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Spider-Man: Brand New Day I've got a teenage boy, so yeah, I've seen the latest spider-man flick. There were things I liked about it - things I didn't. Pros: While I personally prefer installments where we get more of Spidey's sarcastic humor, a core part of Spider-Man also tends to run more on the emo (borderline depressed) side of things, so I liked that they were willing to experiment with leaning into that a bit here in this film. It wasn't all just action sequence to action sequence. Also, we got more screen time for Jon Bernthal's Frank Castle / The Punisher; love that for him. Cons: Meaningful pacing / plot issues. Lots of clunky cameos - whether that be Florence Pugh's Black Widow, Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner / Hulk, or Sadie Sink's "mystery" character that the press were all sworn to secrecy over prior to release - they tended to add little to the story and served more as a reminder that, hey, remember that there are more movies coming up soon! Yes, the setup syndrome was strong with this film. And I really didn't like the fact that we basically got an entire movie without the core friend-group being around to do their thing. It just wasn't the vibe (as the kids are wont to say). Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the movie; it's just not the best version in the series.

Elder Stevenson does not speak for the entire LDS Church. Let me know when an LDS President issues an apology with the particular word "error". I don't think they will as the teaching (the dark skin being a sign of the curse) remains present in the Book of Mormon. Indicating it was an "error" casts doubt on Joseph's supposed translation and it also dismantles a belief that an LDS President will not be allowed to lead the church astray. There is no racial component in Mosiah 16:3. But I was wondering if the LDS Church would issue an apology for people being hurt by reading what it says about them (either the unbelievers or believers) in that verse or others. I am not aware of any LDS elder making an apology for any other teaching by LDS Presidents over the last 200 years or so that may have caused stress to people. Ok. The elder had this apology in his pocket all his life and wanted to issue it at an appropriate time. The LDS Church disavows this "theory" (taught as truth by LDS leaders for decades) but make no indication it was an error. Why? Because doing so shows LDS leaders have led their followers astray. As I've noted before, the teachings about dark skin being a sign of the curse were not presented as conjecture, opinion, theory, or speculation. False teaching leads people in the wrong path, to worship a false God. For example, Joseph Smith teaching that God is not God from all eternity. This is not the God faithful Jews or the majority of Christians worship. Take another example the Jesus of the Jehovah's Witnesses. He is Michael the Archangel, not God. This is a false Christ. They are being led down the wrong path. Another example: LDS Christians believe the Godhead is three Gods. Evangelical Christians believe in one God, eternally existent as three personages. You believe the later teaching leads believers astray. The pressure to remove the priesthood ban would not reach its zenith until later. You don't need a revelation from God if the priesthood ban originated with men. But as shown before, the ban originated with God as per LDS teachings. It seems we have different meanings for the same term. What does leading people in the Church astray mean to you? I don't believe God allows his "entire Church" to be led astray but he allows false teachers into the church, thus leading some followers astray. A previous LDS teaching says His church was destroyed when errors crept in. That teaching is a false teaching. This false doctrine is more formally known as The Great Apostasy. A manual is entirely fallible if it contains no truth. No LDS teaching manuals are "entirely" fallible. LDS Seminary manuals contain both truth and error. So they can and do contain teachings of former and current LDS Presidents which are leading their followers astray. Some of these teachings just passed down since Joseph Smith supposedly had a vision that he saw both the Father and the Son. Maybe I should add some clarity to what I said about a false teacher and false teachings. For my prime example, I'll use the Early Church Fathers and their teaching about deification. The church is repeatedly instructed to correct, teach, admonish, and restore people who are wrong. For example: • "instructing his opponents with gentleness" (2 Timothy 2:25) • "teach what accords with sound doctrine" (Titus 2:1) • "restore him in a spirit of gentleness" (Galatians 6:1) That assumes that not every doctrinally mistaken person is automatically an enemy of Christ or a false teacher. There are people who need correction, people who are immature, people whose understanding is incomplete, and people who are genuinely deceptive and destructive. "I don't have to deny the existence of false teachers in the New Testament church simply because I believe some early Church Fathers were mistaken about particular doctrines such as deification. Scripture clearly teaches that false teachers would arise within the church. But Scripture also gives us examples of genuine believers and teachers whose understanding was incomplete and who needed correction, such as Apollos. Therefore, 'teaches something I believe is erroneous' and 'is a false teacher in the full New Testament sense' are not synonymous categories. I can reject a particular teaching of a Church Father as unbiblical without making the much broader claim that the Father himself was a false teacher." A person can be a historically important Christian theologian while nevertheless being wrong about particular doctrines. I can respect the Fathers historically while maintaining that their writings are subordinate to Scripture and therefore subject to correction. My standard for identifying a false teacher is ultimately the apostolic teaching preserved in Scripture, not whether someone later became influential in church history. But I see a contrast with what is coming from LDS leadership. Wilford Woodruff, the 4th president of the LDS Church, said "The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray". He continued that if a president attempted to lead the Church astray, "the Lord would remove me out of my place". This statement is included in Official Declaration 1. There are other LDS leaders who repeated the idea. For example, Harold B. Lee and Gordon B. Hinckley. Ezra Taft Benson even gave fourteen fundamentals in following a prophet, one of them talking about being led astray. Basically, following a true prophet will never lead you astray (Teachings of the Living Prophets). Others are mentioned in AARONIC PRIESTHOOD Manual 3, chapter 24. A false teacher can teach both truth and error. Example: God exists (true), but God is not God from all eternity (false). Jesus exists (true), Jesus is God (true), but Jesus is the first spirit child of heavenly parents who became a God (false). Worshipping a false god does not bode well. Another example is the Jehovah's Witnesses. Their teaching of Jesus being Michael the Archangel or he returned invisibly in 1914. Their Governing Body, who teach themselves to be the faithful and discreet slave, believe what they teach is true doctrine so they don't understand they are leading people astray. Worshipping Jesus is blasphemy in their theology. Add to this all their false prophecies over the last hundred years.

