Zeitgeist

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Everything posted by Zeitgeist

  1. I was talking about its use in general for difficult situations, not specifically about its misuse for sugar-coating insults. Sometimes you may be describing a person with cold, unflattering facts that leave your listener wondering what you think about the person. A quick "bless his/her heart" can be very useful for emphasizing your pity or sympathy for the person. I don't think it's okay to insult anyone, even if they insult you first.
  2. Coincidentally, I just listened to a podcast today of a faithful LDS member who was married in the temple, got divorced, and then decided to marry a 2nd wife. He applied for a cancellation of sealing so he could marry the 2nd wife in the temple. Both he and his first wife had to write letters to the Church (perhaps even to the First Presidency?). No letter was required from the 2nd wife. His request was denied. He was devastated and began calling everyone in sight. He said he pestered one Seventy so much that he was told not to call again. Officials in his stake quietly suggested that he get married in a civil ceremony and re-apply to the Church after a year. Obviously, this podcast only gives a tiny subset of one side of a hideously complex story, so I simply listened without forming any opinions of anything. But the husband's comments led me to think that the Church moves very slowly on these matters.
  3. The best explanation of 666 I have heard: "Emperor Nero" (Latin: Nero Caesar) can be expressed in two ways in Hebrew: NRWN QSR or NRW QSR. Recall that written Hebrew uses consonants only, so that's why we have forms like NRW and QSR with no vowels. The Latin word Caesar was pronounced with a hard C, which is why Hebrew uses a Q. It's also the origin of "Kaiser" in German. Anyway, if you add up the two Hebrew forms for Nero Caesar, you get 666 for the first form and 616 for the second. And, interestingly, some of the oldest manuscripts of Revelation say 616 instead of 666. I'm not a scholar in ancient languages. I'm just repeating something interesting that I heard. As for snakes, sun gods, eclipses, and occluded planets: I would let the missionaries explain the Plan of Salvation first. It's more important.
  4. Update: A few days have passed since I asked the original question. Thanks to everyone to replied. The story took an interesting turn today. I went to a wedding this afternoon. The couple had met on an Oct 31st some years ago, and they wanted their wedding to be on Oct 31st, even though it was Halloween. It was a very religious Protestant service and it was magnificent. At the end, the minister noted that today was Halloween and said that on this day "the veil between the living and the dead is thin" and that "the presence of those who have gone before us is with us right now and I can feel their joy at the marriage of --- and ---." So perhaps the LDS thinking about this veil isn't so scary and unfamiliar after all. ZG
  5. I once knew a software engineer who kept his checkbook in octal to maintain fluency in that number system. He was an assembly-language programmer on some ancient mainframe system. It worked okay until he discovered that his wife was writing checks in decimal.
  6. With one exception, all the deaths among my relatives and friends have been very sudden. My stepfather was perfectly fine one day but rose to his feet and started to say, "I have a headache." He died between the syllables "head" and "ache." (For the final 10 years of his life, his entire diet had consisted of fried chicken, Coke, and ice cream. They didn't even bother with an autopsy.) The exception was a very close friend of mine who died at age 42 of an incurable disease that slowly overtook him. His mom flew out toward the end. At the hospital, she invited all his friends and family to help decide whether or not it was time to let him go. The doctor explained that "death comes as a friend to many people," which gave us the courage to pull the plug. Well, under state law here you can't actually pull the plug on life support. You must dial it way down instead. My friend was gone in 10 minutes. I went home and slept, and when I woke up I found myself seeing everything in black and white. All the color had drained out of my world. I wandered around the neighborhood and felt real anger at children playing. How could anyone play at a time like this? But my grief slowly disappeared, my anger dissolved, I began seeing colors again, and I am comforted now with the memories of my friend's many acts of kindness to me. Reminds me of the atheist's funeral ("all dressed up and no place to go"). But I think we all do have a place to go.
  7. I am a convert. While I was an investigator, some people at church told me they were fasting so that I would make the right decision and get baptized. It made me extremely uncomfortable and actually delayed my baptism by many months. If the bishopric wants to fast so that young people in the ward will make wise decisions as they choose colleges, work, or missions, I think that would be lovely. But making a fast specific to one person and to one course of action strikes me as improper. If a member of the bishopric had said this to me, I would have smiled and replied, "Thank you so much for your suggestion. I'll give it all the attention it deserves."
  8. Yes, I am from Texas and have heard that often. It's very useful. I had a good friend who used the phrase "Can I tell you in a caring and sharing way...?" as a preface to some of the deadliest insults I've ever heard. E.g., "Can I tell you in a caring and sharing way that you are the sloppiest eater I've ever seen and that nobody wants to sit next to you in a restaurant and listen to your slurps and watch food dribbling down your chin and throat?"
