rayhale

I have some questions about evolution. Why haven’t scientists been able to find any LIVE transitional animals in the 200 some odd years since Charles Darwin, like crude wings, or feathers on an alligator, or apes with crude speech ability? Notice I said live? There have been several different dead animals, fossils, and bones, that have said to be proof of evolution, but in all the cases, that I’ve seen, they have all been hoaxes. Why is that? Why do scientists have to lie about their discoveries? I understand that there are several different theories on how life came to be, that is how science is sometimes, there isn’t always a clear answer.

There are several different ways to study the scriptures. Here are a few that I do: There are several different books that help you do scripture study, try Scripture Study: Tools and Suggestions by James E Faulconer. The book has about 150 pages and goes though many different steps and ways of Scripture study. You can go though the weekly Sunday School lesson plan at Church, this is a long process, four years long in fact, and it doesn’t include all the scriptures (like Leviticus, and Solomon’s Song) but it already has topics ready for you to study. I like to read the institute manuals along with the scriptures. I also like The Gospel Studies Series by David J. Ridges. In this commentary series, it goes through the text of the scriptures, and within the text itself, it explains certain hard to understand words, or phrases. This, to me at least, is easier than to keep looking at footnotes, or worse yet, the back of a book to figure out what is being said. If you like to read the Scriptures like a novel, then I suggest reading the scriptures along with the audio narration, this helps me tremendously to force me to read every single word, and not to be temped to skip words, or verses that I feel is boring.

I need to know what selective neglect means, in order to comment on it. That being said, I can see a large family with children having a wide range of ages, usually will go to and do activities that is for the age range of the youngest, or oldest, child. With a large amount of children, there is less one-on-one personal teaching between parent and child. My main question is, whether or not selective neglect is intentional or inadvertent?

From a non-Catholic perspective, wouldn’t any revelation from the Pope to the Church, and to the world, be considered Public Revelation?

I’ve never seen a Bishop get up during a talk, or a testimony, the closest that I’ve seen, was a girl said something not nice about her brothers, getting close to cursing, she noticed the Bishopric looking at her in a disapproving way, so she corrected herself. The other time I’ve seen it was also during testimony meeting, several people, during their testimony said something depressing, either they were depressed, had a depressing week, or something else depressing, either the Bishop or the Stake President, I can’t remember which, got up, and talked about the Atonement, and tried to uplift what was getting a depressing Sacrament meeting.

I always thought that it was odd that gold is the standard for the price of money. You can’t do anything with it, you really can’t build anything with it, the only thing that I can think of, is that it’s good for radio reception. For me, if I were to set something for the price of money, I would use something that is useful, like oil, iron, wood, or like PC said, education, or food, or anything useful.

If you bought the book, then you can ‘censor’ the book any way you want, if, however, you checkout a book from the library, then, no you don’t have ANY right to write in, black out, or do anything to ‘censor’ the book.

Rachelle, your situation may be resolved, but it would seem that you still need to have a sit-down talk with your ex’s wife, tell her what you want AND don’t want. This way she’ll know that it is going against your wishes for her to be sealed to YOUR son.

I would ask all the who, what, where, when, why, and how questions, plus I would need to consider the fact that people in the scriptures don’t have the same sense of morality, ethics, or laws, as we do, they even have different laws of God. Also I would consider that they used a different language and grammar structure as we do, even in the Doctrine and Covenants (I’ll explain in a moment). The Bible is the most difficult scripture to figure out the original meaning, one reason is, the events in the Bible happened so long ago, with very little outside the Bible information. When you add to the fact that the Bible is a collection of books, stories, writings of numerous prophets, which were written thousands of years apart. When they were all put together, there were thousands of people, in different cultures, translating and interpreting the Bible. I have to apply Article of Faith 8 when I study the Bible. I also apply AoF 8 to some extent to the rest of the Standard Works, during the time that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon and wrote the Doctrine and Covenants, the 1800’s, the English language was different than it is today. Long story short, in addition to the main ‘w’ questions, I would ask, ‘is there a record of this event outside of the Bible, like the Quran, Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, Philo, or any other early books or records. If yes, then how are they alike? How are they different? Do I have access to these books? Is there commentary for the scripture that I’m reading, if yes, read all the different commentaries, that you can, for that verse(s) to see if they have something different to say. What is the best commentary? What does the Scriptures say about that scripture? What does Jesus say? What does Modern Prophets, Apostles, or LDS scholars have to say? Last, but not least, what do I have to say about that scripture?

