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  2. I’ve seen the same idea shared on the LDS Daily facebook page but couldn’t find anything official to back it up. Im all for changing chapels to make them feel more worshipful and with the ordinance of the sacrament being the focus rather than the speaker. I’m doubtful of this announcement mostly because it seems like it would take decades to get all the chapels done and some areas would get the shaft, endlessly waiting, while others (Utah) would get it quicker. My stake center right now is typical of those built in that era. The chapel has no windows, is different shades of brown and orange, and has burlap-type stuff on the walls. It’s utilitarian and not at all inspirational. I can’t even see the sacrament table from our side of the chapel.
  3. I am well aware, do not worry for I will show mercy to those who are... friendly and compliant.
  4. The gathering of Zion in the Mormon or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is nowhere near the likeness of the Zionists of the current leadership of Israel. Just so you know. The current Israel administration feels very evil, but the LDS/Mormon church is the opposite in my humble opinion. Just wanted to get that out, because in discussing things, Zion will come up assuredly. Just needing to verify because I know that Jews under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu are horrified at the evil he's created for the whole world.
  5. Listening to this YouTube and it's not coming from the church but this guy, hopefully he's more pro LDS than not, and I will be okay with sharing. I just wondered about your thoughts if what he says is true. I think it would be nice to make our chapels really nice, somewhat like temples. But of course, the beautiful temples make one want to go inside them. So maybe a good step? Would nicer churches help people attend, plus the physical focus on Christ. Of course in the hallways and the foyers and RS/PH/Primary rooms have pictures of Christ. I haven't finished the video and am impatient to post. Hope I haven't misled anyone because of misinformation.
  6. Today
  7. "And you apparently do as well." I had a feeling you'd say that. But I expected a bit more... I write this in complete seriousness. You are either with me or with Zion! And I will NOT spare anyone even your 4 year olds if they defy me and allign themselves with Zion instead. And if I have to use my very hands to grab them by the throat and smash their head in until I can paint the wall red then so be it. They show no mercy with me so my mercy with you is a quick and swift warriors death. End of story.
  8. Hi @smac97, After I posted this, I realized it wouldn’t be clear what I was referring to, so I decided to flesh out my point. On a personal level, it irritates me that you went to a source with an obvious political bias on this topic (Grok), asked it to create a straw man version of “trans ideology”, and then use this to bait the people you are talking to and then criticizing them for not embracing the straw man. For my part, I asked ChatGPT to critique what Grok said on this matter, and replace its straw man with a steel man. Here is what GPT says: First, I would not call these the “fundamental tenets of trans ideology.” There is no catechism, governing body, or agreed philosophical system called trans ideology. More importantly, allyship is primarily a position about how transgender people should be treated, not a requirement that one accept a particular metaphysics of sex. If I were trying to steelman the minimum position, I would reduce it to something like this: A minimal trans-ally position Transgender people are describing a real human experience. Some people experience a persistent gender identity that does not correspond to the sex category in which they were born and raised. One need not settle whether this identity is innate, developmental, neurological, psychological, social, or some combination in order to take their experience seriously. Transgender people deserve the same dignity, liberty, and legal protection as everyone else. They should not be harassed, assaulted, fired, denied housing, or otherwise mistreated simply because they are transgender. In ordinary social interactions, people should generally accommodate another person's gender identity. If someone lives and presents socially as a woman, there is usually no reason not to call her a woman, use the name she asks to be called, and use female pronouns. That is ordinary interpersonal courtesy. It does not require believing that chromosomes, reproductive anatomy, or biological history have somehow changed. Sex and gender identity are distinguishable concepts. Biological sex is real. Gender identity and gender expression are also real phenomena. Which one matters depends upon what we are talking about. At a cocktail party, gender identity may be overwhelmingly relevant and chromosomes completely irrelevant. In some medical contexts, biological sex may be critically important. Public-policy questions should be decided individually rather than by slogans. Bathrooms, competitive sports, prisons, shelters, medical