Reconciling bruce r. McConkie

[Rivers]

I find it humbling that even an apostle of Jesus Christ can be wrong about so many things. It  goes to show that we all truly see through a glass darkly.

[Amulek]

17 hours ago, Fair Dinkum said:

Elder McConkie held to a very literal young earth biblical timeline.  While I loved that young earth 6,000 year timeline, since it put everything in such a pretty little box all tied up with a beautiful ribbon, it was all make believe and false.

In fact so many of the teachings of Elder McConkie have turned out not to be true.

He held to a Literal: [...]

So, is the problem really Elder McConkie or biblical literalism?

 

Quote

So how have YOU been able to reconcile Bruce R. McConkie knowing that so many of his teachings have been shown to be not true?

I don't know anybody - you, me, the apostles, anybody - who doesn't hold any false beliefs.

So what's there to reconcile?

 

[Fair Dinkum]

10 hours ago, Calm said:

I don’t get why you are refusing to share your own belief about the truth of the Church considering what else you have shared.  What matters in the end if others believe, but you don’t? Or if instead your choice is you don’t know, why not just say that?  Why go where you have, but not here?

Honestly I try to walk a very fine line on this board.  I do a lot of self editing so as not to purposely offend anyone ( I do however know that many of my questions in and of themselves do offend by the very nature of the question, but I can't help that)

So let me state it in another way.  My head tells me that the church is not what it claims to be that I was born into a church and a culture that works for a lot of people and did in fact work for me until I started to scratch the surface and pull on the loose ends. But my heart very much wants the church to be everything it claims to be. So I live with this on going mental conflict.  Some days my head wins other day I go with my heart.

I post here to help me sort out the things I ask myself in my head.  I've put more mental effort into investigating the truth claims of the church than into any other thing in my life. 

It's been very helpful to my journey to be able to process my questions here.  I know I've worn out my welcome and I sense the tide turning and at some point I will just move on, but I enjoy having my thoughts and conclusions tested and retested, scrutinized and examined again.  Eternity or the lack there of should be worth the effort

Edited July 15, 2021 by Fair Dinkum

[Fair Dinkum]

9 hours ago, strappinglad said:

If one has left faith in Christ behind , then one swings on the pendulum to empirical evidence and towards scientism. Scientists become one's prophets and one, in my opinion, has built  beliefs on shifting sands. Review the " beliefs " of science over the last 200 years and you will see massive adjustments. But, you say, science is self correcting .Sometimes yes, but more often than not it has to be dragged kicking and screaming towards new ideas. Lets take the recent finding of soft tissue in dinosaur bones. The scientific community dog piled on the discoverers with vitriol. Can't be that soft tissue would survive for 65 million years. They fought it because it implied that the bones were considerably younger than ' everyone ' knew. Only after many more examples were found did the scientific folks admit it was true that there was soft tissue. Guess what conclusion they stuck with. Yup, soft tissue CAN survive 65 million years. Sure Fred, if you say so. We don't want to admit it but scientists are fallible humans too. They are subject to temptations like greed, professional jealousy, fudging the data etc. 

 

I find this comment quite arrogant, naïve and self serving.  Every advancement we enjoy today in medicine, agriculture, transportation, space exploration, housing, information technology, computerization, robotics to name just a few is the result of Scientific advancement.  So on the science side of the ledger we literally have thousands of advancements while on the religion side its as if time is frozen. Religion is literally dragged kicking and screaming into change by science.  Does religion make those changes willingly? NO they fight tooth and nail to maintain their false cherished truth claims until the overwhelming stupidity of maintaining that belief is just too heavy and intellectually embarrassing to maintain. Science is the driving force behind much of the church that has taken place in religion.  The list of false religious claims that have been over turned and changed due to scientific advancement is long while the list of scientific clams that religion has overturned is non existent.

Religion makes a claim, Science blows that claim out of the water with empirical, testable evidence, so is it science that then changes. NO its religion that changes.