One thing that most of the posts have said, was that they didn’t like what people made for them for some special occasion. One simple solution would be to ask what to buy. As mightyNancy said, there are allergy and other food restrictions that need to be considered, so the next best thing to making food, or buying pre-made food, is to buy gift cards to a nice restaurant, or to a supermarket, that way they will only buy food that they like.

PC, it was very much cultural and historical, there’s a quote by President Gordon B. Hinckley that I can’t remember what he said exactly, but he talked about the pioneers, and how if you didn’t make it, produce it, farm it, (ect…) you go without it. Sure the Church would help if you needed it. But that was the last resort. A lot of people are willing to give to charity, or do chartable things like build homes for the poor, but for these same people, it seems wrong, almost sinful to accept charity.

As it has been stated before, there are many reasons that someone is old and still single, some has been stated already; being handicapped or having homosexual feelings. There are other reasons besides those, for example, women get conflicting statements from the Church, they should get a good education, go to collage, get a good job (while single), yet once married, and have children, they should be a stay-at-home mom. With that, most men, especially, men that think women should be a stay-at-home mom, they feel intimated with a smart woman with a well-paying job. There are other reasons than being handicapped or having homosexual feelings that would make it difficult for a person to get married, lets face one reason, being ugly or not being very social, being shy, or have children out of wedlock, which could put other singles, especially young singles, off, and not want to date you.

Don’t mistake supplements with medicine. If you read the fine print in any of those supplement commercials, they state that the FDA has not evaluated that product. In other words there is no proof that the ‘drug’ works. There are medicine that has ingredients that is against the Word of Wisdom, however there is an ‘asterisk’ in the WOW that states basically that it is ok when the ‘drug’ is used as medicine. Do your homework, like I said, the FDA does NOT evaluate, or is in charge of making sure that supplements actually work.

Since you only will have 30 minutes, just tell the girls to boil the water, then to pick up litter wherever they see it, tell them that litter not only looks bad, and stays there FOREVER, but can, and is, harmful to animals. For instance the plastic rings for a six pack of soda, can be deadly for birds trying to eat them.

I can’t talk for gabelpa, but for me, I cringe when I see stereotypes of people, Gods Army started what has come to be known as LDS films, it does have a few stereotypes; the missionary that follows the rules to the letter of the law. The missionary that doesn’t care/shouldn’t be there, and has doubts of his faith. the reason that stereotypes are effective, is that we all know someone that fits that stereotype. If you ever have seen the RM, Singles Ward, or any other new non-Church produced LDS movies since Gods Army, they all overdo the stereotypes to the point that it is comical. Plus you have to realize PC, that there is a Utah LDS culture, and an everywhere else LDS culture.

With any group of multiple faiths, there will be disagreement with how to interpret the Bible, plus there will most likely be multiple English versions, such as: KJV, NIV, ESV, etc… I would suggest that the first thing you do, when you start your Bible study group, is to tell people not to belittle, mock, or make fun of any others religion, or their interpretation of the Bible.

Even if the Prophet, and all the Twelve Apostles, and the rest of the full-time Church leaders were all millionaires before their Church service, after awhile their money would be gone, so how do they live? Would you have the Prophet dip his hands in tithing? How about Fast Offerings? I would rather Church leaders make money from for-profit ventures, like Deseret Book, the downtown SLC mall, or from books, then from tithing. I find a problem with people that don’t take off their Church leader hat (Bishop, Stake President, Relief Society President), when they are working, for an example, saying, “You can trust me, I’m your (Place any Church leadership position here)” Ask any salesperson who the best person to sell to. Any good salesperson would say a person with a high amount of trust with people, such as the local Minister, Priest, Bishop, R.S. Pres.; sell to them, and they will sell to all of the other church goers. I live in Idaho, the local Wal-marts sell LDS books, which is fine, but I do have a problem when salespeople take advantage of peoples faith, like with food storage, selling people inferior products to people, with the STRONG hint that they are “helping” you keep one of the commandments.

A new translation of the Book of Mormon would be unlikely, what I would suggest, would be a grammar guide that helps you with the odd, and old words of the Scriptures that we don’t use, or have changed the meaning of. For example, thee, thou, thine; what do they mean exactly? How about a Kite, or any other odd named animals in the scriptures?