  9. Some fun quotations I found about gossip: "If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me." (Alice Roosevelt Longworth) "I never gossip. I observe. And then relay my observations to practically everyone." (Gail Carriger) "It’s not technically gossip if you start your sentence with 'I'm really concerned about ___' (fill in the name of the person you’re not gossiping about)." (Brian P. Cleary) "Be warned: A person content to sit with you and criticize others will speak critically of you out of earshot." (Richelle E. Goodrich)
  10. I find that most people are irrational about the use of Spanish in the United States. When I ask my very liberal friends whether English should be the official language of the U.S., they all snarl that official languages are inherently racist and intrinsically evil and that I must be a bigot for even discussing such a wicked idea. But when I ask them whether English and Spanish should be co-official languages in the U.S., they smile warmly and tell me it's a really wonderful idea. Puerto Rico declared Spanish its only official language in 1991. But my understanding is that two years later English was added as a co-official language. Here in San Francisco the ballots are trilingual: English, Spanish, and Chinese.
  11. I am going to a wedding on Halloween. The couple met on a Halloween several years ago, so October 31st has always resonated lovingly for them. At first I thought the whole wedding would have a Halloween motif. I imagined something like a wedding on the Munsters or the Addams Family with cobwebs, ghosts, and bats circling overhead in the mist. But no... it's just a regular wedding. *yawn*
  12. Well... let me tell you a rather horrible story about anonymous gossip that happened to me while I was in the military. Most of the men in my squadron were single, but a few had wives and lived off-base. One morning one of my single friends (let's call him "S") boasted that the night before he had gone out and done some very sinful things that I could not possibly repeat on this site. He was careful not to mention the names of other people who were with him, but he gleefully gave us all other details of his adventure. This was good, high-grade, industrial-strength gossip, which I assumed was true and could be repeated safely because no names were involved. That afternoon I bumped into the wife of another friend (let's call him "M") and repeated, with much snickering, the highlights of the gossip that I had heard from S. It turns out that M was in the group of S's friends from the previous night, and M's wife was able to piece together the whole story from some stray minor facts that I repeated. Thirty-five years have passed since that blunder, and I am still sorrowful over repeating this gossip. I'm sure my carelessness caused a lot of friction in that marriage. Yes, you argue, the marriage itself must have wobbled because of the husband's unfaithfulness, but it's not right for me to make it wobble more. Ever since then, I've pretended that my entire life and all my conversations will be publicly available on DVD form in the celestial kingdom. And without a laugh track, just the raw dialogues. It's done wonders for restraining my gossiping tongue. Read James 3 if you need further inspiration.
  13. Am starting a new thread from the ruins of an older thread about photocopiers that veered way off topic. It's about a book called A Convert's Guide to Mormon Life by Clark L. and Kathryn H. Kidd. It would be hard to exaggerate how useful and wonderful this book is. But there was one section that troubles me. Here it is (p. 259): "There is no greater feeling than finding an ancestor's name through genealogical research, then taking that name to the temple and performing the ordinances on his behalf. Many times, people who attend the temple report that they feel the presence of the person who is being served. The veil between the living the dead is thin in the temple, and the person whose work is being done often manages to convey a sense of gratitude to the person who is serving as proxy. The work done in temples is of great importance to those who have gone before us, and many Church members will tell you of great spiritual experiences they have had while performing genealogy and temple work." If you grew up in the Church, you may be nodding agreeably as you read this. But I did not grow up in the Church, and this passage strikes me as scary and unfamiliar. I wouldn't go as far as using words like "creepy" or "séance," but the passage feels to me like a tiny first step in that direction. It's enough to make me uncomfortable with the whole idea of temple work. Maybe I'm hanging on to parts of the Old Testament that clearly condemn "consulting the dead," as the NIV calls it (Deuteronomy 18:11). Are you comfortable with the way the Kidds describe this? I was going to give this book to the rest of my family because they ask me about the LDS Church now and then, but if they read the section above they would totally freak out.
  14. Thanks for all the comments. Obviously photocopiers aren't a big deal in the great scheme of things, but the topic interested me and I'm glad to hear that the problems might simply come from a ward's wish to save money. Good for them. A friend of mine was in the leadership of a nearby church (not LDS). They rented out the sanctuary to a rather large choir group for weekly rehearsals. The choir had a key to the church office. This group would make midnight runs into the church office and secretly photocopy mountains of sheet music (and I do mean mountains). They broke the monthly cap on copies, which resulted in fantastically expensive overage charges each month. The bookkeeper noticed the high monthly invoices but assumed it was from legitimate church use and simply paid the invoices without alerting anyone. After two years, an audit revealed that the church had been paying almost $9000 a month in overage charges from this criminal choir. Lesson: keep your keys on a tight chain.
