NeuroTypical

How interesting. I've heard a lot of church critics opine about the 'september six' and what it absolutely has to mean about the church. This statement shoots so many holes in their opining, I'm going to predict some of these critics will be trying to smear this lady's motives, character, honesty, and probably any other attribute they can grab.

Preferably before you have children.

A few things to keep in mind:* I don't think anyone is claiming to have 'a blameless childhood'. In fact, I explicitly stated "I had plenty of things to confess of in my youth, but that wasn't one of them." Heck, for all I know, I'm still carrying more obnoxiousness from my teen years than you are. * I was only responding to your belief that anyone who hasn't is such a rarity they should be stuffed and put on display. I'm not claiming you and Mr. Kirn are the only ones who have done it. Surely, between the two extremes "no one" and "everyone", we can find a good common ground?

Well, first of all, I ask myself exactly how I came to the conclusion they are doing something wrong on purpose. Humans posess so many ways to just screw stuff up on accident, why jump straight to the conclusion they're doing something on purpose?Commandments to have charity, mean I must at least allow for the possibility. Scriptures about how everyone has the spirit of Christ in them, lead me to conclude that much or even most of the time, someone is doing what they think is right. Commandments to judge righteous judgement only, prevent me from assuming I know someone's motivations, belief window, past baggage, understandings and misunderstandings, cultural leanings, and all the other stuff that get in the way when one human tries to get a point across to another human. Life got a lot easier for me once I realized two things:1. I may be invested in getting my point across, but them recieving and accepting the point isn't within my stewardship. Them being wrong isn't my problem. 2. Even though neither of us will ever budge a single dang inch in our beliefs, people witnessing the exchange may indeed form or change opinions. In other words, I'm not just arguing with some idiot, I'm arguing my point in a big room of undecided or swayable people. Keeping that audience in mind, it's much easier to be polite, civil, charitable, nonjudgemental, and all those other good words.

I'm not surprised. If anyone can truthfully answer "no" to that question, they should (to paraphrase Jerome K. Jerome) be stuffed and put on display in a waxworks show. I just wanted to emphasize this point. I'm thinking Jamie isn't the only one out there who was taught and believes that "everyone does it". Apparently, that's not as true as one might think.I didn't think "everyone does it" was all that hot of a justification for questionable behavior in the first place. But since the justification isn't even true, it's even less hot.

Happy cleaning! And best of luck in efforts to urge little bird to leave the nest.

I guess I'll have to be stuffed and displayed too. I had plenty of things to confess of in my youth, but that wasn't one of them.

I agree. There are points in his early story that align with points in my own early story. Interesting: I eventually confessed my sins to my bishop, choosing to renounce the lies, and here I am. He left the church and eventually confessed his sins to the whole world in this article. Good article.

Wow. Bike accident - how unfortunate. Huh - how many people do you know that graduate from the UofU, get a Master's degree from Harvard, and then a Doctorate from BYU.

Hi Hewitt, I don't believe in pretending to be something I'm not either. I'm LDS because God made Himself manifest to me, and told me to go be a Mormon. Since I love God and believe He loves me, then by your own belief system, I'm doing what's right. Furthermore, I honestly don't care one way or the other who you chose to partner with and love. The social engineeering and efforts to legislate a change in my belief, I disagree with. Go be with whoever you want and permit me the right to seek my own understanding and truth..

My issue isn't with the trouble we're in. My issue is with folks waving arms around and issuing vague nebulous predictions about complete financial collapse and civil unrest. I'm as big on personal preparation as the worst of the sky-is-falling-ites, but if you're trying to motivate people to do something, melodrama isn't persuasive. Falling empires have never impacted future generations before? You might consider studying history a bit more. The only thing different about this round is the extent of global interdependency and how easily measurable everything is. Again, when you have a notion to push, and someone is showing resistance to accepting it, how useful do you really think it is to insult them like this? I honestly don't find passive-aggressive sarcastic insults all that persuasive. But hey - I'll add yours to the list of things said to/about me over the years: Ostrich with head buried in the sand. In denial. I chose to wear blinders. Blind idiot who can't see my own hand in front of my face in broad daylight. Dupe of [whatever term is being used to describe the current conspirators]. I focus on the MESSENGER instead of the subject. I consider myself "super tough". I use emotion instead of logical reasoning. I'm rude. I get angry when someone mentions the existence of secret combinations. My posts make me look bad. I "troll for sincere people". I'm prideful, heading for destruction. I have a haughty spirit, and I'm heading for a fall.