So honestly, don't mess with science, its gotten us to where we are today

[Fair Dinkum]

4 hours ago, Rivers said:

I find it humbling that even an apostle of Jesus Christ can be wrong about so many things. It  goes to show that we all truly see through a glass darkly.

I try to keep at least one eye open so that by looking through that dark glass I don't end up walking off a cliff

[CV75]

13 hours ago, Fair Dinkum said:

We obviously think differently 

How have you been irrevocably led astray by falsehoods perpetuated by Church leaders?

[CV75]

13 hours ago, Fair Dinkum said:

We obviously think differently 

How have you been irrevocably led astray by falsehoods perpetuated by Church leaders?

[JAHS]

13 minutes ago, Fair Dinkum said:

I find this comment quite arrogant, naïve and self serving.  Every advancement we enjoy today in medicine, agriculture, transportation, space exploration, housing, information technology, computerization, robotics to name just a few is the result of Scientific advancement.  So on the science side of the ledger we literally have thousands of advancements while on the religion side its as if time is frozen. Religion is literally dragged kicking and screaming into change by science.  Does religion make those changes willingly? NO they fight tooth and nail to maintain their false cherished truth claims until the overwhelming stupidity of maintaining that belief is just too heavy and intellectually embarrassing to maintain. Science is the driving force behind much of the church that has taken place in religion.  The list of false religious claims that have been over turned and changed due to scientific advancement is long while the list of scientific clams that religion has overturned is non existent.

Religion makes a claim, Science blows that claim out of the water with empirical, testable evidence, so is it science that then changes. NO its religion that changes.

So honestly, don't mess with science, its gotten us to where we are today

I am a scientist myself and have always considered God to be the head scientist and am sure He gets a chuckle as he watches us other scientist fumble around in the lab, failing over and over again trying discover things He already knows. Every once in a while He inspires someone to succeed in what they are trying to prove. 

[Fair Dinkum]

1 hour ago, CV75 said:

How have you been irrevocably led astray by falsehoods perpetuated by Church leaders?

How?  By trusting in their claims that they actually had some special link to the truth. But now I know that they are just flawed humans with no more access to the truth than I have.  Heck Google has greater access to truth than a general authority does.  GA's have a blind spot, everything is filtered through whatever happens to be the church doctrine du jour at the time in which they make their pronouncements.  But doctrines are fluid and change with time and not really something anyone should build their life on.

I prefer the scientific method of discovering truth. Yes the process is often fraught with jets and starts but science is visible, testable, can be scrutinized and re-tested over and over again and if found lacking it can change and adapt.  It is always leaning towards truth or it is rejected. 

Edited July 15, 2021 by Fair Dinkum

[Fair Dinkum]

6 minutes ago, JAHS said:

I am a scientist myself and have always considered God to be the head scientist and am sure He gets a chuckle as he watches us other scientist fumble around in the lab, failing over and over again trying discover things He already knows. Every once in a while He inspires someone to succeed in what they are trying to prove. 

Perhaps, but He should have told Joseph to boil the water instead of curse the descendants of the imaginary Cain.

[CV75]

3 minutes ago, Fair Dinkum said:

How?  By trusting in their claims that they actually had some special link to the truth. But now I know that they are just flawed humans with no more access to the truth than I have.  Heck Google has greater access to truth than a general authority does.  GA's have a blind spot, everything is filters through whatever happens to be church doctrine du jour at the time in which they make their pronouncements.  But doctrines are fluid and change with time and not really something anyone should build their life on.

I prefer the scientific method of discovering truth. Yes the process is often fraught with jets and starts but science is visible, testable, can be scrutinized and re-tested over and over again and if found lacking it can change and adapt.  It is always leaning towards truth or it is rejected. 

That doesn't answer the question: give me specifics on how you were irrevocably led astray. Ideally, you would address how they led you to abandon ordinances, faith and repentance since I used those as the standard protections against being led astray. But you can use any other example from your practice of the religion.