Where I live there is snow in the winter, which makes satellite dishes covered with snow and loose its reception. I do have to point out that all cable companies use satellites for their signals, so I just say, use the cheapest form of TV platform that you can find, since there is no difference between cable and satellite.

Was King David a great Israelite leader, or was he a murderer and an adulteress? It depends on who you ask, a Christian or a Jew. All of recorded history is bias, that is a fact. A Christian will view the world in a Christian perspective, a Jew will view the world in a Jewish perspective, a secular person will view the world in a secular perspective, and so forth.

One thing that I don’t like is Christian Scholars that write editorials/books about OTHER faiths/religions, even if they are respectful, objective, and have people of whatever faith/religion that they are writing about speak for themselves. I would still be suspicious of their motives, and I don’t think anyone outside of any faith/religion will ever understand the heart, the soul, of what the faith is about.

Although not a CEO, I would like to see the Catholic Pope be undercover in the Catholic church, I would think he would be surprised at what he sees, and not sees, in the church.

I would create my own book of instructions on how to build, and to repair, the time machine, and bring it. Bring a survivors guide. Bring a book that explains how to talk to someone that doesn’t know your language, a linguist type of book.

Does anyone know the web page for “Why I’m Wary of Facebook”, the article that Heather responded to? --　 I’m in the middle with whether Facebook, or any other site on the internet is good or bad. Yes, I’ve heard horror stories of people getting addicted to porn from porn sites, or use the internet for their sole source of social interactions, but what about the good side of it? You can look at www.lds.org and read, and watch, all you want, about the Church, before you have the missionaries come to your house. As Heather pointed out, there is a huge gap between being curious, asking a few questions, to really searching for questions. Here are my list of pros and cons of internet: 　 Pros: There are sites for EVERYTHING, every religion, faith, form of politics, group, in short EVERYTHING! 　 There are sites, like this one, that has A LOT of people participating in, it really makes it a small world after all. 　 There sites like http://www.allexperts.com/ that has self proclaimed ‘experts’ in most all fields of expertise, such as religion, politics, government, sports, tv/movies, etc. 　 Cons: there are sites for EVERYTHING, every sick and twisted, demented thing that you can’t even imagined that existed, exists right in the palm of your hand. 　 Forum sites, like this, has different people, with different views of the world, and since its written, it’s not always clear what’s meant, which leads to confusion, hurt feelings, and misunderstandings. There are more good and bad things about the internet, this is just a small taste.

Here is my reasoning of why it takes more ‘faith’ to be an atheist than a religious person: Nature having a God-like power of creating complex systems, like organs, with no help whatsoever. I know you’ve heard this phrase before, but I’ll say it here, “Nature can put a box of Grandfather clock parts together with no ‘creator’’. Doesn’t this, by definition, make nature a God? It creates life out of nothing, a God-like power. I can’t understand why scientists can say that they can see evolution from man down to dinosaurs, but they can’t see the potential upward progress of man toward God. Whenever I see a science program, it will have a simple explanation of how single-celled organisms evolved to fish, fish to reptiles/dinosaurs, reptiles to mammals, mammals to man, but God forbid the mention of any step further upward climb of the evolution ladder. Scientists can do amazing things, it’s gotten almost to the point that they can create life, they have gone to the moon, created the Hubble telescope, that can see EXTREMLY far into space, yet for all their successes, lets look at it from a universe perspective; the furthest man mission has been just to the moon; the furthest man made object, the Voyager, has just left the solar system, that is not very far looking at that in a universe perspective; for as far as the Hubble telescope can see, in a universe perspective, it would be like describing how the world looks by looking into cheep binoculars on top of Mount Everest. We are pioneers in space travel, we haven’t gone to the moon in over thirty years, we haven’t had a man mission to Mars, we can’t begin to think of any sort of mission to the nearest star, besides the sun, yet scientists can say, without a doubt, there is no God, yet with all the things science says nature can do, namely create life, by definition, that makes nature itself a god. I would call this hypocritical. I’ll put it in a hypothetical manner, can’t there be a civilization somewhere out in the Cosmos, that has learned through science, how to stop death, create life, has figured out all aspects to the Theory of Everything, in short, become gods using science?