One definition of Bad Science: a prediction that is not falsifiable.If you want folks to take you seriously, you'll have to distinguish yourself from the average melodramatic hand-waving prophecying that pops up every year or two whenever there's a hiccup somewhere. Because otherwise, we can't tell the difference between your prophecy, and the 2010 food price scare, or the 2009 "we're running out of pistol ammo" scare, or the 2008 H1N1 scare, or the 2008 hyperinflation scare, or the 2000 Y2K scare, or the 1998 "Pres Hinckley just said we were all gonna starve" scare, or the 1996 "the commies are coming back in the UN" scare. (There are plenty more, but 1996 is when I started paying attention.) Good science is falsifiable. You want to be more successful in urging people to action, vague sensationalistic doomsaying only works on people suseptible to such things.

Moroni 7 might help:

Darn. It looks like the US annual production of corn will only be 12.97 BILLION BUSHELS instead of 14.79 billion. And our stockpile of surplus corn fell to a meager 1.2 billion bushels. This might push food prices higher than they were last time they were this high.

Do you have kids?

I used to wonder if my wife embellished or made up stuff or was flat out crazy, because she has many, many stories like this. But I have personally witnessed enough of them to conclude that no really, she has a gift for connecting with people, and God just draws them out of the woodwork and sets them in front of her. The follup question folks ask is "Um, so, how did your wife come to learn all this stuff about strip clubs?" She was a dog trainer in Utah. The owner of a very upscale SLC 'gentlemen's club' showed up to get each of 'his girls' their own trained german sheppard protection dog. Apparently there had been an attack or beating or something, and his employees were thinking of leaving the trade. She learned everything this guy had to say about things while she trained his dogs.

This is one of the many such stories I've gathered about my cool wife over the years: My wife was sitting in the play place at McDonalds with our two kids, and she couldn't help but overhear a conversation happening behind her. There was a mom and dad, and their 19 year old daughter who had her own place. The mom was on the verge of tears, the dad sounded frustrated and angry. The daughter sounded like she'd rather be anywhere else but here, but had her heels dug in and was resolved to get something communicated to her parents. The conversation got a bit louder as it progressed. The daughter loudly says something like "That's right - they pay me to take my clothes off for money dad! You need to start dealing with it!" My wife tells me her neck muscles just started working on their own, rotating her head around against her will to look at the people. All three of them stop talking and look at my wife, like they expect her to say something and fix it. So, my wife looked at the girl brightly and asked "Pole or cage?" In the same tone that someone would use if someone had told her they'd taken up fishing, and she was asking 'fresh or saltwater'. The parents eyes got pretty large, and the dad looked like he was about to come out of his seat. The girl assumed she'd found someone that would be on her side of the discussion, and said there was a pole on the stage, but 'she didn't really like to use it'. My wife then asked "Did they tell you what it's there for?" The girl stuttered a bit, wondering how to put her answer into terms that she could say in front of her parents. My wife let her know the pole was there to give the dancer something to hold on to, to make it harder to get grabbed and dragged down into the audience. And the cage is there to delay someone getting to her for a few seconds until security could pull them away. The girl turned a shade or two whiter as she caught the vision. My wife asked if the place had security. The girl said there was a bouncer who stayed near the back of the place at the bar. My wife looked shocked, and said it was a lot more desirable to have a line of beefy guys between the stage and the crowd. My wife then talked a bit about the kinds of guys who show up on the front row of a strip club, and said very sympathetically "So, when you get beat up or worse for the first time, give me a call." The girl got another shade paler, and left with her parents - sort of leaning on her father as she'd become a bit unsteady on her feet. They all left so fast she forgot to get my wife's number, so we'll probably never know.

