clbent04

That’s a misconception. You’d be surprised to know that out of the top 3 Americans with the current highest vertical jumps, 2 of them are white-American males. Also, the genetically-inferior assumption is debunked as we’re seeing a steady rise in white-European superstars. But wait, you might say, they’re European… Well, yes, but guess where white Americans primarily descended from.

The general population demographics of the US are as follows: White: 76.3 percent Hispanic: 18.5 percent Black: 13.4 percent Asian: 5.9 percent https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219 But when it comes to NBA basketball, 80 percent of the pros are black. More surprisingly, we have no modern white-American NBA superstars. Zero. Zilch. Probably the most talented white-American playing today is Kevin Love. Haven't heard of him? Well, he's superstar-ish, a far distant second from the likes of LeBron James and Kevin Durant. If you look at high school basketball, over 60 percent of the players are white American. But from there the statistic of white Americans playing basketball dwindles drastically when graduating to college ball and beyond. So it is a question of talent? Are white Americans simply unable to compete at the highest levels of competition in basketball? Are white Americans genetically inferior when it comes to the game of basketball? Or, is it a cultural issue, where it's been instilled in white Americans that they simply can't hoop with black players? Side note - the last white-American NBA superstar to play the game was John Stockton. He retired in 2003. Some argue it was Larry Bird (retired in 1992). But wait, what about Steve Nash? Sorry, he's Canadian. Dirk? German. Luka? Try again. Slovenian. The only modern white-NBA superstars are anything but American.

How have reparations shaped the current status of Native Americans and reservations in America? Should the prevalence of depression, diabetes, alcoholism and drug abuse on Indian reservations be considered an example of why reparations don't always solve a better path going forward? Is it racist to only give select ethnic groups college scholarships? Should we be giving more reparations to the Black and Latino communities?

I was hoping this was a 4 foot by 4 foot dance club request... squeeze them in like sardines and boogie!

It's the execution of The Plan of Salvation that brings us happiness. Work is an eternal principle. Love is work. It's through loving others that we experience the happiness God wants for us. So when we ask ourselves what's our primary objective on Earth, is it to be happy? Well that's a nice thought, but how do we get there? We achieve happiness by loving others. Happiness is the end result we want to achieve, but love is the action that makes it possible for us to get there. Learning to love is our primary objective in this life, not basking in our joy on a hammock for something we've already done. God wants us to always be active. Love is a verb. Joy is a noun. I agree with you that God's ultimate goal for us is happiness, but I see that differently as to what our primary objective is on Earth even though the two are correlated. One is actionable, the other is merely a state of being. It's more practical to say our primary objective on Earth is to learn to love.

Because we all are still infants learning how to crawl when it comes to developing love which is a prerequisite to embracing the greater joy God wants us to have.

I would say the fight for agency goes in line with my belief that the primary objective in the life is to learn to love. Having agency is critical to the foundation for love to be possible. Love cannot be forced and must be freely given.

There's a correlation between love and joy. Taking what you quoted here, do you think Adam fell solely for his own joy? Or did Adam transgress for the benefit of all mankind? If for all mankind, he had to of been motivated not solely by joy, but also by love. God's formula is, the more love you have, the more selfless you are, and the more selfless you are, the more joy you receive because true joy is being in the service of God and saving souls. Back to the purpose of this life -- Can we save souls without having developed love? No. Can we experience joy without having first developed love? No. Does God want our primary focus in this life to be saving souls? Yes, but that's only possible if we develop ourselves into instruments that He can use. If the majority of us in this life are still learning how to love others outside our inner circles without expecting anything in return, ask yourself if the majority of us here on Earth are ready and actively saving souls, or if the majority of us are more largely involved in developing ourselves for that to be possible? The majority of us progress slowly in this life when it comes to developing love for others, maybe more so than we care to admit. Very few of us arrive to the level of someone like Paul or Ammon who dedicated their lives to loving others. Understand that what God wants for us in this life is different from how life actually is, and once you understand that, you can better assess which step we are on in our pursuit to obtain joy.

