Stargazer

Ah, yes. Understood. Yes I knew that they did that for superannuated threads for that reason.

Not sure what you mean here...

This actually corresponds with the purpose of LDS membership withdrawal. From the General Handbook: "If a member commits a serious sin, the bishop or stake president helps him or her repent. As part of this process, he may need to restrict some Church membership privileges for a time. In some situations, he may need to withdraw a person’s membership for a time. Restricting or withdrawing a person’s membership is not intended to punish. Rather, these actions are sometimes necessary to help a person repent and experience a change of heart. They also give a person time to prepare spiritually to renew and keep his or her covenants again." A person whose membership has been withdrawn lose certain privileges. They may not, among other things, partake of the Sacrament or pay tithing. "They are encouraged to attend Church meetings and activities if their conduct is orderly. Those whose Church membership has been withdrawn can be considered for readmission by baptism and confirmation. Usually, they first need to show genuine repentance for at least one year."

If one wants to see something interesting in regards to Catholicism that bears a slight, very slight resemblance to this issue with Mr. Brophy, check out Ready To Harvest's recounting of the situation with a semi(?) breakaway group called the Society of St Pius X (SSPX). The video is HERE if you want to be enlightened over this. I guess Ready to Harvest's question is "Will SSPX Schism?" Apparently, previous Popes have excommunicated officials of SSPX (later un-excommunicating them), whose reactions seemed to come down to accepting the authority of the pope while ignoring the excommunication: "No, you didn't. You just think you did." In short, SSPX was founded back in 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. He was not happy with the results of Vatican II, to include the Mass and other ordinances said in local languages, instead of Latin. I guess there are more issues in play, but that's at least one of them. The society has over 700 priestly members, and a total of 1,482 members (this means officials of various sorts). Several religious institutes, mostly based in France, are associated with the society. Globally, there are an estimated 600,000 people who attend SSPX Masses. Someone in the video's comment section quoted a line from "The Last Samurai" -> "I am surprised to learn that the word Samurai means, 'to serve', and that Katsumoto believes his rebellion to be in the service of the Emperor."

The Danites went for direct action -- physically. Just removing a rebellious member from membership doesn't quite rise to the level of Danite. And the Church definitely still loves Mr. Brophy. And will welcome him back with great warmth as soon as he repents.

Yep. But it would seem a simple matter for a non-believer to recite the pledge but simply omit saying "under God." There's an interesting article about this on The Hill website. Here's a quote from it: "Forty-seven states in the U.S. require the Pledge of Allegiance be recited in public schools, with varying exemptions for students or staff who wish to opt out. The 1943 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, West Virginia V. Barnette, determined that no school or government can compel someone to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or salute the flag. "But states can still require it while offering exemptions. And states have varying levels of exemptions — for example, Florida and Texas allow for a student to be exempted from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance only if a parent or guardian consents." See the entire article here: "Here is a breakdown of laws in 47 states that require reciting the Pledge of Allegiance" As for me, I am not very keen on The Pledge. I am a dual-citizen of the US and UK, but even when I was not a subject of His Majesty King Charles III the Pledge made me feel a bit uncomfortable. I am not keen because the wording has me pledging allegiance to an inanimate object, the flag of the United States of America. Yes, of course also "to the Republic for which it stands," but I'm annoyed at the flag being in there. Not saying I don't love the flag, but allegiance to it? Like I said, not keen.

I am often suspicious of AI, since I've seen some real zingers made by AI from time to time. But in this case I think the AI has done a good job of summarizing all that. As I understand it, Jefferson initially wanted that sentence to be: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and Property." This was because Jefferson was a devotee of English philosopher and thinker John Locke, who wrote about the "right of property" in his Two Treatises of Government when arguing that individuals inherently possessed certain rights (including life and liberty) that governments existed primarily to protect. But Jefferson replaced “property” with “the pursuit of happiness” to emphasize human flourishing beyond material possessions, while retaining life and liberty as core unalienable rights. It is important to realize that the right of property is no less important than life and liberty. In fact, the right of property includes the right to life, since to have liberty each human must have the right to own him- or herself! The ultimate property is oneself.

I am annoyed. I just got done writing a lovely extensive post with tons of relevant data, and what did the site do? It ate it!!! When writing long posts I usually try to save off a copy of the text so it doesn't get eaten by the internet, but I failed to do it this time. Drat.

Well, I got her beat. When I was about 4 years old, a friend and I wandered away from our street on our tricycles and got lost and separated. Next thing I remember was a police car pulling up to me, with my friend in the back seat eating an ice cream the officer had bought him. I got put in the back with him, but instead of giving me an ice cream, too, the officer drove us directly to my house and handed me over to my parents, then took my friend to his house. I am still very resentful I didn't get my ice cream! That was just the start of my life of crime!

Wow, he's got his work cut out for him! Presumably he's restricting himself to the US, where there are currently 208 dedicated temples. If he tries to expand to international, it could get quite expensive! I remember when one of my cousins decided to go on temple visiting spree. Because she lives in Utah, and I live in England, I don't see her very often. And when she came to visit the London Temple (where I was at the time an ordinance worker) I happened to be visiting the US!

My pleasure! I copy the table from a page on my personal wiki and paste it into the post. The entry on my personal wiki is at: https://www.mikeclark.co/index.php?title=Pro-LDS_YouTube_channels The table on my personal site is sortable, so is slightly more useful. I don't know how you gained that impression, actually. I've gone back to edit my posts months later (just tried it on an April post). The only time you can't edit your own post is if you've been banned from the thread (which means you can't even see it), or if the thread has been closed to further replies.

