pugiofidei

Depends on the particular sense in which one means either word. "Faith", e.g., has both the sense of "trust", and the sense of "true-heartedness". "Fear", too, can mean the terror involved in running from a bear, or the sense of wonder involved in contemplating a Gothic arch. When it comes to the "negative" sense of fear, holy John tells us the one thing that can cast it out. To wit: perfect love. Well, is your love perfect? Has it no more growth to do? Does it fit to the last whit the description John gives of it? If not, there is still good reason for fear to remain unoutcast. :)

Every day we out to convert our lives a little more to Christ's. Or, rather better put, each day we ought to allow Christ to convert our lives a little more into his own. :)

This was a double post of the one below. My apologies.

Provided we are working from mutually understood definitions, yes on all counts. A "thing" is participated being--a thing which has a part in being, but does not have the essence "being". For instance, a horse is, it exists, but its existence is not the same as its essence, which might be roughly stated as, "A four-legged, plant-eating maned beast, with a straight-haired tail, one hoof to each foot, and a staggering power to run swiftly." Its essence is not, "The act of self-standing being". The essence of the horse and its existence are two different things. This can further be ably demonstrated by removing a horse's leg. This one horse becomes three-legged, but that does not make a horse a three-legged thing. A horse, being made of matter, is able to exist in a state other than its essence. But then, this is fairly close to the definition of matter: matter is something that can become something else. A green apple can become a red one. A red one can (with some loss) become a human, should a human come along and eat it. And, of course, God cannot have an imperfect idea. For God to know himself is for him to pass on His entire nature to the Logos. What's more, since God is an everlasting Father, there was never a time in which the Son was not. The Son, as the Logos of the Father, is perfect, and therefore exhausts, so to speak, the entire mind of God. Nothing more can be said--which is why there is only one Logos. What's more, because both Father and Son are perfect, and it is the nature of perfection to love goodness, they each love one another infinitely. The common Will of both sighs, with a great heaving sigh of reckless love, the divine being. Love is, remember, the act of gifting oneself for the sake of the Other's good. When Father and Son yield to one another their common Being, they hold nothing back--otherwise it would be imperfect love. This Love, therefore, is all that each of them is--omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal, utterly infinite, falling short in nothing. This Third, this mutual spiration of Father and Son is, therefore, also God--the Holy Ghost.

Many thanks for the reply! Other than not knowing what you mean by "element", I think I agree. The question, though, is why "nothing" is absurd. Upon what grounds does one posit its absurdity? I have my own way of answering the question, but was interested in what the Mormon way is. It seems that there are a diversity of views here, which fact answers well to my interest.

In traditional Catholic thought, God is that being of which the essence is, "to be". He is not a "thing", as such; it isn't as though one can say, "There's the cat, there's the cloud, there's the moon, and there's God." He is, rather, the necessary precondition without which nothing exists. He is immutable--which is to say, he does not change, and cannot, since change is possible only with things that lack something. E.g., if I move from where I am now to a location two yards away, it is because I do not now have that location, and must change to gain it. Likewise, I must lose my present location in order to gain the other. I am, therefore, mutable; there is within me the capacity to change. I ought to note, though, that within my own communion the view of Duns Scotus exists, which posits a single category, "being", and makes God the highest instance of that category. This is called the "univocivity of being", and is the first part of the "Via Moderna" that began taking shape in the late 13th century. Scotus' view is not widely held today, though; the "Via Antiqua" is far more prevelant, which sees all created being as participated being, sharing somewhat in the great "to be" that is God, though not pantheistically. God is God, creation is creation, and these are two fundamentally distinct ways of existing. Another way to put it--which is rather close to the way God Himself put it to Moses--is that God simply and plainly "is". He is "isness". Taken by itself, I acknowledge that this view seems to make God seem a bit distant and alien. Having said that, a full theological description of man would likely make man himself seem distant and alien. The above really implies more than it says; it implies God is a singular Act of Knowledge, Love, and Power. We finite beings encounter this Act as it relates to us in a particular slice of time, making us experience it as an unfolding series of individual acts. For instance, once my son had not yet been born. Now he is. From my finite standpoint, I experience this a change in God's activity; at this one time, God had not yet created my son. Then he changed to the state of having created my son. This isn't the truth as it exists in and of itself, though. It is merely the way in which I, a time-bound soul, encounter the truth. God hasn't changed; His created reality has merely changed its particular relationship to him.

I see. Would that then place the question into the same sort of position that Thomist and Molinist approaches to the problem of predestination have within my own communion? That is, some two Mormons might, in their probing of the problems involved, come to two mutually incompatible conclusions, and yet still both remain safely within the bounds of LDS orthodoxy?

Generally speaking, my definition would correspond to some hypothetical statement spoken to me, such as, "This horse is kicking you in the face", if, at the moment, a horse happened to be kicking me in the face. Likewise, say the same person approached me after the fact, as I lay in the mud, and said: "It is right to place the proposition 'a horse has kicked you in the face' into the category 'true things'." I would accept this statement as well.

Hello! I may be asking this question under the burden of a mistaken notion of LDS doctrines of divinity. If my understanding is correct, the LDS teach that while God the Father is the cause of this particular world, He is not the cause of "ishood", or existence as such. Which is to say, He is Himself in some sense contingent, at least to the degree that he has composition. Since each of the various parts of a composed thing actualize each other, this would seem to move the problem of contingency somewhere beyond this particular world and its God. Assuming my understanding is right, though, what is the official position of the LDS on why there is something rather than nothing?

I think no faith ought to be judged on the basis of the behavior of those who fall short of living up to its principles. The question ought not be, "What are the fruits of those who believe in religion X?", but rather, "If a group flawlessly explicated and lived out the doctrines of religion X, what would the fruits be?"