rpframe

The Book of Mormon was translated by the power of God, not written by the hand of God. I wouldn't be surprised if the Book of Mormon turned out to have many flaws. It definitely could be biased. It was edited by Mormon... He very well may be historically biased by the things he heard about history himself. There is also plenty of evidence that God did not (always) edit the words of the prophets. I feel like if he did, then there wouldn't be stuff like "or rather that is to say" moments in it. Even if it is all a big fat fairy tale, it doesn't make the principles taught in it false.

I'm 5 pages behind in this topic, and have not read all the posts. But looking primarily at the original post... Morality: principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior. Now.. without going too deeply into principles of ethics, there are many bases on which to base your morality, whether it be utilitarian or otherwise. I could theoretically say that Morality is defined by the population of rabbits on the earth. That which helps rabbits thrive and reproduce is good, and that which kills rabbits is bad. Feeding rabbits good... Killing wolves good... Rabbit skinning bad. Is this the way morality SHOULD be defined? Probably not, but I COULD define it that way. We believe that God IS Good. Or that is to say, that morality is DEFINED by God. Or in other words, God's will is good. That which is against God's will is bad. Therefore, if you accept God as the basis of morality, then YES... Morality REQUIRES a God. Now, since we are not always certain of God's exact and precise will... We tend to use other things as makeshift bases for our morality. We may say that killing people is always wrong. And that holds true most of the time. God commands us not to kill. But God has commanded people on more than one occasion to kill people. Does this make God a liar? No. It just means that he as our creator is master of our lives. He is the only one who has the right to decide who lives and who dies. If he decides that someone is to die (Laban), and that one of us is to kill them (Nephi), then that is within God's will, and is therefore RIGHT. If something that is within God's will seems immoral to you, it is likely due to your limited frame of reference. God allowed those people in Alma to be killed, and the reasoning given may not make sense to us. We may say that the deaths of those people seems immoral by another standard. But death is not the end. Those people are with God now. Their pain is over. Their life's mission complete. God knows more than us. Now... you are completely welcome to reject God as the basis of morality. And in that case your morality does not require a God. But our theology uses God as the basis of our morality. Therefore in this context, morality requires a God, because GOD IS MORALITY.

More recent versions of MySQL better handle large tables but... in the end you are still just writing to a single file. And when that file contains rows numbering in the millions, and multiple people are trying to write to it, it can be slow. To help alleviate this, we switched to using Amazon Aurora, which has definitely helped. We consider the many many posts in this forum to be valuable. If we ditch all the current posts and/or archive them, they no longer are all searchable in one place. I hope that one day the software will make archived posts searchable (such that new posts update quickly, but old posts are still searchable), but that is presently not the case. (for those that care there is a whole thread about this in the software forums)

Okay so, various issues came up that I can't go into for site security reasons. No posts were lost in this attempt, but we are not updated yet. Will contact the software developers to get some answers about a few things, and will try again in a few days (depending on how prompt they are about responding). Thanks for your patience.

Either way, we have a lot of things to consider when choosing software. Presently we are going to continue forward with invisionpower. There are a lot of bugfixes and improvements coming with this update. Hope it alleviates a few concerns. The latest major version that we are using was built from the ground up. So it definitely has bugs. But they are actively working on fixing them. And boy let me tell you, the backend of the old version was a complete disaster.

Maintenance will begin shortly. We are just making sure our backups are all situated before we push the big red update button.

We used vBulletin before, it has its own issues. Not real excited about anything more from them. Additionally, there are a lot of other concerns we worry about. Such as keeping the millions of posts we already have in here. Its not quite as simple as just installing new software most of the time. We have recently upgraded our database to help alleviate some of this. But I agree it can still take a while. SQL doesn't like it much when you have multi gigabyte databases. The search index alone for this thing is 700MB.

Hi, Site Tech here. There are a lot of improvements and bug fixes in this patch. I don't write the software, I only administer it, so, all I can do right now is quote the changelog: So, in short, yes, we hope to see fewer duplicates.

/facepalm

What about it?