records, identification documents, and treatment of minors do not necessarily present the same problem. Being a trans ally does not require believing that gender identity must prevail over sex in every conceivable context. It requires taking the interests of transgender people seriously along with whatever competing interests actually exist. Medical questions are empirical questions. It is entirely consistent with trans allyship to ask about benefits, risks, diagnostic uncertainty, desistance, detransition, comorbidities, age, informed consent, and the quality of evidence supporting particular treatments. Compassion does not require knowing the answer before the research is done. That strikes me as a defensible minimum. Someone could go substantially further—believing, for example, that self-identification should control virtually every legal sex classification—without that stronger proposition becoming a prerequisite for treating transgender people decently. And this is where I think Grok's earlier answer went badly off the rails. Its 20-item list isn't a steelman of trans allyship. It is a hostile reconstruction of the most maximalist things one can associate with trans activism, sprinkled with assertions about activist motives and behavior, and then presented as though those constitute the movement's “fundamental tenets.” Look at what gets smuggled into the supposed creed. A trans ally allegedly must believe that sex is socially constructed; that chromosomes and reproductive anatomy are crude or bigoted classifications; that disagreement denies people's existence; that withholding medical treatment is “violence”; that lived experience outranks data; that asking questions is harmful; that opponents are motivated by animus; that conflicts with women's or gay rights must be denied; and even that xenogender identities must receive exactly the same conceptual treatment as classical transsexualism. Those aren't minimum propositions necessary for trans allyship. Several aren't propositions about transgender identity at all. They are accusations about how certain activists allegedly argue. That distinction matters. For example, compare: Steelman: “It is generally courteous to socially recognize a trans woman as a woman.” with: Strawman: “A person's subjective identity literally overrides biological sex, and anyone who disagrees is denying that person's existence.” Those are not equivalent claims. Or compare: Steelman: “Sex-associated biological traits do not always align perfectly, and scientists can therefore meaningfully discuss variation in sex characteristics.” with: Strawman: “Sex is a social construct and chromosomes, gametes, and reproductive anatomy are bigoted ways to classify people.” Again, not remotely the same proposition. And compare: Steelman: “Gender-affirming medical treatment can benefit some patients and should be evaluated using the ordinary standards of evidence-based medicine.” with: Strawman: “Medical transition is lifesaving, withholding it is violence, and clinical caution is cruelty.” A person can believe the first and emphatically reject the second. This is why I think Grok deserved considerably more skepticism than it received here. The giveaway isn't merely that individual statements are debatable. It is the construction of the list itself. Nearly every disputed question is phrased in the version least charitable to the trans side. Moderate propositions are replaced with absolutist ones; empirical controversies become alleged articles of faith; and the worst rhetoric one can find among activists is treated as constitutive of the entire worldview. If I asked an AI for “the fundamental tenets of conservative Christianity” and it returned twenty propositions about controlling women, suppressing gay people, rejecting science, imposing religion through government, and treating dissenters as sinners, nobody would mistake that for neutral analysis merely because examples could be found of Christians saying each of those things. The same standard should apply here. One can disagree profoundly with particular trans activists, reject self-ID as a universal legal rule, believe biological sex remains important, demand better evidence for pediatric medicine, and recognize genuine conflicts involving sports or privacy—and still hold the rather modest proposition at the center of trans allyship: Transgender people are real people describing a real experience, and in both our personal interactions and our laws we should try to treat them with dignity, courtesy, and fairness while dealing honestly with biological reality and legitimate competing interests. That is a considerably stronger steelman than Grok's partisan caricature—and, I think, a much more useful starting point for an actual discussion.
  9. I agree! She's one in a million or trillion!
  10. I see where you're going, but it's making me dizzy Stephen. I do believe this will get shut down so I wanted to let you know I feel your frustration with how the world is going. Hoping for a miracle that God will allow us to work this out before the world comes to an end. And it's not God ending it, it's ourselves.
