Flawed Patriarchal Blessings

[_Gazelam]

"I guess the same could be said about you, Gaz."

How do my comments apply to me?

[_MormonMendacity]

Sorry to hear about that guy. Sounds like he needed to change his attitude and stop seeking after positions.

Hopefully he learned his lesson.

I guess the same could be said about you, Gaz.

How do my comments apply to me?

In order to get some real truth, Gaz, you will need to "...change [your] attitude and stop seeking after positions."

You blindly accept the mythologies written by people you do not know...people dead for thousands of years. You accept biased research for facts, denying reality in favor of mythology. You sound like you're working toward GA. Are you privately seeking positions? Are you hoping for the praise and honor of Men?

The Spirit tells me you are...much like my wife's father. I'm so sad for you and hope you will repent.

[_Gazelam]

Believe me when I tell you , that even a position like Bishop is the farthest thing from my desire.

A position where people would be calling me at all hours of the night with their problems and nonsence sounds like a nightmare. I'm first councelor in the Elders quarum, and I have enough problems with that.

As for choosing "mythologies" written by people I havent met: I have prayed about it, and God himself told me it was true. I have a foundation in absolute knowledge, not postulates and theories.

You should try it sometime, its nice having a foundation.

Gaz

[_Mephitus]

Believe me when I tell you , that even a position like Bishop is the farthest thing from my desire.

A position where people would be calling me at all hours of the night with their problems and nonsence sounds like a nightmare. I'm first councelor in the Elders quarum, and I have enough problems with that.

As for choosing "mythologies" written by people I havent met: I have prayed about it, and God himself told me it was true. I have a foundation in absolute knowledge, not postulates and theories.

You should try it sometime, its nice having a foundation.

Gaz

Consistancy requires you to accept that as an argument from other people.(but i doubt you will)

[_MormonMendacity]

As for choosing "mythologies" written by people I havent met: I have prayed about it, and God himself told me it was true. I have a foundation in absolute knowledge, not postulates and theories.

You do not have an "absolute knowledge", Gaz. Anyone can make the same claim you make.

You don't have an absolute knowledge from this source any more than Kimball and Hinckley knew Hoffman was lying to them or Joseph could "translate". If these guys so close to God could make mistakes...count on this...so have you about your "absolute knowledge".

Read this, Gaz: http://whydoesgodhateamputees.com/

Read it front to back and then explain why god remains invisible, okay.

You should try it sometime, its nice having a foundation.

Gaz

It's not called a "foundation" it's called a "delusion".

(And I just don't see how you can ignore my revelation that you are seeking for position in the Church...I received it from God!)

[_Gazelam]

The fact of the matter is, God can heal amputees.

Luke 22:50-51
50 ¶ And one of them smote the servant of the high priest, and cut off his right ear.
51 And Jesus answered and said, Suffer ye thus far. And he touched his ear, and healed him.

All severed limbs could be restored, if we had the faith to do it. This is merely a matter of power over matter, the same as repentance, and fasting. There is also the issue of God giving us weaknesses to make us stronger, such as in the case of my wife MS. Because of the priesthood blessing I gave her, God halted the progression of the disease, but he did not remove it because he feels there is a lesson we need to learn.

Most members on this board don't even have the faith to receive a simple revelation. Faith and gratitude are what God asks us to show, the miracles come later.

Gaz

[_maklelan]

You do not have an "absolute knowledge", Gaz. Anyone can make the same claim you make.

You don't have an absolute knowledge from this source any more than Kimball and Hinckley knew Hoffman was lying to them or Joseph could "translate". If these guys so close to God could make mistakes...count on this...so have you about your "absolute knowledge".

Read this, Gaz: http://whydoesgodhateamputees.com/

Read it front to back and then explain why god remains invisible, okay.

I'll give it a crack, since it's based on remarkably dim logic. It starts of with several idiotic assumptions:

If God is real and if God inspired the Bible, then we should worship God as the Bible demands.

We're doing our best.

We should certainly post the Ten Commandments in our courthouses and shopping centers,

Why? We don't need to force our beliefs on people who may not share them.

put "In God We Trust" on the money,

We do.

pray in our schools

Why would we need to do that? Different people believe different things. We don't need to force our beliefs on anyone.

and eliminate the theory of evolution from every curriculum.

Why would we want to do that? The theory of evolution is not generally in conflict with God. This author makes several assumptions about religion right off the bat, and they are wrong. This leads me to the inescapable conclusion that the rest of the argument is going to be equally as stupid, but let's give it a shot.

We should focus our society on God and his infallible Word because our everlasting souls hang in the balance.

But our society is made up of individuals who are all equal and who have the right to practice their religion according to their own conscience. Somebody needs a refresher course in Locke.

But how can we decide, conclusively, whether God is real or imaginary?

Since we are intelligent human beings living in the 21st century, we should take the time to look at some data.

Excellent. I have all kinds of good data to share that might surprise you.

That is what we are doing when we ask, "Why won't God heal amputees?"

Wait a minute. This question has nothing to do with data about the existence of God. This question has to do with one person's perception of how God (if he were real) should operate. That's utterly and completely subjective. That's not research, that's philosophy.

Did God actually interact with Jeanna's body, making the impossible happen and curing her case of rabies through a divine miracle?

Or did something else happen?

We can actually answer this question with a simple experiment....

