Doctrine confusion

[Dravin]

The logistical problems of?

[scholasticspastic]

The logistical problems of?

Where did all those Earths worth of bacterial spirits and plant spirits and animal spirits come from? Where do they go? If there's no purpose for them aside from feeding and clothing us, why put so much more effort into such a redundant project than was put into the main attraction?

If the scriptures are about God's plan for Man, then we cannot understand God's plan for bacteria, plants and animals. Is there a passage in there telling us about their spiritual fate? Will they all be resurrected alongside us? If so, where will we put them all? There's room for us, but not for them. Not on this world.

If God has plans beyond being food for us for all the bacteria, plants and animals on Earth, can we count on those plans being important to our salvation? If not, why bother trying to force what the Bible and Book of Mormon say about the other organisms to be literally true? Are the scriptures intended as text books or as guides to our salvation? I hope it's only the latter, because they're not very good at the former. For one thing, there's not enough of them. I've got more pages of text book just for my undergraduate studies- and even if we only count the classes which were required for my major. And it's safe to assume I know quite a bit less than God having read those books. It's safe to assume that I came away from reading those books knowing less than most modern Biologists.

[Vort]

Moses couldn't have described most of those things at all. He didn't have access to the wealth of observations we have access to now. That isn't pride speaking. That's just the way it is.

True. But when you point the finger of judgment at Moses by saying that he was "ignorant", you have three others pointed back at yourself.

Given that the LDS church is a proselytizing church, it's probably a good idea to avoid unnecessary jargon.

The Church uses exactly as much jargon as it needs. Other than that, it tries mightily to speak as plainly as possible.

Death is something other than "separation of the spirit from the body" because we can observe a lot of things dying which would be silly to attribute spirits to.

Why would it be "silly"?

Did you read the link Dravin provided?

If things without spirits can die physically, then your definition of physical death is insufficient to be useful.

On the contrary, death is important in a gospel sense only, or mainly, when applied to people. Even if the LDS definition of death is not biologically useful, that does not make it insufficient. The gospel is not concerned with bringing to pass the immortality and eternal life of animals.

Physical death means you stop being physically alive. Spiritual death means you still exist as a spirit.

These may be your private definitions, but they are not mine, and they are not the LDS Church's.

There is no cessation of being a spirit, thus it isn't terribly useful to call it a death.

Of course it's useful. It describes the spiritual state of being cut off from God.

Unless being cast into the outer darkness means ceasing to exist spiritually. Then we should probably call it ceasing to exist spiritually instead of calling it the outer darkness. And I would agree that it's a spiritual death.

Herein is the real problem: You don't like the wording, so you think the Church should change its language usage to conform to your preferences. But that is not going to happen.

Let's suppose a physicist and a lawyer are talking, and the lawyer mentions the "use of force". The physicist stops him and says, "You are using the term 'force' wrongly. 'Force' means work through a distance. It is a quantity that results in the acceleration of mass." The lawyer then corrects the physicist by saying, "You are mistaken. 'Force' means 'by compulsory means' or 'lacking in choice'." And so it goes.

Bottom line: Do you want to understand LDS doctrine? If so, learn what the Latter-day Saints mean when they say something like "spiritual death" instead of seeking to instruct them on precise word usage and biologically correct terminology.

[Dravin]

Where did all those Earths worth of bacterial spirits and plant spirits and animal spirits come from?

That's no more a logistical problem then where did all the human spirits came from.

Where do they go?

Somewhere, there is, at least, an entire universe out there.

If there's no purpose for them aside from feeding and clothing us, why put so much more effort into such a redundant project than was put into the main attraction?

Who says there is no purpose for them aside from feeding and clothing us? You're making a lot of unstated assumptions, you're gonna want to make sure they're actually shared by LDS Theology before you raise them. Your statement about plants having spirits is a prime example, you assumed LDS theology didn't agree with such a supposition when you made it as a rebuttal against LDS concepts.

