how is conference?

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

There's nothing for me to 'forgive', Calm, so please don't worry about that; while I no longer find the evidence for God or miraculous healing convincing, you saw me posting here for the many years when I did, and I certainly don't think you are callously trivializing others' pain by believing in God.   

[mfbukowski]

42 minutes ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

To those who are claiming that they have personally seen miraculous healings, could you please describe these instances in detail, without retreating into the convenient 'too sacred to talk about ' cop-out? Because I predict that in every single case, the only evidence that the healing was predicated on a Priesthood blessing or prayer will be correlation, not causation. Not to be a cliche, but 'God doesn't heal amputees'. If we're going to go the Alma 14 route and claim that God is fine with standing by watching while innocents are burned alive, and then in the very next chapter Alma and Amulek go to Sidon and use God's Priesthood to heal a mere fever, that is one scary God. 

Jeremy you need to study philosophy.  I have told you that

Hume proved that "causation" was impossible to show.  Three hundred years ago.  

Man dying of cancer.  Gone after apostolic blessing

Young lady scheduled for cancer surgery, throughout abdomen.  Surgery next morning. After blessing- cancer was gone.  NONE.

Baby needing eye surgery.  Blessing given.  Eye is healed.No surgery.  These are direct experiences I have seen in my own ward.

I see no need to explain anything to you.  You refuse to see- that's on you.

[mfbukowski]

54 minutes ago, SteveO said:

On a more positive note--Elder Anderson's talk just now...so needed in many parts of the world.  I mentioned to my wife that I think the church is going to explode in Africa in the coming years.

Elder Bednar's talk was great!  Wonderful explanation of baptism and sacrament

[mfbukowski]

47 minutes ago, SteveO said:

Give it a rest already.  I'm more interested in hearing people's thoughts and impressions from conference.  Your present attitude shows you just want to argue.  Sharing the sacred with you at this point would be casting pearls before swine.

I agree, and refuse to respond to him further.

[busybee]

1 hour ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

Edit: this was to JAHS:

All you're proving is that the concept of God is completely incoherent and contradictory. The scriptures say one thing, then another. 

Can God heal people, or can't He? We get competing theories: 

Exodus 23:25 says "ye shall serve the Lord your God, and he shall bless thy bread, and thy water; and I will take sickness away from the midst of thee."

A yet, just a few chapters later: 

Numbers 5:1 says "the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, command the children of Israel, that they put out of the camp every leper, and every one that hath an issue, and whosoever is defiled by the dead: both male and female shall ye put out, without the camp shall ye put them; that they defile not their camps, in the midst whereof I dwell.

So, in one of the very few egalitarian passages in the Bible, God promises to treat men and women equally by refusing to heal them and making them into outcasts so He is in no danger of being defiled. If He wanted to, He claims that he could heal all these lepers and people with issues and dead people. If with God, "nothing shall be impossible", why can't He just heal these people already? 

If these scriptures are actually accurate, we have a horrifically capricious God, here, and the only rational response to this being raining fire and brimstone down upon us sinners is to band together to fight it. 

(I sincerely doubt, by the way, that anyone in this thread has actually seen anyone healed by the Priesthood, though of course, statistically, there might be a slight few occurrences of people getting better for causally-unrelated reasons.) 

You can doubt all you like. I know that Priesthood power is the reason that my husband is still with me today. But this is 'pearls before swine'  etc and so I shall say no more about it. 

Edited April 2, 2016 by busybee

[mfbukowski]

43 minutes ago, sunstoned said:

If the they don't want the feedback they should not call for a vote. 

It's not a vote- it's a sustaining. They are nice enough to ask for those who do not sustain them so that they can be counseled.

[Avatar4321]

34 minutes ago, VideoGameJunkie said:

It must be awkward to sit next to the guy that cried out no. He's probably getting stared at the whole conference.

hopefully prayed for and he hopefully learned something.

personally if I didn't sustain them I wouldn't watch them

[Deborah]

Jeremy, I know in the bigger world view finding lost keys can be trivial but I can testify that sometimes in the moment it is not; and though finding the keys after a prayer and after looking 3 times in the place you felt impressed to look again may seem insignificant it is a testimony to those small miracles that can lift you at a time of crisis and help you get through the bigger things.

My question to you is what are you personally doing to relieve suffering. Often the Lord counts on us to be the ministering angels to give relief. Not because he needs us but because we need to know we can do something if only to give comfort to someone who may be dying.

I am wondering what it is that set you on this path of anger and doubt when as you say you once did believe.

