India Temple

[Avatar4321]

President Nelson said the revelation to announce the india temple occurred shortly before conference where he was originally preparing to announce just six temples.

thought it was interesting considering our discusssions on revelation 

[theplains]

21 minutes ago, Avatar4321 said:

President Nelson said the revelation to announce the india temple occurred shortly before conference where he was originally preparing to announce just six temples.

thought it was interesting considering our discusssions on revelation 

It might qualify as a revelation if he announced a new LDS temple in Mecca and it actually occurred.

Jim

[Duncan]

39 minutes ago, theplains said:

It might qualify as a revelation if he announced a new LDS temple in Mecca and it actually occurred.

Jim

and how would you know that? does having a revelation about a Temple in Mecca discount one for India?

[Avatar4321]

5 hours ago, theplains said:

It might qualify as a revelation if he announced a new LDS temple in Mecca and it actually occurred.

Jim

How is it any less a revelation as it is?

[Robert F. Smith]

5 hours ago, theplains said:

It might qualify as a revelation if he announced a new LDS temple in Mecca and it actually occurred.

Jim

Yeh, especially since Mecca means "temple," and the Hajj pilgrims there currently only wear their white robes on the left shoulder, and raise both hands in a special prayer.  They need to get a more complete endowment.

Edited April 21, 2018 by Robert F. Smith

[Rajah Manchou]

39 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Yeh, especially since Mecca means "temple," and the Hajj pilgrims there currently only wear their white robes on the left shoulder, and raise both hands in a special prayer.  They need to get a more complete endowment

Coincidentally, the exposure of the right shoulder is a very old tradition in India and continues in the Buddhist monastic tradition:

https://buddhism.stackexchange.com/questions/10992/significance-of-bhikkhus-uncovering-their-right-shoulder

Edited April 21, 2018 by Rajah Manchou

[Robert F. Smith]

35 minutes ago, Rajah Manchou said:

Coincidentally, the exposure of the right shoulder is a very old tradition in India and continues in the Buddhist monastic tradition:

https://buddhism.stackexchange.com/questions/10992/significance-of-bhikkhus-uncovering-their-right-shoulder

Yes, and we might want to take a look at puja -- the part where the image of the god is washed, anointed, and dressed.  A lot going on there.

[RevTestament]

2 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Yeh, especially since Mecca means "temple," and the Hajj pilgrims there currently only wear their white robes on the left shoulder, and raise both hands in a special prayer.  They need to get a more complete endowment.

Actually, rather than trying to emulate us, they just need to convert to Christ. This will take awhile.

[Rajah Manchou]

11 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Yes, and we might want to take a look at puja -- the part where the image of the god is washed, anointed, and dressed.  A lot going on there.

Just finishing up an interesting book called Rainbow Body and Resurrection. It's surprising that Tibet and parts of India were more Christian than Buddhist before the 8th century AD. Also surprising that India and Tibet were more Christian than Europe was during the first millennium. In my opinion, much of the Dzogchen tradition, and other schools of Indo-Tibetan thought, were influenced by Syrian Christianity.

"What we need to keep in mind is that at the time of Evagrius, Buddhism was a highly scholastic monastic system, characterized by the teachings of Vasubandhu and Asanga. The Shaivism of Kashmir may have been entirely in the hands of a few yogins and unknown to the classical Hindu traditions of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. Vajrayana Buddhism did not exist as yet. Tibet was a remote territory where forms of shamanism prevailed. At least from a strictly historical perspective, it would be difficult to imagine a better source for a contemplative worldview than in the writings of Origen and Evagrius!"

"By investigating the one Christian tradition that had documented and fruitful encounters with Buddhists in the early days of dzogchen, we can advance the suggestion that at least some Buddhists were changed by that encounter. Something happened between the 750s and 1100 to alter the doctrinal texture of tantric Buddhism in Tibet. The influence was subtle and combined with other important encounters, above all with Indian Shaivite traditions, but it seems that the Christian themes of eschatology and universal purpose, eschatology, and bodily resurrection awakened new kinds of spiritual practice and philosophical reflection among some Tibetan Buddhists."