Ever since God organized us, His plan has always been to help us develop love. This is the primary objective and always has been. However long our mortal experience is or whatever else may be accomplished on Earth doesn't change that primary objective. Literally everything God has designed and commanded of us in the life is for the higher purpose of us developing love. The scriptures, the format of a husband/wife, having children, the gospel, work, life challenges, our health.... When examining the 10 commandments, each of the 10 commandments serve as a basic framework on how we can begin to develop love, from the obvious "thou shalt not kill" to "thou shalt not have strange Gods before me." God knows if we are to worship anyone or anything other than Him, it impedes our ability to develop love. Why? Because the very core of our souls is compelled to acknowledge that it is God and God alone that deserves our praise and worship. Any deviation to that is dishonest, and love requires truth to abound. To suggest the primary objective of this life is to obtain a mortal body is ignoring life as we know it to be.

However we experienced love in the pre-existence doesn't mean by any means that we mastered love ourselves. The only beings with mastery of love in the preexistence were God the Father and Jesus Christ. Do you really think we live here on Earth for an average of 70 years primarily just to check mark a box that says "Body obtained"? Obtaining a body is important, but it serves the purpose of enabling us to develop love, a process that has proven to take its time when it comes to the stubborn likes of us.

We were limited in our ability to love as premortal intelligences. We had never experienced physical pain and we could not fully process the concept of sacrifice to the extent God needs us to. We still have very little understanding in these matters, but with bodies we are progressing in the right direction.

@The Folk Prophet be like Brett Farve teasing everyone about retirement

@Carborendum good to see you back

“What a piece of man is Carborendum”, said Mrs. Carborendum 😁

My personal life experiences, observations and spiritual insights have led me to the realization of how miserable we are without God as a guiding influence for good. Without God’s influence, we are incapable of progressing. To hear that stated is one thing, but to internalize and see it as reality is another. We are selfish by nature. Our ability to progress beyond our selfish nature hangs in a delicate balance managed and made only possible by God. When it comes to progressing beyond what we are, we are fragile. Push us too much, and we will fall apart. Don’t push us enough, and we will remain incapable of loving others. How did we exist in the premortal life as “intelligences”? The noun would suggest we had intellectual capacity. Maybe we had ability to discern to some degree. But what we didn’t have was the ability to love or at least not to the extent made possible with a mortal, earthly experience. We did not care for our neighbors, we did not understand the importance of empathy, we were not our brother’s keeper, we did not sacrifice anything that wasn’t for our own benefit; we were incapable of understanding or even being motivated in that fashion. We were self-serving. That is our true nature absent of God. We give glory to God because despite us being miserably hopeless on our own, it was His wisdom and intervention that made possible our progression. He is our Eternal Anchor of Hope, our Heavenly North Star, and our only hope for rising above a state of nothingness; that is why we must or eventually be compelled to give glory to God, for anything we become beyond nothing is due to Him. For God to have organized us and created this vacuum where mankind has survived and thrived for as long as it has requires the greatest delicate touch beyond what we could imagine. Left to our own devices, we would have self-imploded and destroyed ourselves long ago. How do I know this? Because mankind has barely been able to survive this long even with God being as present as He is. Our self-sabotaging nature continues to spawn wars, murder, prostitution, sex trafficking, genocide, corruption, and abuse in all forms. These acts are evidence of our self-serving nature, a nature that even the most righteous among us is susceptible to. Our inherent nature of selfishness is just as alive today as it always has been even though the world’s landscape may appear to have changed over time. Selfishness is apparent on many levels even outside the common examples we would think of like theft or greed. Loving only those within your inner circles or those who provide some type of benefit in return for your love is selfish. Primarily focusing your life efforts on building a nest egg for solely you and your family is selfish if not shortsighted at best. Should we feel guilt for not being more advanced in our ability to love? I don’t think so. How developed we are in our ability to love is merely a snapshot of where we are on our individual journeys. Some may arrive to certain levels faster than others, but God didn’t design it to be a race; He designed it as a plan to give us all the best chance at developing love. It’s a monumental task for us to overcome our nature and learn to love, but we have to start somewhere. That is why God designed our learning in baby-step format. God created the format of life involving spouses and families as a step in the right direction for our advancement to learn to love others. Is it wrong to work hard to build a life for you and your family? No. But that alone isn’t the end goal of what God wants us to achieve. The goal is to learn to love, not just yourself, not just those within your inner circles, but to truly love all unconditionally as God loves us. That means putting others’ needs before your own including those who have no direct connection to you other than being a fellow child of God. Ever since Adam and Eve, God has been coaxing us along to learn to love. Through history we’ve seen how progress oftentimes takes multiple generations to build upon, just as chaos can trickle down and negatively affect multiple generations to come. How parents raise their children will influence that generation’s ability to love. How advanced should we become by the end of this life regarding our ability to love? As much as we can. The thing is, God never set a threshold because the purpose of this life never was perfection. The purpose of life is progress towards learning to love. God’s design of this life is what we need for the greatest chance of us succeeding in learning to love. God did not design our nature; He designed this life around our nature to provide us with the best platform possible for our success. If you think about how God designed the world for the benefit of our nature and development to learn to love, it extends itself to many insights of why this world is designed the way it is. For me, the family unit makes much more sense as to why it’s the exclusive unit it is instead of us attempting to love everyone equally. The exclusivity of the family unit concerned me before as it seemed selfish in principle as so many in this world are left unloved by a family of their own. I previously resented the clicks we form, but now I understand them to be necessary steppingstones for our progress in learning to love. We are far too infantile in our current state to attempt loving everyone equally. The fragility of our development of learning to love can also be related to our slow progression towards technological advancements. It’s taken thousands of years just for us to reach this digital age we now find ourselves in. Could the technology we see today have been achieved earlier? Absolutely. But we hindered and destroyed each other’s creations and progress due to our selfish nature. Had mankind not sought chaos and instead always embraced living in harmony with one another, we would be lightyears ahead of where we are today and basic problems like world hunger would not exist. But our nature is not harmonious. With the grace of God, we are swimming upstream trying to overcome our natural tendencies. May we trust in Him and His plan, and that what may seem like an insurmountable task ahead of us may seem possible to achieve with the hope He gives us, remembering that this life is nothing but baby steps in our progression of learning to love, that achieving perfection in this life never was the goal, and that God will guide us by the hand.

