Has any-1 heard about the 4 "mormon" missionaries injured?

[Teancum]

18 minutes ago, Russell C McGregor said:

So you're pleased that they survived, then?

You don't seem all that pleased.

And you seem to take personally the claim that "a lot of people are mad about it." Why is that?

 

I am pleased they survived.  I just think if we give God credit for their survival we have to give God credit for letting the others simply die.

Rodheadlee says people are mad the missionaries survived.  How ludicrous. I see no evidence of anyone saying they wish the missionaries would have dies.

Do you?

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

In the context of this board and everywhere else I've looked, I haven't seen anyone state that they are mad that the missionaries survived. To disingenuously claim that there are 'many' people angry that they survived, just to score a cheap rhetorical point, is appalling. However, to be entirely, technically, pedantically accurate, I suppose I could concede that there are probably some God-inspired terrorists somewhere in the world who are mad that more people weren't exploded into bloody pulp. Personally, I for one am extremely glad the missionaries survived. I would be even more pleased, however, if 'God' had 'protected' everyone who instead died via exploding nail bomb, apparently as part of some grand design meant to teach us some vague moral lesson. We have exactly zero evidence that it was a benevolent deity who reached down and 'blunted' the effect of the blasts. If such a being exists who actually operates in that way, it has extremely unpleasant implications, namely that He chose not to intervene on behalf of all the other people who were slaughtered in this attack, not to mention all the other missionaries who have died on their missions for other reasons. 

[strappinglad]

Too bad that God, if He was going to intervene, didn't just cause the bombers to come down with a severe case of death before they were even born. That goes for Hitler and Mao and Pol Pot and Genghis Kahn and Ceasar and...As if death is the worst thing that can happen to anyone. I will speculate that there are a couple of victims of the evil of others that would prefer death over the suffering they are going/have gone through. For those apostates that saw the movie Bruce Almighty ,remember what happened when the main character hit " yes to all" for the prayers. Could it be that there are a few here who think they could do better?

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

"As if death is the worst thing that can happen to anyone."

Since we do not know what happens to us after death (besides rotting into a putrified mass of slime that reenters the carbon cycle), and it is only within the context of a believer's paradigm that any aspect of our individuality is believed to survive at all, then yes, from the perspective of a non-believer, death is in fact the worst thing that can happen to anyone. I would not wish death on Hitler himself, nor these terrorists who threw their one verifiable life away for utterly absurd reasons. The point is, I wish no one had to die, and if there is an all-powerful being doling out miracles who chooses to save some people while letting others die in agony as an object lesson, that being is evil. 

[Kenngo1969]

8 hours ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

"As if death is the worst thing that can happen to anyone."

Since we do not know what happens to us after death (besides rotting into a putrified mass of slime that reenters the carbon cycle), and it is only within the context of a believer's paradigm that any aspect of our individuality is believed to survive at all, then yes, from the perspective of a non-believer, death is in fact the worst thing that can happen to anyone. ...

With due respect, Jeremy, you seem to be talking out of both sides of your mouth here on the Board lately.  On the one hand, you castigate anyone for daring to suggest that God might have had a hand, however small, in preserving (continuing) the lives of anyone who, perhaps, had better than even odds of dying in an event such as the terrorist attack at the Brussels airport. Yet on the other hand you opine that if there really were a God, surely He wouldn't be so impotent as to allow [fill-in-the-blank-with-undeniably-horrible-tragedy/circumstance-here].  Wouldn't the anticipation of no longer having to endure such a terrible circumstance or circumstances, even if nothing comes after, actually make death a relief, even for a nonbeliever?

For my part, while I have never had experience personally with anyone from beyond the veil, two people that I trust, one of whom is a close family member, have related such experiences to me.  I consider them both to be reasonably sane, reasonably intelligent, reasonably well-adjusted adults who would have no reason to lie to me about such things, who related these experiences without any prompting from me, and without any particular discernible agenda.  To borrow and slightly alter Joshua 24:15, "Choose ye this day whom ye will believe.  As for me and my house ..."

Edited April 6, 2016 by Kenngo1969

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

I'd find the smug use of that same old tiresomely ubiquitous quote to be very slightly more convincing if the actual context it was lifted from wasn't a speech by a genocidal warlord who "utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ***, with the edge of the sword" -- atrocities which were topped only by the maniacal psychopath he worshipped out of fear of being smitten himself: 

Joshua 24:11, "The men of Jericho fought against you, the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Girgashites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; and I delivered them into your hand." 

Joshua 24:18, "And the Lord drave out from before us all the people, even the Amorites which dwelt in the land: therefore will we also serve the Lord; for he is our God. And Joshua said unto the people, Ye cannot serve the Lord: for he is an holy God; he is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions nor your sins. If ye forsake the Lord, and serve strange gods, then he will turn and do you hurt, and consume you." 