  11. Asking Grok to summarize “the fundamental tenets of trans ideology” is like asking Walter Martin to summarize the fundamental tenets of Mormonism. That comparison isn’t perfect, though, because I don’t think there even is a uniform list of trans ideological doctrines that you must subscribe to in order to be considered an ally. When I have used the word “woman” that way, I was using it as a gender category rather than as a synonym for adult human biological female. If somebody has a female gender identity and female gender expression, the polite thing to do is socially categorize them as a woman. In my view, when you do this you are fervently refusing to understand their words, their conceptual framework, and the nuances of their point. “Gender identity” and “gender expression” are well-defined terms that represent real-world things, too. On my mission, on a few occasions people I was talking to were adamant that I wasn’t an “elder”. In their view, calling a 19-year old kid an “elder” was a radical “departure from empirical reality,” and they were willing to die on that hill. I disagree with you on this one. George Box said all models are wrong, but some are useful. The sexual binary is a model. In many contexts it is an extremely useful one, but when dealing with the biology of real-world people, it is less universally useful than many people imagine, and certainly isn’t the ultimate truth of what it means to be a human being. Empirical reality is that sex is "the biological components, including anatomical and physiological traits, largely related to sexual reproduction. Not all components align for all people." "Sex assigned at birth" means “sex recorded at birth.” It is in fact a term used by doctors in medical records when dealing with these issues, and was well-defined by the Academies. I don’t think it is my job to gate-keep the definition of words and to agree or disagree with definitions. I generally use the definitions the Academy provided, and try to understand what people are trying to communicate with the words they use. My sense is that much of trans advocacy is built less on redefining biological sex than on the idea that how we relate to other people matters. In ordinary social contexts, the polite and humane thing to do is generally to treat people in a way that aligns with their gender identity and presentation. That does not require pretending biological sex is unreal or different than what it really is. It means recognizing that social categories used in social situations don’t necessarily need to line up with the underlying biology you’d talk about with your doctor in medical situations. I'm not in a position to endorse anything on this. I’m a finance expert, not a doctor. I will note that the purpose of this glossary is to understand medical records, not describe the polite way to engage with others in all social interactions. Just because you think something is incoherent doesn't mean it really is. I’d give the benefit of the doubt to doctors and assume they speak coherently about medical and biological issues. If you think they are using the language incoherently, maybe you are the one with an ideology that is a little off. “Not all components align” is biological reality when we’re talking about real-world human beings. When scientists say “sex is a spectrum,” they do not mean that male and female are meaningless categories. They mean that the biological traits associated with sex: chromosomes, hormones, gonads, genital anatomy, secondary sex characteristics, and gene expression, do not always line up perfectly and often vary continuously in degree. From this coherent, reality-based point of view, sex is bimodal rather than perfectly binary in every biological feature: most people cluster strongly around typical male or female patterns, while some fall between or outside those typical combinations. This can be an insightful way of understanding human biology. As a thought experiment, imagine in a few years Elder Uchtdorf as prophet. Imagine at the same time a faithful member of the Church who deeply, deeply, feels their spirit is a woman and that somehow, their body looks, biologically, like a male. This person isn’t an activist or public agitator. Just a committed Latter-day Saint who feels like a woman trapped in a males body. They finds themself talking to the first presidency about it, and after a blessing and a prayer they receive a revelation: this person’s spirit really is a female spirt. In principle, this could happen, right? Mormons believe in spirits, and that spirits really do have genders. And they also believe genetic defects generally don’t reflect the essence of the body’s spirit. So what if the prophet had a revelation that a specific biological man had a female spirit? Would you object to this person claiming that on the inside, they really are a woman? Would you insist they be treated like a man, despite the prophet’s revelation that their spirit is female?
  12. And you apparently do as well.
  13. Refugees welcome, here are first supply of 72 virgins for muslim martyr
  14. Only for the strong ones among you: https://www.salon.com/2008/04/15/angela_merkel/
  15. Or Merkel condemning all of ze Germans because of a supposed Hetzjagd against refugees. Her proof was a video from Antifa that didn't show that the beginning where the man was attacked by the refugees LOLOLOL then the president of the Verfassungsschutz Hans Georg Massen interviened and was FIRED for doing his job LOLOLOLOLOLOL
  16. I wish Liveleak was still a thing so I could show you the video of the russian assassin in some german town armed with a Katana butchering some child molestor and then the germans, their mothers with the Kinderwagen they didn't run away they got closer out of curiosity and wanted to chat with this russian Rambo who still has a bloody Katana in his hands and is wondering WTF is wrong with ze Germans like have they no fear?????? Just stupid sheep beyond all... gullible!
  17. Finally the right version:
  18. Maybe listen to your "enemies" for once before shooting them in the head. Or lets take Charlie Hebdo. How convenient. Inside the car of the perpetraitors they found a passport. But ofc. How convenient. Just as convenient as the complete annihilation of the jews in the war in america 60BC or so... ow sorry did that one hurt your precious feelings?
  19. He is sitting in Den Haag instead due to this:
  20. Here in Switzerland many people believe and tell around that Israel let the October massacre happen on purpose to justify their war and plans for greater israel. Also here you have him in the flesh:
  21. The Israeli pager strike real crafty, never underestimate the craftiness of ze Jew.
  22. Kurds still waiting for Kurdistan probably wondering if they at least get some free netflix instead???
  23. The Manchurian Candidate or The Philadelphia Project are great movies. Go watch them. Oh and Men who stare at goats.
  24. MH370 in Diego Garcia LOLOLOL
  25. Or Nato coup in Turkey, and then Turkey falsified Radar data to make it look like russian plane invaded for 3 seconds their airspace to justify shooting it down LOLOLOL
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