I wouldn't say learning to love is our sole purpose, but it's the primary objective. Obtaining a body is a far distant second to learning to love in terms of what our purpose is here on Earth. The body is a vehicle that helps make the primary objective possible.

Whether you’re religious, not religious, or kind of religious, I’m convinced this is the purpose of life for all: To learn to love. We start off in life, hopefully, with a good set of parents who give us their unconditional love as an example of how to love others. We progress to love those in our immediate circles be it family, friends, or someone you love for the love they share with you. We have kids of our own and love them as our parents loved us. And from there a few of us advance beyond to love those outside our inner circles who don’t provide us with anything in return other than the sense of joy that can come from service. Regardless of how advanced we are along the path of learning to love, whether we’re still crawling as an infant or at a light jog, we are all learning and hopefully increasing our ability to love step by step. Personally, I feel like I’m barely learning how to walk when it comes to loving others outside my inner circles without expecting anything in return. I have, however, been fortunate enough to cross paths with a few exceptional people in my life that exude love. These people I think of often and hold in high regard as examples I look up to. Being someone who believes in God, I believe our life experiences are designed to allow us to develop empathy for one another and help us advance from a state of self-interest to selflessness. And even if you don’t believe in God, you might agree life has a way of molding us in this regard if we allow it to. Why is mankind prone to limit its love to its own inner circles? We often reserve love for family and friends only, exclusive to our little empires. For one, all of us are in the process of learning to love, and no one in this life, besides Jesus Christ, has ever mastered love. We need to start with the inner circles we have as building blocks preparing us for further advancement. We need to start somewhere and hopefully someday be able to begin walking in the Savior’s footprints He left as an example to us, and embrace a higher way to love. To those who have set a lasting impression on me of this type of love in my own life, thank you for showing me it’s possible. It inspires me to do the same even in my own limited, finite ability. Love is connection we all seek and transcends any one specific culture, religion, or ideology. Mark 22:37-39 “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” John 13:34-35 “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

I'd say this sums up my main points: -In the premortal life, before God organized us, we existed in a state of chaos. We were limited in our capacity to overcome the chaos -In the premortal life, we gravitated towards those among us who had similar charges or behaviors and tendencies -All unique lifeforms and species pertain to a specific energy class -The energy class that humans pertain to is the only class that is able to defy nature -Before being organized, God was able to identify our energy by our unnatural behavior -"Good" and "evil" have been elusive terms to me in relation to how they apply to the laws of the universe. Replacing these terms with order and chaos makes it more tangible for me to comprehend -This universe is not stationary. It is moving, flexing and bending to the laws of the universe, and the universe is but a speck of dust in the midst of infinity -While Jesus Christ lived a perfect life and died for our sins thus overcoming death, the Atonement did not remove the necessity of sacrifice. Sacrifice will continue to be necessary for God's plan to function. When I say this universe can be likened unto a single atom moving through infinity, sacrifice and work is the fuel that keeps it going. Sacrifice plays a key part in satisfying the laws of the universe

How would we come from nothing? We exist and therefore we are.

