JeremyOrbe-Smith

Man, Goble and Coe, this has been a depressing month. I had my disagreements with some of his scholarly conclusions, but I always appreciated his hard work, and found his books very informative. Very sad. Rest in peace, Mr. Coe. 

Oh no. 😢 This is devastating news. Mr. Goble was one of my favorite writers here, always seemed like a genuinely decent and kind and respectful man, contributing calm words of wisdom. I am so sorry to hear of his passing, especially at such a young age. Wish I had interacted with him more. I hope his family is able to find peace. 

I believe he should be put in jail, not beheaded by a kid listening to the voices in his head telling him to murder the guy in cold blood while he's lying drunk and unconscious in the street. Jesus. 

Look, here's what gets me about threads like this one. If we're going to go the metaphorical, ahistorical, 'spiritual lessons', demythologizing route, then let's at least take the books seriously enough to actually read what is written in them. 

What great moral insight do we learn when Jezebel is thrown out the window so that dogs can eat her flesh and her carcass can be as dung upon the face of the field? What deep Spiritual Truth do we get from the Levite cutting up the concubine into 12 pieces? What profound lesson do we learn by considering Lot being roofied and raped by his own daughters, or all the Witches murdered throughout the centuries because God Said So? 

If these scriptures are merely the best guesses of some ancient tribes, and not Prophetic declarations from people who claim to speak with the Creator of the world, then what is the point of carrying them around as if they contain some great secret? Okay, so they teach us to commune with God. Why would we want to commune with a being that does all the things the scriptures say God does, atrocities that would put Dahmer and Hitler to shame? 

Psalm 110:
Thou art a Priest forever, 
after the Order of Melchizedek. 
The Lord at thy right hand 
shall strike through Kings 
in the day of His wrath. 
He shall Judge among the Heathen, 
He shall fill the places with the dead bodies.

God makes it quite clear that He causes all these horrors on purpose, as part of a greater plan. The scriptures are not just descriptive, as if the text is merely recording these horrific events in history without endorsing them, it is explicitly prescriptive; God is not merely warning us about negative consequences which might flow naturally from our own bad behavior, He is not just teaching us the natural blessings that come from obedience to His principles and describing the violence as a natural consequence of our human choices when we disobey. No, He is explicitly taking credit Himself as having done this all deliberately.

Bottom line: if there really is some hyper-advanced intelligence which has been watching over us for millennia and murders us from the sky whenever it feels like it, then the Forteans and William Bramley are right, and all of humanity should be banding together to fight this creepy extraterrestrial(s), rather than slaughtering ourselves over the pathetically inconsequential sectarian differences that have provoked so much bloodshed over the centuries.  

"So It appears you now believe evil, injustice, alienation and hate win out in the end."

If the scriptures are accurate representations of God's character, then God is evil, unjust, and hateful when He promises to force people to eat their own sons and daughters or melt their eyeballs out of their skulls or behead people or hurl javelins through lovers or command the Chosen People to commit genocide and utterly destroy even innocent children, yes.   

Is it really, honestly, truly, more likely that the revelation of the Book Of Mormon was specially timed by Angels to coincide with Rosh Hashanah, than that Joseph Smith lived in a farming culture that was steeped in zodiacal lore and attached special significance to the Autumnal Equinox? 

That last link includes the passage: "No bolder statement could be made about God’s involvement in history than that of an angel delivering a historical record full of interactions with God." 

Personally, I think God could prove Himself to be a lot bolder if He physically showed up in the White House tomorrow and treated Trump with the same level of civility He showed to, say, Onan. Or is Trump provoking North Korea into a frickin' nuclear war less sinful than not being totally into impregnating your dead brother's wife after a forced marriage? Meanwhile, Cain gets God's sevenfold protection after murdering his own brother, and Elijah gets charioted away to Heaven after hacking 555 guys to death ...  

(At the very least, wouldn't Moroni have mentioned something to all those Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews in New York during Joseph Smith's time?)  