If God has plans beyond being food for us for all the bacteria, plants and animals on Earth, can we count on those plans being important to our salvation?

Did someone say it was? John saw a representation of exalted/ressurected animals, but as far as I know the details of animal exaltation are not important to our salvation.

Edited December 13, 2011 by Dravin

[Seminarysnoozer]

You misunderstood me. Which I guess is fair as I'd just done it to you.

I'm saying that it is prideful to claim to know things which we cannot possibly know given the vagaries of scriptures due to the times they were recorded as far as truth-claims about how the world works. Because even if God had been telling them exactly how the world works, they wouldn't have had the necessary understanding to convey those truths. Thus Moses can be forgiven for not understanding how biology works. Not only that, but it would have been pointless for Moses to learn how biology works at that time. Nobody would have believed him.

This is a separate concern from understanding WHY the world works, which is something which could have been conveyed without any scientific understanding. But the HOW of the world and the WHY of the world are very different things. It is unnecessarily prideful to assume you know the HOW of the world just because you have access to a source which tells you about the WHY of the world.

People back then didn't know how most things worked. We know a lot more about how things work now. We still do not know how everything works. Whenever we confuse speculation with knowledge, whether we're doing religion or science, we're making fools of ourselves.

Concerning the LDS understanding that there are two kinds of death: Then don't be lazy and leave the word "spiritual" off when you're talking about spiritual death versus physical death. It's a barrier to communication. There was no way to tell from context which type of death you were talking about. Not only that, but I'm confused by what is meant by the term "spiritual death."

Care to explain how that's supposed to work? Is it something we ought to call death at all? Because death refers to a cessation. If I die physically, then I cease to be alive. If I die spiritually, do I cease to have a spirit? If not, I have reservations about calling it a sort of death.

Thanks for your response.

I would prefer to defer a lot of your questions to specific threads about those topics or even to missionaries that could sit down with you and explain the details of the doctrine so we don't derail the thread too much (unless enough really want to go with that direction, I suppose). In general, spiritual death is a separation from the presence of God, such as when Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden. Physical death is the separation of the spirit from the body.

I think it is important to realize that there can be a level of understanding that is spiritual, commonly called a testimony. That, to a member of the church , is not anything that can be explained by secular terminology or proven. As that is the nature of "LDS Gospel Discussion" forum then there is no obligation to prove these topics through objective evidence. The beliefs are supported by reference to scripture or leaders but still are mostly faith based beliefs. Knowing that one of the purposes of this life is to test our resolve, our integrity and faith, then there is only a limited amount of knowledge God gives to create the testing situation. What kind of test would it be if it was an "open book" test. It certainly wouldn't be faith based. We believe we already had that kind of test, "open book" where we chose to either side with Satan or choose to continue to follow God. We don't need to take the "open book" test again, as we already passed that test.

[Seminarysnoozer]

"Separation from God" doesn't take much longer to say and is much less confusing than "spiritual death."

As I was responding to Snow's comment about "death" before Adam, the more logical term to use is one that has "death" in it .... if you really need an explanation for my thought process and choice of words. Our purpose here is not to deceive anyone with certain words or secret language if that is what you are insinuating. I would be happy, or someone else, to try to explain something that I failed to convey on my first try, if necessary. I would be glad to do it anytime, if I can, without having to call me "lazy" or suggestion that the intent was to confuse. That, for sure, was not my intent.

I will admit from the beginning that my choice of words are hardly ever exact. And, if anything, I tend to be too verbose in my posts. Sorry.

[Seminarysnoozer]

Physical death means you stop being physically alive.

I have worked over 10 years on an intensive care floor as an intensive care unit nurse. This was mostly a neurology service floor where patients that have had anoxic brain injury or severe stroke as well as a number of other things were treated. Over those 10 plus years, I have sat with countless numbers of families and had intense conversations with the doctor about keeping the body alive in a situation where it was obvious to the family that the person was no longer there. Even though the tissue was being kept alive with medications, the ventilator and by preventing further decay and wasting by giving antibiotics and IV feedings, many families would describe that person as no longer being alive, or no longer there. So when did that person die? Technically, it is when the doctor calls the time of death based in either the heart stopping or brain death criteria. I think many people close to those situations can tell, with a certain amount of confidence, that the person actually died long before the ventilator was stopped.

