SeN: "Hope for immortality" is a Useful Salve for Childhood "rape and strangulation."

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Philo Sofee
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Re: SeN: "Hope for immortality" is a Useful Salve for Childhood "rape and strangulation."

Post by Philo Sofee »

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Sat Nov 21, 2020 6:12 pm
MG,

It’s like you don’t have any [vulgarity] clue what the subject matter of any thread is, but you just pop in with some inane [vulgarity] that seems perfectly rational to you and when someone calls you out for the utter retardery you levy on this forum you act shocked and dismayed. Notice I said you act that way, not that you actually feel that way. This troll game you’ve been playing for decades, pretending you’re not an apologist, or being hyper passive-aggressive, or insulting people while simultaneously demanding civility, or finding “nuance” that ends up just being dyed-in-the-wool TBM turbo regressive doctrine is passé. You don’t deserve the kind of consideration you moan about, because you’re a fake asshole who trolls. If the last four years has taught me anything is that compassion fatigue is a real thing, and if you believe for a second people are still about putting up with your [vulgarity] then you can get [vulgarity]. Your mentality is cancerous and when meme’d it’s disastrous for our species.

- Doc
He does that on purpose to get under someone's skin and then come back all innocent like so it makes his points seem more reasoned and valid. It' s clever, but only by half. When I realized this, I was freed of taking much of what he says seriously. He pretends obtuseness in order to trip up, and then focused on that so his silliness is lost in the conversation. It masks his silly theological views, but he still hopes subconsciously we have absorded them so that one day we will all get back into the church. It's one of the Mormon methods.
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Gadianton
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Re: SeN: "Hope for immortality" is a Useful Salve for Childhood "rape and strangulation."

Post by Gadianton »

MG wrote: Teach and require/force humans to not do any evil?
How is using prophetic authority to save lives by asking the Saints to wear masks any more danger to free agency than pleading with the Saints to pay a full tithing?
Social distancing has likely already begun to flatten the curve...Continue to research good antivirals and vaccine candidates. Make everyone wear masks. -- J.D. Vance
mentalgymnast
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Re: SeN: "Hope for immortality" is a Useful Salve for Childhood "rape and strangulation."

Post by mentalgymnast »

Hi Gadianton. In reference to your last post here’s what I was referring to contextually. In my opinion doc was blowing a lot of secular pc hot air.
mentalgymnast wrote:
Sat Nov 21, 2020 4:14 pm
Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Sat Nov 21, 2020 3:08 pm
I just watched a video of a baby impala being ripped from its mother’s womb by a pack of painted dogs, and both the mother and baby impala were eviscerated while conscious.

There may be another life. There may be another simulation to experience. Whatever. But a just god doesn’t create evil, and it doesn’t set up a system whereby one animal must gut another in order to get energy.

If there is a god, it’s terrifying.

- Doc
Teach animals how to be polite and use forks? Teach and require/force humans to not do any evil?

Good luck with that.

Regards,
MG
Lem
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Re: SeN: "Hope for immortality" is a Useful Salve for Childhood "rape and strangulation."

Post by Lem »

Gadianton wrote:
Sun Nov 22, 2020 5:05 pm

How is using prophetic authority to save lives by asking the Saints to wear masks any more danger to free agency than pleading with the Saints to pay a full tithing?
excellent point. An LDS leader told members in African countries that their poverty would be overturned by paying tithing into the (already overflowing) LDS coffers. An LDS leader who tells members that lives will be saved by wearing masks has a far stronger position than that.
honorentheos
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Re: SeN: "Hope for immortality" is a Useful Salve for Childhood "rape and strangulation."

Post by honorentheos »

Mormonism has a morality problem.

On the one hand, it claims morality is founded on laws that are immutable and upon which the blessings of heaven are predicated. Not even God himself can act counter to the laws and rob justice. There is an objective foundation to moral behaviour.

But on the other hand Joseph Smith taught and the membership recognizes, what is wrong in one circumstance may be right in another. Moral behaviour is also subjective? Hmmm.

The result is Mormons are taught that the way to know what is right is to know the rules and follow them. And the prophet is the ultimate guide for knowing the way to do this. And if there is ever a time when doing wrong is actually right? Don't bother trying to gain any kind of independent judgment because that is most definitely never right. Instead, continue to look to the priesthood and they will let you know when it's ok to smash in the head of a ten year boy traveling to California through Utah, or shun a family member who is homosexual, or send your kid to be alone with an adult where that adult is seen as an authority by the kid. Or view US politics as a moral struggle between good and evil.

