LoudmouthMormon

40 years ago as understanding of radiometric dating techniques spread through the culture, Christian folks were sort of forced to explain earth's existence for millions of years prior to Adam. I've heard various "failed earth" stories several times. It explains the dinosaurs, you see. In my 1980's high school science class, in the unit talking about such things: The teacher presented Bishop Ussher's ~5900 yr old earth theory and supporting evidence, and also presented science stuff like spectrometers and radiocarbon dating and uranium decay and plate tectonics and all that. The unit was timed to coincide with Ussher's date of October 23rd. Right before the quiz, the teacher turned out the lights, lit the candle on the little cake, and we all sang Happy Birthday to the "Adam" and "Eve" students the class had picked. Then we got quizzed on all the science stuff.

Okay. Not sure what you think this has to do with the topic, but I'm glad to hear your sister defended herself against and divorced someone who it sounds like had some things coming to him. On a related note, I'm grateful for various self-defense-for-women oriented places that teach practical skills and techniques that smaller and weaker folks can use against bigger and stronger folks. The girl who dumped me on my head at the KM studio didn't really need those classes, but they're relevant to probably 80% of the biological females on planet earth. If you'd care to interact with either of the questions I asked, that'd be just dandy. If not, have a good day.

Me too, and me too (not many, but a couple). I also once got my butt thoroughly and honorably kicked at a Krav Maga studio by a girl. And probably most fit women can wipe the walls with me in any running sport. Every other strength-related competition with a female in my 5 decades on planet earth have all resulted with me having a clear advantage due to my physical advantages 'cuz I'm a dude. The science behind biological differences between men & woman isn't exactly new, isn't exactly unstudied, and isn't exactly controversial. If you understand bell curves, you're 80% of the way there. There are plenty of folks who haven't really thought about it or studied it, and that's fine. Again, for those new to the notion, here's a not-too-horrible starting place: A website that compares 2016 High School Boys NBNO Finalists and 2016 Olympic Women's Finalists. https://boysvswomen.com/#/ *shrug* You trying to get the thread locked by bringing up politics, because that's the best you got? If not, I'd happily welcome a discussion about biological women competing against men in men's sports. Do you understand bell curves? Ignoring the axis labels, do you understand what principle this image conveys?

I'm trying to think back to the first time I heard a bishop or other leader say "the church doesn't need your tithing", alluding to how well-off the church was. It's probably been more than 25 years. Words fail me at my attempt to express my appreciation for a church that walks it's talk, and talks prudence and savings. It preaches self-reliance, and is self-reliant. Especially when it comes to aspects like preparedness and funding your own retirement. I miss the '70's and '80's when the church openly preached against the evils of "the dole" and government assistance in general. It had done so since the '30's, and I've come to accept that it was a generational thing from folks who had survived the great depression. Now government programs are a fact of life, forced on us whether we want it or not, and when bishops figure out fast offering help for folks, they factor in things like government aid. My parent's generation worried for me, when all the deficit spending would come due. But the nation and the world grew it's GDP so well, that I'll likely be fine, and I worry for my children, when all the 100x deficit spending comes due. In this matter, the church is doing better than me. My social security and medicare is a core component of my retirement planning. The church's plans don't rely on the govt for anything other than protection of religious liberty. In short, it's beyond cool that the church has a massive "rainy day" fund. I look forward to it being drawn upon to fund and maintain more and more temples in low-GDP nations that couldn't hope to fund one themselves. Such a thing of beauty. The church should be able to keep this exponential, beautifully logarithmic growth going for a lot of years:

Please don't put words in my mouth. I said nothing about "taking over". I said hundreds and hundreds of boys and men invading women's sports and wiping the walls with the women. Here's a list of almost 1000 different sporting competitions where biological males displaced women and girls. Most of them have links to news articles. From an athletically competitive standpoint, some of them are invalid like poker or dance or billiards or darts, but the vast majority should fit your demand. https://www.shewon.org/ For folks who aren't so sure that males have such a massive inherent superiority over females in certain athletic endeavors, here's a website that compares 2016 High School Boys NBNO Finalists and 2016 Olympic Women's Finalists. https://boysvswomen.com/#/

It's important to love thy neighbor. Trans folks have higher rates of mental illness, suicide attempts, suicide completions. They're more likely to experience violence at the hands of another. It's important to be aware, mindful, and helpful about these things. I believe I'll kneel at the feet of my Master and give an accounting of how I treated the lost and the least. But when the "odd eccentric extreme" leads to hundreds and hundreds of boys and men invading women's sports and wiping the walls with the women, well, it's important to love thy neighbor. And I've spent 40 years hearing about the importance of women's spaces, and historical injustices and oppression at the hands of men. It's important to be aware, mindful, and helpful about these things. Right?

