NOM

Saw John Dehlin and guest (lawyer) on this issue tonight. Very informative and insightful. The fine is nothing but according to the findings the church leadership had to admit guilt to achieve a settlement. They knowingly lied and broke the law intentionally as stated in the documents. All members ...

A fascinating question. I hesitated to respond because for me the answer is yes. When I was suffering severe depression I did wish I could just cease to be. Yet I wouldn't want to trigger that idea in anyone. Thankfully for me anyway, I got help, and medication and therapy brought me back to a deep ...

To me, there are so many variables that it's almost impossible for someone to try to make sense of someone else's situation. I worked with a couple, both regular decent people, who had been living together happily (according to him) for several years. Then her parents started agitating for them to ...

I heard (read) that "Loud Laughter" is no longer a covenant-breaking act for endowed folks. Ha Ha Ha!!! :lol: :lol: :lol: https://media.giphy.com/media/3orif7aLUehOfdmlXy/giphy.gif But evil speaking of the Lord's pretend anointed is still a no-no, right? https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu ...

2bizE wrote: ↑Wed Feb 08, 2023 2:24 pm Does the slideshow make a beep sound when it is time to move to the next slide?

Does the church try to make it sound like a covenant to wear garments 24/7? Remember wearing garments was only an instruction.

Are you stuck back in the days of the flannelboard?

One of my IRL friends is a researcher in the field of cognitive neurobiology. He presented "This is your brain on God" at TEDxSaltLakeCity in 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocuqguH1OIw The conclusion of video kind of made sense. Like sex, religion fulfills a evolutionary need, but it should ...

So when we use prayer to set goals and ask for help with them, our successes get credited back to that version of reality. And if we fail after praying, the alternate reality has a testing trickster of a god we need to keep believing in. Yes. I used to beg God endlessly to send me confirmation of ...

I think a very simple way to look at it is that the human brain and body are perfectly capable of producing the feeling we call "the spirit" without the need to attribute it to invisible beings. There might be invisible beings contributing to these feelings, but we have absolutely no way of ...

It was enough to convince myself that my eternal salvation was on the line if I didn’t wear the authorized pattern day and night as instructed. But I realized a few things now: 1. I was born in the covenant to goodly parents. 2. I was blessed by a father who held the priesthood. 3. I attended from t ...

So just a little question here. How would you respond when someone inevitably says "the leaders of the church will be held responsible for how they use the funds. We are just responsible to pay our tithing." The scriptures say to tithe to build the kingdom of god on earth. Since the LDSInc ...

nibbler wrote: ↑Thu Jan 26, 2023 7:17 am Do you have to succeed at them or does an attempt count? Like if you tried telepathy but it never quite worked out.

Asking for a friend.

Did you get the message I sent you?

That’s interesting. So do you plant to follow his direction and give the blessings yourself? If they and I had been active at the right time in our lives I would have, but it's too late (in different ways) for all of us. Neither son has had his PB, and I think it's unlikely that they ever will. And ...

Wow. How long is it going to take before the outlaws are "quick to observe" that there are more than one hole in Sis. RR's ears and give her grief over it? I will never forget Lord Bednar's talk on this subject, and how much it's contributed to Mormon judgy culture. In any event, exciting news! I ...

In my Patriarchal Blessing, I was told a few strange things about seeking goals in the high mountains. ... Thou art able to proceed directly by building hanging bridges over the crevices and bends of the mountain sides and thy direction thus remains direct. ... At the end of the blessing, the ...

Unnamed Philosopher maintained that consciousness is a fundamental quality of nature, and that everything in existence possesses it to some degree. Are you sure this wasn't Brigham Young? I seem to remember him having said some very similar things about "intelligence" and how the elements are ...

I only got a score of 3:

• music
• books
• certain people (you know who you are!)

Is a Roomba conscious? It appears to have goals, and to be able to look for and use ways to overcome obstacles. When you touch something hot, and jerk your hand away, it all happens before your brain has any idea about what is going on. So are your reflexes conscious? I could (probably :) go on and ...

You want this discussion to turn into an animal rights fight? Nope. Not at all. What I'm fascinated with and perplexed by is what looks like conscious behavior of things without brains, like the kinesin molecule, organelles like mitochondria, amoebas, sperm cells competing for the prize. Maybe it's ...

I’ve evolved on priesthood blessings. I see them like more of a pep talk. Think of how invigorating a great half time speech by Knute Rockne (think the locker room speech in the movie Rudy). These can be inspirational, give you chills, and make you believe in the cause. If healing blessings really w ...

At one point in my church life I had a reputation for giving "good" blessings. Ironically, it was at a time that my faith in all things LDS was almost completely gone, and I was simply going through the motions, so that if the priesthood I held (and still hold!) were in any way real it was probably ...