The Book Of Mormon does not contain a moral message. The "deeper truths", the "spiritual truths I find communicated clearly" in the Book Of Mormon, along with the rest of the scriptures, are completely monstrous. Think of the story in Alma 14, when innocent women and children are being burned alive while people with the power to save them stand by and do nothing. In the very next chapter, those same powerful people, men of God, go to the land of Sidon and heal Zeezrom's FEVER.

The author of the Book Of Mormon, who was clearly Joseph Smith (some critics try way too hard to detect elaborately silly conspiracy theories), was perfectly fine with God being willing to let people be burned alive, and beheaded like Laban, and zapped by self-righteous prigs like Nephi, and smitten like Sherem, and slain like the Amlicites, and crushed to death like Korihor, and burned and drowned and buried alive in Zarahemla. 

And of course there's that beautiful passage in 2 Nephi 6: "I will feed them that oppress thee, with their own flesh; and they shall be drunken with their own blood as with sweet wine; and all flesh shall know that I the Lord am thy Savior and thy Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob." 

Of course, in other scriptures, God says He could change us all from mortality to immortality in the twinkling of an eye. 

Then again, maybe He'll get off on a technicality, since He also promises to punish sinners in such a way that they are left with no eyes to twinkle with. I really love that uplifting, inspirational, spiritually fulfilling Section 29 of the D&C: 

"I the Lord God will send forth flies upon the face of the earth, which shall take hold of the inhabitants thereof, and shall eat their flesh, and shall cause maggots to come in upon them; and their tongues shall be stayed that they shall not utter against me; and their flesh shall fall from off their bones, and their eyes from their sockets."

I suppose it's better than all the cannibalism God commands in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 and Isaiah 49 and Jeremiah 19 and Ezekiel 5 ... 

So.

God is such an awesome GPS that He can guide people safely through the Arabian desert and give them detailed instructions on how to build boats capable of crossing the largest ocean on the planet and preserve a detailed description of the entire journey (including directions and place names) and then transmit said record to a Prophet living on a different continent and separated by over a thousand years ...

... but He can't bother sending anyone a vision to find Elizabeth Smart while she's being raped three times a day for nine months 18 miles from her home in Utah? 

I guess "all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good." Thank G-d the Lord is keeping meticulous track of all our lost keys! 

I've only read the Vedas and the Tao Te Ching and the Kojiki and some Confucius, but I think it's clear there's a lot of astronomical/astrological stuff going on. Read Hamlet's Mill about the various celestial 'Ways'. 

Just as a quick example, I think the Tàijítú circle as a diagram of the ultimate power of the Pole, divided equally between the feminine Yin and the masculine Yang, probably represents the two sides of the ubiquitous celestial mountain. The Yab-Yum embrace of lingam and yoni is commonly celestialized as well. (Pramantha = Prometheus = mentula = lingam.) If you read Plato's story about the Hermaphroditic origin of gender, and certainly the Demiurge's planetarium creation in the Timaeus, I think it's clearly based on a similar cosmological scheme. ('The different' = the ecliptic, 'the same' = the celestial equator, etc.) 

As far as the Shin Tao goes, I think the gnostic-y Shining Path (er, no relation to Peruvian Communists ... ) of so many esoteric religions is based on the imagined progress of 'souls' descending or ascending through the planetary spheres and the zodiac and all that (ie, what Daniel Peterson is talking about re Ascension literature). I'm just skeptical that souls actually make such a journey. (The Vedas talk about the rikshaka, the pathway of the Bear [Ursa Major/Minor along the Milky Way?], but, well, I'm not very ursine myself, so ... ) 

Mother Ganga = the Milky Way, the Sea of Milk that the Shamans talk about ... I'd speculate that the handwashing ceremony mimicking Izanagi and Izanami has something to do with the dipper constellations ... the eight Trigrams definitely have a three-layered conception of Heaven/Tiān: ☰ ... the Mongols riding towards the four-sided Cosmic Mountain topped with a tree had the same sacred number as the Aztecs, 52, which is the number of weeks in a year, and the number of sailors in Odysseus's boat. Homer is quite explicit about the cosmological stuff; the numbers in the Eddas are, too. The Vedas talk about the Seven Sisters. The Parents of the world stood on the Rainbow Bridge and used the Celestial Jewel-Spear to stir the primordial sea of the milky way, churning the milk to form the constellations and the islands of Japan. Amaterasu was a Sun Goddess. Etc., etc.

