of the things we are commanded to do as Christians do conflict with each other. Sometimes a prayerful decision is needed about which to obey. In this case a decision was clearly made that the "subject to kings" thing took precedence over "make disciples of all nations". That I can understand. EDIT: Another thought just struck me - who knows that the LDS Church doesn't have a huge covert operation in North Korea? I probably shouldn't have used that phrase without understanding its in-culture connotations. I always took it to mean something similar to "God Squad" or "Bible Basher" - someone who practices of Christianity in a visibly serious manner that might - especially to an outsider - appear either annoying or comical (or both). And there's nothing wrong with that of course: ideally all Christians should be "Bible Bashers". Also (if I understand history) the word "Mormon" was originally used as a term of mockery. But maybe "Peter Priesthood" is different, so I apologise for using the term. Having said that though (and this is going to sound horribly callous) I've never had a great deal of natural sympathy for people who complain about being "made fun of" for their faith. I was (mostly in my younger days) frequently teased, taunted, mocked, ridiculed and baited - not for being a Christian, nor for attempting to apply Christianity in a serious manner, but for being a general all-round nincompoop, stooge, sucker, being useless at sport (I could never catch a ball), liking ELO (I still do), clearing my throat loudly before each sentence, wandering aimlessly around the neighbourhood every evening (I don't need to tell you what the taunters made of that habit!), still wearing vests when I was 18, losing the entire rigging off a sailing boat (in ridiculous circumstances) in the middle of Rutland Water and taking a long time to learn how to drive. Let's just say I was a wonderful target for anyone wishing to be on the side of the taunters rather than the taunted. But how much more noble and "saintly" would it be to be ridiculed for belonging to Christ? Surely that would be something worth being ridiculed for? I could understand offence being taken if it were Heavenly Father, or Jesus Christ, or the Holy Spirit (or even the Church) that was being mocked, but anything along the lines of "har har saying your prayers again, God-boy?"....why would I care? But of course I've only ever walked in my own shoes* so I can't speak for everyone else's sensitivities. This is just my personal feeling. * Except on a couple of occasions when I've needed to wear high heels (and a dress) in am-dram stage comedies.
  4. Ok I'm sorry the truth is I'm deathly worried about my wife who has surgery tomorrow morning. I'm trying not to show it to her but it's putting me in a black mood. I was venting off. I shouldn't be taking it out on you guys. As for contempt for believers you are quite right - but I am also a believer myself so it's self-directed too. Sorry - sending this from my phone - jamie
  5. Many, many years ago, when I was a student, I voiced the view that when approached by drunks and addicts begging on the street, the kindest thing to do was give them a couple of quid, because trying to persuade them to change their ways "probably wouldn't work". I was with a group of Christian Unionists at the time, in Pizza Hut. In fact I had just attended my first ever Christian Union meeting since going to college, and considering that I was already a sophomore (though we don't use that term in the UK) you'll believe that I was not overly keen on attending religious student meetings. If I'd been a little older and wiser I'd have know better than to have said this. The guy sitting next to me (who was the non-LDS equivalent of "Peter Priesthood" - at least as far as his words went) took serious issue with me and the next couple of minutes I was formally charged with: 1. Putting God in a box 2. Limiting the power of the Holy Spirit 3. Quite a variety of other unpleasant things. The main prosecution evidence was that "so many people" had had their lives "utterly changed" by the Holy Spirit working through Christians speaking out in faith. He omitted to tell me who these people were, how many of them, how their lives had "utterly changed" or for how long. But I suspect (perhaps unfairly) that they come from the blurb on the backs of a bunch of "Christian paperbacks" he'd seen at the UCCF bookstall. Or (let's be a little fairer) perhaps from the pages inside said Christian paperbacks that he'd bought and read to give himself a warm glow whilst not doing a thing to help anybody...except raising his hands and closing his eyes during Church worship and shouting meaningless truisms from the back of the bus during CU outings about how he wants to be a "Slave to Christ" . Sorry to sound bitter. I'm just in one of those moods. Also this has nothing to do with the LDS Church....except why are there no LDS missionaries in North Korea? They could be sent in illegally couldn't they? After all, isn't obeying the directive to "make disciples of all nations" more important than respecting the wishes of a baby-faced dictator? Isn't God more powerful than Kim Jong Un? I know exactly why not: "it probably wouldn't work". They'd be caught and put in labour camps - or worse. But hey - isn't raising such an objection "putting God in a box"? I find that common sense has a way of making you do exactly that.
  6. Really Vort - you do surprise me!
  7. This is one of the great ideas behind the Trinity: that God "contains" the loving community of the Father, Son and Spirit. God contained love for others within Himself from the start. At the moment I'm reading The Shack by Wm. Paul Young (a book my wife has long badgered me to read, and I'm finally getting round to doing so). The protagonist, while grieving for his murdered daughter, meets God and finds "Him" to be three people living together in a log cabin; when he asks "God the Father" (who defies his expectations by appearing to be a black African woman) why there are three of them and not one, she explains that if there were only one of her, she would be unable to love as God.
