carlimac

I feel it's legitimate. I know some people who are too (what's the word??) to consider anything from Deseret Book, especially fiction to be worth reading.   One of my Relief Society presidents was that way.  Oh well. Her loss. 
 
Are you talking about Deseret Book as a store or as a publisher?   I can get some LDS books cheaper at Seagull Book and Amazon. But for the most part, with, their Platinum program, I have gotten so many free books that overall it's been worth it to shop at DB. 
 
LIke Pam, I read at least 20 times more books not from Deseret Book.
 
Curious. Why do you ask? 

It seems like more and more that opinions is what everyone has and is entitled to... a Judgement is what a person gets accused of when they share an opinion that someone else does not like...

I concur, weak, vapid and overreacting. 
 
 
I don't understand . . . I guess if they are sending things in a nasty way stteo "you dolt, don't you know blah, blah, blah", then sure they are being rude.  But if they are sending it in a polite way, maybe they feel that you would benefit from xyz and are trying to help.  Sure, their help isn't wanted or needed. . . but is that really rude?

What most perceive as judgement is simply a difference in the type and strength of ones principles and standards. To an individual who simply has none they are pretty foreign and uncomfortable. To a person who has different principles and standards they also sound strange.  What is strange to me is how someone can denounce another for making a judgement but consider him/herself non-judgmental. 
 
All of us choose our own compass and choose how much we heed it. 

I published this on my social media page, and got to thinking that everything I said would likely get an 'Amen' from my LDS friends.  Read it and see if you agree.
 
 
CHRISTIANS ARE JUDGMENTAL
 
It is not that we mean to be. Usually we are minding our own business. Out of the blue, a co-worker, friend, sometimes even a family member, will quip, "Why do you Christians judge so much? You're always making people feel guilty?" A trigger response we give--certainly in today's post-modern milieu--is to say, "Oh, no! You misunderstand. I am not judging YOU. After all, we are all sinner's, saved by grace! [i even got a bumper sticker to prove it!] Everyone comes to God with some "stuff." We ask him to forgive us, and we are made right with him. Hey, I still struggle with my stuff, so please don't think me judgmental. The pastor in me might even go a step further, and ask the questioner if I could pray with him or her, so peace would come--comfort, and wellness.
 
Judgment is a very close cousin to bigotry. Some of my fellow Christians are so loathe to appear hateful that they will know longer name sins. At least one famous TV minister has declared that naming and calling out sin is not his calling. God has called him to lift up and build up, not tear down and destroy, you see.
 
Ironically, in my 40+ years as a Christian, I have seldom heard a sermon that parked on sins and sinning. There are a few outliers that find fulfillment in declaring God's judgment is at hand, waving big signs, and yelling condemnations at by-passers. These guys are caricatures, though. Christians cringe, and skeptics laugh.
 
So, why the title? Christians carry the presence of God. Many of us openly say we are Spirit-filled. Further, we believe that the Holy Spirit will bring conviction--guilt. Is it so strange then, when people respond to our proximity with a seemingly impromptu, "Why are you Christians so judgmental?" Might not the underlying cause be God-given guilt? If it is true that all have sinned, then could it not also be that the person feels guilty because s/he is guilty, before God?
 
It's a crucial moment. We Christians dare not squander it by downplaying what the Holy Spirit is doing. Prayerfully, we ought to approach such instances with not one ounce of defensiveness. The accusation is not against us, but God. Can you imagine asking God why He is so judgmental? Would He not double-down, and respond, "Repent?" So, a more appropriate response might be, "You do not have to answer to me. Only God is the ultimate judge. So, whatever you are feeling, He is the one we all must answer to."
 
How we finesse such an answer will depend on our personality, our communication style, and on how God leads us. Humility (I had to repent too), and confidence (this is God's work) will under gird us. Regardless, let us not quench the judging work of God, nor downplay his call to repentance.

I think that comparing attending a gay wedding to watching a loved one commit spiritual suicide isn't quite right. they probably already did that when they entered into a gay relationship. The wedding is simply rubber stamping it.   Chances are pretty great that they have already had sexual relations before the wedding. Observing them holding hands or kissing before the wedding is more likely when you're there to observe the suicide. 
 