Here's one of my favorite verses from a 10th century AD Christian-Tibetan text:

"That being the case, when others hear this book preached, they will acquire delight; examining it closely, they will acquire alimentation; reciting it, they will acquire sustenance. You should also know that they and their fathers, they and their ancestors through all generations, are oriented towards the good by means of the bonds of good causes and conditions; thus, in the past, good roots have been passed along across the generations, so that veneration for my teachings has grown; therefore, thanks to the benefits granted by it, it is possible to aspire to joy. For example, when the spring rains sprinkle and moisten the earth, all the plants gifted with roots produce shoots; if instead they lack roots, they cannot grow. Simon Peter, the same is valid for you: if you seek the transcendent law from me, it is because the numerous generations before you—fathers, ancestors, and relatives connected to you by marriage—have done good deeds in an excellent way, and this has been transmitted down to you.”

[Robert F. Smith]

47 minutes ago, Rajah Manchou said:

Just finishing up an interesting book called Rainbow Body and Resurrection. It's surprising that Tibet and parts of India were more Christian than Buddhist before the 8th century AD. Also surprising that India and Tibet were more Christian than Europe was during the first millennium. In my opinion, much of the Dzogchen tradition, and other schools of Indo-Tibetan thought, were influenced by Syrian Christianity...........................

I had  no idea that Christianity had penetrated that far and that early.

[Rajah Manchou]

5 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

I had  no idea that Christianity had penetrated that far and that early.

Philip Jenkins gives a good summary in "The Lost History of Christianity", describing the range of the Syriac Church across Asia as early as the 7th century AD. The Church in India has been there from the very beginning, and never really died off:

The presence of metropolitan seats in Turkestan and central Asia is amazing enough, but the list of bishoprics and lesser churches includes just as many shocks: Arabia had at least four sees, and Timothy created a new one in Yemen. And the church was growing in southern India, where believers claimed a direct inheritance from the missions of the apostle Thomas. One ninth-century copper plate records the grant of land to one of Thomas’s Indian churches, by a means that would have staggered contemporary Europeans: the boundaries were marked by walking a she-elephant around the grounds.

Timothy himself was committed to the church’s further expansion, and he commissioned monks to carry the faith to the shores of the Caspian Sea, even into China. He reported the conversion of the Turkish great king, the khagan, who then ruled over much of central Asia. In a magnificent throwaway line, Timothy described, about 780, how “in these days the Holy Spirit has anointed a metropolitan for the Turks, and we are preparing to consecrate another one for the Tibetans.” Timothy was deeply conscious of the church’s universality. When debating a technical liturgical question, he drew support from the practice of the wider churches of the sprawling Christian world he knew: the Persians and Assyrians don’t do this, he argued, and nor do the churches of “the countries of the sunrise—that is to say, among the Indians, the Chinese, the Tibetans, the Turks.” The church operated in multiple languages: in Syriac, Persian, Turkish, Soghdian, and Chinese, but not Latin, which scarcely mattered outside western Europe. 

To put this geographical achievement in context, we might think of what was happening in contemporary Europe. Before Saint Benedict formed his first monastery, before the probable date of the British King Arthur, Nestorian sees existed at Nishapur and Tus in Khurasan, in northeastern Persia, and at Rai. Before England had its first archbishop of Canterbury—possibly before Canterbury had a Christian church—the Nestorian church already had metropolitans at Merv and Herat, in the modern nations of (respectively) Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, and churches were operating in Sri Lanka and Malabar. Before Good King Wenceslas ruled a Christian Bohemia, before Poland was Catholic, the Nestorian sees of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Patna all achieved metropolitan status. Our common mental maps of Christian history omit a thousand years of that story, and several million square miles of territory. No reasonable historian of modern Christianity would leave Europe out of the story; and omitting Asia from the medieval record is just as unconscionable. We can’t understand Christian history without Asia—or, indeed, Asian history without Christianity.

In China particularly, Christianity in Timothy’s age was being transformed by local religious traditions. The Church of the East was anything but a newcomer in China, and Christianity first established itself in that land about 600, roughly at the same time that Tibet first welcomed Buddhism. About 780, a Nestorian community erected a monument that recounted the Christian message in Buddhist and Taoist terms, just as European Christians were trying to make the faith acceptable to peoples of western and northern Europe.