My personal musings of organizing intelligences, order and chaos, and God's plan: We have always existed. Not as human beings, but who we are at our core. Our energy is the essence of who we are, what animates us to life, and we are eternal. This energy, which represents only a small percentage of our mass, is matter. It cannot be created or destroyed. Some people refer to it as the spirit, soul, or light within us. Because we have always existed, God DID NOT create us; He organized us so that we may have this mortal experience. Before God, we existed somewhere in space as uncontained energy seemingly bouncing around in a random order, except that the energy we are is of a special class of intelligence and behaves in a manner greater than simply being like a leaf blown about by the wind. We are different in that we behave how we want to behave, and our behavior is not entirely dictated by nature, nor can it be predicted based on a given set of inputs. Prior to coming to Earth, we gravitated towards those who behaved similar to ourselves, those who were of a similar caliber. We knew each other. We had many relationships among kindred energies. All living things pertain to a specific energy class. There are many energy classes dividing us from one lifeform to another, from humans to the varying species of animals, birds, fish, plants, insects, bacteria and so forth. God categorizes us based on the energy we are, and as we are eternal, how we are categorized is an eternal categorization. Humans will always exist within the energy class of humans as will each lifeform in its own respective class. We do not advance from one lifeform to another. We are who we are. We are special and unique compared to other classes of energy in how we behave. Sometimes, however strong the downstream current may be, we will determinedly swim upstream and continue swimming to overcome whatever natural paths lay before us. When God first encountered us, He identified us by observing our unnatural behavior. He saw us for our greater potential, and under His direction knew that He could empower us to develop beyond our own means by placing us in a more structured environment. He empowered us with bodies, with senses, and with a stable environment, all things we lacked previously which limited our ability to discern and progress. Within the class of energy that we are which God channeled into human bodies, our amount of greatness, or level of light, can vary from one to another. Some of us our more advanced than others as evidenced by the different aptitudes we have. Our level of light is based on our connection to God and each other. While here on Earth, much of our mortal experience is merely a reawakening of who we are. Having existed indefinitely, we know ourselves very well, but part of God’s plan is having us forget who we are prior to living on Earth. Being born as mortals we enter this life unaware of our previous existence. But our personalities and tendencies are manifested to us in this life as we relearn who we are. As we go through life, we talk about growing up or developing into who we are, but it’s not really a development at all; it’s a reawakening. This mortal existence is not the first time we’ve developed into who we are. What’s new to us in this life is experiencing an orderly existence in mortal vessels of flesh and bone. This life serves as a measurement of who we are and is an initial indicator of our progress under God’s direction. God purposely designed this life with many eternal reflections allowing us to make observations in this life of things that are representative to what we will continue to see throughout eternity. Work, for example, is an eternal principle and is necessary for us to not only function in this life, but is paramount in our existence hereafter. Love and connection not only elevate us in this life, but will continue to be a key role in our eternal progression. We need each other to flourish. Sacrifice is another eternal principle. In this world lived Jesus Christ. He is the greatest among us, the only being perfectly aligned to God’s order. He died for us to reconcile and bridge the gap of our disorder to God’s order. This is necessary for God’s plan to be possible within the laws of the universe, otherwise the plan wouldn’t function and we would remain as the energy we were before God, limited in our potential and existence. As worlds continue to be created as this Earth has, sacrifice will continue to be central to God’s plan. An innumerable number of energies like us exist across incomprehensibly vast spaces and can be divided into two categories - 1.) energies that have been organized by a Supreme Being and, 2.) energies that remain to be organized. Likewise, as a Supreme Being, part of God’s work and glory is to organize energies. Under the direction of Heavenly Father, all intelligences in this realm are organized. The greatness of this realm is unfathomable to us. Yet it is not just this realm that exists. Many realms exist each of which are under the dominion of a Supreme Being. As we are under God’s dominion, we will always give Him the glory by praising and honoring Him, as He then passes the glory to His God before Him and so forth. This is the hierarchy of the work and the glory. For those of us who develop and advance under God’s plan, we too will be charged with organizing energies yet to be organized. These unorganized energies exist in other spaces where the work and the glory have yet to be perpetuated. We will further the work by organizing these intelligences and establishing our own realms. We are a diverse, intricate web of differing personalities, gifts, and levels of light, and while we aren’t compatible nor see eye-to-eye with everyone, the differences give us a balanced order to God’s plan. Order and chaos are the two forces many describe as “good” and “evil”. Evil is a word packed with nefarious connotation, but striped down to its most basic sense, evil is chaos. Chaos seeks to confuse, distort and disrupt anything orderly. Chaos seeks to drag everything into the abyss of nothingness. Chaos does not want to be contained. Chaos embraces our despair and desperation we face in life hoping those challenging moments will tip us into imbalance and oblivion. Chaos is a palpable, negative energy, an energy strong enough to rip us apart should we let it take hold of us. Good is the order of God, the God who provides mankind the platform we need in order to thrive. He created the Earth and provided us with its many resources, the design of us working to survive, and gave us free will to not only make our decisions but to live with the consequence of those decisions. These are crucial elements to God’s divine plan that was carefully constructed for the benefit of our learning and progression. “Committing a sin” can be viewed as deviating from God’s order or promoting chaos. When we deviate from God’s order, we lose connection to Him and each other. Dishonesty, violence, laziness, greed and addiction are examples of what causes disorder in our lives and the lives of others. Committing a sin is disruptive to the order of universe as established by God. God has made the effects of order and chaos understandable to us by contrasting the terms “good” and “evil”. The collective existence of all life that has lived, currently lives and will live on this Earth is connected and bound together under God’s care. When God first organized us together, we became a family. We are a much larger family than anything observable in our mortal lives. To make it possible for us to have a mortal existence, God needed to manipulate space, matter, and time. This universe is but one of many realms that has been manipulated for mortal life to thrive. Beyond this universe, beyond what we comprehend as space and time, lies infinitely more. It never ends. The work we have to do is boundless. But it is the work that gives us purpose and joy, to seek out energy like us and help cultivate it as we are being cultivated under God’s care. This universe is not stationary. It’s vast and unknown borders shift in relation to universal laws. God designed this universe as grand and vast as He did so that we would have a sufficient buffer to protect us from its shifting nature. This universe can be likened unto a single atom that is moving in its own path along infinity. Earth is the nucleus, and all living things are the many electrons orbiting about it. In order for us to continue to exist on this atom within its insulated pocket of space and time, work and sacrifice is required. God continues to work on our behalf as we work in likeness to Him in our own limited capacities. We are born, we die, and everyone eventually gets a chance to experience mortal life. Regardless of if we have yet to live, are currently living, or have already died, we continue to exist as the energies we are and orbit the nucleus like electrons. Earth is our home base amidst the great vastness.