I am uncertain as to what you mean. In what way are these scholars "above" such theologians who take a different perspective? One precursor to conflict is ranking. This reads a lot like ranking. Help me understand. Thanks.

Who are the divine beings in Psalm 82 which are being condemned for dealing unjustly to the weak and fatherless?

Two different questions are being collapsed (that seems to be happening a lot in this discussion). First, existing criminal laws against voyeurism and exhibitionism address conduct. They do not address the prior question of who is entitled to be present, unclothed, in a space that exists precisely because of sex-based differences in privacy and vulnerability. A rule that keeps intact males out of the women’s locker room is not redundant of a statute that punishes someone only after they have already exposed themselves or surreptitiously watched others. The entry rule is preventive; the criminal statutes are reactive and require proof of specific intent or conduct that is often difficult to establish in the moment. Second, the ongoing demands for documented, prosecuted “examples” in Kansas before the law took effect sets an unrealistic bar. Sex-separated spaces exist because the material differences between male and female bodies create predictable privacy and safety interests. Those interests do not suddenly become illegitimate the moment someone asks for a pre-law incident report. We do not require a body count before recognizing that prisons, shelters, and locker rooms have long been separated by sex for reasons that predate any particular statute. The claim that “no law will prevent every bad act” is both true and irrelevant. The same could be said of every entry restriction, age limit, or sex-based classification. Rather, the policy question is whether the classification is rationally related to the privacy and safety interests that justify sex-separated spaces in the first place. Recording and applying biological sex is directly related to those interests. Treating self-identification as the operative criterion is not. Existing criminal laws remain available either way; they do not make the classification itself unnecessary. Thanks, -Smac

In effect, you are obliterating sex-segregated facilities. Anyone can go into women's bathrooms for any reason or no reason at all. And if challenged, they can just say "I have the right to choose which restroom to use, and I have taken other people's sensibilities into consideration, and I am a 'reasonable person.'" And since there is no functional limiting principle in your regime, they'll get away with it. Thanks, -Smac