[CMZ]

Quote

 

“Our plans were to announce six new temples at conference time,” said President Nelson. “The Lord told me on the eve of conference: ‘Announce a temple in India.’ … That was the Lord's doing.”

https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900016345/in-india-the-story-of-the-india-temple-announcement-is-revealed.html

 

 

[RevTestament]

4 hours ago, Rajah Manchou said:

Philip Jenkins gives a good summary in "The Lost History of Christianity", describing the range of the Syriac Church across Asia as early as the 7th century AD. The Church in India has been there from the very beginning, and never really died off:

The presence of metropolitan seats in Turkestan and central Asia is amazing enough, but the list of bishoprics and lesser churches includes just as many shocks: Arabia had at least four sees, and Timothy created a new one in Yemen. And the church was growing in southern India, where believers claimed a direct inheritance from the missions of the apostle Thomas. One ninth-century copper plate records the grant of land to one of Thomas’s Indian churches, by a means that would have staggered contemporary Europeans: the boundaries were marked by walking a she-elephant around the grounds.

Is the latter from Philip Jenkins' book?

[Rajah Manchou]

13 minutes ago, RevTestament said:

Is the latter from Philip Jenkins' book?

Yes, from The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died

[RevTestament]

3 minutes ago, Rajah Manchou said:

Yes, from The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died

It is sad how people don't realize how far and wide Christianity spread in the East. It is thought of as a Western religion, and I think for the most part even prophecies pertain to the west and the Levant. Christianity in the East was stamped out by Islam, with a few local vestiges which survived like the St Thomas Christians. Even there the Portuguese did their damage. So few records are left. Jenkins is right - Christianity in the East was lost. It was stamped out almost as thoroughly as Christianity in the Americas.

[Marginal Gains]

On the eve of Conference Nelson got a revelation to announce a temple in one of the City’s he was going to be visiting and telling his audience that paying tithing ends poverty....

 

On a related note, I thought announcing a temple in “A major city yet to be determined in Russia” a bit odd. Is the criteria for temple announcements now really just having a general intention of building one somewhere sometime?

Edited April 21, 2018 by Marginal Gains

[Robert F. Smith]

6 hours ago, Rajah Manchou said:

Yes, from The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died

Breathtaking!!  Thanks, Rajah.

[CMZ]

7 hours ago, Marginal Gains said:

On the eve of Conference Nelson got a revelation to announce a temple in one of the City’s he was going to be visiting and telling his audience that paying tithing ends poverty....

 

On a related note, I thought announcing a temple in “A major city yet to be determined in Russia” a bit odd. Is the criteria for temple announcements now really just having a general intention of building one somewhere sometime?

That or being told by the Lord to announce it (No, me saying that does not force anyone to believe it). And people wondered about a lot of other temples being built amidst the peoples' poverty. And tithing doesn't go to President Nelson.

[Stargazer]

On 20/04/2018 at 10:17 PM, theplains said:

It might qualify as a revelation if he announced a new LDS temple in Mecca and it actually occurred.

Jim

I think that is a fine idea!  I'm pretty sure there will be a temple in Mecca after the Millenium kicks in.

[Stargazer]

On 21/04/2018 at 9:17 PM, Marginal Gains said:

On the eve of Conference Nelson got a revelation to announce a temple in one of the City’s he was going to be visiting and telling his audience that paying tithing ends poverty....

You think it doesn't?  

There was an interesting story from my mission that one of my companions told me.  Previous to serving with me in Wuppertal, Germany, he had been assigned to another city in our mission.  The branch president (or bishop, I don't recall exactly) was an ordinary working stiff in post-war Germany who didn't own a car (the German economy even in the early 70's made it difficult for many to own a car). He was advised by the Mission President to buy a car.  He thought that he couldn't really afford one, but in the end decided to sustain his church leader, and went ahead with the purchase of a vehicle that he was worried he could not really afford.  It worked out well in the end because his experience in budgeting for tithing enabled him to find a way to budget for the car.  In addition, he decided to go back to school, taking night courses, to improve his job performance, so he could better afford the car. The improvements were noted by his employer, and he began getting promotions.  In a year or so he was advised by the same mission president to upgrade to a better car, so he bought a Mercedes.  The effort that this entailed led to further improvement in his situation, and by the time they created a stake in his area he had become an executive in his company and could definitely afford the car.  His improving leadership skills also led to his being called to be the bishop in his ward.  This was not my companion's observation, but what the man himself told about his life.  Just think, paying tithing ended this one man's poverty -- not by some magic, but by the effort needed to organize himself to be able to pay it.

But of course, you certainly wouldn't attribute that to tithing.  Have you ever heard of the concept of "unintended consequences"?