Are we overly compelled by Church culture and human tendencies to say, "I know this Church is true"? Could the Spirit of God telling you to profess the Church is true sometimes be confused with the desire to conform and be liked by others in a social environment? Or do members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints happen to be the only group on the face of the Earth exempt from those kind of human tendencies? Should we feel more compelled to testify that Jesus Christ lives rather than saying, "I know this Church is true"?

I'd say Heber J. Grant was the fanciest followed by the artistic underline in John Taylor's signature.

http://www.ldsliving.com/See-the-Signatures-of-Every-Latter-Day-Prophet/s/81575

A younger me didn't like the idea of listing my affiliation with the Church in any way on a job resume because what business does the interviewer have to know my religion? They should make a decision to hire me based on my merits alone and not have any bias for or against my personal beliefs. Not that they would, but why even risk it (a younger me would think)? Although not listing the mission experience didn't really matter since I graduated from BYU and had that listed on there. At this point in my life I don't care if prospective hiring companies know I'm a member of the Church. Even though it's none of their business, I actually prefer being open with who I am with my personal beliefs. And at least in my experience, it has made absolutely zero difference in how others have treated me in the workplace from me being reserved about sharing my religious affiliation to being open about it. I don't currently list my mission experience on my resume just because there's more pertinent experience I prefer to list to illustrate the working qualifications I now have.

This isn't an official term within the Church, but it's appropriate to describe a phenomenon I've personally experienced. My aunt used to tell me if someone is in need of Heavenly Father's love, you pray to Heavenly Father that He might "zap" them. My aunt zapped me during a time in my life when I needed God's abounding love. And after experiencing it, I have to say it's the perfect term to convey what can actually happen. God has the power to fill someone's heart and soul with an overwhelming amount of His positivity and love. If you see someone in need, consider praying to Heavenly Father that He might zap them. The power of God's love is transformative.