The 1926 provision you’re citing is from the Uniform Vehicle Code, a model act recommended to the states — not a binding federal statute that standardized driver’s licenses nationwide. Licensing has always been primarily a state function. Two important points from that era: The application for a license under the 1926 Uniform Vehicle Code explicitly required the applicant’s sex (along with name, date of birth, and address). The license itself was required to contain a “brief description of the licensee for the purpose of identification.” In practice, that description routinely included sex, height, weight, eye color, and similar identifying characteristics. Sex was treated as basic identifying information from the beginning. More relevant today is current federal law. Under the REAL ID Act regulations (6 CFR § 37.17), a driver’s license or ID card that is to be accepted by federal agencies must include the holder’s "sex" on the face of the card (as determined by the State). You already have to radically re-define "woman" to make the ideology work. Your proposal would now require that Kansas also re-define "sex" to include "gender identity." So the historical record does not support the idea that sex was ever regarded as irrelevant to identification on a driver’s license. It has been part of the identifying description for a century, and modern federal standards continue to require it. States remain free to decide how they determine and record sex, but the category itself has never been treated as optional for identification purposes. That is certainly one purpose of the identifying information on a license: confirming that the person presenting it is the same individual who was issued the license. Height, weight, eye color, photo, and signature all serve that function. But it is not the only purpose, and it does not explain why sex has been included from the beginning. A “brief description for the purpose of identification” has always treated sex as a basic, observable characteristic of the person, just as height or eye color is. It is not merely a temporary password that can be changed at will. When an officer (or anyone else relying on the license) looks at the document, the sex marker is part of the overall description that helps establish who the person is. If the only goal were photo matching, we would not need height, weight, eye color, or sex on the face of the card. Those fields exist because identification has historically included a set of stable physical descriptors. Sex has been one of them for a century, and current federal REAL ID standards continue to require it. The question is not whether the license helps an officer confirm identity — of course it does. Rather, the question is whether sex is a legitimate part of that identifying description. History, practice, and current federal rules all treat it as one. I think those comparisons miss the point. No one is claiming that a driver’s license = medical alert bracelet or birth certificate. The question is simpler: Is sex a legitimate piece of identifying information on a government-issued ID? For a century it has been treated as one. The 1926 Uniform Vehicle Code required sex on the application and a “brief description” on the license itself. Modern REAL ID regulations still require sex to appear on the face of the card. Height, eye color, and date of birth are also on the license even though no committee of ophthalmologists or vital-records officials demanded it. They are there because they help describe who the person is. You are correct that a driver’s license is not required to use a public restroom. That is beside the point. The license is an official identity document used for countless purposes — police encounters, age verification, air travel, financial transactions, and more. When the state issues an ID, it has historically included sex as part of the basic description of the holder. The debate is whether that long-standing practice should be abandoned so the marker can reflect self-identification instead of biological sex. Saying “doctors never required it on a medical bracelet” or “you don’t need a license to use the restroom” does not answer that question. It simply changes the subject. Yes, it does. I respectfully disagree. Simply saying “Yes, it does” doesn’t engage the distinction. A government ID that records biological sex is not “outing” someone in the ordinary sense of the word. "Outing" implies revealing private information that the person has chosen to keep hidden. Biological sex is not private information of that kind — it is an observable, documented fact that has long been recorded on official documents for public purposes (identification, law enforcement, medical response, vital statistics, and access rules for sex-separated spaces). What would be novel is what you are proposing, namely, that the state rewrite its own records to reflect a subjective identity claim instead of the underlying biological fact. Declining to do that is not the same as forcing a private disclosure. It is the state declining to falsify its own records. If the argument is that any official record of biological sex constitutes “outing,” then every birth certificate, every passport, and every driver’s license that has ever listed sex has been “outing” people. That is not how the term has traditionally been understood, and it collapses the difference between recording a verifiable fact and compelling the disclosure of something genuinely private. The original purpose was identification, that is, confirming that the person presenting the license is the same individual who was issued it. That purpose has always included a set of relatively stable physical descriptors, not a real-time description of current appearance or presentation. Sex has been one of those descriptors from the beginning, alongside height, eye color, and (historically) weight. It was never intended to be a field that changes with clothing, hairstyle, or self-identification. The fact that a mismatch can occur when someone presents differently from their recorded sex does not mean the category itself was a mistake. It means the person’s presentation has changed relative to a longstanding identifying marker. A driver’s license is not a vital record, but it is still an official identity document. It has never been designed to function as a continuously updated physical description. If it were, we would update height, weight, eye color, and photographs far more frequently than we do. We don’t, because the document records relatively fixed identifying characteristics rather than momentary appearance. Requiring the sex marker to reflect biological sex is therefore not a radical departure from the original purpose. Treating sex as mutable self-identification is the departure. The older approach treated sex as a basic, observable fact about the person; the newer approach treats it as a statement of identity that the state is expected to affirm. Those are different theories of what the document is for. This is the rare developmental condition argument, and it does not do the work being asked of it. Also, I have repeatedly acknowledged that there may be some need for exemptions to account for DSDs: Androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS) is a disorder of sex development. In complete AIS, the person has XY chromosomes and testes, but the body does not respond to androgens, so the external phenotype develops along female lines. These are medical exceptions — extremely uncommon — that have always existed and have always been handled as such. They do not redefine the ordinary categories of male and female, nor do they turn sex into a matter of self-identification. A law that records sex on the basis of biological sex is not “defeated” by the existence of rare DSDs any more than the category “height” is defeated by people with rare skeletal disorders. Hard cases and developmental anomalies are real; they are not a warrant for discarding the underlying binary or for treating ordinary males who identify as female as equivalent to people with AIS. In the specific example you raise, someone with complete AIS is typically raised as female, has a female phenotype, and has been treated as female for practical purposes. That is a medical and social accommodation to a developmental condition. It is not the same thing as a male with typical male development who later claims a female identity. Conflating the two is the error, and apparently a deliberate one. This isn't the first time where advocates have conflated people with DSDs with men whose sex is unambiguous but