The destruction it creates in the world by stunting the development of mature moral judgement is a real issue. It means folks will see themselves as being good while doing real harm to others and then seeing the complaint about the harm being done as sin due to it being out of step with the rules. It's a vicious mental feedback loop that is sickening when it in turn causes casualties in the name of God and country. The person caught in that loop isn't capable of seeing it, and is also morally opposed to trying to step outside of it. It would be pitiful if it wasn't also terrible in it's results.
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Re: SeN: "Hope for immortality" is a Useful Salve for Childhood "rape and strangulation."

Post by honorentheos »

Don Bradley wrote:
Wed Nov 18, 2020 5:38 am
Back to the question, why is progress valuable? Because it benefits individual human beings in the future. Since human beings are subjective at the individual level rather than at the collective level, the future humankind who will reap the benefits of that progress will reap it one individual at a time, so to speak. Also, human beings aren't interchangeable.

I think it's wonderful that in the future we will have, for instance, much more reliable medicine and medical care. But it doesn't, for me, somehow make for the fact that my little brother Charles died at 25 from combining the wrong medicines. Nor does it make up for that to my parents, to our other siblings, or to anyone who knew the wonderful person Charles was and the great life he was going to live. I can only imagine how much truer this is for those who've had a child murdered.

There is nothing egocentric about valuing individuals as individuals, especially not when realize that "humankind" is a collection of individuals and that human experience necessarily happens at the individual level, making the individual the locus of value. (In other words, what is of value to humanity is only of value because it of value in human experience, and this experience is always experienced at the level of the subjective organism--the individual.) So to devalue individual human beings would be to devalue humanity itself.

...

From a different angle, in the above you are arguing for a giant backward step in human morality--one in which the individual ceases to matter, so long as the group is benefited--never mind that every group is comprised of individuals and that the locus of experience, and therefore of value, is always individual.

I'm not accusing you of actually holding a deficient view of justice, because I find it hard to believe that you really hold this view even if it's hypothetically laid out in your post above.(If your child were killed, would you really think that everything about this would be made right by the fact that there would be future advances in humankind benefiting (only) other children? Is the Holocaust really morally squared for you if there's future progress so that millions of other men, women, and children aren't herded, stripped, enslaved, and gassed? Whatever you post by way of argument here, I'm going to have to be skeptical that you really believe this.)

So if justice can't really be served simply by future human progress, how do we hope for justice for those who have suffered?

Don
I don't know if Don is still participating, but to me there is an essential dichotomy involved in reality.

Turns out, I do believe the things above about humans as a collective, and the insignificance of the individual in the grander scope of life on Earth as a biological process. We just celebrated a holiday on November 11 remembering individuals who knew Life to be sure is nothing much to lose but gave it at young ages for a greater good and zero assurance they would be open their eyes again afterward. Like it or not, human history is about more than individuals and includes our behaving in ways where the individual loss is our collective gain. Human beings, as eu-social animals, and speaking of us as a species, are the benefitiaries of collective successes and individual failures. It's part of the reality that gave rise to human social instincts and evolutionary advantages that include both biological and cultural evolution. I lean in the direction of E.O. Wilson. 500!years from now none of us will matter to the people who are alive then just as no one alive in the 1600s is really central to the daily lives of our 21st c. COVID and smartphone centric lives today. Yet the choices and consequences of those countless individuals who lived 500 years ago absolutely affect our lives today through the results. When we celebrate the Pilgrams landing in Massachusetts this coming Thursday, we will be grateful they came here and started off the Anglo-European settlement of North America or possible hate on them for doing so...but we will all do so living in a world that IS because they suffered religious persecution in Europe, the Dutch were playing theo-politics with England, etc., etc. We don't know the loves, pain, loss, loneliness, joy, and everything else that makes up any one of their lives in a meaningful way. We don't know this about our parents, really if we are honest about it. And to our grandkids our parents won't likely matter.

But that in no way obligates me to get depressed because a song I love or a poem I adore is the grunting and scratches of primates. I view it as the opposite, actually. Life as a human being is a gift just by being what it is, no special Amazon over-packaging required.

Can I be candid? I think people who can't get that we aren't important in the grand scheme yet can't see why that isn't impactful on how one lives today are caught up in their own egos. All too often it seems to be rooted in discomfort with the fact I, the big ME, is a temporary and fragile thing. We don't even keep our identities over the course of an average human life span yet the fact we can string together memories that place the me today who is miles away from the "me" that was, say, a second grader learning to write cursive and multiplication, and thought the world of things that give me nostalgia-cringe feelings creates an illusion of continuity we want to see go on out into the other direction.