I'm not condoning going to the wedding. I think it's a matter of personal choice and the ability to stomach something like that. I don't think better or worse of anyone for attending. But just making a point that many straight weddings are also rubber stamping  the spiritual sickness the individuals have bought into. LDS members walk away from activity in the church, get married to someone outside of the temple to another individual who perhaps has no inclinations to ever join. That is spiritual suicide, too.  
 
So the question might be, is having a homosexual relationship/marriage any worse than apostatizing from the church. Are we being a tad bit hypocritical if we attend one wedding but not the other because of our beliefs?

I don't know about the US but in the UK gay marriage is a civil wedding and is not done in a church or has anything said or relating to God in the service, its purely secular.  Is that the case in the US?  Also do you view a Church wedding where you make commitments before God to be the same as a civil wedding where you are basically making a legally binding contract between two people?
Personally I would have no problem with attending a Gay wedding if it was a civil one, but would not attend a religious one as that would go against the scriptural teachings on what a faith based marriage is.  

Don't let them put you off, you need to keep in mind the circle of influences and areas of the country in which other people live. Our perspective is different based on where we live, who we interact with, and how we were raised.

Like Anatess and TFP say, I think the situations are distinguishable. We are under scriptural injunction to "mourn with those who mourn"; and I think that's also a sound principle of family life. But that's very different than being expected to show up to a son's Russian Roulette party and making a point of "being civil" as the loved one laughingly pulls the trigger again and again. (I suppose I could attend and make my mourning--even my opposition--abundantly clear; but that would make me quite an obnoxious guest.)Again--kudos to those who have the spiritual fortitude to sit through that sort of thing; but I don't think that's me.

I respect your (and anyone's) right to prayerfully make this decision. Calling those who would make a different decision Pharisees, on the other hand, and implying that any decision but one means burning bridges, is decidedly unfair.

I would not attend. I'm not sure if I would send a gift either. There are other ways to show your love for an individual outside of sacrificing your own dignity and self-respect, even for a few hours. 
 
If it were me, I wouldn't want anyone who might not approve of my wedding or other event to attend. Regardless of whether the individual is part of my family or not. It would be selfish of me to ask them to put aside those feelings for the sake of some smiling photographs, and selfish of them to come to the event and do anything other than just smile. Why invite any source of negativity into something you are trying your best to enjoy? If I had known that my brother was going to purposefully frown and scowl in all of my wedding photos as he did, I would have uninvited him. 
 
If gay "marriages" are for the sake of the couple and no other reason.. not the attention that comes from a big party and lots of gifts.. then it shouldn't matter to them who else attends. This goes for straight weddings too. My wedding certainly did not turn out the way I might have hoped, very few people who I cared about came, even to the reception. But going on 8 years now, the only thing that matters about that day is that we - he and I - were married. 

Right, and those ordinances are, in your view, at worst, ultimately meaningless.  Not evil, and performed with good intent though not with proper Priesthood authority.  That's a bit different from something that is effectively an outright mockery of a sacred ordinance for a purpose that is clearly and repeatedly denounced by the Scripture behind every Judeo-Christian church.  Would you attend to show support if some relative was having their child consecrated to the Flying Spaghetti Monster in a ritual specifically designed to look like a Catholic baptism?

You mean, besides the fact that a wedding celebrates a sexual union and that gay sex is both sinful per se and, per our theology, cannot bring lasting happiness?This is sound from a practical standpoint; but I think it gives short shrift to what we, as Latter-day Saints, understand to be happening in a gay marriage. Exaltation requires a marriage to a person of the opposite gender, except in limited cases for persons who lack such an opportunity in mortality; in which case celibacy is expected.
Persistent and unrepentant fornicators, we are told, will tend to end up in the Telestial Kingdom--and that is after spending a thousand years in spirit prison waiting for redemption.
A person who enters a gay marriage is spurning the concept of celibacy in favor of a relationship that is, in essence, fornication. Even if the person later repents (an excruciatingly painful process that would involve the dissolution of the gay union), who knows whether the person will be deemed to have "rejected" the true concept of marriage so as to forfeit the prospect of a celestial marriage in the hereafter?
It's not a matter of "harrumph, harrumph, isn't this sinful?!". It's a matter of "you're committing spiritual suicide; and I'd rather not witness this, just as I'd rather not watch you slit your own wrists". It takes a special kind of person to stand there and watch a loved one do that, acting out of a quiet determination that the bride/groom understands the love their family has for them. I salute such Mormons. But in some of these responses I detect an air of "pshaw, it's just a wedding and not that big a deal". As Latter-day Saints, we should be the first to understand: This is a spiritual catastrophe; and those who get that are not the moral inferiors of those who don't.

