mbh26

A pretty straight forward piece of evidence is the fact that central and South America are not nor were they ever a promised land. Zarahemla was located in Jackson county MIssouri where the garden of Eden was. The area is still a fertile and promised land today. The midwestern United States could literally feed the entire world if we chose to do so. The temples were what we often refer to as the mound builders in the American Heartland. The land northward where Hagoth's ships set sail were the great Lakes. That's also where the narrow neck of land was, not Panama. The original land of Nephi-Lehi was around Tallahassee. And the final battle was in upstate New York. Why were there no swords or metal armor laying around. The Lamanites likely looted and carried those away. You're probably not going to find hebrew DNA in mesoamerica. But you will find it in Algonquin, Cherokee, and Hopi Indian tribes. Will everything match up perfectly? Perhaps not, but I contend that this is still possible.

Thank you and Nehor both for your kind words. I certainly agree that the Lord has different paths for all of us, since we're individuals and one size does not fit all. But I have found more and more truth in the sermon on the mount at 50 years old. When I was 16 and read, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, and pray for those who despitefully use you," I could never make sense of how God could love us and then ask us to do that. But I can say now that the Lord is right and it works.

I think it's more common than we care to admit. I just wanted to share how I overcame it. Jesus Christ is always the answer.

I don't think this is a moral failure on your part. If your wife thinks that she's being Christlike by responding this way, then she's wrong. But obviously telling her that (communicating) isn't going to help. Instead of trying to calm my wife down and never go to bed angry as I was taught. I've learned that just walking away is the best I can do, especially when my wife is angry, unreasonable, or perhaps depressed and just taking it out on whoever she is around. The only person I accept chastisement from is God. As long as my relationship with Him is ok, than whatever physical/emotional pain mortal men or women think they're justified in inflicting upon me doesn't bother me anymore. It used make me go into a rage and punch through walls because it was just so frustrating to have someone try to control and manipulate me in that way. Oh she's mad again. Oh she's leaving. Eventually I stopped trying to stop her. If you want to leave, then leave. But she never has. She calms down and starts acting right again for reasons I can't understand. Now she's never apologized for getting angry and giving the silent treatment so I have no reason to think that she has recognized that she has done anything wrong, but for right now that doesn't matter. Ultimately my covenant is with God and not with her. I've taken a lot of emotional abuse in my 22 years of marriage, but if men didn't none of us would be married for very long in this world. All children would either grow up in single mother homes or never get to be born at all. Those things will be worked out in the next life. For right now this is how I've found peace in relying on the Lord in this way. I believe in the power of prayer. My prayers that my wife not get angry have never been granted. But God has answered my prayers that he knows the situation, knows what happened, and that He only He can heal all wounds. I honestly have no desire for vengeance because I've chosen to believe that if I do my part, the Lord will make things right, and when she's being unreasonable the only thing you can do is just walk away. A lot of times when a woman won't tell you why she's angry or has put you in the doghouse for a seemingly trivial reason, it's because she's tired of a situation/affliction which she knows she has no right to blame you for. And often times women will find some thing where she feels like she's more justified in her anger/resentment to call out and punish you. Perhaps she knows that why she wants to divorce you isn't an acceptable reason to lds culture, in the eyes of her parents or other people whose opinions she respects. So her solution is to find something else to accuse you of that might be more acceptable. Not that any of that matters, In the end the solution is still the same, just walk away put it God's hands and allow her to choose whether or not to let it go or remain angry. Either way, the Lord will sustain me regardless of what she chooses to do.

How does that work when you're married to a nonmember? By law, what I earn isn't all mine to decide what to spend or not spend it on. So should I calculate it based on what would be left after alimony, child support, etc. if my spouse decided to divorce me? Wasn't there a talk in conference about a man who kept feeling prompted to pay more and more to his ex? I wonder if he paid tithing on all that money, or if it were up to his wife to pay or not pay on what she was awarded after the divorce? I know that I never paid tithing on what my parents gave me as their dependent and I doubt anyone ever has. What about people who file for bankruptcy and ultimately stiff their creditors? Do they still pay tithing on their two week paycheck net? Is that right? I'm not sure how you could file for bankruptcy and still have an increase. That doesn't make sense to me.

