carbon dioxide

Who is forcing the non-religious to be religious? Who is forcing non-religious people to pray with them. Living in a society of many different views, we may have to endure seeing or hearing things we don't agree with. We may even be offended from time to time but that is part of living in a free country. Sometimes we have to tolerate another person's or groups nonsense. I would be just fine with satanists doing whatever they want on the 50 year line. Might be interesting to watch. I would be fine with an EV group not allowing LDS to pray with them. Why should anyone want to pray with a group that hates them. I appreciate the honesty. I am so over seeing the rainbow flag but I am not going to sue people over it. If people want to fly their rainbow flags around, whatever. I will just view the flag to refer to the Noah flood over LGBT stuff.

GIven that LGBT has flags and can fly them whenever they want, religious people should start having flags and fly them all over the place as well including the schools. Lets have flags everywhere.

He is praying on his own. The school is not telling him to pray nor is he demanding anyone pray with him.

Not really sure. I could just say that some fat is being trimmed from the Church which is not necessarily a bad thing.

If they are not the sons and daughters of God, there would be no need for temple work to be done. I see no evidence that the sons and daughters of God came before Adam.

The Court is NOT supposed to be a political identity that represents the people. That is what Congress is for. The court is supposed to be like umpires in a baseball game. They call balls and strikes on issues that are presented to them according to rules set forth in the Constitution. If the Democrats wanted abortion to become actual law, they had 50 years to pass a federal law in Congress to do it. Contrary to the views of some, Roe vs Wade was not the law of the land. It was a court decision. The Supreme Court is not a law making body. There is only one body that makes law in the US and that is Congress. By ignoring the simple facts of the Constitution and how things work, the Democrats have themselves to blame by making it easy for the Supreme court to reverse the ruling of an earlier one. Lets not pretend that the left does not stack judges that are consistent to leftist views. The Democrats do what the Republicans do when they have the chance. When is the last time a Democrat president nominated a conservative judge to the court?

Pretty much everything in it has been contained in books before. Not only does it not dive deep into any issue, it barely goes below the surface on anything. I don't even think it serves as a good starting point. Generally it covers an issue in less than 50 words and moves on to the next thing. But I suppose it is ideal for the society we live in today. People want superficial stuff and that is good enough for them.

The whole back story of that letter as I understand it is a joke. Why would anyone really think that anyone would respond to such a thing. If a friend of mine sent me a list of a 100 or 200 things they had a problems with the Church, I would toss it in the garbage. I don't have time for that. I would say to them give me 5 or maybe 10 things. Serious people don't write up things like that and expect any kind of response.

Some people get these ideas in their head that if Joseph Smith did or said something, it always had to be from inspiration. I think the Lord expects all prophets and us to spend some time researching and figuring out answers to problems ourselves. He is not just going to give us all the answers. There is no learning and growth in that. If corrections and better renderings of KJV passages could be made by using the Adam Clarke or some other sources, that achieves its purpose. The Lord fills in the parts we can't do for ourselves. So the Lord gave Moses 1 through revelation as Joseph could not have gotten that from any other means. Many times faith problems are created by people manufacturing expectations or assumptions that should never have been made to begin with and the Church and leaders don't live up to those expectations. The one thing I have noticed about the JST or inspired version is how little LDS critics tend to avoid it in terms of the changes or additions. I think in part when compared to the KJV, the JST versions just read better and make better sense.

The thing I find interesting about the CES letter is why it became a big deal in the first place. I got bored with it after about 10 minutes as there was nothing in it that was unique or breaking news. All of it was just rehashed arguments found in dozens of other anti mormon books. Perhaps it was the packaging but the substance itself is old news.

Abortion has never been a big issue to me. The way I see it, the majority of women who have abortions would have been bad moms anyway and so there are just fewer bad kids running around to deal with. I place them in the same category as those women who are have decided not to have kids due to climate change. I say to those women, THANK YOU. Time to end that branch of the great genealogy tree right there. My problem however is the inconsistency of the argument. Abortion is based on the idea that the woman has a right to do what she wants with her body. If that view is true, then prostitution, drug use, and even assisted suicide should also be legal. We should have a right to do anything with our bodies including terminating it. But I don't see the abortion crowd advocated, safe and legal suicide where a person can get one with no questions asked. So as long as all these other things are illegal even though it is our own body that is affected, why should abortion get an exception? It really comes down to one of accountability. Outside of rape or abuse, there really is no such thing as an unplanned pregnancy. If a woman does not want to get pregnant, don't engage in the activities that would lead to pregnancy. It is no different than a person choosing to take an laxative and then declaring they got an unplanned watery bowel movement. No they did not. The moment they took that laxative, they consented to the biological processes that will lead to them spending more time on the porcelain throne. Same with sex. The biological purpose of sex is pregnancy. Anything else is supplemental. Don't want an unwanted pregnancy, don't have sex. It really is not that complicated.

It is always interesting to see people trade 30 or maybe 50 years of their existence for something like this for a hundred trillion earth years of time of regret. It is like giving up a 500 million dollar lottery ticket that can be redeemed in 2 years for a snickers bar today. The choices people make.

Hollywood can't come up with new content so they have to keep making new editions of stuff from the past. At least the market has decided that a new Top Gun or Jurassic Park sequel is preferred over a Toy Story one and a gay kiss is not going to make it number 1.

Overall society was more intelligent in 1995.

Some people choose to take a break from the Church to see what wonders in Babylon will bring them. But as we slowly inch towards the second coming and peace is more and more withdrawn from the world, these breaks may become shorter for both spiritual and temporal salvation. Unfortunately for some, they think they found freedom and reason. When in reality they like a man resting on railroad tracks, all is quiet, thinking everything is fine while a 200 mph bullet train is speeding towards them and this train is stopping for nobody. Maybe they will get off the tracks in time and maybe they will not.