mordorbund

Recently my son went in to get the flu vaccine. Everyone he trusted told him he would not need to get a shot, that it would be administered nasally. The nurse came in with a medical tray that included all your standard tray stuff (like bandages for instance) and started putting on her gloves. Everything about her behavior said she was giving him a shot (putting on gloves, prepping a tray, just looking medical). Even she tried to reassure him that she was not giving him a shot. His cognitive dissonance had the words of trusted individuals pitted against what he was observing.
 
I'm glad I didn't have him express his concerns on this forum. He would have been met with a stream of "don't worry about it, you're totally getting a shot. It's not that big a deal."
 
Why are we jumping to "yeah, Joseph did some stupid things. He's still totally a prophet though." I can get that with bankruptcy, poor business acumen, or just being too forgiving or trusting of people he should have second-guessed. I don't understand where you say a prophet is acting as prophet but it maybe is errant or fallen. We've canonized the revelation (D&C 132). It's something we have to own up to so long as it's in our scriptures. Throwing Joseph under the bus on this one requires questioning Brigham through Wilford in practice, and all the way to Kimball who continued to leave it in the 1981 edition of the scriptures.
 
By the way, it turns out my son trusted the right people because it was just a nasal spray - not a shot.

May I suggest that if this was your intent, then you've been asking the wrong questions. You may want to consider some of these:
 
What role does the LDS Church have in shaping and influencing communities and cultures ('none' is also an acceptable answer)? You'll learn a little about when the Church has gotten involved politically and when it has kept out. You might also hear about some local interfaith initiatives.
 
James says pure religion is caring for the poor and the need. How does the LDS Church and its members fulfill this initiative? You'll learn a little about the Church's humanitarian programs and the Church's welfare program.
 
And then of course there's the fundamentals that you've completely skipped over. Remember the primary purpose of a church is salvation. It assumes an afterlife and a God, which then goes to inform life's priorities. Remove God and the afterlife and you're dealing with a social club. With God in place, you then need to discover what the rules of this game are. Now that's a useful line of questioning.
 
What is the purpose of life?
Why does God allow so much inequity in this life? Do I have a moral (even spiritual) responsibility to address it?
What does it take to be saved? Is salvation as unfair as this life seems? I think you asked something similar and got to hear a little about the pre-mortal life, but I think the discussion was abandoned before you understood the implications.
What does it mean to be saved?
What do you recommend I do to learn if these models are indeed correct? For instance, a community of scientists would tell me about the scientific method and encourage me to duplicate their reproduceable results, and a community of philosophers would instruct me on the rules of logic and encourage me to rederive the same conclusions they have. What is the Mormon scientific method or rules of logic? 

Jethro fits in wherever he likes. That guy has a sixth-grade education.
 

But everyone has a right to popcorn! It's not *fair* that funkytown hogs all of the popcorn to himself! Redistribute the popcorn!

I assume you meant that as a request, not a command.  Because a command would be . . . you know . . . theft. 

No, I don't think so. In that context, Jesus wept at the expressions of grief from his beloved friends, Lazarus's sisters. I believe that God mourns with us when we mourn.

You may enjoy reading President Kimball's talk Tragedy or Destiny (included in the Church manual). He starts with a whole list of specific cases and asks why. He never answers the question for specific cases.
 
 
He then explores some general principles that may or may not be relevant for a given case.
 
In your professional practice, just because you can't preach doesn't mean you can't minister. I would encourage you to remember your covenants. When someone comes in mourning, mourn with her. When someone comes in needed comfort, comfort him.

Is there? Mormonism has been accused of being an "American religion", and I think there's good reason for that. Roman Catholicism smacks of a religion emerging from a Jewish base with heavy Roman influence. Islam is so Arabic that it's easy to forget the country with the most Muslims is in Asia (Indonesia). What does Wicca look like without the Celtic culture?
 
When I read footnotes and commentaries to scriptures (not just our own) I see that the commentator spends most of her time trying to set a cultural context for the message. So what religion has been cleanly separated from culture?

The listening crowd is usually as turned off by boorish behavior as the recipient of the message.

Did a temple session this morning. What a beautiful thing it was. I love the endowment presentation.

I imagine some kin of the Beverly Hillbillies writing them and asking if they get bored, since they no longer have to walk to the outhouse to take care of business, they no longer have to stock the wood stove, no longer have to hand wash their clothes, and hang them out to dry, etc.  They'd find it hard to explain their new lives, so they'd like respond that they are doing just fine, and not to worry.