Another situation; when the heart of an individual who is dying is harvested, then the person dies (at least the rest of the body) but the heart is being kept alive, in other words, the heart is "physically alive" (using your words) then physical death (according to your definition) has not occurred? Or does it have to be the whole person alive? That would exclude, of course, someone loosing a leg. Then their whole body is not alive.

Another situation; When there are no brain waves or low voltage waves without reaction seen on EEG, in other words, the brain is alive but not functioning and there is no chance for the brain to recover such as being exposed to severe hypoxia, and repeat EEG is performed 2 days later with the same findings. Is the person physically dead or not if the rest of the body and the brain tissue itself is alive but not functioning? In other words, is brain death by your limited word description of physical death, really physical death or not? Would you keep the tissue of a loved one "alive" on medical equipment if they were brain dead (meeting all the criteria for brain death - the brain tissue is alive but not functioning), at the tune of $80,000+ a day and for how long, a week, two months, longer?

So, you see, even though you thought you had a simple definition of death, it is not that easy. The separation of the spirit from the body is a much more encompassing definition, in my opinion, even if it is not as practical.

[Blackmarch]

"All living things—mankind, animals, and plants—were spirits before any form of life existed upon the earth (Gen. 2:4–5; Moses 3:4–7)."

(I don't know how to do nested quotes on here.)

I'm unable to find an official estimate of how many bacteria are alive on Earth. This source estimates it to be 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bacteria alive on Earth right now. That's just right this minute.

ET 9/98: First-ever estimate of total bacteria on earth

How many Earths of bacteria have there been, assuming the minimum allowed time for the Earth to have existed (I'll let you use the Young-Earth Creationist figure of 6000 years for this one). How many Earths of grass have existed in that time? How many Earths of trees have been germinated in that time? How many Earths of jellyfish have been spawned in that time? How many Earths of mice have been born in that time?

There has been less than one Earth of humans born in the entire history of the Earth so far. So making that claim is possible for human spirits without running into all sorts of logistical problems. But for most unicellular and plant species and for many of the shorter-lived animal species we run into silliness when we try to force that to be literally true.

I"d say that number is a microscopically small %. Problem with logistics in regards to spirits is we currently do not know the limits of them, beyond that spirit interacts a bit differently.

quote commands are

[ quote=(insert name)] put what you want in the quote here [ /quote]

minus the spaces and parenthesis within the brackets

[Jezebel2011]

I am an engineer, working on a PhD. I've often thought if I hadn't been born into the church, I'd probably be agnostic. I understand where you are coming from; I am very logical and extremely anal-retentive. As a missionary, I personally had to understand the gospel from a logical perspective before I could teach it, otherwise it just didn't make too much sense.

If you are looking for a checklist of what it is to be LDS, the best is to stick to the basics. Someone else quoted the baptismal interview questions. Another list is the Articles of Faith:

The Articles of Faith

But ultimately it is more simple than that.

1) Do you believe in God the Eternal Father, in Jesus Christ as your Savior and in the Holy Ghost?

2) Do you believe that Joseph Smith was God's prophet called to establish His Church and that today men are called of God to be Prophets?

3) Do you believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God like the Bible?

4) Do you believe the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints is His one and only church on the Earth?

Those four things are really it.

Ultimately all doctrine comes from the scriptures, so if you want to learn doctrine: read the scriptures. This is why the BoM, PoGP, and D&C are so important; they help clarify the doctrine in the Bible.

My opinion on xyz topic, or someone else's internet opinion doesn't matter. To find answers, one has to go to the source the scriptures and ultimately God and be willing to accept whatever answer is given.

Wholeheartedly agree.

For me it was as simple and as basic as that for me to be baptised.