The Great Tower and the Confounding of the Languages

[OGHoosier]

3 minutes ago, bOObOO said:

Okay, I'm now seeing it as a blend of your point and my point.  In the first place we need to be tempted with an alternate thought to the thoughts of our Father in heaven.  To sin is to choose the thoughts of Satan over the thoughts of our Father.  To yield to temptation with sin as the result of yielding to Satan's thoughts.  Then hopefully soon we will see that we made a bad choice by yielding to temptation and Satan's thoughts, and if our desires are to do good we will not do that again because we will have experienced how that was a bad choice.  So over time we gain a better knowledge of both good and evil, and Satan's thoughts and God's thoughts.  For some it takes a while longer to discern the differences but the end result is that we align ourselves with either Satan or our Father.  We choose for ourselves how we want to become, whether good or evil, like Satan or our Father.  And the catalyst for all of it is a thought from both Satan and our Father or us to choose from.  To sin we need to be tempted with bad thoughts, and Satan gives us bad thoughts just as our Father also gives us good thoughts in this war between Satan and our Father.

Something like that, yeah. 

Also there's a big element of us needing to experience taste the bitter that we might know the sweet, and that includes relationships between ourselves and our fellow man. One absolute fact is that, as we progress on to become like our Father in heaven, we will be hurt by those of our creations who turn from us...a nigh-unavoidable outcome so long as freedom exists. We need to learn how to forgive and how to deal with being hurt. All of this requires that sin exist. So God put us in a world where it is likely to exist and extends to all the way out...but we needed to come here in the first place. 

[Calm]

4 hours ago, smac97 said:

I think it does. 

Scenario A: Let's say that I go into a small corner store and see my favorite candybar there.  However, I also see that the owner of the store is present, and has convex mirrors and security cameras set up throughout the store.  And the owner saw me enter the store and is watching me browse.  There is no way I could pilfer a candybar without being immediately caught.  And I also know that the owner has zero patience for shoplifters and demands prosecution of them.  Knowing all this, I take a candybar from the shelf, pay for it, and leave.  

Scenario B: Now, let's say that the next day I go into another small corner store a few blocks away.  The owner is there, but he's fallen asleep in his chair.  And I know for a fact that he does not have any security cameras.  Nobody else is there.  A display in the store has a huge stack of my favorite candybar.  Over a hundred of them.  And I also know that the owner is independently wealthy, and only runs the store for nostalgic reasons.  He doesn't need the money, and would never miss one candybar if I pocketed it and left.  Nevertheless, I leave a pile of change at the register with a note telling the owner it was for a candybar, then I walk out.

I ostensibly exhibited "ethical" behavior in both instances, right?  Except in Scenario A I had no meaningful choice.  I knew I would be caught if I tried to steal.  But in Scenario B, I could have gotten away with it, and yet I still did not do it.

Compulsory ethics are, in my view, illusory.  Where there is no meaningful choice to be made, there is no ethical question.

Thanks,

-Smac

If you are the kind of person who would not do it if no one is watching, aren’t you the kind of person who is not impacted significantly in that way when others are watching?

Is that the whole point of the quote…knowledge or lack of knowledge makes no difference, ethical behaviour always occurs in an ethical person?

For some it may be harder to make the ethical choice when no one is watching, but given a particular scenario there could be many who would never make the choice to steal. I have never shoplifted in my life. Never had occurred to me to try either. There is no appeal to it (never not had money to buy what I wanted as an adult so that may make a difference in level of temptation for me).  The idea that the experience is different for me just does not work since it is not fear of being caught that is my motivator but my desire not to harm others and not to take what doesn’t belong to me.  Not saying this to brag as the attitude was most likely given me by my parents. I have no awareness of ever feeling different. 

Edited August 12, 2021 by Calm

[bOObOO]

2 minutes ago, OGHoosier said:

Something like that, yeah. 

Also there's a big element of us needing to experience taste the bitter that we might know the sweet, and that includes relationships between ourselves and our fellow man. One absolute fact is that, as we progress on to become like our Father in heaven, we will be hurt by those of our creations who turn from us...a nigh-unavoidable outcome so long as freedom exists. We need to learn how to forgive and how to deal with being hurt. All of this requires that sin exist. So God put us in a world where it is likely to exist and extends to all the way out...but we needed to come here in the first place. 

With our Lord as our exemplar, though, I wonder how much we need to learn to tolerate sin.  Enough to try to help those who sin but not enough to let them live in our own house if they choose to remain in sin, I think.

At some point those who sin and those who do not are going to be separated from each other.  And either our Lord or our Father, or maybe the righteous among us under their direction will be handling that work of separation.

I don't like to tolerate sin.  I abhor it.  I want my own home to be a home where righteousness prevails, with all who live in it like-minded with me and our Father in heaven.  So while we may be surrounded by those who sin now, it will not last forever.  At least not in my house.

[mfbukowski]

2 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

I do agree that knowledge of God does not take away one's agency. We see this from the fact that Satan and a third of the host of heaven rejected God even though they presumably were more familiar with Him than we are now. 

I would argue that public "empirical verifiability" of God would still render impossible many types of experiences which people need to have in this life, and I do agree with @smac97 that the threat of certain retribution cheapens choice. It doesn't do away with agency but it does cheapen it, and in any case we need to learn to be good independent of certain retribution, because in the eternities we will be Sovereign. 