It sounds exactly right to me. I'm not sure I could ever understand infinity. Even Moses beholding every soul with God's help seems impossible to me, let alone suffering for a seemingly infinite number of sins in a finite amount of time.

I love Bruce R. McConkie. I think I'll like Clark Gilbert as well. I'm sorry this will be a test of faith for many of you. Were we to have a prophet like Pope Francis, I could be going through the same struggle.

I'm not sure about the illegal immigrants, but if I knew church members were acting as insurgents, attacking ICE officers, obstructing arrests, using their vehicles to obstruct ICE officers, spitting on them, vandalizing their vehicles, etc. I would turn them all in 100%. If they really wanted to help illegal immigrants they would get real jobs and send them money in their own countries. I see nothing Christlike in being generous with other peoples hard earned money. I'd also have turned them in had they disrupted an LDS church meeting in the way Don Lemon did.

Yeah, this is the first I ever heard of Strawson. I'm not sure I'm finding him very helpful or enlightening at first glance.

I'm not sure how you're defining free will. For me free will means that we're free to choose our actions not that we can choose what the consequences of the those actions are. Not even God can choose what the consequences of an action will be. The consequences of a given action exist independent of God. At least that's how I was taught.

Didn't Cleon Skousen make that kind of argument. It's the trust that God has built up with the eternal intelligences existing in all matter that allows God to command the elements. It's these intelligences that demand justice. In Cleon Skousen's view, the multiverse was and still is to some extent a great democracy of intelligences. I've also heard that each of these intelligences already possess a gender prior to their spiritual births. Hence we never chose our gender nor did God. It's an eternal property of the intelligences.

Well thanks for responding. What I was getting at was the idea that there are many resurrected beings that go on to have their own spirit children. Perhaps they might be our literal spirit parents, while God with a capital G (Elohim) is our Father in a more indirect sense. Michael Rush has a theory similar to infinite regression that our Heavenly Father (Elohim) was once played the role in his iteration of the plan of salvation, that Jesus Christ now plays in the current iteration of the plan of Salvation. He postulates that when Jesus Christ becomes God the Father in the next iteration of the plan of Salvation, the Holy Ghost will be called as the one to atone for the sins of mankind in the next iteration of the plan of Salvation. He postulates that Jehovah was the Holy Ghost when Elohim took upon Himself a mortal body and attoned for the sins of the world during the prior iteration of the plan of Salvation. But how could Jehovah have served as the Holy Ghost if Elohim had not yet begotten Him spiritually? Or is it just a case where the scriptures often call grandchildren and great grandchildren sons and daughters even though they are actually several times great grandchildren? The other attempt to explain this is to say that perhaps intelligences had more ability before our spirit birth than we thought? What does it mean when Elohim says that His Beloved Son was with Him from the beginning? In what way could Jehovah be with Him before Jehovah was spiritually born?

The Old Testament says that the Sons of God mated with the daughters of men and produced giants. I hold to the theory that the watchers were extra terrestrials and therefore giants didn't have divine DNA. But giants did have DNA from a planet and beings that God perhaps never intended to be mixed with earthly mortals. I think this scripture proves that stranger and more inexplicable things have happened then Jesus having children. Adam and Eve had divine DNA and were still subject to the fall.

Yeah, I'm sorry I butted in. I didn't get what point you were making to our protestant friend, All intelligences are eternal. It remains unclear to me what intelligences without spiritual bodies are capable of. I guess it depends on what you mean by create. We believe that God created our spiritual bodies correct?

Because God respects our own moral agency. I believe we all existed as intelligences before becoming spirit children of our Heavenly Father. Our independent will and level of development was up to our own choice even then, not just a question of God's competence in creating us. Otherwise God could have simply created us to be perfect like Him without us having to do the hard work of improving, suffering, repenting, and ultimately progressing and even risk ultimately failing in the attempt. All God can give us is an opportunity to improve upon what we are and become more like Him. Lucifer accepted that opportunity only to later choose a path that led to his own unhappiness. In his effort to get revenge, God has used Him to help improve his saints and bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.

He was more than a good man to me. He was my prophet because I overcame my faith crisis during his tenure. Much of that had to do with listening to his talks.

If you're under the illusion of presently being happy, why would you go looking to find out whether or not it's just an illusion?

Better an illusion of happiness than one of misery.