From what I've seen.. there are primarily 3 points of discussion from Reece right now. 1) Paraphrasing from my understanding: "I don't necessarily agree with the amount of money and resources being dedicated to the building of temples. They could be cheaper". I want to emphasis that the dollar amounts allocated to various parts of the church's budget, is a matter of church policy and not doctrine. A few comments on this... Thinking about the construction of the Salt Lake temple. Much time and effort and resources were sacrificed in the building of the temple. The possible reasons for this are many. It helped build faith and dedication in those that helped construct it. The work itself is a sacrifice. There is a tradition of "only the best for God". In modern times, with the way tithing currently works... the resource we give to the church that is used in temple construction is primarily cash. Depending on how you may pay tithing, it may not feel like that big of a deal. Like income tax.. for some people it may get automatically sent out without them thinking about it due to automatic withdrawals. or sometimes even writing a check each month or handing cache over to the bishop may still not feel like a big deal. But that is part of our sacrifice. But... because we hire construction workers to build these sorts of things for us. We may feel a bit more detached from the construction of the temple. We may feel that it is unnecessary to make the temples that nice. And you know what.. I think its okay to feel that way. I think it is just fine to feel like "I wish that more of my tithing money went to other things". For whatever reason.. the general authorities either through their opinions or through revelation, feel it important to make the temples really nice, and probably not just because the kingdom of God is nice. They also feel like they should be built to survive through natural disasters. But for whatever reason... they feel like its the way it should be done.. and until they receive inspiration otherwise, it is the way it will be done. Church policy is policy.. and policies change occasionally, and you can hope that they will change.. but hopefully you don't stake your testimony on that.. because there may be reasons that we don't understand for them being that way. But if its a problem.. I'm confident that God will fix it in his own time and in his own way. 2) Paraphrasing from my understanding: "In my mind I feel like it would make the most sense if the afterlife worked like such and such. And if it does work like that, then things in the church would be more like this and this." I think its important to think about things from our own perspective. But we should be careful to keep in mind how much more God knows than us. And you know what you could be entirely right, but the world may not be ready for that. God will make sure that things work out in the end though. I appreciate Reece sharing their opinion on these matters. 3) Paraphrasing from my understanding: "Our lack of detail in the afterlife, and our lack of details concerning sealings and eternal families brings up some questions for me and people I know". This is definitely a pain point for people. Real life doesn't always mean the perfect Mormon family setup. And that makes the afterlife confusing, and maybe a bit concerning. I know a lot of people that have a lot of faith in the church, but absolutely do not want to be sealed to their earthly family. And all I can say to them is that hopefully those family members that enter the celestial kingdom will be more pleasant as perfected beings, and that we probably really aren't able to fully comprehend what the afterlife is really like.. so.. try to keep an open mind. Anyway.. I think Reece is getting a lot of flack for expressing their thoughts on temples and sealings and eternal families. Reading it, I don't think they are trying to say that the church is wrong, just that certain policies don't entirely make sense to them. And you know what that is okay. I feel like we should try to not put too many words in Reece's mouth. Note: I am not a moderator.. just giving my 3 cents on this discussion.

Oops... fixed the title haha. Never said he was the first one to use it. He was just the first one that spelled it out for me: "When we use the term moral agency, we are appropriately emphasizing the accountability that is an essential part of the divine gift of agency. "

More like.. specificity of language

I know that most of us grew up indoctrinated with the term "pre-existence".. but it is really a terribly confusing abbreviation of pre-earthly-existence.. Like.. just think about the phrase for a second... "What do you mean by.. before I existed?". Anyway.. I feel like its just poor word choice that I chose a long time ago to remove from my vocabulary. And while I'd love to have it eradicated from existence... know that I can't and/or shouldn't try to convince others to do the same. So.. just mostly planting a seed of thought for people that have never thought about it that way. Other options include: Pre-mortal life Pre-earth life I don't know if any general authority ever said anything about it.. but.. at worst its just a personal prerogative of mine that I hold alongside things like trying to use the phrase "Moral Agency" rather than "Free Agency" (courtesy of Elder Christopherson). Mostly I just find it helpful when talking to friends of other faiths. And while I know most of us know what we mean by "pre-existence"... never know who's watching on the intarwebz And I also know that its not just a Mormon thing.. (heck.. there's even a wikipedia article for pre-existence)... But.. it just rubs me the wrong way.. similarly to things like "I could care less". Anyone else feel this way? Or just me?

