jerome1232

I gotta jump in here, on the "doesn't appear handicapped to me" quip. My wife has rhuematoid arthritis. That's an autoimmune disease where your body attacks the linings in your joints and causes inflammation and pain. It gets bad enough that my wife will sometimes use an electric scooter to get around. But it comes and it goes, sometimes she can be at barely a hobble, other times she can barely get out of bed. Sometimes she's doing okay but if she does a lot of walking, like from the back of the parking lot for example, she'll pay for it with an inflammation attack the next day. Sometimes people really do have difficulty getting around even if it's not immediately apparent. *Gets down from soap box*

I'm not sure how to say this eloquently but as we look at examples like: Daniel refusing to stop praying. Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednigo refusing to bow to a king. Joseph Smith escaping from capture. Nephi slaying Laban in cold blood. I think it's clear that sometimes God laws must Trump man's law and sometimes we are even commanded to do so. I suppose you must use the holy spirit as your guide.

Next to nothing. I know only that Facebook's ad algorithms showed me that book, I was intrigued. I leafed through it at a dessert book store and decided I wanted it and then I ordered it from Amazon and enjoyed the first chapter greatly.

This is really a look into what runs through my head when people call for gun control. The inner mind of Jerome1232

1) semi-autos are legal for civilians. 2) Automatic weapons are illegal for civilians to own.* *There is a process to purchase historic automatic weapons. They aren't easy or cheap to get.

I've been slowly reading "Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling". I've enjoyed it though it can get tedious here and there. So far it's really humanized Joseph Smith for me, and it's provided a good deal of historical context on events in church history for me. This is a book I will definitely be rereading in the future. I've also just started reading "Understanding Temple Symbols through Scripture, History and Art". I've only just begun it, but it starts you off with a medieval painting and talks about all the symbolism in the painting to get you started and thus far I've found it enlightening, and I'm hoping it will allow me to better understand/think on temple rituals. I'm hoping to hear of some other books you guys are reading or would recommend. What have these books done for you?

I'd just like to add what I feel is greatest about temple attendance. It has next to nothing to do with self and everything to do with serving others. I grew up not knowing my biological father, he also passed away before my high school years. Just last year I had the privilege of taking his name through the temple. I got to act as his proxy to get his endowments completed. It drove home to me what we do in the temple is a great service. We can give those who for one reason or another couldn't get baptized, endowed, or sealed in life, a chance to accept those ordinances so they may complete their journey to their Father. The joy of serving others is an amazing experience. If you work on genaology you can provide your own ancestors this amazing godly act of service. As far as your indecision on whether homosexual acts are within God's law, I felt that has been sufficiently addressed. Man is in a fallen state. All of us must daily battle our natural inclinations and urges to stay on the covenant path of God. I urge you to do the same.

It's kind of been said but it's not that we'd prefer everyone to be Mormon. We simply aren't one christian denomination among the 2k+ other christian denominations out there. We simply aren't one choice of many on God's path. We are Christ's church. We are the only place on this earth that contains all of the saving principles needed to get you back to your father. We are the only place on this earth where priesthood authority exists. That's why you should be Mormon. All other christian denominations have the truth in part, and most of them do their best to teach God's word as best as they can see it. But here, in Christ's church, this is the only place you'll find a prophet holding God's priesthood receiving revelation for God's church. As it's been mentioned, the first place to start would be the scriptures, in particular the Book of Mormon, and prayer and fasting.

I gotta be blunt, my eyes cross in funny ways when people starting getting into Trinity theology.

I've always thought of Star Wars as more of a Epic Fantasy inspired by Sci Fi. It's more fantastical than science fiction, and I'm okay with that. (I'm a big Brandon Sanderson fan btw, he really does a great merge of Fantasy and Sci Fi in the way he creates fantastical worlds with rules and laws that adhere like a sci fi does to... real rules but why am I mentioning that) At any rate I didn't like The Force Awakens (it felt too recycled, they seemed to be trying to bridge old with new and it was just bleh), loved Rogue One and The Last Jedi, yes they have their issues, but seriously, so did the old trilogies.

It's reverse heat.

Hmmm, that is interesting. I swear we have generic "Children's bibles" that refer to God in the OT as just "Jesus" and I've heard my niece and nephews who are Southern Baptists also use this terminology, they also usually say that "Jesus created the earth". Likely they are just used to calling God Jesus and I am recalling that children's bible incorrectly. Or perhaps Catholicism differs from Southern Baptists on this?

I actually thought this was a pretty universal belief amongst mainstream christianity. /shrug. Out of curiosity what faith did you grow up in?