who nevertheless "identifies" as a "woman," and vice versa. Sex-segregated spaces exist because of the material reality of the two sexes in the overwhelming majority of cases. Rare disorders of sex development require careful, individualized handling. They do not supply a general rule that sex is whatever is written on a birth certificate by mistake, nor do they require the law to treat self-identified sex as the operative category. Two separate claims are being mixed together. First, the privacy claim: This is a new argument from you, which appears to be made up out of whole cloth, apparently so that you can fit it under a rubric of heightened constitutional scrutiny. As it is, though, I think this argument is of the "pounding a round peg into a square hole" variety. Sex has appeared on driver’s licenses and similar identity documents for a century. It has never been treated as sensitive medical information on the order of a diagnosis, treatment history, or private health condition. It is a basic identifying descriptor, like height or eye color. Calling it a “privacy violation” that triggers strict scrutiny simply because the document is shown in ordinary transactions rewrites the longstanding understanding of what these documents contain. Height and date of birth are also revealed every time a license is shown; no one seriously argues those disclosures require strict scrutiny. AFAICS, courts have not treated the sex marker on a driver’s license as a disclosure of intimate medical information subject to strict scrutiny. I think one of the many reasons I think you just made it up, but I am certainly open to correction, so feel free to point to case law where courts have "treated the sex marker on a driver’s license as a disclosure of intimate medical information subject to strict scrutiny." I found a case that sort of touches on this: Corbitt v. Sec'y of the Ala. L. Enf't Agency, 115 F.4th 1335 (11th Cir. 2024). A Grok summary: I think Corbitt v. Secretary of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency is fairly on point (though in a different circuit, and analyzing federal - not Kansas State - constitutional arguments). It upholds a state policy that ties the sex marker on a driver’s license to biological/surgical criteria (amended birth certificate or proof of sex-reassignment surgery) rather than self-identification. The court held that the policy is not a sex-based classification triggering heightened scrutiny, applies the same objective rules to everyone, and survives rational-basis review because the state has legitimate interests in consistency of identity documents and reliable information for law enforcement. It also rejected due-process and First Amendment challenges, treating the license as government speech. This supports the position I am advancing fairly well: the sex marker is an official identifying descriptor grounded in biological sex (or a closely related medical standard), not a vehicle for affirming subjective gender identity, and requiring it does not violate equal protection, privacy, or free-speech rights in the way opponents claim. The more ordinary framework is rational-basis or intermediate scrutiny for sex-based classifications, not strict scrutiny for the mere presence of the marker. Second, the line-drawing claim: Rare disorders of sex development create difficult edge cases. I acknowledge this now, and have done so many times in the past. But the old legal idiom has some relevance: "Hard cases make bad law." Edge cases do not erase the underlying binary or make the ordinary category unworkable. Almost every legal classification has hard cases at the margin. The existence of those cases does not require the state to abandon biological sex as the operative category in favor of self-identification, nor does it convert a longstanding identity field into a constitutional privacy violation. The state’s interest in recording sex on an identity document is the same interest it has always had: basic identification and the administration of sex-based rules where they exist. That interest does not disappear because a small number of developmental conditions require careful handling, and it does not elevate ordinary disclosure of the sex marker to a strict-scrutiny event. I think your argument here overstates both points. Yes, a driver’s license is not a full vital-records extract. It does not carry birth weight, birth length, or a baby photo. No one is claiming it should. But that does not mean every field on the license must be limited to whatever helps an officer match a face to a photo in the moment of a traffic stop. The license has always contained a short set of relatively stable physical descriptors — height, eye color, and sex among them — precisely because identification is not limited to a single snapshot comparison. Officers use the listed information when querying databases, checking warrants, making arrests, booking people, and determining housing or search procedures. Sex has been part of that identifying description for a century, and current federal REAL ID standards still require it. The claim that the only purpose is “ascertain that the person presenting the license is the person who is licensed to drive” is too narrow. If that were truly the sole purpose, height, eye color, and even the address could be omitted once a current photo is on the card. They are not omitted, because the document serves broader identification and administrative functions. Sex has historically been treated as one of those basic descriptors. Insisting that the marker must instead reflect current self-identification (or appearance) is the newer claim. The traditional approach treated sex as a stable identifying characteristic, not a field to be updated whenever presentation or identity claims change. That is the distinction at issue — not whether the license should also display birth weight. You are treating “description of the licensee for the purpose of identification” as if it means “whatever the person currently looks like or claims to be.” That is not how the field has ever functioned. The 1926 Uniform Vehicle Code and the long practice that followed treated sex as one of a short list of relatively stable physical descriptors (alongside height and eye color) not as a real-time appearance field. Those descriptors were chosen because they are objective and do not change with clothing, hairstyle, or self-description. An officer (or a database query) can rely on them as fixed reference points. If the standard is simply “what does this person look like right now,” then height, weight, and even the photograph itself would need constant updating. We do not do that. We accept that the license records durable identifying characteristics rather than a continuously revised physical description. Calling the biological-sex entry “objective data” and a self-identified marker “because-I-say-so” is therefore accurate in this context. One is a recorded biological fact that has long served identification purposes; the other is a subjective claim that the state is being asked to treat as controlling. Nothing in the original “description for identification” language requires the state to substitute the latter for the former. Although we continue to disagree, I appreciate both the vigor and the generalized civility with which you have participated in this thread. Thanks, -Smac ETA: I just found a Kansas Court of Appeals case that may have some relevance: State ex rel. Kobach v. Harper, 65 Kan. App. 2d 680 (Kan. App. 2025). A Grok summary: This decision does not hold that biological sex may not be required on driver’s licenses, nor does it endorse self-identification as the controlling standard. It is a narrow ruling on the standards for a temporary injunction: the Attorney General failed to make the required preliminary showings of irreparable harm and substantial likelihood of success. The underlying statutory question (whether K.S.A. 77-207 forces the sex marker on the face of the license to be biological sex at birth) remains open for a full merits determination. In this conversation, this case may be seen as a procedural setback for the biological-sex position at the preliminary-injunction stage of a lawsuit. I'm not sure that's much. And it leaves the substantive policy and statutory arguments (consistency of identity documents, law-enforcement utility, privacy/safety interests in sex-separated spaces, etc.) still live. It does not resolve the deeper dispute we have been addressing about whether the marker should track biological sex or self-identified gender. Thanks, -Smac