My point is, none of this imagery means the underlying astronomy is wrong, it just means I'm doubtful I'll literally be making the trip past the moons of Jupiter after I croak, regardless of what the Celestial Masters have taught.  

(I don't recall Joseph ever mentioning Taoism (?), but it's worth noting that Chinese immigrants were teaching Taoism in America since at least the 1840s. Zen was known from at least 1727. Etc. The East India company had been around for a looong time, man. I'm not sure what's so special about the formulation 'opposition in all things' that Joseph couldn't have 'known' about it. It's a pretty obvious 'philosophy'.)  

The point is, history is based on a calendar, whether or not the timeline is conceived of as being cyclical or not. The calendar, whether 'secular' or 'religious', is based on the rotation of the earth, the positions of the sun and moon and stars, all that stuff. And all that stuff was transmitted in preliterate society through imagery, ie the three-tiered worldwide cosmology (with elaborations or subtractions, of course), and the anthropomorphizing of nature. So if a personification of, say, a planet within that cosmological structure, was not originally a historical figure (a historical 'God'), and then someone a few hundred or a few thousand years later claims to have telepathically received literal histories from said ahistorical entity, it doesn't really ... work.    

If history is irrelevant, the Church is certainly going to a lot of trouble for nothing by distributing big thick books that they explicitly claim to be literal historical records of the interactions between God(s) and humanity. The entire Church as a distinct entity is built on the historical claim that there is an entity (or entities) called 'God' who intervenes in history, for instance in the 1830s, or during the Nephite battles. It is completely disingenuous to claim that history does not matter. I mean, c'mon, the Joseph Smith History? The whole point of the Book of Mormon is historical.

Jacob 1 claims that an ostensibly historical figure named Nephi taught another ostensibly historical figure named Jacob that "the history of his people should be engraven upon his other plates, and that I should preserve these plates and hand them down unto my seed, from generation to generation. And if there were preaching which was sacred, or revelation which was great, or prophesying, that I should engraven the heads of them upon these plates, and touch upon them as much as it were possible, for Christ’s sake, and for the sake of our people. For because of faith and great anxiety, it truly had been made manifest unto us concerning our people, what things should happen unto them. And we also had many revelations, and the spirit of much prophecy; wherefore, we knew of Christ and his kingdom, which should come." In the D&C, God supposedly said "that it is my will that you should hasten to translate my scriptures, and to obtain a knowledge of history, and of countries, and of kingdoms, of laws of God and man, and all this for the salvation of Zion." 

The unsupported (historical) claim that a telepathic being (or beings) on another planet (or in some other dimension, or wherever) is communicating daily with billions of people, and has for thousands of years, is, I admit, not terribly convincing to me. 

It doesn't work. There has to be a historical core at some point, or else the entire edifice collapses. What is the 'non-sequential' utility of believing in Gold Plates? If the Book of Mormon is not historical, it is worthless. If it is not historical, then the morality it preaches is absolutely horrific. (Let people be burned alive as an object lesson even when you have the power to save them, purely to make some trivially banal theological point as if it is 'deep', and then turn around and heal someone's fever in the next chapter, etc.)   

In the context of Mormonism, God is not interchangeable with 'ultimate reality', and it makes me kind of sad to see believers trying to graft in traditional transcendental theological arguments from other traditions, even though I'm no longer a believer myself. I see so many Mormons taking the only good things about their theology (in other words, the things which most closely resemble secular scientific or philosophical ideas -- like the conservation of mass and energy, the mind-melting impossibility of 'immaterial matter', the exaltation of male and female embodiment, etc -- that Joseph Smith welded into his theology) and trying to downplay them in order to fit in with traditional Christian theology, which was discredited centuries ago. (By the way, Nibley was wrong about Joseph Smith 'translating' the BoM at the exact right time to preemptively counter the atheistic arguments which would follow after Darwin in the characters of, for instance, Korihor. All those arguments existed long before; he wasn't anticipating a thing. Even monsters like de Sade had written the atheist-promoting stuff in Philosophy in the Bedroom by 1795.)   