It's always a friend of a friend, or an ancient writing, or an inference drawn from a subjective 'feeling', or 'impression', or 'experience' that is always conveniently too sacred to talk about, lest these utterly vague and meaningless 'pearls' be cast before swine like me. There is never, ever anything verifiable. 

It's not about sanity or dishonesty, it's about cognitive errors that even well-meaning and healthy people make. It's just how human brains are wired; people seek out patterns and intentional agents and fill any gap in their knowledge with what amount to conspiracy theories in which someone somewhere must have meant every little event in our lives as a sign or a symbol or something, anything, to avoid coming to terms with the idea that we're on our own. 

If God has the power to 'blunt' the effects of the bombs, He has the power to, say, make a forcefield around the bomb itself so it only explodes in a two-foot sphere and no one around it is hurt. For that matter, God could just dissolve the bomb ("the elements shall melt with fervent heat"), or teleport it to a different room like Jesus supposedly did with His own body, or give everyone in the airport a capital-R Revelation to stay home that day. If God has so much power that Elijah can call down flames from heaven to incinerate his enemies with laserlike precision, then God certainly has the power to put fires out. If God had the power to save any of these people (a power which the scriptures and modern-day 'Prophets' certainly claim He has), then it is evil to single out the missionaries as being uniquely worthy of protection even as other people are ripped to shreds. 

[Kevin Christensen]

It seems unlikely to me that the the vantage point from which we can gain the clearest, most decisive insight into the meaning of life is from that perspective that assumes that we know all we need to know now and can see all there is to see from the here and now, and then to serve it up on a slice of burnt and smoking cynicism that insists that if there was a loving God, that God would coerce absolute justice and righteousness, prevent death and pain, grant all wisdom and knowledge to us by osmosis so that we'd never have a moment's uncertainty, never have to act in faith, or do deal with puzzlement or angst or fear or doubt or disappointment, and submit to all unspoken human wishes like an Omniscient Vending Machine, and do so without ever engaging a conflict of interests or desires. 

In the "The Book of Enoch as a Theodicy" Hugh Nibley observes.

Quote

It is the ultimate foundation of all theodicy: we are in no position to judge what is going on because we see things from literally only one angle, and we therefore have no conception of reality. In Enoch, it is not only God who sees things from different levels, but holy men as well are given that privilege—and that makes everything different.¹⁰³

Though science has conceded an infinite number of possible viewpoints for describing any object, in practice it has always insisted that there is really only one valid viewpoint: the down-to-earth, no-nonsense reality of everyday experience. We see everything, as it were, through a long, thin tube set up at an immovable point and welded in position to face in one direction only. What do we know of reality? For two thousand years the doctors have allowed God in theory unlimited perception while taking it upon themselves to decide how things look from God’s point of view. All the astronauts knew quite well what to expect when viewing the earth from outer space; yet several reported that when they actually saw it, they were stunned and overwhelmed with the reality of the thing, and they knew with absolute certainty that there was more going on than science could ever know. The words of Whitehead on his deathbed that the Bible teaches us of infinite possibilities and that “these possibilities are REAL!” admonish us not to be too hasty in condemning Enoch: we really don’t see things as they are.

http://publications.mi.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1102&index=4

Different people die at different times in their lives.  A few years ago, my wife organized the funeral of a little girl who died of SIDS.  In the summer of 1977, I was working at an all night gas station on Redwood Road and North Temple in Salt Lake City, when at 3 am I had two guns pressed against my head, and the wielders insisting that I could open a floor safe to which I did not have a combination.  Okay, so I could have died that night, but I didn't.  Was I protected when two cars pulled in at a most fortuitous time?  It seems to have made a difference, and I suspect at this juncture, almost four decades later, that God had a work for me to do that I not only did not, but could not forsee then.  So where is that baby girl now?  Doing nothing because there is nothing?  Or is she busy and perhaps even happy because there is something?  Was she greeted by loving spirits that welcomed her and said, "Thank God you've come!  We need your help!  We've been waiting so long, and missed you so much!"  Our scriptures do talk frankly about each of us having a "time" that won't be cut short,  and therefore a purpose.  When my Dad went off in WWII, the first man who died in his unit was his best friend, caught in the open desert in North Africa, strafed by an Me109.  My Dad was strafed several times, and had bullets landing on either side of his body.  He saw lots of death, and had nightmares till his last week of life at 97, and he reports several occasions when he felt promptings to move that saved his life.  If there was a purpose to saving my Dad's life, could there not also be a purpose, on occasion, for letting someone die?  Jesus, or Abinadi, or Joseph Smith, or even, when God wills, me?

