The Folk Prophet

With all due respect, in my opinion, the replies you've given are either flat out wrong about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the teachings thereof, wrong about biblical teachings, wrong about what it means to be transactional, wrong about what grace is or means, and logically inconsistent. But...saying any more would simply be useless arguing. You're clearly a nice guy who's making great efforts to be extremely civil. Digging into the details of how how I think you're wrong would likely breach that pretty quickly. So I'll leave off. Clearly, if you feel the Spirit has led you to a truth that I believe is false and vice versa, then an impasse exists. I'm not sure what your objective is here. (Perhaps that's been stated elsewhere in the thread.) But whatever it is, it doesn't seem to be to learn, and you certainly won't persuade me I'm in the wrong. So..., you know...thanks for the civility. I wish you the best.

Of course it's semantic distinction. You have an understanding of what "glory" is and, accordingly, adjusted your theological perspective. You can say it's not semantics...but the catalyst for the shift was a semantic understanding of what glory means, what transactional means, and so forth. But the doctrinal points on those matters may well mean something different than your understanding, which makes the theological shift, perhaps, mistaken from the get go. This kind of sentiment makes me mindful of many parent/child relationships. I have children. If they make choices that bring them peace and joy it brings me joy. If they make choices that bring them turmoil and sorrow it makes me sad. But then the child, in their ever-wise childish wisdom, determines that I'm pressuring them unfairly by being unhappy at their life choices, and that I'm making my relationship with them transactional and conditional. And they declare unfairness and pressure, and blame me for their unhappiness, as if my desire for them to find peace and joy is what causes their lack of it. Until, of course, they become parents, and their kids start making bad choices and then they go, "oh... I get it now." To presume that God just doesn't find less or more joy in my choices belies the reality that He is my father and that he actually does, truly and legitimately, love me. One cannot love someone else and at the same time not care if they destroy themselves. The way I see it, there's just no getting away from it. Loving someone else makes the relationship "transactional" at some level. Presuming God gets no more or less joy or sorrow when those he loves make decisions that bring them pain is to presume God doesn't actually love. 1. Since when is "fully at rest" something that's meant to be any part of mortality? 2. No one has ever "done enough" to be counted worthy. Hence: 3. The whole point of Christ's Atonement for our sins. 4. It kind of sounds to me like you never really understood the doctrine or teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Semantics. Depends on what one means by a wage. I'm going to assume (once again, haven't read the entire thread, but I'm assuming your view is fairly mainstream "Christian" now) that you believe one must, at the very least, accept Christ for salvation? Okay...fine... isn't that still a transactional "wage"? Like...all you've really don't is moved the difficultly level way down to alleviate your own stress. But it doesn't change any of the theory behind it. It's still something that has to be done in order to get something else. Payment for accepting Christ. Payment you don't get if you don't accept Christ. Either that or you believe everyone's saved, regardless of choice. Deny Christ, refuse His baptism and His gospel, but heaven anyhow? In which case... well that just has no relation to any biblical teachings whatsoever. All Christianity, as far as I know, actually very much sits in the realm of wage for choice. They just mostly narrow down the choice to a single "accept Christ as your Savior" element for said wage. Then they try and claim grace isn't a wage. Salvation for accepting Christ. Definitionally, it's the same thing as a requirement for any given adherence to any thing, and trying to argue it's not is logically inconsistent. Why on earth do we need to offer him our hearts if he gains nothing from our doing that? And if he gains or loses nothing from our doing so...why would he not just save us all? Why would he require anything of any of us? Why are we even here? Why didn't He just just send us to heaven to all have eternal perfect joy? What does He gain by sending some of his children to hell? I just don't get the point of view here? How does it make sense to remove ALL transaction from our relationship with God? It doesn't make sense. (I apologize if you've explained prior.) I experience it constantly, as any right-minded, sane person does. I just don't see denying reality as the proper solution. My Father in Heaven loves me. Therefore He'll be sad if I go to hell. Therefore it's transactional at some level, regardless of whether that makes me feel pressured or not. Mostly I reconcile it thusly: I will do my best and trust Him. That's the end all of it. I do my best. I fail, and fail, and fail, and often feel unsavable. But I know what I know because the Spirit has witnessed the truth of it to me, and if I deny that it makes a liar of me. So how it makes me feel isn't relevant. Truth is truth.