I mean in defense "Jesus the Christ" isn't the easiest read. This companion book seems to explain language, talk about updated archaeology, *and* offer commentary on commentary on scripture. Some of us need all the help we can get.

I can remember putting my boxcar children books inside my text book in elementary. haha.

Ah, Mistborn sucked in me, Stormlight Archives sealed the deal. I really liked how the first mistborn trilogy ended, I'm eagerly awaiting the last Wax and Wayne Mistborn books. His whole unified cosmere thing is a ploy to get me to read all of his other series to wring out all the secrets in Stormlight I swear.

It's already been digitized and published so I don't think that is a concern.

Clearly the real problem is your household is mired in it's old ways and is refusing to progress with the times!

We were moving into a new apartment, I held a Wii remote by the cord that you slip around your wrist, gave it two spins and tossed it to my wife. It landed on the couch like I intended but it had a bit more speed than I meant to put into it. It bounced off of the couch cushion and hit the TV hard breaking the LCD screen inside. My wife wasn't very amused.

I live in Southern California. It really is a beautiful state! We got rain this year and the hills bloomed. We have amazing redwood forests. We have an amazing beach. There are sights to see in the desert. I live in the San Joaquin valley, it's hot, it's dry, it's all oil and agriculture. I don't particularly like where I live except for one thing. I'm about a 2 hour drive away from everything. The beach, the snow capped mountains, the blooming hills of poppies, the desert, the beach, Los Angeles, red wood forests. It's all roughly 2 to 3 hours away from me. Which is a really, really cool thing.

I see my attempt at making an absurd comparison wasn't as absurd as I thought. I'm actually pretty surprised people have been asked that, I do get it, but it's also not outright banning them. I also did mention I'd follow counsel did I not? I beg to differ, books are no different than a screen. It doesn't even have to be a steamy novel. If I'm reading Rough Stone Rolling in sacrament I may be reading a great book and learning about Joseph Smith, but I'm not really "there" with my fellow brothers and sisters. Personally when I am reading a book my awareness of what's around me drops do nil. I get really focused in to what I am reading. Then there's the fights that breakout between my kids over who gets which book. That's certainly a distraction. (I do have three toddlers, I haven't actually *heard* a sacrament talk in a long time) I thought I mentioned in my OP that I do get it, but I was trying to explain why I think a phone could be just fine in sacrament (at the hands of a mature adult, a YSA ward as per the original poster *is* another story)

You know I get it, from their perspective. Especially if people are always distracted by them. If I were in that ward I'd probably murmur but I'd put my phone on silent (not vibrate, everyone can still hear vibrate) and break out some physical scriptures. At the same time.... Everyone in our ward kept staring at these leather bound books at our ward so we banned books from the chapel. We've got along for centuries without books, you can survive an hour without them. Does that seem ridiculous? I don't see how the two logic lines are any different. Seriously, I am an adult, but in all my classes I have the gospel library app, I take notes in it. I also can't remember the last time I physically wrote on a piece of paper (okay, like last week, I filled out a form for work) but I take annotations on my phone, I make highlights and keywords and link scriptures. They are useful tools.

AFAIK the artificial sweeteners we use *are* way, way sweeter than sucrose. Sucralose is like 300x sucrose. Aspartame 200x. Saccharine 300x. Stevia 150x. I don't buy it either.

It's more than that. Cannonical is trying to trim down and become a profitable company. They are making money in the cloud, and by not developing their own desktop environment and going with upstream gnome-shell they can focus on what makes them money.

Hmmm, I've Used Ubuntu for a very, very long time. I also use a Linux (openelec) on a raspberry Pi 3 ( a credit card sized computer) and my sons computer has Ubuntu with a lightweight environment (lxde). The major cons with a Linux is something like 98% of desktops are Windows and that's what software is written for. Usually there are great alternatives that work great on Linux, sometimes they aren't as great as the Windows version, sometimes they are better. Another initial major con is true for all operating systems, there's a learning curve. You do things differently in the Linux world. But I find the online communities are absolutely fantastic for Ubuntu and you can usually figure things out over at askubuntu or ubuntuforums. I also find it's easy for me to find my way around on a mac since they are both *nices. My main desktop dual boots, 99% of my time is spent on Ubuntu. I boot to Windows 10 exclusively for one game that I'll be rid of soon. It's hard for me to put a finger precisely why I like Ubuntu. But I do. I'm currently running 16.04.2 LTS, the latest LTS release using Gnome-shell as my interface (I switched since the announcement that Unity is officially dead).