All the large updates are done. You *should* receive an email.. make sure you check spam. If you continue to have problems.. we should talk over email. You can get ahold of me via http://lds.net/contact/

I'm not sure that you can apply this directly to the afterlife. Not saying that it doesn't apply.. just saying that its unclear. I personally apply this primarily mortal life only. Meaning that part of the plan is that we can make mistakes in ignorance here on earth.

ANYway... pertaining to the main topic of the thread... which I will admit that I have not read all of... I think that one cannot say with certainty that Jesus was not married based on the fact that it is not mentioned in the bible, but I also think that one cannot say with certainty that Jesus had to be married either. Its all just conjecture right now. All that really matters is that WE, should be married. But conjecture is fun.. so proceed

Maybe I should clarify, I think we mean "all" in the sense of "everything pertaining to life on earth and salvation". Similarly to how Satan was fully informed about the plan to come to earth and get a body, but rejected it anyway. Besides I'm pretty sure "How to make your own universe" is probably a it beyond the skill and mental capacity of imperfect beings.

Maybe I should clarify, I think we mean "all" in the sense of "everything pertaining to life on earth and salvation". Similarly to how Satan was fully informed about the plan to come to earth and get a body, but rejected it anyway. Besides I'm pretty sure "How to make your own universe" is probably a bit beyond the skill and mental capacity of imperfect beings.

I'm with traveler on this one. God will not judge us in ignorance. At judgement day we will know the truth and feel the full weight of the sins that we refuse to forsake. But even knowing the truth, some will reject portions of it.

Not sure to exactly what text you are referring to when you say "Original Texts", but, most of the time when we refer to original text, we are referring to what was originally written down by the prophets and apostles, not the many times over rewritten and re-translated manuscripts. Moreover, we also believe that scripture alone is incomplete, and that just as in the times of the apostles, revelation is an essential part of the Gospel of Christ, and that God continues to guide his people on the earth through his prophets. So even if the bible was somehow near perfectly preserved, it could still be misinterpreted, and we need constant guidance through our personal communication with God, and the direction we receive through His chosen prophets.

I'm so very glad the changes are working

I didn't develop the forum software, I'm just here to tweak settings. I don't believe that is a current feature of the software, but they may decide to include that in future software updates.

Greetings wonderful peoples of the forums! I'm posting here in an attempt to keep you all updated on what is actually going on, and what we are doing to make things better. Server OS, PHP, and Forum updates completed 1/9/2017 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Techy stuff for people that care: Database: Database upgrade has helped significantly. Things in the back-end are running much more smoothly. Version Update: Just updated the forums to 4.1.17.1 from 4.1.14.3 Highlights: Performance improvements on activity streams Remember me cookie is now 90 days rather than 7 days The editor will now show a message if a link that can be embedded (image, video, etc.) failed to embed for some reason. There is now logic to prevent double-posting when the initial post encounters an error on submit You can now press ctrl/cmd+enter in any editor window to submit the reply There is now a setting to change the number of topics per page in the forum view If you are using multiple devices to login to a site you will be less likely to be logged out Tags can now be quickly edited when viewing an item Added quite a few new embed providers: codepen.io coub.com deviantart.com docs.com funnyordie.com gettyimages.com iFixit.com kickstarter.com meetup.com mixcloud.com mix.office.com on.aol.com reddit.com reverbnation.com screencast.com screenr.com slideshare.net smugmug.com ustream.tv Full list of changes found here

So, our new login system works independently from the IPB account settings. Thanks for letting us know that the password reset settings in IPB are still reachable (they shouldnt' be). You can reset your password using the "Lost/Forgot/Reset your password here" link on the login page. Or just click here. Sorry for the confusion.