Had a friend who did that.  She was shocked when her 16 year old turned up pregnant, but it didn't get her to change her ways with the 14 year old.  I gave up trying to talk sense into her at that point.

Yet the stance the Church came out on with the non discriminatory had nothing to do with situations like this.  It had to do with jobs and housing.
 
There hasn't been anything yet that prohibits or makes it illegal to attend a gay wedding.

The overwhelming majority of grandfathers who have ever lived are currently dead. Sobering but true Vortic Fact o' the Day.

When I was first baptised I searched everywhere for exceptions to the WoW. 
Mainly because I didn't understand why we would be asked to follow some of it - the reported health benefits of tea etc, but the more i looked into it, the more i realised there were no exceptions.
 
Yes, I miss tea and coffee and sometimes alcohol, but in the grand scheme of things there is so much better here and later that we will have.  Giving up tea and coffee is nothing when you consider the blessings.
 
i had a blip and started drinking it al again and it was a horrible time.  I then prayed and began following the WoW again, even in going to bed earlier, and it all began to change.
 
There may not be any understandable reason as to why we shouldn't drink these things, but there is so much that Heavenly Father gives us that we are not yet to understand.  

paracaidista508,
 
It's not enforced evenly because that is not the point. Many, many things are not enforced evenly. With most things, we are taught correct principles and left to govern ourselves. There are, however, certain things that our leadership has determined are strict lines. The evenness of the matter isn't relevant.  The line is the line. But that hard line is only for temple recommends.
 
Anyhow, the culpability we will have before God is really significantly more important. That is a point that so many people seem to miss. There's this whole, "temple recommend=worthy" concept that permeates the church. It is invalid. Likewise is the, "this won't get me excommunicated" concept (another thing that is highly uneven).
 
But our standing before God will not be uneven. God is no respecter of persons. We will stand accountable for our choices, whether we "technically" qualified for a temple recommend and/or membership in the church or not.

Your mistaken assumption is that the Lord is concerned about making a case for anything....    The whole point in coming to earth is to test us to see if we will obey all of his commandments.
 
If you are only going to obey his command that fit your notions of what he should be asking... well that answer the question now doesn't it

The older I get, the more weight I lift getting out of bed every morning. I wonder if eating meat might help?

After I was baptized into the Church, a wonderful LDS woman in my ward turned me on to Postum, and I drank it every day.  It was available at any Safeway, but they always kept it on the very bottom shelf and nobody ever bought it, so every jar I bought often had dirty water marks from where wet mops had slapped it when they washed the floors.
 
They stopped making Postum a few years ago, but it still has its own website*, and you can order it today from some specialty distributor who acquired the license and trademark or whatever from Kraft.  But it costs $10.50 a jar and $6.00 shipping, so I've never ordered it.
 
I get Pero and its competitor Cafix all the time from Whole Foods.  Totally herbal, with a kick and a tang not unlike those of coffee.  I can't work without a warm beverage next to me.  I have one now, in a monster cup that my coworkers nicknamed "The Jacuzzi."
 
*The notion of Postum having its own website is almost as bizarre as the notion of an online dating site for the Amish.  There really is one (http://www.amish-online-dating.com), and if you go there you hear background music of birds chirping, cows mooing, and wagons passing by.  The "Quick Search" box allows "bonnets" to seek "beards" and vice versa.

Hi Stovepipe -
 
The LDS Church prefers to keep apologetics at arm's length.  There are some great sources out there (Maxwell Institute, FairLDS.org, Mormon Interpreter, JeffLindsay.com); but the Church doesn't generally officially endorse any of them--rather, it focuses on teaching members to approach God and get answers directly from Him.
 
 
I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all explanation.  I've posited some theories in a post to these forums here.  You might also want to take a look at Brian Hales' website at http://josephsmithspolygamy.org/.
 