[Guest]

4 hours ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

Platitudes, moral vacuity, and faith-promoting stories about God taking the time to miraculously find lost keys while the Ebola virus rages elsewhere. 

Other than the "moral vacuity" (which I wish would expand upon)...the rest of what you discribe is how the Godspel has been taught with little variation through the history of the Gospel. It has gone on from Adam to today with (Platitudes) "Proverbs and Psalms", (faith permitting stories) "The way Christ taught almost everything he ever taught". I will just assume you comment is just anger coming out. 

[Calm]

Talk summaries are out with lots of quotes (just go lds.org, front and center under video link on my ipad) and here are images with selected quotes...thought they were something else:

https://www.lds.org/media-library/images/category/april-2016-general-conference-picture-quotes?cid=HP_SA_2-4-2016_dOCS/ML_fGC_xLIDyL2-3_&lang=eng

Edited April 2, 2016 by Calm

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

mfb: If causation is impossible to show, then we cannot say that it was the blessing in particular that healed the sick person. In each of the cases mentioned, the only connection drawn between the blessing (I am assuming consecrated oil and the laying on of hands) and the healing is that the former preceded the latter in time. The problem is that many other events preceded the healing as well; how do we know that it was not the pattern of someone's breathing or the way someone blinked or the particular clothes they wore that day that 'caused' the recovery? I assume these examples sound as unconvincing to everyone else as they do to me, but what is the real distinction? If a person used a voodoo doll with deeply sincere faith and real intent, and the next day their target broke a leg, should I similarly have faith and develop 'eyes to see' that the former event was causally related in any way to the latter? Yes, if we want to have a philosophical discussion, we can insist that we technically cannot 'prove' that it was the vaccine which stopped the polio, but the correlation is strong enough that it's the best explanation at the moment. If testimonies count as evidence, then my testimony that of all the many blessings I have witnessed, not a single one was efficacious in any way should be valid as well. And if God is so fickle that His designated ritual offers nothing that can be shown to be statistically distinguishable from blind chance, then what's the point?

[BlueDreams]

Enjoyed conference so far. Based on the amount of personal notes I took, My faves were probably Renlund and Eyring. I still wonder about the accuracy of Renlund's premise, but definitely felt it was applying to my own personal circumstance. It's one that I'll probably ponder a little bit. My therapy cohort texting group really really liked Duncan's (his was on forgiveness).

On miracles and pain in this world. Priesthood and blessings of Faith for me have been answered more with endurance than outright healing (though I've known of others who healing was the answer). I remember the first time this happened was on my mission when I started having migraines. I got a pulsing one that made me want to vomit while in the car about to start an appointment. They also make me disoriented and everything (light, smell, sound, etc) can make it worse. So I prayed in the car begging for one hour of reprieve so that I could teach. I had a migraine right up until I entered their front door and it immediately went away. As soon as I left their house it came right back. The most recent "endurance" blessing was when I got food poisoning about 40 minutes away from my house at work. I couldn't stop shaking and was doubled over in pain...though not vomiting yet and I had to drive home in this state. I called a friend who lived nearby for ginger ale and some meds. Her husband came, the ginger ale made it oddly worse, and the meds were sleep inducing (so I couldn't take them). He gave me a blessing and my shaking stopped and the pain became bearable....plus it answered something I needed more than healing: a promise that assuaged my major fears that I hadn't mentioned. It stayed that way until I made it home. And then I vomited. A lot. And had to crawl around my floor. Many of the experiences have taught me that God will take care of me, but He may not make it entirely as I want it....but He will answer as I need and teach me in the process. 

I don't know how healings work....and I don't know how suffering goes. I've pondered my bio-dad's extreme suffering as a child that gave him PTSD symptoms for much of his childhood (he grew up on the losing side of a civil war, was an in-country refugee, homeless for a period, etc). I don't know why he lived and the twins his mother had during this period died at birth because of where the family was. I don't know why he "made it" economically while much of his family still struggles to do so.  But I know that none of that was enough to remove him from God (though not LDS). Nor did it stop my Grandmother who lost her first husband to cancer (a good man) to then get trapped in a marriage with a bad one. Or my other grandmother who was married to a violent alcoholic and in a culture that leaving your husband meant you can lose your children too. 