Well, we have a pretty clear scripture on the issue: If ye are prepared, ye shall not fear. I suppose it might be worth some thought to figure out what it is you could actually prepare for here. Folks also tend to fear the unknown. Honestly, if the only hard fact is that someone is smoking pot, well, it sort of smacks of unrighteous judgement to think you should fear these people. Yes, they are sinners and probably commiting a crime, but to personally fear them seems a bit uncharitable. Whoever they are, they are God's children just like you. They have hopes and fears and dreams and loves and hates just like anybody. If there's a safe place in public where you can meet them and get to know them, that might help. At the very least, you could realize the blessings that come from some other good advice: "Know thy enemy". Finally, if it starts getting so bad that you find it difficult to leave home, (and it probably won't) then you should see a doctor.

I got all excited when hearing about Gallileo. And Copernicus. Heck, I even got excited when the hero in Battlefield Earth was explaining how triangles work to the other prisoners. So yeah, I'm excited here too. Even though I just can't manage to wrap my brain around what it actually is, no matter how brilliantly simple it's put, I'm excited.

Huh. That's interesting. 1. Bahá'í House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois 2. Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, California (Buddhist) 3. Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Michigan 4. Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Augustine, Florida 5. Temple Emanu-El in New York City (Jewish) 6. Palace of Gold in Moundsville, West Virginia (Hare Krishna, and the only one that charges admission) 7. Salt Lake Temple in Salt Lake City, Utah 8. St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City

Yeah, no.There were apparently multiple victims, but only one went to trial. The girl wasn't 14, the abuse allegedly happened starting around 1986 and lasted across years, between age of 9 and 12. She wasn't a babysitter, she was a friend of the family who visited and traveled extensively with them. In 1994, he admitted to a single act in court, pleaded down to attempted sexual abuse of a child, got 18 months probation and a fine, and was ordered to stay on the sex offender roles until 2011. The excommunication occured years after the events allegedly started, but years before any of this went public. (Sorry for the increased tangent - just correcting the record.)

4 laundry baskets in the house, 4-5 loads per week on Saturday. Kids have the chores of getting it into the baskets, and sorting and putting away. They have a choice - they can earn a buck by doing laundry once a week or they can go to bed at 7:30pm.

Exactly. Joining the church because someone else told you about their revealation, is another not-too-good reason. The promise is - you get your own. You hold your knowledge of confirmation bias, and myside bias, and experimenter's regress, and subjective validation and groupthink and authority-driven methods of altering reality, and the phenomenons of self- and group-hypnosis, and good plain old wishful thinking, and you say to yourself "Huh - I was just spoken to by God - and it was different than all of those things."Nothing else would (or should) suffice for you sabastious. Heh - Are you sure you're not me from 15 years ago?Back when I was searching for answers, I came within a few credit hours of a minor in philosophy. But I never really found anything that made sense to me past Descartes' "I think, therefore I am". He continued his line of thinking, but I didn't follow. From where I'm standing, yeah, this life may be the matrix. There may indeed be some great deceiver taking nefarious glee in making me think my perception of reality is actually reality - when the real reality is I'm sitting in a vat somewhere hooked up to wires. From that standpoint, the only thing that made sense to me, was to stay true to my own understanding of right and wrong. My willingness to assume God, the BoM, and the prophet are all what they claim to be, is a function of my ability to choose what to do with the reality my senses present to me. I think that's what they call 'faith'. So far, it's led me to happiness in this life. I don't think so... Look, if you wanna be a Lutheran, go be one. I know several - they seem to be good people. I've also never seen a rude wiccan. Again, typing words into a glowing box, and reading the words that others type - this may set the LDS church apart from all the other options, but no really - there's only one way to know.

Hi Sabastious, I really respect where you're coming from. Healthy skepticism and distrust of humans in general, and a clear understanding of our usual ability to mess up just about any organization with our agendas and greed and desires is to be commended. All that said, let me clarify something. If you find perfect answers to your questions that fully satisfy you, and you decide to join the church, then you are joining for the wrong reasons. Our church leaders don't claim infallibility or perfection. They only claim that God chose them and they're trying their best. If you look, you will find human flaws. I say this often: The only good reason to be a mormon, is you believe God wants you to be one. Any other reason is setting yourself up for dissapointment or disillusion. Here's the promise - you can gain a personal miraculous revealatory witness that the BoM is what it claims to be, and our church is what it claims to be, and our prophet and leaders are who they claim to be. If you seek this witness and God gives it to you through the spirit, then you are pretty much on the hook to follow it. Without this witness, you're left with judging our church by your standards. I happen to be in agreement with your standards in general. But can you see how something else is going on here?