  8. In an earlier thread (http://lds.net/forums/topic/57028-does-god-exist/) MormonGator suggested I check out “Quinque Viae” by St. Thomas Aquinas. I have, and it’s very interesting. Here are some comments: (My summaries of Thomas Aquinas’ arguments are rather laconic – if you think I’ve missed some important point by brevity, please tell me.) 1. The unmoved mover “Nothing moves unless it is moved by something else. (Nothing which moves is own mover.) In order for anything to move, there must have been a first mover: God.” Comments: This is very much what I was getting at in my earlier post; if we interpret “move” as “come into existence” then how does that apply to God? If God is the “author of existence” then His own existence must rely upon Himself. He is both “mover and moved” – which totally contradicts what Aquinas is saying. Also the first observation that nothing moves without a mover may have been true in Thomas Aquinas’ experience, but what about quantum-level events such as radioactive decay, that are only governed by probability? 2. The first cause “Everything must have been caused by something else. (Nothing that is caused is its own causer.) So for anything to be caused there must have been a first cause: God.” Comments: This seems to be little more than a restatement of the argument 1, so I’ll move straight on… 3. Argument from contingency “A thing may be either (a) non-existent or (b) existent for a finite period of time. It must be possible to all these things to be non-existent at the same time, in which case there would be nothing to make anything else become existent. Something must therefore exist permanently: God.” Comments: This assumes that (a) things do not come into existence spontaneously (the axiom behind arguments 1 and 2, which is questionable in the light of quantum theory) and (b) that a thing may exist without necessarily causing another thing to exist. This would require a thing exist without influencing in any way other things that exist. Is this even possible? Leibniz might have argued that there are an infinite number of monads which play no part in the pre-established harmony of the universe, but could such entities truly be said to “exist”? (I don’t know, and I always thought Leibniz was wacked.) 4. Argument from degree “Some things are more perfect than others. Perfection must therefore have an ultimate standard from which all other degrees of perfection are assessed: God.” Comments: I shall have to think about this some more before I can really comment, but for the moment two ideas spring to mind: firstly Plato’s “transcendent forms” – things that exist imperfectly in reality have their perfect archetypes in the world of ideas. But if a thing that exists as an idea can be truly said to “exist” then mermaids and dragons and the Loch Ness monster (not to mention God) truly exist. When communication engineers talk about the “gain” of an antenna, they measure that with reference to a perfectly “isotropic” antenna – but that does not mean that the perfect isotropic antenna really exists. This also makes me think of Anselm’s ontological argument: “The greatest thing imaginable” must exist as an idea, it cannot truly be the greatest thing imaginable because a “real” greatest thing imaginable would be greater. That real greatest thing imaginable is God. (This has to be has to take second place to Leibniz’s monadism in the “weird ideas” charts – but there again I’ve probably misunderstood it horribly.) 5. Argument from design “Natural bodies obey certain laws (e.g. trees grow, rocks fall, hot air rises) in a manner characteristic of intelligence, though the bodies themselves may be unintelligent. There must therefore be an intelligence behind their behaviour: God.” Comments: This reminds me of David Hume’s “Dialogues”: the character Cleanthes makes exactly this argument – that the universe is like a machine, and a machine must have a maker. Philo responds that if the universe is like a machine then given its imperfection it is a very poor machine, and that the God who made it was either an “apprentice” who has since moved on to better things, or else a senile old deity who died eons ago. He suggests (if I remember rightly – it’s years since I read it) that the universe is more like a vegetable. Though (to return to what Thomas Aquinas had to say) vegetables grow according to natural laws which most have an intelligent origin, so we’re at the start of an infinite regression of the sort he rejects in his first two arguments. Overall Comments To restate my original suggestion, I contend that God – the source of existence – cannot be categorized as either existent or non-existent (just as water cannot be categorized as either wet or dry). If so then Thomas Aquinas (and Dawkins too for that matter) are wasting their time trying to answer the question “Does God exist?” The question itself is ill-formed and unanswerable.
  9. LOL thanks Vort - I wonder how many more of us possess the 2-level nerdyness needed to get the joke
  10. Before we can answer this question... 1. What is God? 2, What does it mean to exist? I don't totally know how to answer the second question except to give some examples... Things that exist: Kangaroos Blue whales The North Star Things that don't exist: Mermaids Dragons The Loch Ness Monster (probably) So what is God? The creator? If so then God must be that which determines which of the two above lists any given item belongs to. Or to put it another way, any entity obtains its property of existence or nonexistence from God. So which list does God belong to? If God does not exist then nothing exists from which anything else could have derived its existence. But if God does exist, then from what did He obtained that property of existence? From Himself? If so then He is himself a part of His own creation. This makes a nonsense out of anyone who says "Where did everything come from? A creator must exist! That is God!". In bestowing the property of existence upon God, they include Him within creation. We're left with the same question: "What created creation?" (in which "creation" now includes God). It reminds me of a question I used to wonder about when I was a kid: "Is water wet?" A thing becomes wet from contact with water; if it has not been in contact with water then it is dry. If water is that which determines wetness or dryness, is water itself wet or dry? Most people thought I was an idiot for asking such a question, but maybe the question "Does God exist?" is no different.
