Jamie123

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. 

Seems to me Hitler got an awful lot of pushback, too.(Yeah. I went there.)

http://blog.nasm.si.edu/behind-the-scenes/wonder-womans-invisible-jet/
 
Doesn't it look exactly like you thought it would?

http://blog.nasm.si.edu/behind-the-scenes/wonder-womans-invisible-jet/
 
Doesn't it look exactly like you thought it would?

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)

Everyday is "hug an engineer day" for me...my wife is an engineer!

But for all the other engineers I have to deal with on almost a daily basis, I like to stick with this quote:
"There comes a time in every project where you just have to shoot the engineer, and get the project done!"

Sorry to tell you this Jamie, but despite the best efforts of the Aztecs to kill off all flamingos, according to each of my recent counts, on April 9, March 21, March 6 and February 2 the number of real flamingos exceeded the number of plastic flamingos by between 3 (9 April) and 7 (21 March). However, given the frequency with which these figures change, its quite possible that by tomorrow, the number of plastic flamingos will once again prevail. Interestingly, the situation with plastic turtles is the complete opposite of the plastic flamingos, but that's a story for another post.

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)

Oxford University....
 

 
is older than the Aztec Empire...
 

 
It's the News you'll Never Use!

This had me in stitches for about half an hour...
 

 
P.S. I realise now I posted this thread in the wrong forum. Sorry.

This had me in stitches for about half an hour...
 

 
P.S. I realise now I posted this thread in the wrong forum. Sorry.

Well now you've just lost all credibility.  
 
I, on the other hand, am partial to Jodorowsky's Dune from the 1970's.   Salvador Dalí, David Carradine, Mick Jagger and Orson Welles.  Now THAT's a Dune movie.
 

<lynch dune fan as well

>.>
<.<

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?

Jamie, for what it's worth, I agree with MoE's interpretation--and I think I'm a good deal more conservative than he is.  The Book of Mormon authors seem, to me, to see everything through the lens of God's dealing with man; and that's how they write their histories.  If David McCullough or Mike Quinn had been alive in AD 385, their accounts of the war of Nephite extermination would have been very different than what Mormon and Moroni actually wrote.  If Mormon and Moroni lived today I think they would have unabashedly tied the Ferguson riots to oppression of the poor by the wealthy, our military quagmires in Vietnam and the Middle East to the wholesale abandonment of American women and children by their husbands and fathers, September 11 to American toleration of abortion, and Hurricane Katrina to the spread of gay marriage. 
 
And the press would have pilloried them for it.

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!  

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)

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*)

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

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.

If you want to know if people in the LDS community agree violence against those who mock or criticize religion, look at the huge backlash against the South Park creators.
Obviously, they're still walking around. Matt Parker and Trey Stone have not been shot despite writing 'The Book of Mormon: The Musical'.
In the end, God wins. Their mocking doesn't mean anything.

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.