askandanswer

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Everything posted by askandanswer

  1. The imagery/analogy is faulty given that the sun is a star.
  2. It would have been very helpful if you had mentioned this earlier! I've been trying to work out what I've been doing wrong. Perhaps I should start trying to go through trees instead of trying to go around them. I'll have to think about that a bit.
  3. As someone involved in education, I'm really disappointed at the number at the number of students who take a literal interpretation to the first line of this quote.
  4. This is the main reason why I'm thinking of ending this universe and starting again with a new one. All that effort involved in creation, just to lead to an outcome like this! It hardly seems worth the effort.
  5. I believe that few, if anybody, and more likely, nobody, knows the details of the atonement. What we know is how to make it effective in our lives Knowing that is the most important thing to know, but only a tiny fraction of all there is to know, about the atonement.
  6. So is it the case that the term God is both a collective noun, referring to one organisation consisting of three Gods and a personal pronoun, referring to each member of that organisation? And now I'm starting to wonder where God's wife fits into things, and Christ's wife. What is their part or role? Is God, in the collective sense, composed of 5 individuals? Or perhaps God and His wife count as one individual and Christ and His wife count as one individual?
  7. 4 And they are aone God, yea, the very bEternal cFather of heaven and of earth. Does the use of the pronoun they in this verse add support to the idea that Jesus and His Father are, collectively, one God?
  8. Its an odd situation where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is funding the missionary efforts of the Community of Christ.The next time I renew my temple recommend I'm going to be asked whether I support or promote any teachings, practices or doctrine contrary to those of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter_Day Saints. If I'd provided just $1,000 to support the missionary efforts of a church whose missionaries taught that this was a false church I think I might have to answer yes to that question. I'm not going to say that the church should not have done this because its not my place to say such things. I'm just saying its an odd situation.
  9. I have vague memories of reading about a discussion between the leaders of the two churches many decades ago in which the then Reorganised church offered to sell the LDS church the Kirtland Temple and the LDS church turning the offer down with the reason that the time would come that the Reorganised church would be so poor that they would give the Temple to us. It appears that that has not happened. Does anybody else recall something like this?
  10. How interesting! I've never seen a baby wombat in a pouch before. Lots of joey kangaroos in pouches, but never a wombat.
  11. We encountered this wombat wandering along the side of the road when we were on a trip to the south coast. It was unusual to see a wombat wandering around so close to a road during the day so we got out and had a closer look. Something, maybe us, must have scared it because suddenly it started running. I think it was heading for its hole. Unfortunately, I see far more dead wombats than live ones by the side of the road. There is a place about an hour from where I now live that does jumping crocodile tours. You can take a boat the size of a small ferry which puts you well above the water line or you can take what is commonly referred to as a "tinnie" which is a very small boat which puts you almost at the same level as the crocodils. We took the tinnie. This part of the Adelaide River has a very dense crocodile population. We saw about 10 crocs in less than a kilometer. https://www.adrenaline.com.au/tours/darwin/jumpings-crocodile-cruise-adelaide-river/
  12. Its really hard to imagine a wombat maintaining that sort of speed for more than, at a guess, 90 seconds on flat ground. I suspect they would have considerable energy reserves given how fat they are and how little they generally move.
  13. I thought that happened during covid. I know the mission I am living in shrunk to less than 20% of its normal size during covid.
  14. I remember being amazed the first time I saw a wombat run. Until then I had only seen them move at a very slow pace. For a moment I thought it was chasing me and I got a bit worried , but when I changed direction it ran straight past me.
  15. Since Christ is coming quickly, we can rule out the possibility that He's coming on the 904 bus from downtown.
  16. I am quite sure that that is exactly what has been happening since at least 6 April 1830
  17. My former stake has a mostly disused chapel that they have been able to hang on to for more than 10 years. The stake holds the occasional Relief Society event or YSA fast-breaker in that chapel to justify its retention and prevent it from being sold.
  18. It sounds like the residents of this area are heeding the Lord's counsel in Isaiah 2 20 ΒΆ Go ye forth of aBabylon, flee ye from the bChaldeans, with a voice of singing declare ye, tell this, utter it even to the end of the earth; say ye, The Lord hath redeemed his servant Jacob.
  19. I read Numbers 21 this morning and noted some similarities between Joseph Smith's multiple inquiries of the Lord on behalf of a friend and Balaam's several inquiries to the Lord on behalf of Balak. That incident might provide further context for interpreting/understanding what happened with Joseph and Martin.
  20. The Branch that meets in the same chapel as my Branch has about 50 attendees on a good day. Its western and eastern boundaries both extend about 300 kilometers. Going south its about 250 km to the next Branch. Every time he comes up here the Mission President talks about having a Temple in this city of two Branches with a combined weekly attendance of about 160
  21. So these people have really big feet?
  22. So people would end up with nicely vacuumed feet? Is that a modern version of washing the dust off their feet?
  23. That's a vacuum cleaner? It looks pretty awkward to use, no wonder it was so henryish!
  24. Some semi-formed, highly speculative ponderings about light: Given their source, we can accept these verses as truth. If we could work out how they are true, I think it would revolutionise our understanding of astronomy, electo-magnetic energy, truth, information, and how it is conveyed. It might also improve our understanding of how the Spirit communicates with us. In these verses, God has given us the answers. We just need to work out the how. If I was a physicist studying the properties of light, Doctrine and Covenants 88 is where I would begin. When God has given us direct teachings and truth on a topic that we want to know about, I can see some disadvantages arising from not accepting and following those teachings. I suspect that one approach to studying the question of how physical light is/might be truth would be in looking more closely at the dual nature of light as both a particle and as energy. Light joins together in one thing the properties of a particle and the properties of energy. I think that the joining of two things into one - intelligence to spirit to create a soul, then soul to physical body, then two bodies merged into one through temple marriage to create a family, then sperm and egg combining to create a body - is main method God uses for bringing seperate things into a higher order of being. When I think of these verses I almost always immediately think also of the idea that God dwells in the midst of everlasting burning which sounds to me like a sun. A sun produces and emits more light than anything else - as does God. The other side of that thought is the idea that the place of least light, a black hole, where matter is stripped of its defining characteristics, sounds exactly like outer darkness, to which souls are consigned to be returned back to the condition they were in before they came into contact with God. (This is a diversion from the main topic but if it is the case that black holes are outer darkness, and that everything, including the remnants of those souls who are assigned there, eventually gets recycled, then perhaps what comes out of black holes - hawking radiation - might in some way be related to, or even be a form of, intelligence.) I suspect that either light is the medium through which truth is conveyed, or in ways yet to be worked out, light is truth. Verse 12 of the above refers to light filling the immensity of space. Light is a form of energy. The only thing I know that fills the immensity of space is the form of energy we refer to as the cosmic microwave background. I suspect that if you compare the properties of light/energy with the properties of truth/intelligence you might find enough similarities to have cause to start thinking that they might be the same thing. If we accept the idea that this universe started with the big bang, and maybe that's true and maybe its not, and that God played a part in enabling the big bang to happen, then that could be part of the explanation for how God created all truth, because light only came into existence as a consequence of the big bang.