So life isn't fair, pain comes willy-nilly, and some miraculously are healed while others are not. In my own minor afflictions or struggles and including the talk by Renlund, the answer I have received most was God has not forgotten you and knows exactly where you're at. and  that's enough for me I cannot deny Him just because all injustices are not made right today and my life isn't as I wanted it exactly. He has given me more than most and opened windows of opportunity my predecessors couldn't even dream of. And because of that, I owe him and my brothers and sisters as much as I can give in His name. I worry less about the unfairness and more as to how the Lord can use me to breath life into the hurt and afflicted. I'm not a doctor nor in an area suffering from ebola. So that's out. But other areas aren't and I find joy in journeying with those I meet in their afflictions for the while I know them.

 

With luv,

BD

Edited April 2, 2016 by BlueDreams

[BlueDreams]

Duplicate

Edited April 2, 2016 by BlueDreams

[Dgal]

Thus far, nothing has stood out that is atypical from most other conferences. So I would say, status quo. 

[Jeanne]

2 hours ago, JAHS said:

You know you could just say there is no God and leave it at that. We will accept your opinion if you can accept our opinions. It all makes perfect sense to me. When God does want someone to be healed it is not just Him that is involved in it; we know that faith in Him to heal must be also be demonstrated by the one being healed. 

The Numbers 1: 5 scripture is simply one of a practical medical caution so others would not be infected with leprosy. Nowhere does it say that He did not heal them. Perhaps He did go to them and heal them, but He didn't want anyone else to become infected. 

I personally have seen others, including myself, healed by faith and the priesthood and other miracles. And it requires faith to understand that those healings were not just by medical intervention or natural processes.   

 

This kind of sounds like if a person isn't healed..it is all his fault.  I hope this is not what you meant.  Sure, faith has a lot to do with it.  A priesthood blessing will always work..even if it doesnt.  If someone is not healed and/or dies..it is God's will.  If he lives and lives healthy..what a miracle!  I learned all this the hard way.

[Okrahomer]

I couldn't help but notice that President Monson was the one who asked President Uchtdorf to get back up and advise those who had vocally opposed the sustainings to contact their Stake President.  The cameras also captured a couple additional such interactions with his counselors.  He did not speak, but he sure seemed alert and in charge. 

I'll wager there are some folks who are just a wee bit disappointed that President Monson continues to "act" like he isn't senile.  When will the outrage stop?!

Edited April 3, 2016 by Okrahomer

[JAHS]

19 minutes ago, Jeanne said:

This kind of sounds like if a person isn't healed..it is all his fault.  I hope this is not what you meant.  Sure, faith has a lot to do with it.  A priesthood blessing will always work..even if it doesnt.  If someone is not healed and/or dies..it is God's will.  If he lives and lives healthy..what a miracle!  I learned all this the hard way.

No not what I meant, although it helps if the one being healed can have faith to be healed. But I have seen babies being healed who of course have no clue what faith is yet. And even if a faithful person who is administered to dies, as God said in the scripture, "They die unto me". 

[VideoGameJunkie]

I'm headed to watch the Priesthood session soon and I hope President Monson has the strength to talk this evening. It would be his first public speaking since he almost collapsed last conference.

[sunstoned]

2 hours ago, gopher said:

Wait, was it you?

Not me.  I was home with my wife and cat.  Honest :-)

[Ginger Snaps]

Elder Bednar's talk was fantastic. He limited it to a discussion about the link between baptism/confirmation, but I could see bigger implications for the temple ordinances as well. 

Also loved the sister who spoke in the morning session (I can't remember her name) who spoke about teaching children the language of the Spirit by "immersion".

[sunstoned]

3 hours ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

(I sincerely doubt, by the way, that anyone in this thread has actually seen anyone healed by the Priesthood, though of course, statistically, there might be a slight few occurrences of people getting better for causally-unrelated reasons.) 

I have observed and participated in many priesthood blessings over a span of forty years.  I honestly have never seen anyone healed.  

[Rivers]

I really enjoyed the talk on forgiveness this morning.  

[Rain]

I need to study Elder Ballard's talk on family councils.  One point I caught was where he said it should be listening.  I have wanted to do family councils for a long time,  but feel stuck. We have one member who pretty much refuses to talk except to insert "no" when he doesn't want to do things.  I'm at a complete loss with him.  And he is not 2 if that is what you are thinking. 

 

[SteveO]

1 hour ago, VideoGameJunkie said:

I'm headed to watch the Priesthood session soon and I hope President Monson has the strength to talk this evening. It would be his first public speaking since he almost collapsed last conference.

I can't tell you how I know this, but he is only going to speak at priesthood this conference.  

[bluebell]

I loved the talk on going to the rescue. I can't remember the speaker's name but his emotions were close to the surface many times.