Vort

A few questions to consider: Where in LDS scripture is the phrase "become a god" found? (Hint: Nowhere) What does it mean to "be a god"? If it makes a difference, capitalize the G before answering. In what sense are we expected to become as God is? What does that mean, exactly? What is the glory of God? Can God's glory be shared? Can it be taken by another? What is the difference between God's glory and God's honor? What exactly was the rebellious Satan trying to take from God? Describe a scenario where such a thing (procuring God's honor by taking it from Him) even makes sense, not merely semantically, but philosophically. As with many seemingly "deep" questions, this issue cannot even be addressed until we define our verbal tokens sufficiently that we can manipulate them in a rational way. Once we sufficiently define those tokens such that the situation they describe becomes meaningful, the answer is likely to reveal itself in a pretty straightforward manner. Until then, we cannot even know if the question has any real-world meaning. "Can God create a rock so big that He cannot lift it?" makes perfect sense grammatically, but not semantically. It proposes a meaningless situation that exists only because of wordplay and the rules of grammar, then demands we take that situation seriously. But we cannot, because it is not a serious situation. It is meaningless, like "colorless green ideas sleep furiously". (For further development of this particular part of investigating the topic, see Gõdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. Seriously, if you're willing to put the effort in, you'll learn a great deal.) As a general life rule, I believe that many of our questions can be approached only after we grasp the fundamental elements of those questions, not merely in a grammatical sense, but semantically, epistemologically, and hermeneutically. Until then, we are small children pondering how to solve a differential equation. We're just scrawling crude pictures on a whiteboard covered with equations, carelessly and vacuously kicking words around without actually addressing anything meaningful.

More like this, but shorter.

FTR, I have nothing against beards, and I wouldn't mind a bit seeing BYU remove beard restrictions. Assuming the guys who wore beards actually took care of them and didn't look, well, um, like i would have looked if I had tried growing a beard in my early 20s.

Facial hair. I don't think so. I hope for the best for Retzlaff. I hope even more that future BYU athletes will take their promise to follow the honor code with greater sincerity. We're definitely swimming upstream in that regard. Maybe we should call ourselves the BYU Salmon.

Well stated. I don't remember ever really thinking about this before. I have always taken the words as meaning "The predator and the prey will be at peace", but maybe there are more layers to the story. For example, the lion is a widely recognized figure of the tribe of Judah, and specifically of David and his reign and progeny. The lamb is obviously a figure of Jesus, but may also symbolize those ruled by David's or Judah's house. Come to think about it, I don't think the "lamb and lion" metaphor/prophecy/whatever you want to call it is biblical. Pretty sure Isaiah talks about the wolf and the lamb. Okay, looks like Isaiah 11:6, which reads: The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. Hmmmm. Not sure what to make of this. Why do we so often talk about the lion and the lamb? Is there another verse of scripture that I'm missing here?

Did I mention that most Israelis love Trump? Like LOVE love him. Like want to have his babies. No wonder undisguised antiSemitism is on the rise among Democrats.

Why has the US refused a Congressional declaration of war since the end of WWII? What exactly are the politics involved? Has this been nothing more than a naked power grab by presidents since Truman/Eisenhower, or is there more subtlety than that? Will an increasingly divided and partisan Congress simply refuse any declaration of war?

I have worried for years about the brittleness of the US power grid, a worry that has been fueled by the every-few-years collapse of sections of the grid—the northeast, Texas, etc. We need our grid to be much more dispersed, much more redundant, much more interconnected but less interdependent. Having said that, the EMP threat has been recognized since the 1950s. I think the fantasy of bringing the US to its knees by a high-altitude nuclear burst is just that: Fantasy. Our grid is not "hardened" in the military sense, but there are numerous failsafes and autodisconnects in the grid that would limit the catastrophic effects of such an airburst. I would think (not being any sort of expert) that even if power were interrupted, it would be restored to most people within hours or days, maybe a couple of weeks at worst. And most critical infrastructure has backup generators available. Such an attack during a snowy, stormy, frigid winter might greatly complicate matters, but on the whole, I think that particular threat is overblown in public perception. tl:dr—US public security has many things to worry about. I really don't think that a nuclear airburst leading to months-long power outages is one of those things.

The Middle Eastern mullahs and political leaders seem, to a man, deeply corrupt. Not so different from the Western leaders, but the overt nature of their striving for power is a thing which all but the most leftist abhor. When even those who maintain their dislike of Trump openly admit that the Iran attack was the only reasonable way forward, you know that the mainstream media is utterly lost in their hate-fueled wanderings, and are exceedingly unlikely ever to return to anything resembling reason.

Trump played the Iran angle almost perfectly. Love him or hate him—and basically everyone on the left and everyone in the media (but I repeat myself) hates him—any honest observer must acknowledge that his strategic handling of Iran, including his carefully calibrated policy of misdirection, enabled Israel to carry out highly effective strikes against Iran's research infrastructure. Whether statesmanship or gamesmanship, it was a master stroke, a shrewd exercise of international power politics. Had Biden (or *shudder* Harris) done such a thing, the left would have been falling all over itself gushing about the steely nerved brilliance of the plan, and with some justification. Expect no such concession for Trump. That would require clear-eyed honesty.

Self-effacing jokes are often appreciated largely because they are self-effacing. Humility is often attractive and rarely objectionable. But I do agree that knowing the gospel and participating in its covenants and practices is the surest, perhaps the only, way to find enduring happiness in our lives. Joke about the silliness and weaknesses of the Saints, and I may laugh and even nod in agreement sometimes. But therein lies my hope.

What a great conversation. It's more...meta, I guess, than most of the conversations I've had with ChatGPT. I mean, I often ask ChatGPT to reflect on its own commentary and such, but investigating how its (and my) eternal existence is defined in terms of soteriology is a conversational direction I have not yet taken, at least not with an AI. That's fruitful ground for conversations about moral accountability. I might dip my toes in that pool at some point.

To be fair, 95% of the recent superlong "conversation" was ChatGPT responding to and amplifying my prompts.

I have heard people suggest, apparently in all seriousness, that the white stone given us will be in effect an iPhone.

That's because you GenYers do everything on your phone, while we boomers sit in front of a keyboard and read from a screen that our eyes can actually focus on.