  15. Oh come on, I was joking. I did find that passage very odd, though. The rest of the book was warmly constructive, cheerful, and (allow me to say) downright LDS in its friendliness and happiness. Then this jarring digression attacking poor photocopies. Whatever. The only part of the book that troubled me was the section on ordinances for the dead. My own belief is that these ordinances are an act of compassion from living LDS members, who live and preach the Gospel so fully that it spills over into acts of generosity even for those who have died. But the book says that some LDS members go to the temple to do these ordinances and they sometimes feel a spirit of gratitude from the dead and some sort of presence from beyond the grave. Maybe the authors are citing idle folklore as fact, but I'm having a bit of trouble with this.
  16. I was in Houston when the Houston temple opened. I went through the open house and was struck by how much the LDS Church tried to make even the open house easy on neighbors. Visitors were not allowed to park anywhere near the temple and had to go to a nearby meetinghouse and take a shuttle bus to the temple. I remember reading a lot about that temple in the newspapers that week, and I don't recall reading a single negative comment by neighbors. Of course, Houston has no zoning codes. You see a skyscraper in the Galleria next to a residential area. When I lived there I was told that your neighbor could legally tear down his house and build a 24-hour gas station next to your house. So maybe the apparent lack of opposition to LDS temples was rooted in Houstonians' apathy toward zoning. (I think the temple is in Spring, TX, not Houston, though.)
  17. In preparation for my possible reactivation, I am reading a book called A Convert's Guide to Mormon Life by a Mr. and Mrs. Kidd of Northern Virginia (apparently in the same stake I once belonged to in a previous century). It's a really wonderful book, but it contains one bizarre passage (p.42): "[F]or some reason photocopiers in LDS meetinghouses are unfailingly temperamental. If by chance you find a photocopier that is in working order when you start printing, it will probably break before your printing job is done. Use that photocopier only when there's no other option, and never assume that it's in working order." I raised an eyebrow at various points in this book, such as the Cheerios on the chapel floor and basketball hoops in every photograph of a wedding reception. But this comment about photocopiers makes me wonder if there's more to the story. Did the Church get hoodwinked into a 100-year contract on lousy copiers or something? And no, this probably isn't a dealbreaker for my reactivation.
  18. I dated a Mormon woman from Utah and almost married her. She seemed like a very typical LDS woman with pleasant memories of her Mormon youth, a rock-solid happy faith, and a bookshelf full of tomes by LDS general authorities. Her Book of Mormon was almost unusable because of all the underlines and notes in the margins. She told me "no marriage" unless I was LDS, so I began reading about the LDS Church and its history. We had some deep conversations, and pretty soon it was rather clear that she had no knowledge whatsoever about Joseph Smith's wives.
  19. I once heard a Baptist preacher talk about Jesus' sense of humor. It was an interesting sermon, because many New Testament scholars agree that the Jesus painted by the four Gospels was utterly humorless. The preacher claimed that the Parable of the Great Dinner (Luke 14:15-24) strikes the modern reader as rather solemn, but that in Jesus' time it would have been laugh-out-loud funny. If you read this parable and wonder why it would have been a thigh-slapper, here's a 21st-century equivalent. You ask a girl for a date in two weeks, and she replies that she can't go because she has to shampoo her hair that night. The idea of ludicrous pretexts is timeless, but the surface details apparently change over the centuries.
  20. I've faced many decisions like this: weddings of distant relatives, bar mitzvahs of cousins I barely knew, birthday parties at really inconvenient times for friends who had hurt me deeply. People will judge you most by your reaction to adversity. And I must say that after many expensive trips for weddings, bar mitzvahs, and birthday parties, I have enjoyed every one and grown closer to people who needed me close by. But don't go too far. A friend of mine (an American) has a brother in Israel who gets married and divorced as often as other people buy new cars. He invited my friend to Israel for his sixth wedding, and my friend finally laid down a rule: he would attend weddings only of even-numbered new wives. Seems like a great compromise to me.
  21. Mornings for me. But the best advice I got for mornings was to (a) eat breakfast, (b) exercise, © make a list of goals for the day, and (d) achieve the hardest goals first and get them over with. Obviously there are limits to these. If your hardest goal for the day is to cook a great supper, you probably would not want to start that while the rooster is crowing. If you want your day to turn into a wasteland, simply negate all four items and start your day surfing the Web.