To insist with absolute certainty that there is nothing requires, it seems to me, if you want to be consistent,  that you ought to provide exactly the kind of absolute coercive proof that the not-sufficiently-coercive-but-nonetheless-evil-God you don't believe in would have provided if he did indeed exist in that nature.  Falling short of absolute coercive proof, you have to work with "cause to believe," to generalize from limited sampling, to work within an ideological framework that saturates all of your selections and generalizations and premises.  As N. R. Hanson observed, "All data is theory-laden," which includes the notion that the way to prove absolutely that God does not exist or is evil because of a few choice passages of scripture or news reports itself constitutes sufficient and irrefutable proof, and never mind any personal accounts or experiences that suggest otherwise. 

If it happens that my Mother did hear my Grandma's voice in the Temple, announcing that my sister's seventh baby would indeed be a girl, after six boys, then I have to accept the possibility that this life does not contain the whole story, that here, we are, as Nibley has it, in the middle act of a three act play, that sometimes, the meaning of the moment is obscure in ways that only the first and third acts could clarity for me.  I could dismiss my Mom's story as anecdotal, but quite frankly, so are the atrocity stories quoted from Judges.  And it was biologically and socially appropriate to name the baby Sarah. And I've got a little book at home that points out that the concentration of atrocity stories in Judges is meant to tell us something about the state of Israel at the time, rather than God's will and plan.  We're not supposed to approve of everything we read in Judges, just because it is reported there.  Quite the contrary.  It is quite deliberately presented as a catalogue of horrors that is evidence of the state of Israel, rather than the will of God. (Read the Enoch story in our Book of Moses.)  For more evidence of that I have the Book of Mormon take on that period.  I have, on three memorable occasions, heard my wife speak by the spirit in such a distinct manner that we both knew what was happening and who it was that was really speaking.  It may be an anecdote to you, but from my perspective, it is experience, and not just of a moment, in light of subsequent consequences, not just for me, but for many people.  It is scientific or even reasonable to insist that only your personal experience counts as real or towards what is real?  What happened to me, or Joseph Smith or  Oliver Cowdery or countless NDE reports may not be "proof" but could it not be accepted as rational "cause to believe" to be weighed in a complex balance?

What is testable?  What provides a comprehensive and coherent explanation that expands the mind and enlarges the soul?  What is fruitful?  (What has reflexive cynicism, doubt, and skepticism produced besides depression and bitterness?)  What is aesthetically pleasing and beautiful?  What holds future promise?

Best,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

 

[rodheadlee]

13 hours ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

"As if death is the worst thing that can happen to anyone."

Since we do not know what happens to us after death (besides rotting into a putrified mass of slime that reenters the carbon cycle), and it is only within the context of a believer's paradigm that any aspect of our individuality is believed to survive at all, then yes, from the perspective of a non-believer, death is in fact the worst thing that can happen to anyone. I would not wish death on Hitler himself, nor these terrorists who threw their one verifiable life away for utterly absurd reasons. The point is, I wish no one had to die, and if there is an all-powerful being doling out miracles who chooses to save some people while letting others die in agony as an object lesson, that being is evil. 

Speak for yourself pal I've already been dead once.. you're right that I misspoke and nobody is mad that the missionaries survived. They're mad that God didn't save everybody. It makes me wonder if all of these people around had a relationship with God or he's just supposed to save the them no matter what. Is God suppossed to save everybody or just the people that ask to be saved? If God saves everybody, all the time, without them asking doesn't that negate free will? Should he just zap all the murderers in the whole world? When would he zap them? Should God have zapped King David right before he sent Uriah to the front lines?

[Calm]

17 hours ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

"As if death is the worst thing that can happen to anyone."

Since we do not know what happens to us after death (besides rotting into a putrified mass of slime that reenters the carbon cycle), and it is only within the context of a believer's paradigm that any aspect of our individuality is believed to survive at all, then yes, from the perspective of a non-believer, death is in fact the worst thing that can happen to anyone. 

Are you suggesting we should avoid death for ourselves and anyone else because it may turn out to be something horrible?

As someone who has loved ones who suffer and who is experiencing not the easiest of lives, when I comtemplate the idea of total ceasing of existence in contrast to living the rest of life this way, I see the absolute nothingness as preferable to the suffering and I would choose it in a heartbeat for myself and two other loved ones if I believed this existence was it because at this point it just wouldn't be worth it in any foreseeable way.

[Kenngo1969]

Jeremy,

Thank you for your response.  We get it: You don't care for the Old Testament; that's fine.  There are more than a few things that I don't care for in the Old Testament, myself.   See also the quote about the Talibachman in my sig line below ,  but you still didn't answer my question. (Don't worry: I'm not holding my breath. )

Edited April 7, 2016 by Kenngo1969

[BookofMormonLuvr]

In conspiracy theory circles they believe Mason Wells is a "crisis actor" in false flag events, having been around 3 of them.