Heck Google has all the pros and cons of religion vs. science, so let's stick with personal life experience.

[CA Steve]

Have there been any GA level theologians since McConkie?

[JAHS]

14 minutes ago, Fair Dinkum said:

Perhaps, but He should have told Joseph to boil the water instead of curse the descendants of the imaginary Cain.

But he wasn't a scientist and boiling water has nothing to do with gospel principles. And just as we have no proof that Cain existed, you also have no proof that he did not exist.
Religion is all about having faith that things are true without scientific evidence. If you don't have faith you got no religion, which explains your dilemma. 

[Fair Dinkum]

55 minutes ago, CV75 said:

That doesn't answer the question: give me specifics on how you were irrevocably led astray. Ideally, you would address how they led you to abandon ordinances, faith and repentance since I used those as the standard protections against being led astray. But you can use any other example from your practice of the religion.

Heck Google has all the pros and cons of religion vs. science, so let's stick with personal life experience.

Someone gives you directions to a destination far far away.  You follow those directions in ever detail but long into your journey you discover that many of the directions you were given were either false, based on bad information or sending you to a destination that may not even exist.  Do you continue to follow those original directions or do you stop, seek more information and reevaluate the path you are on? I chose the latter.

Edited July 15, 2021 by Fair Dinkum

[strappinglad]

This outlines what I said and at the end says something about what Fair Dinkum said.

Is Most Published Research Wrong? - YouTube

 

[strappinglad]

9 minutes ago, Fair Dinkum said:

Someone gives you directions to a destination far far away.  You follow those directions in ever detail but long into your journey you discover that many of the directions you were given were either false, based on bad information or sending you in a destination that may not even exist.  Do you continue to follow those original directions or do you stop, seek more information and reevaluate the path you are on?

Welcome to the world of GPS . 😁

10 Times GPS Failed With Terrible Consequences - Listverse

Edited July 15, 2021 by strappinglad

[Fair Dinkum]

24 minutes ago, JAHS said:

But he wasn't a scientist and boiling water has nothing to do with gospel principles. And just as we have no proof that Cain existed, you also have no proof that he did not exist.

Actually we do. And just like Galileo who invited the unlearned around him to merely look through the telescope to prove that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around, all you have to do is study the science.  Because we know through evolutionary science also supported through DNA analysis that the story of a first man Adam and his wife Eve created from dust is a myth.  And because we know this it is reasonable to conclude that fictional myths don't bare children, thus we can conclude that the story of Cain and his curse is also a myth.  Perhaps an important story from which we can learn valuable lessons but never the less still a myth.

Edited July 15, 2021 by Fair Dinkum

[mfbukowski]

11 hours ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

You're right, of course, about scientism in general, but you may want to re-check the facts surrounding the person who discovered soft tissue in dinosaur fossils:

 

Schweitzer!   Rah! 👍👍

So glad she has been reading my stuff!  🤪

[Rain]

2 hours ago, Fair Dinkum said:

Honestly I try to walk a very fine line on this board.  I do a lot of self editing so as not to purposely offend anyone ( I do however know that many of my questions in and of themselves do offend by the very nature of the question, but I can't help that)

So let me state it in another way.  My head tells me that the church is not what it claims to be that I was born into a church and a culture that works for a lot of people and did in fact work for me until I started to scratch the surface and pull on the loose ends. But my heart very much wants the church to be everything it claims to be. So I live with this on going mental conflict.  Some days my head wins other day I go with my heart.

I post here to help me sort out the things I ask myself in my head.  I've put more mental effort into investigating the truth claims of the church than into any other thing in my life. 

It's been very helpful to my journey to be able to process my questions here.  I know I've worn out my welcome and I sense the tide turning and at some point I will just move on, but I enjoy having my thoughts and conclusions tested and retested, scrutinized and examined again.  Eternity or the lack there of should be worth the effort

I don't know if it helps or not, but this is what I have felt from you.  I've not felt you were disagreeable.  Just questioning and trying to find the answers.  I wish you luck in finding answers and hope you find peace from them.