  22. A few thoughts... 1. A cousin of mine, who is non-LDS, moved from the Chicago area to Utah in the late 1980s. He lasted less than a year and finally gave up and moved on to California. He ran a small business selling skis or sporting goods or something scary like that. Said he couldn't break into the community and that his non-LDS status aggravated the problem greatly. I imagine things have changed a lot since then, but if your line of work is retail, then maybe this is something to think about. 2. Another cousin of mine from my home state of Texas moved to Sandy, Utah about six years ago. She was also non-LDS. According to her, the Mormons in her neighborhood welcomed her with open arms when she moved in, but they later "dropped her like a rock" (her words) when it became clear that she was not interested in joining the LDS Church. Of course, this is my cousin's side of the story, and all stories have at least two sides. My cousin later moved back to Texas. (Unfortunately, she had a bad experience on Temple Square. She took a tour and one of the sister missionaries went to great lengths to come across as spiritually contemplative and calmly beneficent and other-worldly. But she came across instead as robotic and brain-washed, and my cousin was deeply spooked by the whole experience.) 3. I am thinking of moving to Utah. I really dislike my current home state and I work at home, so it doesn't matter where I live. For much of 2012 and early 2013 I read sltrib.com (the Salt Lake main newspaper online) to understand the Utah culture better. But I was really turned off by the comments on all the news articles. I really got the idea that the non-Mormons in Utah resent the Mormons very much. The non-Mormon writers would call Utah a "theocracy" and complain about "Zion curtains" and bitterly gripe about all the stores closed on Sunday. Seriously, I think the Tribune could publish a story that President Monson uses strawberry jam on his toast instead of raspberry jam, and you'd get an avalanche of rabid comments from non-LDS readers who attack the LDS church for not being fair to raspberries because gosh darn it the whole religion is just a sham anyway, as everyone knows, and its members are driven to force their deluded beliefs and values on non-Mormons in Utah. I finally stopped reading sltrib.com because I was so sick of reading these sarcastic comments. I don't know what's going on here, perhaps a Utah resident can explain. But you are wise to consider moving West. I went to school out East and disliked it immensely. The West (which I define as Mountion + Pacific timezones minus everything within 100 miles of the coast) is my favorite part of the country. Good luck to you wherever you move to.
  23. aclaire11, my heart broke when I read your story. Nobody should have to go through what you have endured. But how wonderful that you are persistent about asking the right questions about how to move forward. I think that's a very positive sign. I have found that my biggest blunder in life was making quick decisions about something that seemed pressing at the time but that could have waited several months or a year or more. Maybe you can make a list of all the decisions you feel you need to make, and then decide which ones really need your immediate attention and which ones can be postponed. I would guess that many of them can wait a few weeks or months, and that might give you some breathing room to focus on the decisions that need attention right now. Sometimes the best thing you can do is just let the dust settle and decide not to decide anything until you feel competent to make long-term, permanent decisions, such as who to marry or what church to join. As for your testimony, let me share my own experience. I think many testimonies grow from the inside out, not from the outside in. If you stand outside the Church looking in and demanding scientific proof about all of its claims, you can easily spend your entire life on the outside scratching your head and wondering if it's true and doubting a lot of what the Church says. But if you step into the Church with a true openness to God and actually live the Gospel instead of studying it medically like a cadaver, you will feel a certainty that service to your fellow beings is service to your God, that the friendship of the Spirit is real, and that aligning your life to Heavenly Father's law of love and forgiveness (as expressed in the Atonement) will bring you the greatest happiness on Earth and prepare you for greater things to come. I would urge you to talk to your bishop, to pray, and not to make any quick decisions. Best wishes.
  24. If you have to skip Skype at the baptism, why not just Skype your friend afterwards? Then you can share your feelings and description of what it was like, and in some ways it would be much richer than raw footage of the event itself. Besides, baptisms aren't always photogenic. I knew a Baptist minister in Texas who baptized an elderly woman. As he pushed her head under the water, her wig floated neatly away. The minister (he claims) found himself holding the woman under water while he tried to poke her head back into the floating wig. I'm sure the woman would not want to post a video of that on YouTube.
  25. I tend to agree with the recent pro-Sabbath comments. As a child I once heard a story about a man who asked a wise teacher how to set priorities for the many competing demands in his life. The wise man answered, "Put love for God first and above all things, and everything else will find its place." A pleasant (but inverted) variation of the old advice on budgets: watch the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves. What does the Church teach about recreation on the Sabbath? Would an hour run in the early morning be sinful? A walk through the woods? An all-day hike to the top of Half Dome at Yosemite? A hard work-out on a rowing machine?