NeuroTypical

I got a much more concise answer.We figure it's accurate, and we don't need a rebuttal. Any angel associated with any mormon, has been pretty much preaching the same gospel that you find in the Bible. God is real, Christ is His son, who came to earth to atone for our sins, so we can be washed clean through accepting Him as our savior, and live again with God. That's the Gospel - same in the Bible as it is in the BoM. We might have an extra detail or two here, but the story is the same. LM

We got nothing to offer you on the subject but speculation, Tantalus. When Joseph smith was writing an account of the vision, he tried the word fire, crossed it out, then wrote light, crossed that out, then tried glory. Apparently he was struggling to adequately describe the experience too.

Not to mention spreading false doctrine. Not all sins need to be confessed to a church authority. From the Gospel Principles lesson on repentance: Sounds to me like this guy did just fine.LM

Reuters - Anonymous thief pays for stolen hammer, decades later

To my way of thinking, the gospel and a social circle are two completely different things. - The gospel is true if your friends are jerks. - The gospel is true if your friends are righteous good people. - The gospel is true if you are a jerk. - The gospel is true if you are a righteous good person. You can change or stay the same, your friends can change or stay the same, and you can change friends or keep your current ones or both. The gospel is still true. LM

The church figures it knows what is true. It's job is to hold out an inviting hand to everyone and explain why it believes what it believes. If you wanna be LDS and only belive part of it, fine /w me. The church forces nobody to participate or accept anything (although parents might). Priesthood is for believers. Temple recommends even more so. If you want either, you'll be sitting down with someone who will ask you what you believe. For the priesthood, they'll pretty much decide, based on your answers, on whether to advance you in the priesthood. It is possible that someone would be willing to advance you to various priesthood offices, even though you're struggling with belief. Temple recommends are more stringent. A series of simple yes/no questions about what you believe and what you do and don't do. If you give a no where a yes is being looked for (or vice versa), you pretty much won't be having a temple recommend. You can always lie, and sometimes it will 'work', although there are obvious questions about how wise or useful such a course of action would be. After all, if I don't really like the game of chess, I could probably lie my way into a chess club by pretending to like it, but what would be the point? Regardless of what you decide and how you proceed, you're ok in my book. I spent a decade wrestling with such questions, and where I am today isn't where I was in the past. We all find ourselves not currently who we'll be later on. We're all on a journey. Happy choosing!

Welcome to hanging around mormons. This is not because you're new and thinking about getting baptized. This is about us being who we are.Here's part of the relevant scriptures which guide us: We call this our 'baptismal covenant' It's a big thing you agree to when you get baptized. We're all about bearing one another's burdens and comforting each other. So yeah, you hang around mormons, you have to beat them off with a stick if they hear you're feeling down.Example - I had shoulder surgery last week. So far, people have been offering my wife any help she needs. People watched our kids so my wife could be at the hospital without distractions. They took our kids to the ward Christmas party. They're offering rides to church. Elders poured out of the woodwork to give me a blessing before the surgery. The bishop visited us to see if there was anything we could do. We're all about service, and that often translates into bringing food. It's one of the 'fringe benefits' of being LDS. Keep in mind, this is service volunteered. There's no quota. For example, before the kids came, I probably helped move a dozen people in or out of houses. Then the kids came and my wife's health went down a little - I don't do moves any more, because I need to watch the kids. I do my serving on Sunday, when the kids are somewhere else. LM

Hey Slamjet. Have you tried mocking? It helps my wife and I feel better. There's plenty of parodies to familiar Christmas songs that poke fun of the commercialness, and the fakery and dumbness of the season. If you can't find solace in the meaning of it, how about solace in light-hearted humor in it's seedy underbelly? LM (my parents are dead, and we usually just see hers every 3-4 years at parole hearings)

The fact that a horrible outcome isn't always the result, is sufficient justification to not be against something? Does that hold true for other things like espionage and child pornography? Those things don't always end up with a universal situation which applies to everyone who does it either.And I'd also like to point out that yes indeed, just about every single child out there born out of wedlock, was also conceived out of wedlock. Not all, but most. LM

Thanks much. Feedback all given. We'll see if it does any good.