[Kenngo1969]

2 hours ago, BookofMormonLuvr said:

In conspiracy theory circles they believe Mason Wells is a "crisis actor" in false flag events, having been around 3 of them.

The Boston Marathon bombing, the Brussels airport bombing, and what else?

[PeterPear]

On April 4, 2016 at 2:55 PM, canard78 said:

Do you have the detailed quote/reference please?

April 2016 General Conference - last speaker.

Edited April 7, 2016 by PeterPear
Typo

[Okrahomer]

1 hour ago, Kenngo1969 said:

The Boston Marathon bombing, the Brussels airport bombing, and what else?

Elder Wells was also in the vicinity of the recent Paris attack.

[PeterPear]

21 minutes ago, PeterPear said:

April 2016 General Conference - last speaker.

My mistake!

Elder Oaks Opposition in All Things

God rarely infringes on the agency of any of His children by intervening against some for the relief of others. But He does ease the burdens of our afflictions and strengthen us to bear them, as He did for Alma’s people in the land of Helam (see Mosiah 24:13–15). He does not prevent all disasters, but He does answer our prayers to turn them aside, as He did with the uniquely powerful cyclone that threatened to prevent the dedication of the temple in Fiji;6 or He does blunt their effects, as He did with the terrorist bombing that took so many lives in the Brussels airport but only injured our four missionaries.

[Duncan]

I don't know what to believe when it comes to things like this, why this happened to that person, is it our mistakes, God wants you to go through certain experiences or that's just the way life is but what I do know is 

1 Nephi 11: 16 And he said unto me: Knowest thou the condescension of God?

 17 And I said unto him: I know that he loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things.

[Kenngo1969]

4 hours ago, BookofMormonLuvr said:

In conspiracy theory circles they believe Mason Wells is a "crisis actor" in false flag events, having been around 3 of them.

 

1 hour ago, Kenngo1969 said:

The Boston Marathon bombing, the Brussels airport bombing, and what else?

 

28 minutes ago, Okrahomer said:

Elder Wells was also in the vicinity of the recent Paris attack.

I see.  Thank you.

[Kenngo1969]

I think Elder Oaks' remarks need to be interpreted in light of other things he has said.  Simply because someone posits that a person or group was protected or blessed on one occasion does not mean that the person who so posits believes that the person or group will be protected or blessed on all such occasions. See, e.g., Elder Dallin H. Oaks, "Timing,"  https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/dallin-h-oaks_timing/, and "Healing The Sick," https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2010/04/healing-the-sick?lang=eng. 

[Russell C McGregor]

17 minutes ago, Kenngo1969 said:

I think Elder Oaks' remarks need to be interpreted in light of other things he has said.  Simply because someone posits that a person or group was protected or blessed on one occasion does not mean that the person who so posits believes that the person or group will be protected or blessed on all such occasions. See, e.g., Elder Dallin H. Oaks, "Timing,"  https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/dallin-h-oaks_timing/, and "Healing The Sick," https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2010/04/healing-the-sick?lang=eng. 

It's been a favourite theme among the self-styled Clear Thinkers that anyone who thanks God for protecting someone or answering a prayer must imagine that God loves them more than those who didn't get protected.

Which isn't true, but that doesn't matter to them.

 

[Kenngo1969]

On 4/6/2016 at 4:37 AM, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

... It's always a friend of a friend, or an ancient writing, or an inference drawn from a subjective 'feeling', or 'impression', or 'experience' that is always conveniently too sacred to talk about, lest these utterly vague and meaningless 'pearls' be cast before swine like me. There is never, ever anything verifiable. ...

 

 

I know these people personally, Jeremy.  I'm not talking about something my sister-in-law's cousin's nephew's mother's brother's friend of a friend heard the ward crank say in Sacrament meeting in Hole-in-the-Wall, Nowhere after everybody else in the meeting had drifted off to sleep; nor am I talking about an ancient scriptural account, as valuable as I, personally, find those to be; nor am I talking about something based on nothing more than a subjective "feeling" or "impression." These are first-hand accounts of first-hand experiences of people I know personally who have reported actual interactions with people who have died.  Obviously it wasn't too sacred for them to talk about with me or in my presence, because ... well ... they did.  And I resent your implication that these experiences were "utterly vague and meaningless," but that simply verifies the conclusion that you so ridicule, that they should be shared judiciously, if at all.

Quote

It's not about sanity or dishonesty, it's about cognitive errors that even well-meaning and healthy people make. It's just how human brains are wired; people seek out patterns and intentional agents and fill any gap in their knowledge with what amount to conspiracy theories in which someone somewhere must have meant every little event in our lives as a sign or a symbol or something, anything, to avoid coming to terms with the idea that we're on our own. ...