I think God desires our closeness, in our hearts if not in physical proximity, and I think it's wonderful that Catholicism has a way for its members to experience the Presence of God in both ways. My understanding is that the Divine is present where two or more are gathered in his name (no mention of a requirement that they agree about everything), and perhaps that gathering "place" can even be an internet forum.

There are longstanding laws against voyeuristic conduct and sexual exhibitionism that can apply in locker rooms. The fact that someone has a right to be in the locker room does not give them a right to engage in otherwise illegal conduct once they are there. In Kansas, for example, exposing yourself to a nonconsenting person is criminal if it is done with the intent to arouse or gratify sexual desire; merely being naked while changing or showering obviously isn't enough. Kansas also criminalizes certain invasions of privacy, including surreptitiously observing someone in circumstances where that person is entitled to privacy. (Kansas Secretary of State) Of course there are fuzzy cases. Incidental looking isn't voyeurism, and incidental nudity isn't exhibitionism. Someone might even get sexual gratification from looking or being looked at and never cross the line into provably criminal conduct. That's an inherent feature of communal locker rooms, not something created by allowing transgender people to use them. But when the line is crossed, these offenses do not suddenly become unprosecutable merely because the defendant was entitled to enter the locker room. The larger point is that I'm criticizing a Kansas law that went into effect less than six months ago. I've looked for examples in Kansas where a victim or police said that someone was engaging in sexually inappropriate conduct in a restroom or locker room but could not be stopped or prosecuted because Kansas lacked this new sex-at-birth-based entry restriction. I haven't found one, and nobody I've asked has produced one either. No law will prevent every bad act or make every difficult case provable. The relevant policy question is whether this new law solves a demonstrated problem—and whether the problems it creates outweigh whatever benefit it provides.