I'll believe that when hundreds and hundreds of girl and women athletes are no longer displaced at competitive sports events by biological males who enter female events and using their biological superiority to dominate the females.

The 8% is a gift, meaning you don't have to contribute to get it? Yeah, that's pretty dang awesome. My S&P 500 high-tech employer does a very standard 100% match for the first 4%, and 50% match for the 2nd 4%. Assuming the pay is par, that's outstanding.

As I start to think about eventual retirement, I keep hearing how common it is to get a shock from moving from employment to unemployment. My wife and I make a good team, but both of us hear repeated stories about how couples struggle with a bored spouse suddenly in close proximity for an extra 10 hours a day, and we can absolutely see it needing to be dealt with for me. (The operative phrase I keep encountering is "I promised to be with you forever, but not all the time." ) Volunteering my skills and experience (such as they are) 2-4 days a week, even long-term, is a highly attractive option. If the church doesn't want me, I might end up doing something with United Way, or some other large charity that could put an old guy who knows a lot to good use. Judging by the endless articles on the subject in endless retirement magazines and blogs and whatnot, I'm thinking tens, if not hundreds of thousands of folks are like me.

Lol I have, literally, heard every single one of those notions being conveyed, one at a time, by hundreds of people. Any one of these is arguable and defendable (as evidenced by the endless folks who argue and defend every one of these.) That said, I've never encountered anyone who has expressed more than two or three of them at a time. Nobody does all of them. That's just silly.

BTW, I'm a huge fan of this guy. I am not bright. I struggle with complex topics and big words. But I got a copy of his 2006 book Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and pushed my brain harder than it wanted to be pushed into this breathtaking field of science. Life starts a single cell, which divides and divides into a crapton of other cells, which eventually turn into living organisms. A butterfly wing grows in ways that cells divide into pink ones and blue ones, forming patterns replicated in mirror-image by the other wing. Something tells the dividing cells when to change color. Something tells lizards to grow legs, and snakes to not-grow legs. Something informs the growing spinal column how many vertebra to create, and when to stop. And science gives us insight into the hows and whys. And surprises the heck out of us, by providing insight into evolution at the same time. This science, (unlike this thread's claims to "know spirits aren't real"), does produce compelling proofs that force the rational mind to accept certain knowledge about evolution. I got the book and made it through a full 4 chapters in 4 months, until I had exhausted my poor weak brain and couldn't understand the paragraphs any more. Big fan of Carroll. Even though in his forward/introduction, there was the sort of breathless crowing about having finally emerged from the dark ages of religion and superstition. My experience reading his book was quite different. I was gaining insight into the details about how God has life happen. The author was breathlessly excited about how little God he found in the science. I am breathlessly excited about how my testimony of the greatness and perfectness of God grows the more I learn. By the way, this video got me interested in the topic and directed me to Carrol's book. It's much more weak-brain friendly, I'm spending a period of time trying to memorize this song, line by line, looking up summaries of all the big words, to expand my knowledge and understanding.

I'm a fan of science and the scientific method. It's a rational path to knowledge, which will occasionally make life better for humans. And yet, when you get humans doing science, you end up with the results that you get when humans get their wet little brains and bodies involved in the pure pursuit of knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis And economic studies are THE WORST! It truly pains me to understand such problems exist with our body of scientific knowledge. I've been following truth since my late teens. When arguing with folks, I appreciate the value of sources and published studies claiming this or that. But I have to take even the most credentialled of studies with a grain of salt. There's more wishing and hoping in science than people want to admit. Because scientists are as human as religionists.

Well, our story, and we're sticking with it, is that God is compassionate and loves you, and after death you'll have a much better grasp on what's good for you. Here on earth, we're rarely qualified to have valid opinions about eternities. We've just got speculation and emotion. So if God is God, then your fears will swiftly fade away and be replaced with confidence and perhaps even joy at the proposition.