The meaning of the events in Brussels, Belgium, is a separate issue from the accounts I mentioned hearing firsthand.  In contrast to the retelling of the latter, I wasn't in Brussels. While I have already indicated that I am rather well acquainted with one of the victims of the Brussels attack who was seriously hurt, and while it may be a lengthy process for him to come to terms emotionally (not to mention physically) with what has happened to him, if you want to take umbrage at whatever powers that be (or not) on his behalf, that's your business.  As I have already indicated, we don't see events such as this as they are; we see them as we are.  Therefore, I strongly suspect that he, conversely, will handle this turn of events with a good deal of grace, of aplomb, and of equanimity, because that's simply who I know him to be.

And speaking of "cognitive errors" you still haven't addressed my question: Why do you decry the suffering that any "god" (small "g" and quotation marks mine) allegedly allows, on the one hand, while saying that death is the worst thing that can happen to a person, on the other?  Even if nothing comes after, wouldn't a person who doesn't believe in "god" welcome it as a release from suffering?

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

Sorry, I didn't realize I was being interrogated, or that you were seriously asking such an utterly useless question as anything more than a rhetorical flourish. 

Nibley was fond of quoting Claudio's words from Measure For Measure: 

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

I've often heard people claim that death must be a 'relief' from suffering. This can only be true if one makes certain unquestioned and unverifiable assumptions, the most obvious being that death leads to a better experience than the current pain, or at least neutral in the blinking-out-of-existence sense. Personally, I would rather be tortured for eternity than cease to exist altogether, but that wouldn't make death a 'relief'. If some branches of Christianity are correct and nonbelievers go to a literal lake of fire, that would certainly not be a 'relief'. Still, again, I'd prefer that to the thought of pure nonexistence. Not that I'd be around to somehow 'experience' nonexistence, of course -- but that's the whole point. The thought that whatever is essentially 'me' can cease to exist as an individual is absolutely, mind-numbingly, gut-churningly terrifying; I don't want that for myself, and I can't bear the thought of it happening to anyone else - not you, not the terrorists, not Hitler, not anyone. You can get so close to imagining it, but at the very last extremity you just can't; it's like trying to see the back of your own eyeball. (Scott McCloud's The Sculptor has a nice attempt at illustrating the futility of trying to imagine nonexistence, for any fellow comic geeks out there.) 

What makes me angry is how often God seems to be talking out of both sides of His mouth. In some verses, He promises that nothing will be impossible, that He will take away all pains, etc.; then, in other verses, He explicitly commands genocides. If God will heal us in the future and all tears will be dried, etc., etc., and it won't take away our free will then, and if God claims to have the power to heal us all in the twinkling of an eye, then this entire charade is pointless. The key point to remember here is that He claims that He could turn us all immortal this instant and be done with it, but instead He (apparently) spends time healing fevers here and there while allowing other people to be burned alive.  

If our understanding of reality is so far removed from God that we are incapable of judging whether or not being burned alive, or disemboweled, or eaten by animals, or eaten by humans, might somehow, in some currently-unimaginable way, be 'for the best', then our morality simply does not intersect in any meaningful way, and it's useless to appeal to this deity as someone who will give us divine aid in any sense that we would even be capable of recognizing as such. And let's be clear here: God doesn't have to curtail the free will of murderers even slightly. All He has to do is make the intended victims impervious to, say, puncture wounds. All He has to do is give them the ability to teleport between rooms, as Christ apparently is able to do. Remember, with God, all things are possible. You appear to be saying that the only way to preserve free will is to let people murder each other in appalling ways, which is completely horrific nonsense; if the police get a tip and bust some El Cartel Del Golfo members in Mexico right before the drug runners rape, dismember, and behead innocent teenage girls, they are not obstructing their free will in some metaphysical sense, they are preventing innocents from meaningless suffering. I don't understand what is so complicated t understand about this. 

I was referring to myself with the 'friend of a friend' comment - I'm not saying I doubt that your peeps really did express their experience to you, but I have no way of verifying it. I don't care how much you trust the people who tell you they've had these miraculous experiences; if I'm reading you correctly, they are talking about a voice in their heads, and we have absolutely zero evidence that it is anything but their own minds. There is no way to know whether it originated in an entity external to themselves, transmitting information through some as-yet-unknown medium. I can effortlessly call to mind the voices of my parents and my brother and sisters and my friends and classmates and coworkers in my head; that doesn't prove the existence of telepathy, and if it still happens after one of them dies (God forbid, though of course He won't), that will not prove that some part of them has survived death and is talking to me (more's the pity). 