I certainly don't want to tell people to disregard real threats or potential assaults. While I believe people have the right to choose which restroom to use, I also think they also have a responsibility to take other people's sensibilities into consideration. I think a "reasonable person" test can be applied here, and the right to choose the most appropriate space for a urinary emergency isn't a license to assault or intimidate others.

I've done some research on this, and going back to 1926, a federal law that standardizes drivers license doesn't say that "sex" needs to be shown on it. Rather, it says "Every such license shall bear thereon the distinguishing number assigned to the licensee and shall contain the name, age, residence address and a brief description of the licensee for the purpose of identification, also a space for the signature of the licensee." That is the real purpose: to help a police officer ascertain that the person who presents the license in fact the same person who was licensed to drive. A group of doctors never said the most important piece of information on a medical alert bracelet is the sex listed on your original birth certificate, and therefore that needs to be displayed on everyone's ID. A group of vital records registrars never got together and said that vital record information needs to be placed on a drivers license and carried around with people. And you don't need a drivers license to use public restrooms. Yes, it does. Actually, it defeats the original purpose. The NYT article that was too long to read tells the story of somebody who was pulled over and the cop was quite confident the drivers license was invalid because it said "Female" with the driver was obviously "Male." The real purpose is to help cops verify that the driver that presents the license is the one licensed. It isn't a vital record. That's why it doesn't show weight at birth, name at birth, place of birth, and have a baby photo. Insisting that the licence contain biological sex rather than an accurate description of what the person looks like is a radical departure from the explicit original purpose. If that were the case, then you should oppose the Kansas Law. Emily Quinn is, objectively, a male. She he has testicles and XY chromosomes. When she he was born, her his doctor incorrectly put "female" on the birth certificate, not knowing she he is really a male with androgen insensitivity syndrome. But now in Kansas, it is against the law for Emily Quinn--a biological man--to use the men's restroom because of a mistake made by a doctor about 35 years ago. I've tried to illustrate with photos why the place where you want to draw the line is in fact defective, and why drawing the line there creates more problems than it solves. We have to weirdly agree to disagree about whether the people I've shown belong in the men's room or the women's room. My point in this post and the last is about Constitutional scrutiny. If "sex" is defined as biological sex or the sex assigned at birth (things that aren't necessarily the same), it is a violation of privacy to put that personal medical information on a document that needs to be shown to others every time you vote or cash a check. I'm arguing that regularly requiring this disclosure to others in contexts that are totally unrelated to bathrooms is a violation of the individual's personal autonomy. That doesn't mean the state doesn't have an interest in putting birth certificate information on a driver's license, but it does mean that this need needs to withstand strict Constitutional scrutiny. You don't put birth length, birth weight, and baby photos on a driver's license. That is because the purpose of the drivers license isn't to summarize vital records about an individual. The purpose is to help police officers ascertain that the person presenting the license is the person who is in fact licensed to drive. Again, "sex" is on drivers licenses to help an officer ascertain that the person presenting the license is the person licensed to drive. The Federal 1926 law I linked to above says it is intended to be a "description of the licensee for the purpose of identification." If we are going to meet that explicit, original purpose, an accurate description of this person is a man, not a woman.

I miss Mark, too.