If you really want to go the etymology route, you'll find that it REALLY ends up in astrotheology. Theos comes from an Indo-European root, which ultimately has nothing to do with (and indeed predates) Semitic Elohim. Same deal with our word God, which is Germanic ghut. Divinity, Deos, all the Indo-European words, ultimately come from dyeu, meaning 'shining'. In other words, the Gods were the points of Light shining in the sky: the planets and stars and moon and sun. That Indo-European root is where all the common mythologies spread from; Dyaus Pitar of India is Zeus Pater of Greece is Ju-Piter of Rome, etc. Same goes for all the other days of the week: Sun-Day, Moon-Day, the war-God Tiu's-Day (Mars), Woden's Day (Mercury), Thor's Day (Jupiter), Frigga's Day (Venus), Saturn's Day (the Sabbath of the demiurge Saturn/Jehovah). Even our word 'soul' is Germanic, and probably means 'from the sea'. Not quite the same as spiritus or anima or nefesh or ka or ba or whatever. (And we certainly don't get our morality from Christianity, or any form of theism; Latin moralis was coined by the pagan Cicero before Christ was even born; ethike philosophia was pagan, too. For that matter, grace is an Indo-European word gwreto that predates Christianity and is indeed embodied in pagan Goddesses.)  

The cosmological schemes are metaphors for celestial movements. They are ultimately 'scientific' models. The common worldwide motifs like the axis mundi Tree of Life growing in the garden of the Heavenly Mountain, the flat earth supported by the four pillars and surrounded by the celestial sea, yada yada, that was all the technical language of astronomer-priests:  

     

It's the same idea as teaching a grade schooler about the orbit of planets by giving them a visual demonstration by holding a tennis ball and circling it around a lightbulb. We don't take it literally; it's just a model. It's 'real' or 'true' in the sense that it is a sort of microcosmic model representing a larger reality, but if anyone were to take from the lesson the idea that planets are literally giant tennis balls, they would definitely have the wrong idea. Temples, then, were built as edifices to maintain the sacred calendars (the circle of the ecliptic; the square formed by the four points of the two equinoxes and two solstices within that circle; the 12 houses of the zodiac, etc). Because the 'Gods' were personifications of the planets, the stars, the sun and moon, the 'Gods' marked and determined the seasons; the seasons determined the harvests; the harvests determined human prosperity or lack thereof. 

Re-read the earliest scriptures from around the world with the perspective that they are personifications of celestial movements, and they actually (finally) start to make some sense. And the sacred calendar is the root. That's where we get the ubiquitous number 7 (or multiples thereof), which is based on the seven-starred constellation which circles around the pole star; that's where we get the stories about a celestial boat (Argo constellation). That's where we get the Serpent (constellation), and the war between the Dark and the Light, and the Heavenly Hosts, and the 12 (zodiacal) tribes represented by (zodiacal) animals, and the Virgin (Virgo) that gives birth to a new age represented by a Fish (pisces). That's where it all comes from. The creation stories in Hesiod or Homer or Plato or Genesis or the Rig-Veda or the Kojiki are all about the creation of new World Ages, ie, the root of secularism. (Each Age is a Saeculum) (This is also, I'd say, where the Deuteronomist prohibition against worshipping the hosts of heaven comes from, during the Reforms which produced the Old Testament as we have it today.) 

Since the underlying meaning of the vivid imagery of the sacred calendar was lost and the images then literalized by later generations trying to make sense of these old writings, people then had those images in their minds to draw on. Later 'scriptures' written as if the personifications were literally people (Gods) are clearly, then, fictional. (Book of Mormon, Urantia Book, channeled writings or all kinds based on cryptomnesia, ancient astronaut theologies, etc) The planets don't talk to us, and they certainly don't answer prayers. The 'Gods' we see every night shining above us when we go on wilderness treks to have our mountaintop theophanies don't step in and cure ebola or prevent car accidents or help people dodge bullets or, y'know, find their lost keys. In the 250,000 or so years of anatomically modern humans, there has been zero evidence that any benevolent ancient astronauts are out there making sure we'll be okay.

We should stop relying on Gods who never answer back. We've got each other, and that's it.