You have given me zero details of these 'experiences', except that they have, purportedly, happened. That is, by definition, vague. Until we find a way of measuring whether the subjective experience of hearing voices in one's head is somehow evidence of an external entity communicating psychically, it is meaningless as a data point. It is not 'ridicule' to point this out, and the solution to allow them to be taken seriously is to document them as thoroughly as possible so that we might find a way to test them, not shield them from criticism and hide them away for the (completely rational) fear that others will come to the rather more probable conclusion that it was all imaginary. You are defending a comforting conclusion you have already decided upon without evidence. 

Good timing and lucky coincidences establish exactly nothing. There is simply no causal link demonstrable between a fortuitous event and the existence of a benevolent deity. It is a completely unjustified and unwarranted intellectual leap that no one would make if there was not an oral tradition conditioning us to frame our perceptions in that way. And every single miracle story brings up the all-important (and never answered) question of why other people who were caught in the same dangerous circumstance were not healed or rescued. God can give the Nephites a Liahona and lead them halfway around planet earth, but He can't guide a lost hiker a few miles back to town, instead leaving her to die in the forest. God can find the frickin' lost keys again and again when all that's at stake is being late for work, but lets girls get kidnapped and locked in the trunks of abandoned cars to rot, with nary a key or crowbar in sight.  

We're always fed these utterly patronizing pat answers - God must be wiser than we are, God must know things we don't, this is for the best, yada yada. They're all just evasions that function to anesthetize us to the mind-melting horror of reality by covering up the fact that we just don't know a damn thing, and God, if He exists, doesn't tell us. We constantly get the little chiding morality tales admonishing us not to expect God to actually answer prayers, because He's not a vending machine, He has His own timetable, He moves in Mysterious Ways (cue U2), etc. 

I'm sorry, but these go completely against scripture. If we're still taking scripture seriously enough to condemn homosexuals because God Said So, then we have to acknowledge that scriptures and Prophets both explicitly describe God as, in fact, a divine vending machine handing out answers to the smallest, most insignificant prayer. That's supposed to be the draw. 

We certainly know that God actively answers prayers to hurt people, so we know that's not out of bounds in the debate over what denies free will: 

2 Chronicles 14:11 And Asa cried unto the Lord his God, and said, Lord, it is nothing with thee to help, whether with many, or with them that have no power: help us, O Lord our God; for we rest on thee, and in thy name we go against this multitude. O Lord, thou art our God; let not man prevail against thee. So the Lord smote the Ethiopians before Asa, and before Judah; and the Ethiopians fled.

Jeremiah 18:21 Jeremiah entreats the Lord: "Therefore deliver up their children to the famine, and pour out their blood by the force of the sword; and let their wives be bereaved of their children, and be widows; and let their men be put to death; let their young men be slain by the sword in battle. Let a cry be heard from their houses, when thou shalt bring a troop suddenly upon them: for they have digged a pit to take me, and hid snares for my feet. Yet, Lord, thou knowest all their counsel against me to slay me: forgive not their iniquity, neither blot out their sin from thy sight, but let them be overthrown before thee; deal thus with them in the time of thine anger. 

(Just imagine a modern-day Prophet praying for that.) 

We have scriptures that explicitly say that God heals: 

In Numbers 12, God turns Miriam leprous, and then answers Moses' and Aaron's prayer to "heal her now". In Deuteronomy 7, it is claimed that "the Lord will take away from thee all sickness". In 1 Kings, the Lord answer's Elijah's prayers to let the child live. In 2 Kings, Naaman the Leper is healed after dipping himself seven times in the Jordan. The Psalms exult in how God healed the Psalmist, and how God hears his voice. In Matthew 4, Jesus goes about all of Galilee, healing all manner of sickness and disease. So we know that we can ask God for healing. 

There are very specific promises which Jesus (supposedly a perfect, sinless being who never lies - see Numbers 23:19) attaches to prayer:

In Matthew 7:7, Jesus says "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: for every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." 

In Matthew 17:20, "Jesus said unto them [...] If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you." [A similar phrase is used in Matthew 21:21] 

In Matthew 18:19, Jesus says that "if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them."

Mark 9:23 says "Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth."

Mark 11: 24 teaches that "What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them."

Luke 1:37 says "For with God nothing shall be impossible."

In John 14:13 Jesus teaches "whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it."

James 5:14 teaches "Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: and the prayer of faith shall save the sick."

Mormon 9:21 Behold, I say unto you that whoso believeth in Christ, doubting nothing, whatsoever he shall ask the Father in the name of Christ it shall be granted him; and this promise is unto all, even unto the ends of the earth.

Let's emphasize that: Nothing shall be impossible. Anything, anything whatsoever, whatever we desire, that will He do. 

These promises are clearly not true. How many faithful, believing people have sincerely prayed and asked Jesus for all the cancer in the world to be cured? If we say 'thy will, O Lord, be done, and not mine' (Jacob 7:14), then we are saying that God specifically thinks it is better for these people to die of a horrible terminal rotting disease rather than be healed 'in the twinkling of an eye' (1 Corinthians 15:52). And if these ideas are not true, it is immoral to teach them to suffering and trusting people and give them false hope.