Sorry to hear that!

Indeed! Totally off-topic, but I ran into this and it made me think of you. I hope your avatar change didn't signal anything tragic!

When someone makes it very clear that they are an enemy of the Church by publicly and continually attacking its leaders, its beliefs and doctrine, then it seems obvious to me that they should not be allowed to do so from the congregation of the faithful. By NOT withdrawing their membership the Church might seem to tacitly approve their attacks. The Church is a voluntary association of faith with standards of behavior. When a member goes contrary to those standards, and refuse to even meet with the leadership to discuss their behavior, then why should they be permitted to continue to attack it as a member? Perhaps it draws people to him, but if it does draw people to him, the suit makes it clear to them that he is not using the term "Mormon" in a benign way, and is in fact an opponent of the Church. The suit is intended to make him stop using the term "Mormon" in a way that implies he's friendly when he is not. Once that object is obtained, fewer people will be "drawn" to him.

I believe this will answer your question with more information than you need or want. Yes, dashes are permitted. I've seen plenty of URLs with it. Generally, this is the list of allowable characters in a URL (after the protocol identifier -- http:// or https:// or ftps:// etc): ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789-._~:/?#[]@!$&'()*+,;= Spaces are not permitted, as spaces, but can be encoded with the percent sign as a prefix followed by the hexadecimal value for "space" (from the ASCII table) like this: "%20". Of course it's more complicated than that.

Another update to the table! There are about 35 more channels in the table than when I last updated. See the original post above.

Since I like to overdo things sometimes, here's another one I just found today. It's mostly a music channel, all in Brazilian Portuguese, and the songs are really brilliant. The name of the channel is "Jovens da Igreja de Jesus Cristo" or "Young people of the Church of Jesus Christ" I posted one of their videos already in @poptart's Music Thread. But at the time I didn't realize they were LDS-related until I finished listening to this video here, when the Church logo popped up! The use of the logo makes me think the channel may be an official channel of the Church, but the channel information is a little equivocal: "Welcome to the official channel of the Youth page of The Church of Jesus Christ! A channel created especially to uplift, entertain, and guide young people around the world based on the teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Here you will find music from The Church of Jesus Christ, the Youth Mutual CD, stories from Mormon missionaries, broadcasts with the Area Presidency, and much more! Formerly the “LDS Youth” channel." The title of this video in English is: "Faith : Young people of the Church of Jesus Christ".

Just for the fun of it, I thought I would start this topic for folks who want to share pro-LDS YouTube channels they run into. As some of you are aware, as a hobbyish activity I've been cataloging them as I find them. So far I have 196 channels in my catalog. So to start out, here's a brand-new channel I just found today: Latter-Day Try-Hards. It's been posting only since 29 December 2025, and at this moment has only 68 subscribers. Here's one of their earliest videos, which is called "Don't Bury Your Gifts and Talents....OR ELSE!"

The SLC Visitors Center now includes a replica temple interior that visitors can tour! This is pretty cool!

You write well enough that you really ought to publish some of it. Or do you, under a pen name? I searched on Amazon to see if Ken K. Gourdin was the author of anything, but there wasn't. There are self-publishing options available out there. I have used Kindle Direct Publishing, not so much because it's the best, as I started with it as CreateSpace before it was bought and rebranded by Amazon.

Finally got around to watching "Greyhound" the other day. If you're unfamiliar, it is a "2020 American war film directed by Aaron Schneider and starring Tom Hanks, who also wrote the screenplay. The film is based on the 1955 novel The Good Shepherd by C. S. Forester, and follows a US Navy commander on his first assignment commanding a multi-national escort destroyer group of four, defending an Allied convoy from U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic." Text from Wikipedia. I really enjoyed the film. It was supposed to have had a theatrical release in 2020, but due to Covid and all the disruptions the theatrical release was cancelled and it was released digitally. It was Oscar-nominated for "Best Sound."

There were a lot of Russian and Ukrainian young men who left their countries as the war started, in order to avoid being called into military service. These two might be such.

In our Sunday school the discussion is the Come Follow Me theme for the week. That seems to be the usual practice everywhere, or am I assuming too much?

I was once called to be a counselor in a Sunday school presidency (this was over 25 years ago), and was really pumped to be able to serve therein, but then found that the only reason I was in there was to be a roving substitute teacher, as needed. I had thought that we were supposed to monitor how teachers were doing, make suggestions, organize teacher training, and when necessary advise the bishopric about Sunday school matters. I suppose the president did some of that, but I never heard about it, nor did we ever have a presidency meeting. I was very disappointed. But me being me, I was definitely on board being a substitute teacher.

In our bishopric WhatsApp group our bishop today commented that he wished this had come out a couple of months back when we were considering whom to call as SS president. That's because our candidate pool was rather constrained, being that our ward is one of the smaller ones. I'm not surprised. I also don't see it as shocking as some might paint it. In my opinion, there was never any real reason for women not to serve in Sunday School presidencies. A more radical change would be women preparing and passing the Sacrament. There's no scriptural or doctrinal reason why women cannot do either of these. In fact, many many years ago, as I understand it anyway, women regularly prepared the Sacrament. And even now, females and unordained males pass the sacrament in the pews. I think that particular change might get a bit more pushback, however.