askandanswer

Now I'm full of curiosity and hope about how the first meeting goes..........

The fish was shot with a 9 mm round?

So some ballistics, such as a .44 are measured in imperial units, and others, such as a 9 millimeter, are measured in metric units? And I'm still not sure where the 207 rifle fits in.

Media outlets here are describing the sentence as a slap on the wrist with a wet lettuce.

27 And if the time comes that the voice of the people doth choose iniquity, then is the time that the judgments of God will come upon you; yea, then is the time he will visit you with great destruction even as he has hitherto visited this land.

How many pages is the list of conditions?

so a .44 is .44 of a centimeter across? Which would then make it slightly larger than half a 9 millimeter? And a .22 is half the size of .44. There was a reference to a 207 which I think referred to a rifle. Is that a different scale or is it something that is almost ten times bigger than a .22?

This sounds something like: I God, am talking to you in English, but I'm not going to tell you clearly what I mean. So that you can understand what I mean, I want you to refer back to the 200 year old English translation of what I said to a prophet in Hebrew more than 2,500 years ago, and which has since been translated multiple times with varying degrees of accuracy. If achieving understanding and clarity are the purposes of your communication, this seems to be an odd way to achieve it. Of course, these might not have been the purposes of this particular part of the communication - perhaps you're right and the intention of this communication was to prompt those who read this phrase to go away and seek revelation as to what it means.

I see a lot of numbers in this thread - .44, .45, 22. 207, 9 millimeter- most of which I guess are measurements. What are these measurements of?

It's not immediately clear to me why the Lord would use such vague and imprecise language, capable of multiple meanings, all of which seem to carry some degree of uncertainty. At first glance, it doesn't strike me as the most effective means of communication. It's possible that the only people likely to clearly understand this phrase are those who have made the same sort of effort as those who have participated in this discussion, and when compared with all those who read the phrase, that is likely to be a very small number. I kind of like the idea of say what you mean and mean what you say - its clearer, more precise, and leaves less room for misunderstanding. This style of language - sword is bathed in heaven - gives weight to the arguments of the clerics in the middle ages who claimed that interpretation of the bible should be left to trained specialists.

Would that be a black radio? As in Sirius Black?

You can't be Syrius?!

It seems to me that if the main support for the idea of a Priesthood ban for a certain group of people is based on certain scriptures, then all of those scriptures should be true, and not just a part of them. According to those scriptures, one part of the curse is that the descendants of Cain and Canaan would be servants of servants and another part is that they would be cursed as to the Priesthood. If it can be demonstrated that one part of the curse is untrue, or did not come to pass, or is not universally applicable to the group to whom it is said to apply, then that gives reason to be less certain about the other part of the curse. I think it is a matter of widely accepted historical fact that over the period from when the curse was first said to apply, up to the time of Joseph Smith, and up to the time when the curse was lifted, there were centuries, perhaps even thousands of years, when a very large proportion of the people to whom the curse is believed to apply, were not servants of servants, but were members of great and powerful kingdoms, exercising power and dominion over many others, and even over those who were descendants of Shem from time to time, up until the establishment of the state of Israel. In particular, its very hard to see how that part of the curse was true during the 400 years that the children of Israel were in bondage to the children of Ham. Who were the servants of servants at that time? Since it is clear that one part of the curse is completely false/wrong/incorrect/unreliable/misunderstood, I’m not sure why we shouldn’t assume that the other part is equally as wrong and miunderstood.

An interesting and useful site - thanks @zil2

The very first verse of Job raises questions about whether all of it can be taken literally as true. 1 There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil. Some people suggest that there has only ever been one perfect person and I don't think they have Job in mind when they say that. And if he was perfect, he would certainly have lived in the land of Aus rather than Uz.