bluebell

Since there is no way to get away from the light of Christ, I don’t think such an experiment would be possible (leaving out it being completely immoral to do that to a child of course) but I agree it would be very interesting to know how a human would respond with only neutral or negative influences. I’ve always wondered.

I think it comes from Roman 3:10 and the teaching that there are none righteous but God, and that an unrighteous person is incapable of doing good without the influence of righteousness. The whole 'fruit of the tree' thing, and how an unrighteous person cannot produce good fruit, left to their own devices.

Are they worried that religious teachings against homosexuality etc. might be classified as hate speech?

I agree, it wasn't an afterlife as we would view it, but it was an afterlife, where choices made during mortality directly impacted the state of the soul after mortality.

That article was written by Elder Lund, and he's actually refuting the idea that tries to separate salvation from exaltation, and explains that though it was a popular way for some Latter-day saints to deal with Paul's teachings, it's not correct. The quote you shared above from the article is actually located under the heading "Inadequate Explanations". He even quotes Elder McConkie to double down on incorrectness of the idea that the term salvation used in the scriptures doesn't mean exaltation: It's a very long article and most of it is relevant but since it's not possible to quote all the parts discussing salvation by grace, I'll quote one of the last paragraphs:

It depends on what part of Judaism you’re talking about. During Jesus’s time the Sadducees believed that the spirit died when the body died, but the Essenes and the Pharisees seemed to believe in an afterlife. And some believed in a blissful afterlife for the righteous.

We’d still have to ask, what works could we do to save ourselves?

Same here

It's anecdotal for sure but I've never felt that Rod was a liar. Maybe better to just assume it happened (or remain neutral on it) while addressing reasons that one experience isn't indicative of the majority.

That is such good news!

Agreed. It leaves open some important questions like, are we saved before we can have faith in Christ? Are we saved before we can repent? Are we saved before we can covenant with Christ through baptism? The theology just doesn't work, in my opinion.

I think it would answer some issues with that verse but open up new questions and problems. For example, it could be said to imply that we are saved by Grace automatically, without any input or agency on our part.

I think Calm's point is that some Christian denominations (such as Trinitarians) don't keep their definitions inside the group. They want to apply them globally. It's fine if Trinitarians want to define a Christian as only being Trinitarians, for example. But their definition applies only to them. They aren't the gatekeepers of who is a Christian or not. But really, I think the difficulty with this conversation is that you seem to be coming at it from a perspective of 'theology determines salvation' while latter-day saint teaching focuses more on 'being a sincere follow Christ determines salvation because all sincere followers of Christ will eventually get where He wants them to go." I think you've set your sights too small, pitting one denomination's theology against other with the winner being the one that gets to go to Heaven. That is a uniquely protestant perspective that doesn't translate to latter-day saint theology very well. In our belief system, every person who is honestly and sincerely seeking to follow Christ will be saved because they will sincerely try to do all things that He commands them to do, both in this life and in the next. For example, if Christ told me that I needed to be a Trinitarian to be saved, and I was a sincere follower of Him, then of course I would do that without a second thought. Does that mean that I'm only going to be saved because I finally conformed to evangelical theology? Heck no. It just means that I can continue on the path that I was already on, but now with more truth to help me walk it. If evangelicals have a truth that I need to also hold in order to follow Christ better, then I will embrace that truth because it is true, not because I have to agree with evangelicals to follow Christ. And I will be saved because I embraced Christ's truth, not because I finally conformed to EV theology. Likewise, if Latter-day saints have truth that sincere evangelical followers of Christ need to also hold in order to follow Christ better, then we believe they will embrace that truth as well, for the same reasons that we would happily embrace all the truth that they have. It's another step on the path that they are already on. It's not about conforming to your theology or you conforming to mine, it's about both of us sincerely working to conform to Christ, wherever we find Him or wherever He leads us. If we do that, then we are saved. Full stop.

The Life of Chuck Very weird. Rated R because the middle act has a woman who says a bunch of F words when she's mad about something, but for no other reason that I can figure out. It's about a man named chuck and the timeline of the movie runs in reverse, starting at the end and moving to the beginning. I can't say much more because it will spoil the plot. I enjoyed it because I'm a sentimental person and it's in that lane. It's more a reminiscence of life than about any specific thing. Again, it's very weird.