That's my point. The only 'saviors' that ever actually show up are us mere mortals. 

God, an exalted man like ourselves made of flesh and bone, lives on an earth light-years away, and He is powerful enough that from across that unimaginably great distance He can manipulate the elements at an atomic level; while He is communicating constantly through the Light of Christ with 7 billion people on this planet (and uncountable others over worlds without number), He is also tweaking things so that His followers are given 'evidence' that is so utterly vague it could be interpreted any way they choose. He is given credit when a few waves calm down enough that a few mammals can dunk each other in the ocean; He is also given credit when natural disasters such as the cyclone in Fiji happen not to prevent a Temple dedication. Meanwhile, this same God chooses not to intervene when a Tsunami kills hundreds of thousands of people.

It just seems to me that there is an absolutely enormous intellectual leap necessary for these propositions to be causally related in any way. Please, if there is an actual argument beyond mere assertion, detail the exact logical chain you are basing your conclusions on, without merely implying that there must be an answer, somehow, somewhere. 

I do not understand how people can reconcile these issues. I would sincerely like to. Can someone actually explain it to me?

No. No one ever has, and no one ever will, because no one ever can. 

Of course people 'forget' the 'miracles in living memory'; there is absolutely zero evidence, none, that they occur outside of our own minds. I Prophesy that no matter how long this thread goes on, and no matter how many one-liners are tossed off, no one will be able to give a successful theodicy which shows why God would take the time to calm the waves so someone can get baptized, but does not take the time to calm the waves that killed 280,000 people. 
 

280,000 people! 

So miracles are real and God lives because ... there was a lull in the shore break? 

I grew up in Hawaii. I've seen stuff like this happen more times than I can count. There is nothing in this story that even hints at any form of divine intervention whatsoever, and it's obscene to suggest that some God has the time and ability to calm these waves rather than, say, the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami that killed 280,000 people. 

I'm sorry if I'm getting heated. Not too long ago I read Dave Cullen's book on the Columbine massacre, and the intersection of violence and youth culture has been on my mind.  

Up until I was maybe five, I loved cowboys. I had a horse on springs, my dad made me a little leather hat, I even had little chaps and a vest. 

I also had a very realistically-designed toy Colt pistol made of real metal that looked like it came from the late 1800s. 

Gradually, I realized what me and my brother and friends were actually acting out. The way we played, I wasn't consciously aware of what we were pantomiming; I thought of it as just a game. When I 'shot' someone, I didn't think in terms of killing, it was a completely abstract ritual that had no connection to reality. It was like playing Tag; you say 'bang', the other guy falls down, and then he resurrects a few seconds later and the chase begins again. But when I began putting the puzzle pieces together and fully understanding what we were miming, I was horrified. We were 'having fun' by pretending to KILL EACH OTHER. I quickly became extremely uncomfortable. Later, I didn't even like playing with our SuperSoaker squirtguns, because they were molded to look like machine guns. I did not encounter Airsoft guns until the past few years, after I moved from Hawaii to the mainland; I found the whole concept not just morally repugnant but mindlessly boring even from a purely 'entertainment' perspective. 

To say that 'boys will be boys' discounts the role of culture in these things. Obviously we're not tabula rasa and there is probably a masculine primate dominance component to aggression and expansionist warfare. But if this is so, then we should be shaping our culture to channel that energy in a productive way that benefits the community in peaceful ways, not have these relatively affluent children pantomime wars that they will probably never face, but which other children do see every day. 

Look, I get it. If Trump is elected and starts WWIII with all his 'just telling it how it is' bull$hit and the economy collapses and we have to go into survivalist mode and compete for resources by forming tribes and roving around kicking a$$ in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, then we'll have to learn to shoot, and it will be very noble of us Big Strong Men to protect the Poor Defenseless Women. Great. Wonderful. Can't wait. 