At our parish, we try to have adoration of the Blessed Sacrament 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This means that someone volunteers to keep our Savior company as He shows Himself in His chapel under the appearance of consecrated bread for each of the 168 hours of every week. I think most of us do it once a week. That is what I do. My hour is 3:00 every Wednesday morning. It seems like the least I can do as a retired guy who can grab a nap any time almost every day. One main idea behind this practice is to remember how it seemed like Jesus desired fellow company with some of His Apostles during His agony in the Garden. The Heart of Jesus is unfathomable. He doesn't need us...and yet He expresses these desires for us. Before the Last Supper, wherein Catholics believe that Christ celebrates the first Mass He says, "With desire I have desired..." What? I guess that means He wants to do this thing with an intensity that we might find hard to relate to? "...to eat this Passover with you before I suffer." (Luke 22:15) This is why the Mass is also named the Paschal (Passover) Mystery. The time went so quickly this morning. I could not get over the idea of God who creates out of nothing is about six feet away, out in the open, easy to see. The same eternal God has been waiting for me this morning in this humble manner, so unimposing? There is a natural doubt that man can attain to a union with a Being so far above us. I understand the appeal of God being a man. But I also understand the appeal of God being infinitely more. The Incarnation of Christ gives us both. One author puts it this way speaking of Christ assuming our nature: "...it strengthens our hope all the more since it brings the excellence of our nature home to our consciousness, and shows us that we, elevated as we are above all creatures, can and ought to achieve perfect happiness in closest union with God." ---The Mysteries of Christianity, Matthias Scheeben, B. Herder Book Co., St. Louis, MO (1947), p.417 Sometimes my differences of opinion with my LDS friends can make me ponder delightful beliefs, as happened this morning in pondering over again some of the beliefs that we agree upon and those we don't. At the end of my hour, I was thinking about how different it might be if mfb were here. I might be frustrated, but I miss him very much. I hope Mark is okay. He made me think so much harder than I ever would have without his opposition to my transcendent God. I would be happy if he could poke his head in here, and offer his misgivings...and then I would probably get angry! Heh. May the good Lord bless our absent, but well remembered friend/adversary Mark Bukowski, and may God draw him to his His loving heart, even if God created ex nihilo. Yeah, I know Mark, it doesn't make sense unless God has a heart. (I am speak anthropomorphically. Of course. That is the only way we know how to express ourselves, and that is why God speaks to us that way too, Mark!) Sorry for taking the last word, my friend. I know you would have more to say.

It has been 20 years since I lived there, but when I did, if this is the double chapel I was thinking of it is where at least 1 Tongan ward met. I can't remember if there was another Tongan ward or maybe a Samoan ward too as we had quite a few Tongans and Samoans who lived there, but I think there were 2 Tongan wards at that chapel. And yes, some parts of that area were pretty rough, and it wasn't just Tongans. So no, I don't think it is odd.

Just a thought. Maybe one gang may have known/suspected that the other gang may have been attending the funeral, and decided to be present.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/08/17/kearns-shooting-1-killed-2-injured/ Chat claimed the funeral was for a gang member, but I am not seeing that in the links it gave me, so could have made it up. Maybe mixed up with previous shooting? You don’t have to be LDS to use our chapels for funerals, but the family likely were imo. Now gang members being active or devout…that is more debatable. Iirc, one of the people involved in the previous case had spoken at the funeral and then went outside to smoke…again doesn’t mean not active and devout as we had a neighbour who had reactivated, but struggled with a smoking addiction, beat it too eventually, but it took its toll, died recently. Good guy. Still someone smoking or being in a gang…bet that links with a significant drop in activity level

Have no clue. Family probably originally was, but many have been here for several generations (started coming in the 1920s, really established in the 1950s). Not all who came were LDS converts though. https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=52551592&itype=cmsid

Yea that’s plausible.. I’m assuming they are all Mormons tho right? Or at least mostly?

Okay. Much appreciated.

Mission presidents get reimbursed for living expenses, BYU tuition and missions paid for kids, funds to fly kids out to see them, funds for birthday and christmas presents, dance / violin etc lessons for the kids. Lots of stuff. I dont think they are paid a salary though. Also they are instructed to not tell their tax preparers any details about their financial agreement with the church....that one is interesting. Maybe a nothing burger Source is 2006 mission presidents handbook pp80 if you can find one. Scribd has it if you have an account.

In Utah if using the chapel for a funeral, you tend to live in the same neighborhood. Gangs can overlap the same neighborhood surely? A church parking lot is an easy gathering place whether one is there or not for church. Our chapel parking lot in CA was a school bus stop and often where people carpooling would meet as they headed up to the freeway. I suspect very few parking there were LDS. It was the only place to park safely on that somewhat long stretch….think there was also an empty lot at the intersection with the freeway (or the road that went to the freeway, should doublecheck the map). 1/3 of the kids waiting for the bus were LDS for high school because of seminary. Just me for junior high because we lived down the street. added: memory was right, it was the freeway. They have a Caltrans Park and Ride there now. The busstop by the Church is even officially marked. Only one on the road…which wasn’t as long as I remembered it, but very wooded. I would always get lost driving around up there in my dreams, lol. The Church parking lot is really the best meeting place in the area with easy access to the freeway. The rest of the road is residential except for a little fruit stand.