If this were Facebook, all you would need to add to this is: "Post this if you agree. I'll bet 95% of you won't..."
I just love it when people try and beat others into submission to their viewpoint.. And guilt anybody else who may already be on their side, but who still might not be "passionate" enough about it..

That was President Eyring's talk: https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2014/10/continuing-revelation?lang=eng
 

Light has a spectrum, of which visible light is only a small portion. Radio waves are also a form of light, and we've figured out ways to piggyback information on a light wave which your stereo then interprets into sound.
 
I mention this to magnify and contrast TFP's opinion. If it is symbolic, you can take it farther than what Joseph (technologically) knew at the time of the revelation. Or it could turn out to be literal, that there are forms of light that carry packets of spirit information. I know of no sources that explore such (except a simple analogy (by Widtsoe maybe?) comparing seerstones and a "sea of glass" to radio technology).

Note to PC:
 

Light has a spectrum, of which visible light is only a small portion. Radio waves are also a form of light, and we've figured out ways to piggyback information on a light wave which your stereo then interprets into sound.
 
I mention this to magnify and contrast TFP's opinion. If it is symbolic, you can take it farther than what Joseph (technologically) knew at the time of the revelation. Or it could turn out to be literal, that there are forms of light that carry packets of spirit information. I know of no sources that explore such (except a simple analogy (by Widtsoe maybe?) comparing seerstones and a "sea of glass" to radio technology).

The caption's not right but the image is.

It would probably get ignored (or at least not "liked") if they tried such a play.

The caption's not right but the image is.

Or "Those that divide people into 10 types and those that don't."
 
Hey, that combines two separate jokes into one. I like it.

Even revising PV's joke, the answer suffers from an off-by-one error. Let's sidestep the not-a-question issue by changing it slightly:
 
[O]Write a good test problem and answer it.
 
([O] is a simple notation to keep track of the original problem) Now we don't need a question and the original problem can satisfy it's own constraint (assuming it is a 'good' test problem (I'm not fully sold on that, I suspect it's poor because the prof couldn't come up with a good one)).
 
The proposed solution is:
 
[P]Write a good test problem and answer it.
 
Write a good test problem and answer it.
 
Where [P] is the problem and is the solution. If the [O] requires two statements to follow as an answer, then [P] also requires two statements for an answer. The prof should dock points for an insufficient solution for the student problem [P]. This of course assumes that the "answer it" portion of [O] requires correctness. The solution then should look something like:
 
[O]Write a good test problem and answer it.
 
[P]Write a good test problem and answer it.
 
[s:P1]Write a good test problem and answer it.
 
[s1]Write a good test problem and answer it.
 Where is the solution to [P] and [s1] is the solution to [P1] ([s:P1] being the statement that is both the solution to [P] and a new problem). We don't need [P1] to have a correct solution because we aren't receiving marks for solving problems that are themselves solutions (in other words, [O] requires a [P] and a correct , which for our given [P], requires both a [P1] and an [s1], but neither [P1] nor [s1] needs to satisfy [O]'s requirement of being "a good test problem" or of being a correct answer respectively ( still needs to be a correct answer to satisfy [O] and "a good test problem" to satisfy [P])). A simpler solution is where correctness is not required in the solution. In that case, I think the null solution would be the simplest and the student should be docked for inelegance. This is the scenario where a proper [P] and could be: [P] Solve 2 + 2  Purple, because ice cream has no bones With that understanding, the simplest solution to any given [P] would be the empty answer. So that yields the following solution: [O]Write a good test problem and answer it.
 
[P]Write a good test problem and answer it.
 

 Either way, writing 2 lines is unsatisfactory.

On a slight tangent, re the Eric Garner case (in which a grand jury in New York today refused to indict the cop who put a man into a choke-hold that, apparently, killed him) evoked the following interesting response from Instapundit:
 
 
 

Yes, I thought it might be self-referential, but it isn't a question. It's an instruction. Guess I need to cast a wider net in word definitions, especially with jokes.

The B in Benoît B. Mandelbrot stands for Benoît B. Mandelbrot.

And I disagree with your disagreement. Legality or illegality of an action has a profound effect on the public perception of acceptability, as the abortion holocaust clearly demonstrates.