That's fair. I used to get bugged by ignorant people claiming stuff in their ignorance, and refusing to allow things into their entrenched, thick skulls that might force a little critical thought. I've since accepted that I'll be around such folks forever, and I occasionally am such folks, so it doesn't bug me any more. I prioritize the energy I spend interacting with them. These days, when my wife calls me to some task, I'll call back "Just a minute - someone is being wrong on the internet!" It's a fun recurring joke in our house. It's better to not get bugged by people. I'm not going to tell you your business, but when I stopped being emotionally impacted by fools, my life got an awful lot lighter and happier. I recommend it to everyone. Anyway, a response: You and some of your sources claim "knowledge", and you give the title "proof" to your 4 arguments. I call hogwash. It's been 25 years since my "Symbolic logic" and "Fact, Belief, Truth, and Knowledge" classes in college, but I was given different definitions for your two words in the happy secular philosophy department of the University of Utah. You can't know something if you might be wrong. And proof compels the mind to accept something as true. I don't think ya got either. What you have is evidence, perhaps strong evidence, possibly conclusive evidence. But you're lacking proof, and neither you nor your sources reach knowledge. I've seen the exact same certainty, for decades, by smart and sometimes even credentialled people about stuff like precolombian horses, massive undiscovered mesoamerican civilizations, and the lack of "Jewish DNA" in Native American populations. All 3 criticisms are about 98% dead in the water, out argued by advancing human knowledge and understanding in the sciences they called upon to voice their lofty pronouncements. For your claims of proof and knowledge: "Absence of evidence isn't proof of absence." I understood this when I was 20. It would be nice if more folks understood that. (That quote is an example of what knowledge looks like, btw.) Your questions: Dunno. And neither do you. I mean, good questions, but these are questions we can only speculate about. They are not proof. Unanswered questions are not knowledge. Behold - I am not compelled to admit the lack of a soul by your questions. Quoted questions posed by your sources: Same answer: Dunno, and neither do you and your sources. I'd add Dissociative Identity Disorder (multiple personalities), and the auditory hallucinations of schizophrenics (where voices tell them to do things) to the pile. Just pointing out that Caroll is looking at a "theory", and you're packaging it as "proof" and "knowledge". Dude refutes you himself when he says "To imagine that the soul pushes around the electrons and protons and neutrons in our bodies in a way that we haven’t yet detected is certainly conceivable, but it implies that modern physics is profoundly wrong in a way that has so far eluded every controlled experiment ever performed." Again, you've got a strong argument, you've got lots of good evidence. You ain't got knowledge. You ain't got compelling proof. I don't understand quantum stuff enough to speak intelligently on the topic, but it still remains quite easy to respond with "dunno. It's a poser all right, but you can't jump from your questions to claims of conclusive proof and knowledge." Sort of related, I once heard an argument from an atheist intellectual, quite smart. Like you, data driven, bugged by dogma and dogmatics. He was working on the new cultural winds of preferred pronouns and gender theory, and advanced an argument in support of such things that inadvertently argued for the existence of a soul. He mentioned the emerging science of quantum entanglement, where particles seemed to influence each other in ways we don't understand, sometimes faster than the speed of light, which we also don't understand. He pointed to the existing scientific research (in pretty early stages), suggesting that there might be some sort of quantum entanglement effects between two human brains, which might be part of the reason we form attachments and have love. Possible explanations for the feelings of being intertwined, knowing what the other is thinking, finishing each other's sentences, etc. My contribution to that line of speculation is to point out that particles remain after death, and might remain entangled after death. So yeah, the next time I see Sean Carrol, I'll mention it to him and see if it might help him answer his questions. I suppose to conclude, I find such things fascinating. How our brains work, where we get our sense of self, how a single cell grows into an entire person. I get why folks look at all the stuff we're learning about the topic, and end up concluding "This finally shuts down all the backwards superstition about souls and god and all that." But what they're really doing, is finding reason to believe stuff about reality that conflicts with other religious beliefs about reality. Don't be claiming knowledge until you've got some. Your proofs may be strong and persuasive, but they aren't compelling.

It's been 2 decades since I heard this, but someone once told me that church HQ specifically offered salaries in the bottom quarter of the generally acceptable salary ranges. A general notion I've heard expressed was "nobody gets a church job to get rich, they all do it to forward the work of the kingdom." I've also gathered a lot of personal anecdotes about how this or that church employee would confuse their priesthood office for management authority. I haven't heard anything in 15 years, but these stories used to reach me several times a year. Does anyone have any current contacts or info about jobs and careers at church HQ? I'd be interested to hear if the environment has changed since I was hearing about in the 2000's.