Are we seriously trying to justify these wargames because they are somehow 'educational' or 'preparation' in the event that The End actually happens? What complete nonsense. What a waste of a finite lifetime. If we were serious about it, we would be teaching these kids games that make it 'cool' to think about resource management and intercultural communication and conflict resolution. The fact that that sounds pathetically, mind-numbingly boring and will be dismissed out of hand as being impossible to interest young people in shows how sick this culture is. Fact is, adults are rarely conscious of how their attitude towards these issues affects the children they are in charge of; the children are usually mimicking the adult response of being being bored with subtleties and only interested in conflict and violence and (sanitized, blood-free) explosions and black-and-white thinking. If the adults provided a culture in which warfare was acknowledged as a horrendous necessity but never, ever celebrated as 'cool', then kids would pick up on it. 

This has nothing to do with being 'politically correct' (which, whenever someone uses it, is never even an argument, but rather just a sad attempt to characterize the opposite side as being unworthy of listening to without bothering to examine their evidence.) I am not opposed to showing violence in media. To the contrary, I think we should show more, but rather than glamorizing it and stylizing it like in a 90s James Bond flick or Matrix fantasy, where it's all about the graceful ballet of people dodging bullets that kill nameless hordes of depersonalized Bad Guys without even making them bleed, we should show it more as a Saving Private Ryan thing, where we actually see the cost. Or we can show completely over-the-top gruesomeness as satire, which knowingly exaggerates the violence and rhetoric used to justify it in order to call attention to how stupid all the grandstanding really is. (It's not gruesome, but one thinks of the satire in the Community paintball episode.)

The fact that this video is so twisted that it can use the fact that the vast majority of the scriptures detail utterly horrific and unjustified genocides and use it as a SELLING POINT to get CHILDREN interested in them is simply obscene and absurd. 

I'm a history major. The past 5,000 years were utterly drenched in bloodshed. (The tired canard that religion somehow acts as a 'check' or a 'brake' against the natural human tendency towards violence, merely because the death tolls exacted by the 'atheistic' regimes in the 20th century were higher than during, say, the crusades, simply because modern weaponry hadn't been invented yet, is laughable.) Yes, there have been Just Wars that needed to be fought because there was simply no other way to get the opposite side to leave the innocent alone. But there are far more utterly needless wars that happen for no reason except sheer human stupidity dressed up in high-sounding rhetoric. 

To implicitly claim that there is some necessary biological connection that links boys with guns is so myopically culture-bound I have to laugh or despair. (If nothing else, it completely discounts the female archers and snipers and sharpshooters found throughout history.) 

This entire video is just morally repulsive. It is not clever sophisticated satire, it is certainly not showing the desperate necessity and brutal consequences and moral ambiguities  of even the most Just War. These are children being dressed up in extremely realistic miniature SWAT gear and set against others in 'bad guy' outfits. In a world where there are literally child soldiers and school shootings, I can't believe sane adults actually rounded up a bunch of boys and got them to act this all out as if it was just a cool, harmless way to spend their time. It takes for granted an utterly appalling worldview in which the only way to get boys interested in studying history is to show how violent and 'cool' the scriptures are. It sanitizes warfare to highlight the cool explosions, but doesn't show the horrific consequences which might make one reconsider the cost of violence. There is no actual bloodshed; the children simply explode in a burst of SFX CGI fire. There are no entrails, no spurts of blood, no guts and hearts and brains and limbs left spattered across the landscape, no children left fatherless, no widows screaming, no PTSD, no parents left bereft, no collapsed infrastructure, no population depletion when most of the country's young men simply do not come home. It is trivializing violence and whitewashing the horrific consequences. 

We do a disservice to children when we assume they are incapable of complex moral reasoning. The adults who made this video should be ashamed of themselves. It's one thing for an adult to watch Blood Diamond; it's quite another to 'play' these wargames and glamorize appalling violence by an appeal to scripture and God. 

Because, as I said, there clearly just aren't enough school shootings or terrorist attacks. In real life, those who are killed are not resurrected five seconds later like in the games I played when I was a child. As far as I can tell, the millions slaughtered for absolutely no good reason are not resurrected at all. But who cares about that? Let's teach our kids how cool it is to blow each other up, and then we can pretend to be surprised when that's just what the next generation does, and the next generation after that, and on and on until our species goes extinct. 

Yeah, let's glamorize child soldiers and snipers and automatic weaponry and super awesome explosions, all done in the name of God. 