A simple experiment

For this experiment, we need to find a deserving person who has had both of his legs amputated. For example, find a sincere, devout veteran of the Iraqi war, or a person who was involved in a tragic automobile accident.

Now create a prayer circle like the one created for Jeanna Giese. The job of this prayer circle is simple: pray to God to restore the amputated legs of this deserving person. I do not mean to pray for a team of renowned surgeons to somehow graft the legs of a cadaver onto the soldier, nor for a team of renowned scientists to craft mechanical legs for him. Pray that God spontaneously and miraculously restores the soldier's legs overnight, in the same way that God spontaneously and miraculously cured Jeanna Giese and Marilyn Hickey's mother.

If possible, get millions of people all over the planet to join the prayer circle and pray their most fervent prayers. Get millions of people praying in unison for a single miracle for this one deserving amputee. Then stand back and watch.

What is going to happen? Jesus clearly says that if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. He does not say it once -- he says it many times in many ways in the Bible.

And yet, even with millions of people praying, nothing will happen.

No matter how many people pray. No matter how sincere those people are. No matter how much they believe. No matter how devout and deserving the recipient. Nothing will happen. The legs will not regenerate. Prayer does not restore the severed limbs of amputees.

This is the dumbest excuse for an experiment I have ever heard of. A real experiment would address what actually happened to the girl. You cannot determine the cause of one event by testing an entirely different event under entirely different circumstances. This is idiotic, and it also rests on another stupid assumption:

Jesus clearly says that if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.

This makes it sound like this promise is unconditional, and this "experiment" rests upon that assumption, but it's not. We know Jesus was the perfect example, so His prayers should show us the best pattern, and they clearly show that the blessings asked for were contingent upon the will of the Father. Christ didn't always get what he asked for, either:

Matthew 26:39 - O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.{/quote]

God's will is the determining factor, and for whatever reason, He sometimes doesn't heal people. Rather than wondering about amputees, why doesn't the author go and try to find out what really happened with this girl who survived an incurable disease? THe author is obviously not going to try to argue his/her point unless it is on his/her own terms, which shows just how respectable the premise is to begin with.

The article addresses a form of my repsonse above, but it refutes the explanation with a rather weak protasis/apodosis statement:

If God answers prayers as promised in the Bible, and if God is performing all of the medical miracles that we read about in inspirational literature, then God should also be restoring amputated limbs.

There is no explanation of how we get from the protasis to the apodosis, but the author assumes that it is obvious. Not only is this a false inference, but it also includes that word "should." Again, this author is basing a conclusion on what they believe should be happening. The weakest of weak arguments.

Here is another explanation that you might have heard: "God needs to remain hidden -- restoring an amputated limb would be too obvious." We will discuss this idea in more detail in later chapters, but let's touch on it here. Does God need to remain hidden?

This is a reductionist view of the point being made. God requires faith. He tests everyone's faith. What good is a test if the answers are all given to you? It would be counteractive for God to promulgate a plan and then make the solution obvious to everyone. ON a sidenote, if an amputee were healed, authors like this would then find another claim to investigate that will somehow prove that the amputee wasn't actually healed by God. THis is the logic that was shown in the issue with the girl and the rabies. As this author shows, some people would even be beyond a blatant display of godly power.

Key Point
If God intervenes with cancer patients to remove cancerous tumors, then God should also intervene with amputees to regenerate lost limbs.

Another stupid false inference.

The rest of that page addresses points that I would never bring up anyway, so I'm not going to waste my time.

How can we determine whether it is God or coincidence that worked the cure?

THis is an example of an "answered prayer" that is very ambiguous, and might just be a coincidence, but many are not. The author apparently thinks that amputees are the only examples of potentially unambiguous answers to prayers:

One way is to eliminate the ambiguity. In a non-ambiguous situation, there is no potential for coincidence. Because there is no ambiguity, we can actually know whether God is answering the prayer or not.

That is what we are doing when we look at amputees.

The rest of the pages operate under the same pattern: False assumption of beliefs - reductionist view of scripture - false inference - weak conclusion touted as the gospel truth.

By the way, your little diatribe about absolute knowledge may be generally true, but it applies to you as well. The difference is we have experiences that you haven't had, and in telling us what we can and can not know you refuse to accept the conditions of qualia. I'll give you an example. Pretend I'm a blind person who's been blind from birth. Please help me to understand the color red. Until you can explain the experience to me I will refuse to believe that it exists. After all, you cannot have absolute knowledge.

[_Mephitus]

[_Runtu]

Most members on this board don't even have the faith to receive a simple revelation.

Gaz

And how do you know that, Gaz? You know very little about any of us, yet you continue to make uncharitable judgments to excuse the problems that are readily apparent in your belief system. I wonder what it says about your religion that it forces you to make horrible assumptions about your fellowbeings.

[_Gazelam]

I based my statement on personal experience in "speaking" with various people here on the board.

Mind you, some have stated that they have felt the Holy Ghost, but say they "discovered" that at the time they "were obviously deluded" and were having "emotions forced upon them through group hypnosis". I am savagely paraphraseing from memory, but that's what I recall being said.

The promise made by Moroni works for members who are having a crisis of faith the same as it does for non-members wanting to know if the church is true. The entire purpose of the Holy Ghost is to testify. that's his job.

Gaz