If God can and does heal these people, why did they get sick in the first place, and why doesn't He heal the people currently suffering from these afflictions in our own time? If there is some sort of external limitation imposed on God which narrows the parameters of what He is capable of healing, why doesn't He just tell us, so we know what kind of healing we should and should not ask for? (For instance, like in the old version of the Temple ceremony, when we were very conveniently told not to expect a chopped-off hand to be healed, because even in Joseph Smith's time skeptics realized that God Never Heals Amputees, though apparently we're supposed to expect that He can reanimate the constituent elements of our rotting corpses at some future date.) 

If we dismiss the atrocities of the Bible as mere anecdotes, then we also have to face the fact that it's the same 'historical' 'record' from which we derive our understanding of God itself. If we explain away the absolutely overwhelming majority of scripture which teaches quite explicitly that God Himself commands or causes rape, genital mutilation, capital punishment, cannibalism, and genocide, then there is simply no compelling reason to take it seriously when it very, very, very occasionally records that God was the cause of something nice. This is cherry-picking of the worst sort, designed specifically to buttress a moral view of God we have developed not from the supposedly historical records of His interactions with humanity, but rather from the modern understanding of ethics and morality that we created in spite of all the religiously-inspired and God-approved atrocities. 

If our Father knoweth all things we have need of before we ask Him, then what is the point of asking? Still, I'll play along for a minute: if God answers all prayers, I hereby pray that He makes me capable of understanding every hidden reason He might have for not answering prayers. *waits awhile* Well, nothing yet, I'll let y'all know if I get anything in the future. 

Oaks' comments are simply obscene. There is no other way to receive them. God protects the Fiji Temple, a mere building, but allows 55,000 homes to be wrecked and 44 people killed? God protects the Missionaries, but allows over 300 others to be injured and 33 to be killed by being blown to pieces by nail bombs? This is monstrous. (And why wasn't Solomon's Temple protected? Why weren't other Missionaries saved?) 

If the leadership is 'not speaking Prophetically' even at General Conference, even when they think they are, but we have to sort out for ourselves whether what they are saying is being channeled direct from God, what's the point? If we can't even trust them to speak 'Prophetically' and not 'as a man' even during General Conference, when can we trust them? 

I have never claimed to know anywhere even close to 'everything', nor have I ever insisted that I 'know' there is nothing after death; I hope against hope that there is, but I certainly don't have any actual answers, and neither does anyone here. If we have the gall to say that God knows 'better' than us what we really need, then there is simply no meaningful connection between our morality and God's, because one thing I do know is that being taken up to Heaven without pain and being turned immortal in the twinkling of an eye is better than being, say, raped to death and dismembered. What in God's name does anyone 'learn' from being beheaded with a rusty chainsaw by some Sinaloa drug runner in Mexico? What in God's name is the profound moral lesson the Dnepropetrovsk maniacs taught the Ukrainian people when they were stabbing them in the guts and eyes with a screwdriver and bashing their skulls in with a hammer? 

False comfort is no comfort at all. I'd rather know the truth than a comforting lie. I'd rather rage against the dying of the light for as long as I can possibly hold out than delude myself into believing that the candle never actually gets snuffed. 

To review:

1. Scriptures which are believed to be 'inspired' record that God explicitly promises that prayer works, and that literally anything a believer asks will be given. 

2. After reading those scriptures, believers who haven't died (yet) claim that God protects them and others from harm.

3. Elsewhere in those exact same scriptures, it is recorded that hundreds of millions of people -- including people who believe in God -- die in gruesome, excruciating ways.

This does not make sense.  

[Kevin Christensen]

Jeremy,

It seems to me that most of your conundrum here comes from absolutizing what is relative.  We've recently discussed the moment in our Enoch story where Enoch refuses to be comforted, when God, who demonstrates that his own heart is wrenched by the suffering his children both suffer and cause, simply asks Enoch to lift up his eyes and look.  To change perspectives, to not assume that a view of the horrors that people endure in this life, constitutes the only meaningful and telling perspective that we can take.  If I don't absolutize the relative in looking at the promises made to the faithful, I don't over look the conditions of faith and of expedience that play into how prayers can be answered, when blessings come, or the crucial importance of experience.   If I don't absolutize the relative, I can take into account that not every rationalization that people make is necessarily correct, or approved by God. 

1.  There are conditions around how prayers work, and when and how they are answered, and when miracles are granted and not.  The D&C is very clear on this.