Because there just aren't enough school shootings and terrorist attacks. 

*barf*

Quote

Part of the problem here may lie in the fact that many Church members may not be reading and pondering the scriptures as they should. I say this because if they were studying their scriptures It might dawn on them that the word of God is chock-full of so many prophetic pronouncements that liberal/ progressive Latter-day Saints would likely consider to be un-Christlike, or at very least spirituallly insensitive, that they might wake up to the fact that though God is loving he is also very strict. Hopefully, after familiarizing themselves with the way the Lord's prophets phrase things, they might stop complaining everytime God's living servants lay the truth on the line without sugar-coating or minimizing their message.

I agree. As Isaac Asimov famously said, "Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived." 

Quote

No, I honestly believe that God will judge people on their actions and they will bring consequences of law upon themselves.

And all the excuses, opinions, and hurt feelings in the world won't change this.

So the 'consequences of law' include gays and transsexuals being eaten alive by wild animals as a supposedly loving and all-powerful Father-God who could change them from mortality to immortality without even tasting death stands by watching. 

And to protest that this is the kind of utterly deranged thinking that only psychopaths could take seriously is merely 'hurt feelings'. 

Tyler Glenn made the right choice to get out of this horrifying insanity. 

Quote

The Church does have to draw lines in the sand.  Life is a test to see if we will follow God or the world.  Some issues will require faith for the members.  Some will be tough but that is what a real test is.  If the Church simply drew lines in obvious places like do not kill your children, that is not a real test.  Real tests press our faith.  It will get worse as time goes on but we also know the Lord will sustain the Church and punish the wicked.  So it will tough for a while for us but then the Lord will flip the tables and it will be really bad for the wicked. 

God is supposed to be a loving father to all who are born into this world, including gays and transsexuals. 

Loving fathers do not let their precious children be ripped apart and devoured alive by wild animals.  

Quote

The options have nothing to do with belief.
Reality is not dependent upon belief.

So you honestly, seriously agree with carbon dioxide that 'reality' is a wrathful God (who has the power to change all people from mortality to immortality in a twinkling of the eye without them even tasting death) will someday round up all the gays and transsexuals and those who support them, set wild animals on them and let them be eaten alive, and sit back and watch as their remains are infested with maggots and their eyes are falling out of their sockets? 

Gee. I can't imagine why Tyler Glenn might have felt slightly uncomfortable at Church. 

I beg you, carbon dioxide, stop and think about what you are actually saying. When compassionate people read the words of someone using scripture to proclaim that a wrathful supernatural dictator is going to take vengeance upon gays by causing them to be eaten alive by wild animals and left to rot until they are infested with maggots and their flesh is dripping off their bones and their eyes are falling out of their sockets, their only sane response is to reject both the horrific scripture and those who propound it. This is utterly obscene and sociopathic. Please, I beg you, get help from a professional therapist, because exulting in the deaths of those who are on the 'wrong side of history' is about as far from healthy as you can get.  

These kinds of analogies, while well-meaning, come off as trivializing the pain that some people suffer. Dying of Ebola is not comparable to a crying child being put to bed. 

I don't know if I'm one of the petty critics, but my criticism was based on the moment when Stevenson claimed that "later that evening I did miraculously find the keys that had fallen out of my pocket on the mountain. The Lord has shown us that He will not leave us standing in the bitter cold without keys or authority to lead us safely home to Him." 

This talk came directly after Hallstrom's, who claimed that God "allows some earthly suffering because He knows it will bless us, like a refiner’s fire, to become like Him and to gain our eternal inheritance," and contextualized his visit to Liberia by saying that "the dreaded Ebola disease killed nearly 5,000 people there during the latest outbreak. We were the first group of Church leaders from outside the area to visit Monrovia, the capital city, since the World Health Organization declared it safe to do so after the Ebola crisis." 

So the representatives of God, who claim to have a healing power in the Priesthood (which implicitly acknowledges that suffering is negative, and being healed is a positive), wait around until a secular organization says it's safe for them to travel, and meanwhile God is busy miraculously finding lost keys while thousands of innocents suffer in obscene ways. 

No.

I have very little in my life.