  11. Depends which Wonder Woman you're talking about. I don't recall ever seeing Lynda Carter fly (except of course in a plane) - though she could run pretty fast and bounce bullets off her wrist bands when anyone tried to shoot her.
  12. http://blog.nasm.si.edu/behind-the-scenes/wonder-womans-invisible-jet/ Doesn't it look exactly like you thought it would?
  13. My degrees are in engineering, but I was never a very good engineer. My main problem was that I could always see too many different ways of doing something, and could never decide between them. I'd start working on a problem one way, then (no matter how well I'd thought I'd thought it out to begin with) I'd see a better way of doing it, which would mean undoing most of what I'd done already. (Changing horses in mid stream is rarely a good idea, but I've never been good at telling that to myself.) Then I'd realize my new "better" way had complications I hadn't foreseen and I'd have to start again. And the end result would usually be a mess. Maybe if I'd persevered I'd have sorted myself out eventually, but I chose to go into teaching - originally electronic engineering but now computing. Oddly enough, I'm a lot better at keeping students' projects on track than I am at controlling my own.
  14. I'll tell you something else that's quite interesting: there are more plastic flamingos in the world than there are real flamingos.
  15. Oxford University.... is older than the Aztec Empire... It's the News you'll Never Use!
  16. Do you count anti-superstitions? There's a member of our theatrical club who likes to shout "Macbeth" in a loud voice at the beginning of rehearsals. (Hot Potato Orchestra Scores, Puck will Make Amends)
  17. Did Joshua and his followers believe in a God you would recognize when they massacred the population of Jericho? Maybe the God of the Islamic fundamentalists is a false God, and the God of Joshua (and us) is the true one, but I don't see how we can argue this on the basis of nice vs. not-very-nice.
  18. It usually does have something to do with the weather in this country! Really? I was a student at Bradford University 83-87 - right next door to Leeds. I don't remember the temperature ever getting much above 50. I do remember there was quite a lot of snow - by UK standards anyway. And my shoes had holes in them.
  19. Has anyone ever noticed a certain kind of cold, which is actually not that cold (it could be over 50F) but it chills you right through and makes your bones ache? It's usually accompanied by chilling wind and a very light cold drizzle. The colder temperatures that produce snow and frost I don't mind that much. The cold is certainly colder, but if you wrap up warm and blow your hands every now and then you can keep it out. But this... This what it's like in London right now. I took my daughter to Funpark last night (it's a travelling carnival-type-thing which comes to our area every few months). Some of the rides are good but others are pathetic. The Ghost Train is the most pathetic I've ever ridden on (and I've ridden on some pretty pathetic ghost trains) but they didn't have that this time. And as I've already said the weather was horrible. Not that my daughter minded of course (which is the main thing) - kids love fast rides however foul the weather - but after 4 hours in the dank chill all I wanted to do was get into a hot tub - and by the time we got home I was too exhausted even for that. Moan moan moan... Hey, it's Good Friday tomorrow!
  20. It seems to me these blessings come not from membership of the Church per se, but from an assurance that these promises are true. If you don't believe then membership of the LDS (or any other) church is nothing more than a piece of paper.
  21. This had me in stitches for about half an hour... P.S. I realise now I posted this thread in the wrong forum. Sorry.
  22. You're quite right Dravin: some people do say "Pedancy" but (as I now confirm from Google) the proper word is "Pedantry". And yes, I know this is ironic as I'm taking a dig at Ralph Bakshi for mispronouncing his Sindarin. (Motes and beams etc.) I actually quite like Bakshi's LOTR (which makes me a heretic I know, but I've already exposed that by admitting to liking David Lynch's Dune). I think Bakshi's "Mirror of Galadriel" scene is much better than Jackson's. And I don't care that Galadriel looks like a Disney princess! Annette Crosby provides the perfect queenly voice, so long as you keep One Foot in the Grave out of your head when you listen to her. By comparison Cate Blanchet overacts the part. And what was the deal with turning her into....well I don't quite know how to describe what they turned her into (some sort of wicked ghost/witch?) but it certainly did nothing for me. As for Ralph Bakshi's Treebeard though.... Did Fimbrethil tell him to go get his nose clipped?
  23. The song "Jesus He Knows Me" by Genesis sums up the idea rather well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35K6vQRt67g
  24. Princess Irene (from The Princess and the Goblin/Curdie by George McDonald)