2.  The same scriptures that record accounts of how people have been protected by God also records the death of people who have on previous occasions been protected.  Jesus, Abinadi, and Joseph Smith are conspicuous examples.   Expedience and timing and purpose matters.  The account of the Stripling warriors who are protected comes along with the account of two thousand of their parents who died, and soldiers on both sides who died all around them.  That is, what happened to them should be seen as exceptional, rather than as a general promise to all who obey every word of command with exactness.  The boys, it happens, went to war expecting they could be killed, and it was not the prophet, but their mothers who taught them otherwise.  And the mothers could only have passed on that promise to their sons if they had received information that contradicted their own personal experience on the killing grounds.   If we care to look, we can see the conditions and the different circumstances that apply in different situations, and not generalize from exceptions, and not ignore conditions and expedience.

3.  If you can even so much as desire to believe that death is not an absolute, then it follows that a perspective that looks beyond the moment of death could cast light and meaning on moments where you now cannot see any meaning.  But to insist that death is both an absolute and undesirable is rather like going to the Nelson Art Museum in Kansas City, and staring forever at the large black on black painting on the top floor, and lamenting the lack of color, beauty, and variety.

I pointed out at length in my response to Deconstructing Mormonism that positivism regarding reports of spiritual experience is not a clear-eyed and objective response to spiritual accounts, but that it reconstructs such reports and experiences to suit its framework.  You say that "we have absolutely zero evidence that it is anything but their own minds" but that blanket declaration overlooks a great deal of evidence.   Specifically, I've read numerous NDE accounts where people made testable observations beyond anything that could have been observed.  The Book of Mormon contains a great deal that can be explained as coming from eye-witness accounts.   Not coercive proof, but it does indeed all count for evidence, for cause to believe, to be allowed in the court, or dismissed due to philosophical or emotional or rhetorical technicalities, but it is evidence of a sort regardless of whether you accept in your own mind.  (See Welch on the nature of evidence in Echoes and Evidences.)

You've got no coercive evidence that compels me to throw up my hands and brain and heart in abject surrender.  I feel for you, and have compassion for you, and want to help you, but I am not going to follow you into despair.

Best,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

 

[Jeanne]

I don't pretend to  understand any of this.  I had an uncle who was a POW in WWII and went through some horrible things for a couple of years.  He came home and within the year, died on a horse. 

[Calm]

I am not sure nonexistence can't be at least extrapolated, at least of oneself as a thinking being. When one is knocked out for surgery there is (at least for me) a complete gap in experience.  No awareness of that time period exists.  Imagine that experience goes on without end not because of drugs, but because the body ceases to function as a whole and eventually breaks down into its various elements to be reused in something else.  How is that nonawareness at least close to what nonexistence might be like?

[Kenngo1969]

12 hours ago, JeremyOrbe-Smith said:

Sorry, I didn't realize I was being interrogated ...

You're not.  This is, however, the Mormon Dialogue and Discussion Board. Sorry for the misunderstanding.  Now that I know that you're primarily interested in rhetorical uncontested slam dunks, I'll be much less apt to expend time and effort attempting to accomplish anything else (read, "anything productive") with you.

or that you were seriously asking such an utterly useless question as anything more than a rhetorical flourish.

 

More evidence you're not interested in anything other than rhetorical uncontested slam dunks ... and you call me out on my use of rhetoric?  Oh.  OK.

I was referring to myself with the 'friend of a friend' comment - I'm not saying I doubt that your peeps really did express their experience to you, but I have no way of verifying it.

That's true, you don't.  You can continue ranting, "Dance, Monkey!  Dance!  Give me my verifiable evidence!" but, as Dr. Phil would say, "How's that workin' for ya?"  I wouldn't hold my breath.  

You have given me zero details of these 'experiences', except that they have, purportedly, happened.

That's true, I haven't: "Dance, Monkey!  Dance!"  Again, don't hold your breath.

That is, by definition, vague.

Yes, it is.  "Dance, Monkey!  Dance!"  Don't hold your breath.

Until we find a way of measuring whether the subjective experience of hearing voices in one's head is somehow evidence of an external entity communicating psychically, it is meaningless as a data point.

So, you, alone out of all of humanity, are the one person capable of seeing the world, not as you are, but, rather, as it is.  Gotcha.  Congratulations!  I'm very happy for you!  (Don't get too lonely, though!)

It is not 'ridicule' to point this out, and the solution to allow them to be taken seriously is to document them as thoroughly as possible so that we might find a way to test them, not shield them from criticism and hide them away for the (completely rational) fear that others will come to the rather more probable conclusion that it was all imaginary. You are defending a comforting conclusion you have already decided upon without evidence.

Good luck defending your "I'm-just-an-honest-investigator-looking-for-data" pretense.  Given your other behavior on this thread, that's gonna be a really tough sell.

Good timing and lucky coincidences establish exactly nothing.

Quite true.

Oaks' comments are simply obscene.

Not to his audience, they're not.