[JAHS]

14 minutes ago, Fair Dinkum said:

Actually we do. And just like Galileo who invited the unlearned around him to merely look through the telescope to prove that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around, all you have to do is study the science.  Because we know through evolutionary science also supported through DNA analysis that the story of a first man Adam and his wife Eve created from dust is a myth.  And because we know this it is reasonable to conclude that fictional myths don't bare children, thus we can conclude that the story of Cain and his curse is also a myth.  Perhaps an important story from which we can learn valuable lessons but never the less still a myth.

That does not prove at all that there was no Adam, Eve and Cain and we really don't know what God meant when God said He created man from dust.
Brigham Young said:

"Here let me state to all philosopahers of every class upon the earth. when you tell me that father Adam was made as we make adobies from the earth. You tell me what I deem an idle tale when you tell me that the beasts of the field were produced in that manner. You are speaking idle words devoid of meaning. There is no such thing in all the eternities. Where the gods dwell mankind are here because they are the offspring of parents who were first brought here from another planet and power was given them to propagate their species and they were commanded to multiply and replenish the earth." (Journal of Discourses 7:285-286)

Joseph Smith is quoted as saying:

"Now regarding Adam: He came here from another planet, an immortalized Being, and brought his wife Eve with him, and by eating of the fruit of this earth, became subject to death and decay. . . was made mortal and subject to death." - (Prophet Joseph Smith, Jr., as recorded by Anson Call and copied by Patriarch John Whitmer)

The scriptures tell us that God made Adam's body from dust of this earth(Morm. 9: 17, D&C 77: 12, Moses 3: 7), and placed him in the Garden of Eden as an immortal being with flesh and bone (no blood). The book of Moses states that Adam's children were also created from the dust of the earth (see Moses 6:59). The same expression used to describe the bodily creation of Adam's children was used to describe the creation of Adam's body. So it seems that dust of the earth is more a figurative expression.  Adam is also spoken of as being the "son of God" (Moses 6:22). So is it possible that Adam's immortal body was formed somewhere by immortal heavenly parents in a similar fashion that Adam and Eve created their own children, using the substance (dust) of this earth to grow to maturity?

 

[Metis_LDS]

21 hours ago, Fair Dinkum said:

The Catholic Church being the Great and Abominable Church of the Devil (Oh the fun we had with that one with my Catholic neighborhood friends)

After what this Church has done to my native brothers and sisters who were children in Canada perhaps he was not too far off the mark.  This is not some ancient genocide. the last of these schools were shut down in the mid 1990's.  More that a 1000 unmarked graves so far.  It chills my blood.  There is talk of what really went on in these schools but it is too horrid for to repeat.

[Fair Dinkum]

27 minutes ago, JAHS said:

That does not prove at all that there was no Adam, Eve and Cain and we really don't know what God meant when God said He created man from dust.
Brigham Young said:

"Here let me state to all philosopahers of every class upon the earth. when you tell me that father Adam was made as we make adobies from the earth. You tell me what I deem an idle tale when you tell me that the beasts of the field were produced in that manner. You are speaking idle words devoid of meaning. There is no such thing in all the eternities. Where the gods dwell mankind are here because they are the offspring of parents who were first brought here from another planet and power was given them to propagate their species and they were commanded to multiply and replenish the earth." (Journal of Discourses 7:285-286)

Joseph Smith is quoted as saying:

"Now regarding Adam: He came here from another planet, an immortalized Being, and brought his wife Eve with him, and by eating of the fruit of this earth, became subject to death and decay. . . was made mortal and subject to death." - (Prophet Joseph Smith, Jr., as recorded by Anson Call and copied by Patriarch John Whitmer)

The scriptures tell us that God made Adam's body from dust of this earth(Morm. 9: 17, D&C 77: 12, Moses 3: 7), and placed him in the Garden of Eden as an immortal being with flesh and bone (no blood). The book of Moses states that Adam's children were also created from the dust of the earth (see Moses 6:59). The same expression used to describe the bodily creation of Adam's children was used to describe the creation of Adam's body. So it seems that dust of the earth is more a figurative expression.  Adam is also spoken of as being the "son of God" (Moses 6:22). So is it possible that Adam's immortal body was formed somewhere by immortal heavenly parents in a similar fashion that Adam and Eve created their own children, using the substance (dust) of this earth to grow to maturity?