I love Brad Wilcox's explanation of Christ's "part" in our salvation that he shared in his book "His Grace is Sufficient" (the title is a quote of a verse in the Book of Mormon, @Jay 4 Christ).

Do you consider creating AI generated messages for those who have died to be different than what this video does, which is a sermon actually written by JS, but with an AI generated video of him saying it?

One good way to look at the "after all we can do" aspect is to remember that for most of us, all we can do is have faith in Christ, repent of our sins, try to follow Him, and then keep doing those things over and over for our whole lives. Christianity as you've described it also believes in a shared responsibility, otherwise everyone would be saved automatically, right? (Welcome to the board. )

Thursday Murder Club on Netflix. Its about a group of old people in a retirement community that talk about cold cases once a week but then have to solve a real murder. It’s got a bunch of big actors (like Pierce Bronson) and is a lot of fun with a story that isn’t obvious. Plus it’s only rated PG-13 which is a nice change. I don’t even really like murder mysteries but still liked it.

If I remember right single motherhood, lack of education, and unemployment are the top contributors to poverty risk. No one can seem to figure out how to help much with any of them despite millions of dollars spent on each topic each year. (not arguing with your sentiment, just lamenting the difficulty of the challenge)

I think we crash against the law of unintended consequences a lot more than we would like as humans. I don't think that's always a bad thing though, unless we refuse to acknowledge the weak parts of our good intentions and just let them run because we don't want to admit we were wrong or that our perspective was incomplete. I think if different sides of an issue could actually work together we could skip a lot of the negative consequences altogether, because different sides see different things and focus on different pitfalls. But I don't know if we will ever be able to get there.

I wish they had provided some references for this part of the article: Research by criminologists Judith van Valkenhoef and Edward van der Torre published in 2017 raised some doubts about the degree to which these statistics represent a success story for the Dutch judicial system. Their study points to other issues, such as inefficient police investigations and failures by state prosecutors to bring criminals to justice. They argue that the Netherlands has become a major center for the synthetic drugs market and is likely to remain so without political action. For the University of Portsmouth's Professor Francis Pakes, co-author of the above report, the statistics don't tell the whole story, and the overall decline in the prisoner population isn't solely the result of fewer crimes being committed. The study suggests that there are other factors at play, such as fewer cases being prosecuted or even investigated. He cites the growing influence of the drugs mafia in the Netherlands as evidence of this development.

There is a chance the gun/s were in a vehicle outside of the church, since the shooting happened in the parking lot. But hopefully more information will be provided soon. I've heard some speculate that it was gang related but I don't think there's credible sources for that. I've read in a couple of articles that the church where it took place housed Tongan wards, so probably a lot of people in attendance.

I can’t say anything about the validity of this source, but it provides some interesting information. https://amp.dw.com/en/the-story-behind-the-netherlands-empty-prisons/a-70544397 It looks like the major reason that the prisons are being shut down is because the Netherlands no longer prosecutes that much crime and the people who do go to prison go for fairly short sentences. Our criminal laws would definitely have to change a lot to match their system, because most states have mandatory lengths for conviction of certain crimes, and we definitely prosecute for all felony level offenses, and some misdemeanor ones too I’m sure. I think there is an argument to be made for re-examining our court system, and how quickly we put people to into prison for large amounts of time. There is no real rehabilitation in prison (the opposite, in fact where prisons make better ) and a justice system focused more on rehabilitation seems like it would be a good thing.

If you mean people who ignore the arguments that they don't agree with and so don't actually know the evidence contrary to their interpretation, then I agree. While it could still be seen as deliberate to choose to be ignorant of the reasons people disagree with you, most of the time I think people do it without giving it much thought, just assuming they are right so the other evidence has to be suspect and not worth bringing up. But I do think there are many people who know the different interpretations or contrary evidence but because they don't want to deal with it (for whatever reason) purposefully choose not to bring it up.

I think it's way more likely to be a result of people focusing on the data that supports their beliefs rather than a sign of racism. We all do it, where we ignore the stuff that says we are wrong and really latch on to the stuff that says we are right. White European activity can sometimes support the idea that the church is in a free fall so that is what the people who want the church to be in a free fall are going to march out in discussions on the subject. They are going to pretend the other data doesn't exist if they can get away with it because it doesn't match the narrative they are presenting. (Members do the same thing, it's not an ex or anti-mormon problem. It's a human problem.)