tesuji

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Everything posted by tesuji

  1. AGMom, I am sorry to hear of your challenge. I am a husband, and your story reminds me of how much a trial I am to my wife sometimes. She is patient and loving, for which I'm grateful. Marriage is Love School. It's one of God's main ways to teach us to truly love. My advice is to keep being patient and love your husband. If you both keep working at it, things will get better. The best thing besides your continued patience is for him to keep growing in the gospel - that will help him and you more than anything. You can't change another person, but God can. My wife's main tool in our marriage is to pray to Heavenly Father that I will learn the lessons I need to in order to become a better person and a better husband. It's worked well for her. If she keeps praying about something I need to understand, eventually I get it. Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love and serve God. And then to love each other. These two things are what life is about. I wish you the best.
  2. Regarding the original post, the main point here is that Christ will judge. I think he will judge us according to how well we lived according the knowledge and light that we have. It's very possible that many Mormons will not go to the Celestial Kingdom, and many non-Mormons will. Christ condemned people in his day who thought they were chosen because they were born into a certain lineage or had a greater knowledge of God. In the D&C it says the elect are those who "hear my voice and harden not their hearts." He didn't say the elect are people who were baptized Mormon. I am a Mormon, and I have know many non-Mormons who were much better people than I. I hope I will always remember that and be humbled by that fact. If I have been blessed by having the gospel, then my responsibility is even greater to live up to that, or I will receive the greater condemnation.
  3. This is a very interesting question to me. The scriptures say seek knowledge by learning and by faith. So the Lord wants us to use our brains and to learn. But he also wants us to develop faith. When you do become educated, you learn that science is the major competing worldview to religion. At their core, science and religion are both talking about truth, but we don't know enough to see how they are connected a lot of the time. Science is a very specific method - it can only talk about what you can measure. If you can't measure it, science can't touch it. Also, science is always tentative. It never has final answers. I love learning about science. I think it is a very valuable tool for discovering truth. However, some people make it into more than a tool, and start to treat it like a religion, making it into a complete worldview. The problem with this is that science is limited and is always changing it's theories. Religion is a very different way to truth. It is all about revelation from God. And also faith is required - the first principle of our LDS religion, in fact. Faith to me means trusting God. As we are obedient to God, our faith will increase. I think it is possible in this life to get along fine without learning science or the "internet controversies." The most important thing is learning to love God and love your neighbor. But my personality is to ask questions, and I think God likes us to learn. It is extremely foolish to decide whether the church is true based on things like "no evidence has been found for horses in the Americas." Let's use this as an example: First of all, lack of evidence doesn't prove anything. It just means so far we haven't found anything. Also, the Americas - that's a huge area. We don't know where the Book of Mormon people lived. Much of the Americas is not dry arid desert, where stuff would just lie on the ground, uncovered, and preserved by dryness. Also, how hard have archaeologists looked for horse bones? Say you find some bones, and you already "know" they can't be horse bones. Are you going to pay a lot of money to have them tested? Bias like this can influence what has been "found." I have looked into most of the "internet controversies" and found reasonable explanations for things. Sometimes you have to take things on faith while you keep learning - suspend judgement. And sometimes you must take things on faith all your life. Luckily, we have the Holy Spirit - when you feel that, that is evidence that speaks to your soul. Two great sources for answers to the "internet controversies" are the Gospel Topics essays on LDS.org, and the Fairmormon.org apologists site. https://www.lds.org/topics/essays http://en.fairmormon.org/Table_of_Contents
  4. The second to last movie I watched was Brooklyn. I highly recommend it. It's an intelligent, sensitive movie that will teach you to be more empathetic. I watched it content-filtered, which was nice because I think there was a fair amount of swearing. Also, apparently an intimacy scene which I'm happier to skip. The last movie I watched was Looper. I also watched it content-filtered but it was still a little too violent. It's about assassins, so I can't fully recommend it because of the violence. I absolutely to not recommend it without being content-filtered - it's surely a strong R. Spoiler alert - Spoiler alert: The ending of Looper almost made up for all the violence. It was a truly Christian, feel-good type ending. Loved that, but can't fully recommend the movie.
  5. Dear Investigator, I want to commend you for being baptized. If you haven't already, you might talk to the bishop, ward mission leader and/or missionaries and tell them you feel "over-loved." My advice would be to just carry on. Just like Heavenly Father is real, Satan is also real and he does not want you to be baptized. Always remember the feelings you've had so far from the Holy Spirit, telling you this is all true. Life is meant to be a school and a trial. Your faith will be tested. The scriptures talk about enduring the end after you are baptized. However, if you continue in the path, and keep seeking the Lord's will for you and trying to do it, you will find great joy and blessings, even though you will certainly have times of difficulty. Daily prayer and daily scripture study are vital, as is going to church every Sunday. These will keep your faith nourished and teach you how to walk the path ahead. I wish you the best.
  6. I highly recommend Approaching Zion. I am a huge Nibley fan. Although I admit I have often been too lazy to read him as much as I would like. Lately I have been listening to audio of his lectures, which is a much easier way to absorb it, I find. The thing about Nibley is that you know he has a solid testimony and is a faithful member. He does criticize church culture sometimes. But I have never heard him criticize the prophet or apostles directly. He gave a lecture about this topic titled "Criticizing the Brethren" - as in, don't do it. He sustained his church leaders, which is the mark of a faithful Mormon. Do we as members have room for improvement? Oh yes, we sure do, myself included. Nibley is great at pointing out ways in which we follow Babylon culture instead of living the gospel. Approaching Zion points this out very clearly. He always realized that faith comes foremost. Despite a lifetime of scholarship, he said it that wasn't actually the most important thing: "We're just sort of dabbling around, playing around, being tested for our moral qualities, and above all the two things we can be good at, and no other two things can we do: we can forgive and we can repent" (Faith of an Observer, 1985 FARMS film). Nibley was a great LDS scholar, as others have commented. The continued support of the BYU Neal Maxwell Institute (formerly FARMS) is evidence enough of that. I happen to have known some of the students who fact-checked Approaching Zion when it was published. One or two commented that he sometimes took some liberties with his sources and/or didn't fully cite them. But their overall opinion seems to have been that he was a good scholar, and that he had blazed many paths that others would later pursue further. For me, Nibley is a model scholar-saint. He is both, as we should all be, not just one or the other. Nibley shows us how it's done.