 
Meg Stout (who did a series of blog posts at millennialstar.org entitled "A Faithful Joseph") posits that Emma knew more than she let on.  This is a minority view, though--the majority of scholars believe Joseph did indeed mislead Emma about some (not all) of his polygamous marriages.  The reason, bluntly, is that Emma was extremely hostile to the marriages and (in spite of her other virtues) was not above doing some pretty ghastly things to women she suspected Joseph of having married.
 
 
I believe two or three of Smith's plural wives recalled hearing him say something to that effect--though they were pretty clear that Smith also gave them a great deal of time to consider and that they entered the matches freely.  These anecdotes, and later teachings from other Church leaders, do make it clear that it was vitally important--at least, for a time--that the Church teach and practice the principle of plural marriage.
 
 
Not everything a prophet says is inspired; and sometimes they haven't been terribly careful about which of their sayings the Church should formally embrace and rely upon versus which of their sayings are expressions of their own, potentially misguided opinions.  The promise we do have is that we will not be led "astray from the oracles of God, or from [our] duty" (see the explanatory material to Official Declaration 1)--or, as President Uchtdorf put it last year, "God will not allow His Church to drift from its appointed course or fail to fulfill its divine destiny."
 
 
There's been a lot of research done on this by LDS scholars--see Maxwell Institute, FAIR, etc.  Bottom line, in my opinion:  No, the scrolls weren't written by the hand of Abraham itself--they date to thousands of years later.  No, the Book of Abraham as we have it is not a literal translation of those scrolls.  There are lots of interesting theories as to how the two relate--from the notion that the Egyptian funerary rite (which is what the remaining fragments of the actual papyri appear to contain) was a convoluted version of an earlier, pure, divinely inspired endowment; to the idea that the actual papyri were thirty to forty feet long and we only have three to five feet of them at present; to the idea that the scrolls in their entirety were nothing more than a "catalyst" that inspired Joseph to seek further revelation from God and led to the revelation of new scripture (much as the Joseph Smith translation did).  We do have precedent for Joseph Smith working with one text, then getting a revelation restoring the content of another text that no longer existed--see D&C 7.
 
By all means, do your homework on this one.
 
 
Oh, they were here, all right.  Where we get tripped up is when we assume they were the only people here.  :)
 
 
Yep.  You look for explanations, pick them up, weigh them out, and decide which ones make sense and which ones don't.  I also don't expect all of my questions to get answered (though many, many of them have been)--sometimes you just put something "on the shelf" and come back to it later when you have a little more light and knowledge.  The bottom line is that God has revealed Himself to me and given me a testimony; and I'm not going to let the things I don't know lead me to throw away the things I do know.
 
 
The closest you'll get that comes with official Church imprimatur is the Gospel Topics section of the Church's website.  The section is continually being updated, and there have been some really good articles generated in the past few months addressing some of the hairier historical issues.
 
 
I don't completely shut them out, but I don't seek them out either.  If I already have a question about the Gospel and I do some googling and an anti-site comes up--sure, I'll skim the entry as part of the study process.  But I don't read through anti sites looking for more questions or expecting to find "the truth".  If you go digging underneath an outhouse, you might find a few interesting things--but mostly, all you're gonna get is excrement.
 
 
Oh, sure, it's an issue.  LDS leadership has been pretty candid about it.  I think the Church has (belatedly) evolved from a view of history as something that should be specifically written to be "faith promoting", to more of a sense of comfort that even a warts-and-all history can still be just as edifying (perhaps more).  I have a few good friends that left the Church over historical issues, and they are all pretty clear that they could have dealt with the issues themselves--it was the fact that the Church hadn't addressed the issues in a more public way that made them feel "lied to". 
 
The Church is getting better about this sort of thing; but I think there are limits to how far it should go.  Historical interpretations are always evolving; and I don't think it's generally a good idea for the Church to hitch its wagon to any particular theory of history any more than it should come out and endorse particular scientific hypotheses, political platforms, or any other man-made philosophy.  These will eventually stand or fall on their own merits; and the Church will focus on the work of bringing people into communion with God.

Singles ward. 

In my experience, SLT excels at the tiniest of digs.

Well, I tried to paraphrase it politely.  The article used the phrase "navigate though multiple layers of clothing."  
 
I'm fond of neatly packed precise wording, but somehow I would never think to describe the act of probing into layers of clothing as "navigation."  Suum cuique.