 

Lets try to put this puzzle together:

But first we will need to agree on some basic assumptions.

01. Where was The Garden of Eden located?

02. Approximately when did your Adam live in his Garden or depart that Garden?

I'll await your reply

EDIT:  On second thought, I don't have time for this.  Sorry but the invitation to look through the metaphorical telescope is still available and I encourage you to take a look.

 

 

Edited July 15, 2021 by Fair Dinkum

[Tacenda]

2 hours ago, Fair Dinkum said:

Honestly I try to walk a very fine line on this board.  I do a lot of self editing so as not to purposely offend anyone ( I do however know that many of my questions in and of themselves do offend by the very nature of the question, but I can't help that)

So let me state it in another way.  My head tells me that the church is not what it claims to be that I was born into a church and a culture that works for a lot of people and did in fact work for me until I started to scratch the surface and pull on the loose ends. But my heart very much wants the church to be everything it claims to be. So I live with this on going mental conflict.  Some days my head wins other day I go with my heart.

I post here to help me sort out the things I ask myself in my head.  I've put more mental effort into investigating the truth claims of the church than into any other thing in my life. 

It's been very helpful to my journey to be able to process my questions here.  I know I've worn out my welcome and I sense the tide turning and at some point I will just move on, but I enjoy having my thoughts and conclusions tested and retested, scrutinized and examined again.  Eternity or the lack there of should be worth the effort

I relate well to this! I actually had a long response to one of your posts, not the opening, and now have lost it due to the boards tech glitches. I guess that's a good thing, haha. I post on here more than any other board and have a hard time with ex mo sites because they don't push back and sometimes I often wonder if some things said aren't entirely fact checked. So I too appreciate this board giving me push back if I'm wrong on something. 

[Chum]

2 minutes ago, Metis_LDS said:

After what this Church has done to my native brothers and sisters who were children in Canada perhaps he was not too far off the mark.  This is not some ancient genocide. the last of these schools were shut down in the mid 1990's.  More that a 1000 unmarked graves so far.  It chills my blood.  There is talk of what really went on in these schools but it is too horrid for to repeat.

How many decades did law enforcement find this monstrous, systemic abuse so uninteresting, they couldn't be bothered to protect even one child?

[pogi]

1 hour ago, Fair Dinkum said:

I know I've worn out my welcome...

Not at all.

My only bit of advice is that with all the searching for fault, mistakes, and reasons to doubt, that you give at least equal room to reflect on all the blessings, positive life lessons, and other fruits that membership in the church has provided you.  Even if you ultimately end up leaving the church, don't leave empty handed or with a chip on your shoulder.  Take with you all the good that came with it.  Be grateful for the good fruits and even find reason to be grateful for the adversity that came with membership too.  Gratitude (even in the adversity or faith crisis) will serve your soul well and lead to more peace and well-being.  Too often I see others in your position grasp onto resentment and anger while standing blind to all the blessings that the church has provided them.  It never seems to lead to peace and well-being.  Be at peace with your roots - let them feed you still.  Be at peace with your culture - even if you disagree with much of it, be grateful for the good.   Look at the BIG PICTURE of Bruce R. McConkie.  Look at his cumulative work.  When you take it all in scope, you will see that there is more to be revered and admired then there is to ridicule and grumble about.  THAT is what I am talking about.  Don't be so overly consumed in the yin that you neglect to see the yang of your roots all around you.  Give equal space to both.  It will better serve you.