Jamie123

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.

People come onto LDS.net to talk about LDS matters and light topics, not usually to talk about world topics or heavy news items that dominate the headlines. The Charlie Hedbo disaster leads to a conflict in the minds of many Mormons. On the one hand, it's undisguised murder, as reprehensible as tongue can tell. On the other hand, few Mormons will be willing to proclaim "Je suis Charlie Hedbo" any more than they would say "Je suis Vladimir Putin" or "Je suis Playboy magazine". So how does one convey sorrow and outrage for the murder without implicitly providing solidarity for the cause in which the murdered were engaged and, truth be told, for which they were murdered? But Americans are famously self-interested. I am sure your point about the terrorism taking place overseas does indeed play some part in explaining why a mostly American discussion list such as this one has scarcely any mention of the event.

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?

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.)

This is an assumption that many like to make...  But they can't an anyway prove from the Text that he was not a priesthood holding faithful leader of the Church.  Not any more then we can prove that he was...  But let give some context...  By the time of Samuel the Lamanite there had been a conversion among the Lamanites and churches (with the relevant authority given)  established among them... therefore its quite possible he was indeed authoritative.
 
Samuel was right and prophetic, clearly called of God.  So the question becomes how does a person become called of God to do so.  The LDS believe that God is a God of order, and if God has a Church and that church has a mortal leader then God will work through that mortal leader to give is word to the entire church.  Anything else would be chaos.  Since we believe we are God's church and that God has given us a mortal leader then the God's direction for the church as a whole will come top down through the leaders, and not bottom up through the members agitating change.