Thinking

Good point. Edited to add: In thinking about your post, I wonder if the $200,000 that the Church says it's losing per month is for paying the workers who are on standby.

I'm sort of torn on this, but I think the Church should proceed. It's losing lots of money in delaying, and because those opposing construction "have no legal standing to block the project," I don't think the Church should act as if they do. I don't think the Church should use money to justify its case. If the Church earns a modest 5% annual return on its $100 billion, that's $5 billion. Divide that by 12 and the monthly interest earned is over $416 million. The lost $200,000 is not even a drop in the bucket of the monthly return. It would take 2,083 months (173+ years) for the $200,000 monthly loss to equal one month of interest.

President Nelson is going to give a directive that no longer can the phrase "it will all be worked out in the next life" be used in talks, lessons, discussions etc. as an excuse for not be able to explain complicated scenarios, especially with sealing messes caused by divorce and remarriage.

This is not entirely true. Tithing is supposed to be used for things like building chapels and temples and for their maintenance, etc. Certainly it would drop below the principal for such expenditures.

It's been interesting to read the back and forth between defenders and critics. Some defenders act like the average lay member should have understood exactly what Hinckley allegedly meant when he referred to "earnings of invested reserve funds." Most members just heard that tithing would not be used and the rest just sounded like Greek - you know those annoying letters that are used in upper level math. This case is all about what Hinckley really meant when he made that statement AND what a member should have reasonably inferred from it. I have noticed over the years the changes to the disclaimer at the bottom of the tithing slip. I wonder if somebody has a tithing slip from the time of Hinckley's statement. It would be interesting to read the disclaimer.

Years ago I went on a tour of the conference center. While on the roof, the guide explained that gardens were planted so that the residents above the roof would have a pleasant view of the roof and not just typical "roof stuff." If you haven't been on a tour and seen the roof, go. It's impressive. Emphasis mine. It seems that in the case of the conference center, the Church tried very hard to be good neighbors.

Well that clears it up.

Earlier you referenced the Episcopal Church with the attached picture. If you go to its website you will see a slideshow of pictures, two of which are at better angles to show the sides which have a LOT of red bricks. https://www.christchurchcody.org/

I love my former mission president. He definitely was not the reason I stopped believing. He was calm, understanding, and really cared about the people and the missionaries.

This discussion reminds me of the song "Come Sail Away" by Styx. Here is part of the lyrics. A gathering of angels Appeared above my head They sang to me this song of hope And this is what they said, they said Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me... I thought that they were angels But to my surprise We climbed aboard their starship We headed for the skies, singing Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me...

Had President Hinckley NOT said what he said, there would be no story. His statement opened the door for pickiness.

Expecting members to remember and "correctly" interpret the language in Hinckley's previous talks from years before reminds me of an experience my wife and I had with a rental car company. Before we flew to our destination, I booked a rental car online. At the rental desk the associate asked for the card I used to reserve the rental car. She looked at it and said, "This is a debit card. You can't use a debit card to reserve a car. It has to be a credit card." I told her to run it as a credit card, that it would work because it's tied to an overdraft account (which is a line of credit). Note: When I use this card at a store the card pad asks if the card will be used as debit or credit. Sometimes I choose credit and sometimes I choose debit. Anyway, the associate disagreed with me and told me that because I used a debit card to reserve the car, she wasn't allowed to issue the car to me. I told her that the funds for the rental had already been taken out of my account. She said that didn't matter. I asked for my money back. She declined and said, "Didn't you read page 9 of the rental agreement?" Long story short: I eventually did get my money back, but I did not get a car from that company on that day.

You do realize that you just quoted the Onion?

Yeah. All those rectangular building foundations whose diagonals are the same length and corner angles measure 90 degrees are built using a mathematical system that makes no sense. It's amazing they remain standing at all. Now when you start talking about air travel...

Indeed. The physical world doesn’t conform to Euclidean geometry — it’s another one of those “looks correct at our scale but is ultimately wrong.” There are many little pieces of the world that are close enough to being flat that Euclidean geometry is useful in those situations.

I saw a pair of coffee cups once. On one was a picture of a rooster proclaiming, "I rule the roost!" On the companion cup was a hen saying, "I rule the rooster!"

In a patriarchal culture, there will be those who misinterpret what it means to be the "head of the household." I have witnessed both ends of the spectrum. I would say that in my small corner of the Mormon world, most of the men that I know don't order their wives around. Unfortunately, it's the bad apples that get the headlines. A headline like "Husband does the dishes after dinner" isn't going to sell papers.

I'm glad you saved the email.

Cody is not Cheyenne. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Cody is not bound by what is in Cheyenne's code. Sometimes when I tell a student they can't do something they will say something like, "But Teacher X lets us do that." We are talking about a residential neighborhood. The codes are different for non-residential neighborhoods. Roofs are typically pitched at 4:12 or 6:12. You might see a pitch at 12:12, but that's pretty steep. Let's take the 12:12 pitch. if the house was 40 feet wide, the pitch would go 20 feet up from the eave to the ridge, then 20 feet back down to the other eave. The midpoint of that height is 10 feet, meaning the eave would be at a maximum height of 20 feet. 20 feet + 10 feet = 30 feet. The ridge would go up another 10 feet, making the ridge 40 feet above the ground. Like I wrote earlier, I'm confident that when the codes were written, a rooftop projection that tall in a residential neighborhood wasn't considered. I think you do, but perhaps bluebell can explain it better.

I'm confident that when this code was written, a 77 foot steeple on the top of a roof was not even thought of as something that might occur. Anybody who has ever had to create a set of rules knows how difficult it is to include everything. I constantly make changes to my classroom rules to cover things I hadn't considered. In the 1990s there was no rule about smart watches. Now I have a rule that forbids the wearing of a smart watch during a test. That was a rule that I put in during the school year after I caught a student looking up the answer to a problem during a test. It looks to me like the Church is trying to win this case using the letter of the law, and it might. It might also lose the spirit of the battle.

Mine will. When we purchased my $200,000 term life insurance policy 21 years ago, during the first year suicide wasn't covered. After the first year it was.

My wife's parents are currently visiting. I asked her dad if he had heard about the Cody Wyoming temple controversy. He hadn't. I read to him this article. He simply stated, "They should move it."

There are some members with a lot of money who just might like to own something that nobody else has.

I was at BYU when Jeffrey Holland was the president. It was common for them to roam the campus and interact with students. Every time I saw her she was smiling.

That was a great comeback!