It makes as much sense to me as anything I or any other LDS has come up with about the ultimate…the ultimate is grounded in mystery.

It wouldnt matter if my commander had been in Vietnam or Desert storm.. he still wasnt involved in the fight we were in and was safely ensconced behind the wire, sandbags and bunkers and did not participate in any combat. He wasnt part of the we. We were a unit with divisible assets who would be attached to other organizations for missions. Our commander didnt even plan missions, he was working part time for a higher guy and part time being our commander. Our missions were strictly Company size (~120 troops) down to platoon size (~30-60 troop) which is what I was leading at the time. He didnt come under fire, he didnt lead missions, he didnt engage in combat, we wasnt wounded. He did not participate in the combat missions "WE" were on. My own company suffered 48% casualties and the fact his existence somewhere at HQ where no one could find him made him definitely not part of the "WE." Granted his job wasnt to be out with us, but to take credit for what "we" did as if he was a participating team member is irritating. My platoon was routinely parted out to go augment other missions and I wasnt with some of the squads who went out. Many times they came back with some crazy stories. In one engagement they killed ~35 AQI. They kicked butt and were my troops but I wasnt on the mission with them and there is no way I would have told them ... "we kicked butt tonite." Best idea is for these guys to quit saying we have no paid clergy. It isnt true and it rarely adds anything of value to the talk or conversation unless they want to virtue signal which is probably a majority of the motivation IMHO.

God existed eternally, unlike Creation, which marks the beginning of time. God is One, but God is also Three, in a different sense. God would not be the only one. There would be two others Persons who have the same divine nature as the Father. If God is omnipresent, there is nothing that can surround God for Him to be inside of. This would go back to what was said above about "Him who the worlds could not contain, was contained in the womb of the Blessed Virgin." As man, the person of Christ was contained. As God, the Person of Christ, made Mary the Mother of a Person who was unbounded Existence, God. I understand you saying "Hmmmm". How? Why? Why is there something instead of nothing? The fact of existence is an amazing mystery. Maybe an eternal God has something to do with it? I apologize for saying this poorly. Of course you are welcome to explain a different understanding of why there is anything. Like, why would matter exist before God made it? Maybe we should worship matter if God depends on it or else He wouldn't exist? Hmmmmm. You very much agree that the Father won't mind if we overestimate what He is. I am not infallible. I am not even a philosopher. I believe the most that I can possibly believe about God. There is a passage in the Psalms where the Israelites were chided for doubting that God could provide for them in the wilderness, and it seems like He was insulted (anthropomorphically speaking). With God all things are possible, or maybe not ALL things? Why must we doubt that God could create matter out of nothing? Why Is that flawed speculation for the presence of matter? Why do we have to believe that nobody made matter? It strikes me as impersonal and without purpose. Does that make any sense? What if God can make matter out of nothing? Maybe it would be an insult (anthropomorphically speaking)? The universe is already a mind blowing place anyway. Why limit God? For religious reasons, I instinctively want two P's. #1) A Person, #2) A Purpose. I can't worship in a universe that doesn't begin with at least a Person and a Purpose. Creation ex nihilo has provided that. I can't go back on that without losing my religion. So I am biased. Maybe I am not objective. If it is about the problem of evil, God will exonerate Himself or not someday. I am not worried about that. I believe we will all see that God brings good out of evil. What is evil? It is a defect of what is good. It is a cleft palate. It is immorality and strife with neighbors and selfishness. But all of these evils involve good natures. They are negatives. Evil is not positive. It isn't a thing, but the lack of a thing. Evil is in a sense, less than nothing, a negative, a corruption of the good, and God intends to bring good out of that! How much more then should it be possible that we should believe that God can bring good (matter for instance), out of pure neutrality, mere nothingness? Nothingness is so much better than evil! Maybe I should just erase this whole thing calm? I know you will be nice though even if it seems ridiculous to you. I don't know what else to say right now. God bless, Rory

Hmm and the attendees at the funeral and the warring gangs just so happened to both be Tongan. Pretty odd coincidence