Have you checked out the would like some advice... if possible thread today? If your life depended on it, could you now provide a reason why out of wedlock nookie can be wrong? Can we send this lady to go live in your spare room?LM

You have nookie, babies sometimes happen. Your friend's hubby cheated on her, and she 'forgave' him. Now a consequence of those indiscretions has shown up. Now she's forced to deal with her forgiveness being a bit less-complete than she originally thought. She's dealing with it pretty poorly right now, but it's her job to deal with it. Do they have kids together? If they don't have any kids, I don't much care if their marriage falls apart or not. But if there are kids, she needs to get her act together, accept that she's been living in denial about what infidelity can bring into a marriage, and then go back and raise her kids with her husband. He's the same guy she forgave, she's just been in denial about what she was forgiving. LM

MyYahoo homepage has the following RSS feeds: BBC News - Business Cato Headlines EurekAlert! - Breaking News About US Government Info TED Blog Local news feeds Local severe weather and breaking news feeds Yahoo! News: Top Stories, US News, World News, Politics News, Health News, Technology News Iraq The Model (Iraqi bloggers) Law.com Space.com APOD Ha'aretz Defense and Diplomacy RSS Arabnews front page Various preparadness-related feeds Various friends & family blog feeds Various funny feeds Movie showtimes, stock feeds, email summaries Handy links I also get emails from stratfor.com and the occasional Michael Yon dispatch. Scanning through that, talking with various people, news-scraping items of interest, listening to my local talk radio guy on the way to work and Hugh Hewitt on the way home, as well as items showing up on forums like LDS.net, is how I get my news. Walking past the TV's at the work breakroom, always tuned to CNN headline news or Fox, is where I get my smug self-righteous attitude against those who focus on either as their main source. They really are in a battle for last place, IMO. Open challenge to any leftie who thinks I'm not open enough to the right viewpoints - you sign up for stratfor.com emails, and I'll add whatever source you'd like to my daily browse. LM

Yeah, well no matter how often we've discussed it, the search still stinketh to high heaven. One wonders if those webby folks in church HQ did it wrong on purpose in order to keep people from finding things too easily. I figure if our church ever develops something like the pharisees and saducees, they'll originate in the church office building and keep their borg queen there. No logical operators. No use of quotes. Not even any + or - recognition from what I can tell. Google it ain't. Heck, 1995 LDS Collectors Edition it ain't. Shame, shame, shame on whoever signed off on the search functionality. LM (Kudos on the social-media aspects, though.)

I'm thinking 'stay out of it' is the best advice. Wish everyone the best, hold your friend if she needs holding, and watch it go by.

That's really good.

Even more proof that Elphaba and I are the same person, just from paralell universes. Lots of people would get defensive like my liberal dad, but the "Not interested" comment is a clincher. LM

You don't? Well, let me list a few. From the top of my head:* Worthiness to go to the temple and be sealed to the person you pick to marry. * Closeness to God. * Odds of finding someone who was saving himself for you, are increased. * Less chance of creating a life, just so you can abandon or abort it, or increase it's chances of poverty, incarceration, and lower IQ than lives created within a marriage. There are others. LM

One Second After was a terrifying book. It made me cry. I take comfort in recent tests that show a man-made EMP pulse just isn't near as powerful as that book describes.

AP: Pentagon: Lifting gay ban to take time

That's a fine answer also. Since I carry a firearm, I find much value in running through tons of what-if scenarios in my head. It's important to know beforehand what I will and won't do given a certain set of circumstances, so that I don't sit there trying to figure it out in the heat of the moment. And yes, I can see umpteen possible scenarios where I will use force to protect the loved ones within my stewardship from serious harm or death. No end-times scenario necessary. But really - your answer is ok too.

Yeah, there's something to be said for selflesness. But I wonder Mightynancy - what if the choice was to fight to keep your kids from starving? Would you kill or even harm for your child's pudding mix and wheat? Or would you refuse to defend your food, choosing instead to hand it over to someone who decided to take it by force? This is the sort of dire scenario this thread is talking about. Folks are starving. Someone wants your kid's bellyfull of food, and won't stop unless you stop him. What then?

Not gonna spend much time on this. Only wanted to mention that I already had low expectations of people who gain their information about how the world is working mainly from network news. Hearing that Fox news people win the position for last place, while the cnn'ers of the world proudly hold up their 2nd-to-last gold star, isn't incredibly devastating to me.

Light-Minded = mocking sacred things of God. Big no-no. Light-Hearted = anything else that makes us smile or laugh. I'm thinking the video was firmly in the 2nd camp. Gonna pass it around. LM