I haven't read through the thread...and I have SO much to say... a lot of which may have already been said. And I don't really have the time to detail out all my thoughts. But they can be summarized in the two posts I've made. I think calling God's glory complete vs increasing is a semantic issue and not really worth debating. It's both. And it can be easily reconciled as both. Neither are hard ideas. It just depends on what one means by glory. I don't think our having a transactional relationship with God takes away from things flowing from love and grace in any regard. I understand and appreciate the need to balance these ideas. But I don't think one needs to be cast aside in favor of the other or that that's the best way to come to terms with various principles and ideas.

I'm not so sure there are different kinds of faith, as if faith is gravy which can be brown or white. Faith is just a word and it means what the person who says it means it to mean. It is, I agree, used in two different ways. But even then... I'm less sure. I think it's used in two ways because it's used incorrectly in one of them. But.... to my chagrin, Alma seems to use it in that way I think is incorrect. And, you know... I'm no Alma. Moreover...if a word is used in any given way to mean a certain thing and those saying it mean that and those understanding it understand that, then it DOES mean that and callings it incorrect is incorrect. I'm sorry grammar Nazis. But that's just the way words work. So...I guess I have no point. But... more importantly, God uses it, and means something by it. I'm not certain why, because it is used to mean different things, which causes a lack of clarity. If the word faith, across the board, was replaced with either "belief", "trust", or "commitment" then... Obviously my point of view on the matter is meaningless. As I said, I seem to have no point.

I don't see how these "flow chats" are mutually exclusive. Maybe reconciling the idea that both can, essentially, be correct...

Aren't semantics fun? It's like debating whether it's okay to be proud of your kids when pride is a sin. Very useful.

Haha. Maybe true now. I'm an old man out of touch with modern tech apparently. YouTube?! Come on man! What a boomer! Get off my lawn!

No one actually does research. They watch YouTube videos or the like and consider themselves having researched.

Which is funny branding because.... well, have you ever tried to explain cloud storage, for example, to someone in their 80s? Here's the explanation you give so they get it: "It saves it on the internet."

Just so we're clear, I'm not countering anything you're suggesting. (I'm not supporting it, per se, either. Just...commenting.) The thing is... the dangers of (air-quotes) A.I. (air-quotes) are not, at present, what everyone believes they will be. Everyone thinks it's some form of the terminator. Well...maybe someday. But that's not what the current danger is.. The dangers of AI is that AI is a big freaking lie that's turning the business world upside down...based on a lie. The lie is, as always, wealth. "A.I. will make you rich!" But NO ONE is going to get wealthy from A.I. except those peddling A.I. and its related support system (computing power). Well, and the dirtbag traders and execs who will sell A.I. to their companies, get big bonuses, and then move on to another lucrative career. None of that is actually related to the first comment I made about A.I. not existing yet. More related to the video I just posted. But it's related... in that even calling it A.I. is a lie. It's not. It's not intelligent in any way, shape or form. Not artificially or otherwise. We think we're experiencing "intelligence" in the way that Hollywood has portrayed A.I. But we're not. Not even close. At best we're seeing some artificial artificial intelligence. Maybe that's argumentative in an unnecessary way. But not really. Like I said...it's marketing. Don't get me wrong. There's value in some of what we are experiencing. Not monetary value. Not for most. But it's a nice tool. As a developer, for example, I like that when I google (or bing or whatever) the syntax for some code I can't quite recall, that instead of having to click on the Stack Overflow link, I get an AI Overview (that's basically stolen the info from Stack Overflow), which has been "summarized" for me. That makes my search a bit quicker. Nice. And I like that when I shop on Amazon that when I go to the reviews there's an "A.I." summary of the reviews. Nice. But neither of these things, once again, are in any way "intelligent", artificially or otherwise. It's just branding for basic algorithms that have been running for half a century in some form or another. Guess what. That's what computers do! All of a sudden it's being touted as "A.I.". Why? Money and the promise of money. It drives me nutty. There's only a very few applications of the tech that even pretend to be intelligent, as in artificially "thinking". The chat engines for one. Even the art generation...which is nifty and fun...but...is it "intelligent"? Since when is automated replication of something or another "intelligent"? And, moreover,.... I'm pretty intelligent. But I can't do that. My brother can. He's not more intelligent than I am. He's trained artist that's learned skills. But the ability to paint a face that looks like a face instead of a scribble isn't exactly intelligence. I mean...it's tied into intelligence. The ability to learn and to assess and remember. So at least the art stuff can, sort of, fit the classification of A.I.... sort of. But so much the other stuff out there being called A.I.? Nope. It's just the new thing to call stuff. It's like, for example....cameras autofocused for fifty years, but now anything like that is "intelligent". And everyone's freaking out because a camera is "thinking" for itself? Yes...I'm using a simple example and tech has advanced and what cameras or the like do is more complex now. But it's essentially the same thing. It's like calling the starter on your vehicle intelligent. "You mean it...starts the car? By itself? All I have to do is push this button!? Wow! Well, there goes humanity." Another more realistic example is the writing suggestion tools from Word or Grammarly or the like. They've done that forever. But now it's called A.I. The spell checker is A.I. now. Oh no. We're doomed. The real danger, in things like that, is when all the companies needing photography fire all qualified photographers because the camera is smart enough by itself, and then wonder why their photography magazine nose dives. But, hey...maybe, eventually, the camera will be smart enough. Except, I forgot...we don't need cameras at all now. Just a few prompts. C'est la vie.