On 21/04/2018 at 9:17 PM, Marginal Gains said:

On a related note, I thought announcing a temple in “A major city yet to be determined in Russia” a bit odd. Is the criteria for temple announcements now really just having a general intention of building one somewhere sometime?

Well, that should encourage you, actually.  Just think, when it doesn't occur you can then feel all the schadenfreude you clearly wish to.

[cinepro]

On 4/21/2018 at 1:17 PM, Marginal Gains said:

On the eve of Conference Nelson got a revelation to announce a temple in one of the City’s he was going to be visiting and telling his audience that paying tithing ends poverty....

 

On a related note, I thought announcing a temple in “A major city yet to be determined in Russia” a bit odd. Is the criteria for temple announcements now really just having a general intention of building one somewhere sometime?

I may be wrong, but in the past there was probably a location picked out and a rough time frame, so the idea of "announcing" a temple came with a kind of plan for building it that would assure the members that it was going to happen within the near future. 

The announcements for Russia and India seem to be more along the lines of "we'd like to build a Temple somewhere, but we don't know where or when."  It will take some adjustment, just as the building of the Temples in Hong Kong and New York city (where they are part of high-rise complexes) required us to adjust what, exactly a "Temple" was supposed to look like. 

And the time frame between announcing the Temple and building can be years, decades, or (in the case of the Missouri sites) centuries.

[Rajah Manchou]

On 4/21/2018 at 11:26 PM, RevTestament said:

It is sad how people don't realize how far and wide Christianity spread in the East. It is thought of as a Western religion, and I think for the most part even prophecies pertain to the west and the Levant.

There certainly are many prophesies pertaining to the Levant. In your view, which prophesies would pertain to the west?

On 4/21/2018 at 11:26 PM, RevTestament said:

Christianity in the East was stamped out by Islam, with a few local vestiges which survived like the St Thomas Christians. Even there the Portuguese did their damage. So few records are left.

There are accounts of thousands, if not millions, of 'hidden' Christians in Asia dating as early as 328 AD. A Persian Prince named Sapor reported large numbers of Christians and Christian churches in Seres (China). Nearly every westerner who ventured that far reported Christians and a Christian kingdom of some sort, and some described it in a way that leaves no doubt that this was not just a fanciful legend.

Jenkins has a chapter on the 'ghosts' of the Church of the East. Once you start poking around in the history, especially in the hilly regions where there hasn't been much external influence for centuries, it really jumps out at you. Here's one example (source) describing the beliefs and practices of a Malay hilltribe:



Click on the image for the source, and tell me if that account of Adam and Eve and their innumerable spirit children doesn't sound familiar. When people say the Book of Mormon is so obviously a fiction, full of anachronisms, I just think they aren't looking closely (or broadly) enough.

Edited April 23, 2018 by Rajah Manchou

[Rajah Manchou]

On 4/22/2018 at 6:03 AM, Robert F. Smith said:

Breathtaking!!  Thanks, Rajah.

This is from "A History of Eastern Christianity", you may recognize the author Aziz Atiya, the U of U professor who found the JS Papyri in the MET. 

"One relic of Nestorianism in the heart of Asia is said to be the survival of its ritual in a debased form in the Lamaism of Tibet. The striking resemblances with Lamaist Monasticism, the use of holy water, incense and vestments of a similar character to Nestorian practices, must be traced to the days of the Nestorian missionary in the high Middle Ages. It has been suggested that Jesus came to Central Asia, from where He carried back those Buddhist teachings shown to be identical with Christianity from Tibetan Lamaism. Since Buddhism did not reach Tibet until 640, it is unnecessary for the historian to waste his time refuting a baseless argument. Of more interest is the fact that a officiating lama recalls a Nestorian bishop celebrating the Nestorian liturgy."

I'd add the practice of burying golden texts in hills to preserve religious knowledge through periods of apostasy to the list of striking resemblances between early Christianity and early Lamaism. 

[Marginal Gains]

On 22/04/2018 at 4:37 AM, CMZ said:

 And tithing doesn't go to President Nelson.

You don’t know that, you don’t know where tithing goes. Unless you have financial reports you’d like to share with the group?

[Avatar4321]

1 hour ago, Marginal Gains said:

You don’t know that, you don’t know where tithing goes. Unless you have financial reports you’d like to share with the group?

So we should just assume, absent any evidence, that President Nelson is secretly hoarding our tithes and offerings to the Lord and everyone who says otherwise is covering it up?