I'm going to say something that might be controversial. I think sin is a critical part of the experience of life. The experience of sin, that is, not the commission of it. I find the opposition cosmology of 2 Nephi 2 to be the most probative philosophical commentary in all of scripture. If there is to be good, evil must be experienced. If there is to be right action, wrong action must also be known. Reacting to the sins of others and repenting of our own are often phenomenal providers of growth, and if one of the principal attributes of Godhood is a supremely merciful nature, it seems that we need to have experience with mercy and justice, which can only occur in the presence of  wrongdoing. God needed a world where we would all be in close proximity with sin, where sin would not merely be possible but nigh universal...save for One, who is in His person the key out of the prison of evil in which we live. If God were obviously present to all, I doubt that a lot of that kind of experience would come to pass. 

Yes, and that is doctrine, to clarify for non LDS Christians.

And so it is controversial I think, to Creedal Christians, but not of course to LDS.

The wages of sin are death, yet we can "pay the debt" through repentence, but in the end we are ultimately saved by GRACE, after we have repented after we have done all we can to make it right.

Just a clarification for other Christians not familiar with our doctrine.

[Hamba Tuhan]

17 hours ago, Fair Dinkum said:

It is the magical things claimed to have occurred there that I do not believe actually happened or took place.  For me it is just one of the many fracture points to my faith in the Book of Mormon as an actual historical record.

So you find it difficult to accept a book that was (1) revealed by an angel and (2) translated using various stones because the text mentions possibly 'magical things'? It sounds to me that maybe scripture is just not really your kind of thing full stop, considering that it usually involves a god or two?

On 8/12/2021 at 1:43 AM, Fair Dinkum said:

Amazing how miracles seemed to have disappeared in the age of the iPhone and verifiable evidence.  But that doesn't stop believers from still proclaiming miracles it just stops them from being verifiable. 

I suspect this is one reason why we often speak past each other. I live in a world filled with miracles; you choose not to.

Do want to pick a miracle and tell me precisely how you would verify it?

On 8/11/2021 at 8:00 AM, Fair Dinkum said:

But even BYU linguists accept that languages evolved over 10's of thousands of years and certainly not at a central point in the middle east/Asia minor.

When I was completing my master's degree, I accompanied a linguist from one of America's Ivy League universities on a research trip to a small farming village on the far side of the island, where native speakers of the local language had dwindled to eight elderly people. The purpose of the research was to clarify/extend some data to be fed into a computer as part of the 'Proto-Austronesian Project'. Linguists working across the Austronesian-speaking world were doing this in order to try to recreate Proto-Austronesian by meticulously analysing its surviving daughter languages. In the past, this analysis would have been done by hand, and a single researcher would only have contributed to the comparison of maybe two or three languages. Computers, of course, have changed that.

On our way to the village, this linguist told me excitedly that work was being done on a number of proto- languages using this method, and a new goal had emerged: analysing the relationships amongst all of the world's disparate languages. Work on this project had already started, and he said the early results were unexpected. Languages, he said, seem to be much more closely related than previously believed, with a diversion point of only about 6,000 to 10,000 years BP.

I asked this researcher what he made of that. He said no one knew, and he didn't know if the analysis would hold up with more data or not anyway. In the meantime, one theory was that a single language had spread out of the Near East 6,000 to 10,000 years ago as agriculture spread from the same region. I'd love an update at some point.

Quote

Nope didn't happen.

You are a very certain man.

[OGHoosier]

3 hours ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

When I was completing my master's degree, I accompanied a linguist from one of America's Ivy League universities on a research trip to a small farming village on the far side of the island, where native speakers of the local language had dwindled to eight elderly people. The purpose of the research was to clarify/extend some data to be fed into a computer as part of the 'Proto-Austronesian Project'. Linguists working across the Austronesian-speaking world were doing this in order to try to recreate Proto-Austronesian by meticulously analysing its surviving daughter languages. In the past, this analysis would have been done by hand, and a single researcher would only have contributed to the comparison of maybe two or three languages. Computers, of course, have changed that.

On our way to the village, this linguist told me excitedly that work was being done on a number of proto- languages using this method, and a new goal had emerged: analysing the relationships amongst all of the world's disparate languages. Work on this project had already started, and he said the early results were unexpected. Languages, he said, seem to be much more closely related than previously believed, with a diversion point of only about 6,000 to 10,000 years BP.

I asked this researcher what he made of that. He said no one knew, and he didn't know if the analysis would hold up with more data or not anyway. In the meantime, one theory was that a single language had spread out of the Near East 6,000 to 10,000 years ago as agriculture spread from the same region. I'd love an update at some point.

That's wild. You wouldn't happen to have any more resources on this or  a point in the right direction, would you?

[Tweed1944]

Paul Seeley argues that there were already many languages spoken in the world. 

https://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/ted_hildebrandt/otesources/01-genesis/text/articles-books/seely_babel_wtj.pdf

c

[Hamba Tuhan]

On 8/14/2021 at 1:30 AM, OGHoosier said:

That's wild. You wouldn't happen to have any more resources on this or  a point in the right direction, would you?

None. I totally lost contact with the researcher; I expect he may be dead now. And I don't even know what became of the Proto-Austronesian project.

It's funny. He had already mocked me for being a member of the Church, so when he told me about the early results, he immediately warned me away from reaching any faith-affirming conclusions. That seemed to be his primary concern.

[Hamba Tuhan]

11 hours ago, Tweed1944 said:

Paul Seeley argues that there were already many languages spoken in the world. 

I think that's a given.