Yep. The right to "peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" is, indeed, kind of one of the reasons America is great. That's not an argument against whether actually doing so is stupid or not. I'll defend people's right to do it all day long. And I'll continue to think it's stupid.

Not a direct reply...but for the record..."marches" are SO FREAKING STUPID! Anyone who "marches" for anything at any time should.... Well...I best not go on lest I offend someone who believes in marches. Except...too late.

A.I. does not exist yet. What we're living through is a big marketing lie.

I was also thinking of this from 1st Samuel: 1 Samuel also said unto Saul, The Lord sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of the Lord. 2 Thus saith the Lord of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. 3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. It kind of always amazes me when people call any sort of violence "un-Christian".

I don't think it refers to natural state of anything, but the general mental state of the time.

Once I was discussing our ADD with my brother and he said, "Remember when we were kids and it was just called being bad?"

Yep. See my response to @estradling75 just prior to this one. Fully agree. People like to think they understand. Even I do. But we don't.

Sure...but that doesn't mean it isn't maybe true. What I do know is that there's WAY more to the eternities than we can even begin to try and comprehend.

Sure. But if it's a true principle, and if anyone practices it in the eternities, then it means more exalted women than men.

Moreover, even IF statistically more women make it to the Celestial Kingdom than men (which, you know....considering plural marriage.... but I digress....), the assumption that therefore any given woman is more righteous than any given man is classic biased stereotyping.

Happiness is not so simple though. The principle of losing our life to find our life, sacrifice bringing blessing, and that joy comes from faith, righteousness, humility, service, obedience, and effort, are not intuitive to the human (natural man) condition. People are (in their fallen "natural man" way) seeking self-fulfillment, money, pleasure, and ease, laughter, fun, and a painless existence. The gospel does not intuitively provide these things (though it does in a round about way). The core principles of Christ's gospel amount to denying oneself and taking up one's cross to follow the Savior. These principles are obvious to those who've engaged in them, even in practical matters of life (such as working out and eating right to be healthy, being careful with money and working hard to be wealthy, etc., etc.). But the world, more and more, pushes the ideas of "deserve" and "self" and "victim" and "follow your passion" and all the Disney (a.k.a. Satan) garbage like that, which all feels, to the natural man, like how we should find/seek happiness. The problem is that it doesn't work. So I'm not disagreeing with you. An environment where people left happy is, you're correct, the key. But what that environment looks like is sacrifice, humility, service, obedience, a broken heart and a contrite spirit, and so forth. And that's a tough pill to swallow, even though it's the actual medicine we all need.

Meaning...it's Disney's fault.