Point being, the meaning of an individual life is substantial but only at scale. Like the relationship between quantum mechanics and the macro universe. The macro world doesn't reflect the weirdness and complexity of quantum mechanics directly yet is what it is because of it.

That's my two cents.
dastardly stem
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Re: SeN: "Hope for immortality" is a Useful Salve for Childhood "rape and strangulation."

Post by dastardly stem »

mentalgymnast wrote:
Sat Nov 21, 2020 12:49 am
dastardly stem wrote:
Tue Nov 17, 2020 4:07 pm
...God knows us so well he places obstacles and puts us through ringers for our own benefit. If we agreed to all of it before the world was, then it was only so because God chose every circumstance and every eventful occurrence for each of us.
Cause and effect. Micro or macro?
dastardly stem wrote:
Tue Nov 17, 2020 4:07 pm
Apparently while spirit intelligence Hitler and Hussein joined the chanting crowds amongst the noble and great ones, they had a spark of devilish intent. God allowed them to march with the throngs because he needed some evil ones else no one would be able to embrace the good, or some such thing.
Don’t we all have that spark of devilish intent? Or godly characteristics? If God has knowledge at the macro level does that entail control at the micro level of individuals doing bad...or good...things? If God is in and through all things cannot He know what evils are being perpetuated before they happen at the micro level of human choice?

May I suggest that we leave things in God’s hands rather than trying to control Him by telling him how to run the universe? 🙂

Regards,
MG
MG are you suggesting that God likely didn't really know how things would play out? He only knew the eventual outcome because he could guess enough about how it would happen? It was that He knew there'd be some sort of Hitler or Hussein but didn't know which individual spirits they would be? An explanation to distinguish between the micro and macro level of God knowing what will happen seems to be excuse making to me. I thought God knew us intimately enough to know precisely what obstacles we need to best enhance us individually? Or God knew us well enough to do things like, save us for the last days due to our own noble and greatness? You seem to think, in an effort to excuse God, that He doesn't really know us individually nor is involved in placing obstacles or knowing whats best. You seem to be suggesting there's no way God could possibly know what made Hussein and Hitler, and yet its obvious circumstance, environment, biology all had to factor in.

Its true there is some major contradiction in scripture on this point. In one sense God never knew most of us. In another only He knows everyone so much He constantly has the perfect assessment of each and every individual, including our thoughts and intents. It makes sense on that point for believers to say I'm going to have my cake and eat it too, and then condemn any questioning with a "how dare you question God". But, let's face it, that's inconsistent. Is God all knowing or is He so obtuse His vision misses the trees in the forest? That is it doesn't matter to him at all how the sheep herd makes it through, just as long as some eventually do wiggle free?
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
mentalgymnast
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Re: SeN: "Hope for immortality" is a Useful Salve for Childhood "rape and strangulation."

Post by mentalgymnast »

dastardly stem wrote:
Mon Nov 23, 2020 2:16 pm
mentalgymnast wrote:
Sat Nov 21, 2020 12:49 am


Cause and effect. Micro or macro?



Don’t we all have that spark of devilish intent? Or godly characteristics? If God has knowledge at the macro level does that entail control at the micro level of individuals doing bad...or good...things? If God is in and through all things cannot He know what evils are being perpetuated before they happen at the micro level of human choice?

May I suggest that we leave things in God’s hands rather than trying to control Him by telling him how to run the universe? 🙂

Regards,
MG
MG are you suggesting that God likely didn't really know how things would play out? He only knew the eventual outcome because he could guess enough about how it would happen? It was that He knew there'd be some sort of Hitler or Hussein but didn't know which individual spirits they would be? An explanation to distinguish between the micro and macro level of God knowing what will happen seems to be excuse making to me. I thought God knew us intimately enough to know precisely what obstacles we need to best enhance us individually? Or God knew us well enough to do things like, save us for the last days due to our own noble and greatness? You seem to think, in an effort to excuse God, that He doesn't really know us individually nor is involved in placing obstacles or knowing whats best. You seem to be suggesting there's no way God could possibly know what made Hussein and Hitler, and yet its obvious circumstance, environment, biology all had to factor in.

Its true there is some major contradiction in scripture on this point. In one sense God never knew most of us. In another only He knows everyone so much He constantly has the perfect assessment of each and every individual, including our thoughts and intents. It makes sense on that point for believers to say I'm going to have my cake and eat it too, and then condemn any questioning with a "how dare you question God". But, let's face it, that's inconsistent. Is God all knowing or is He so obtuse His vision misses the trees in the forest? That is it doesn't matter to him at all how the sheep herd makes it through, just as long as some eventually do wiggle free?
For me the only way I can begin to wrap my mind around God knowing the end from the beginning and everything in between is recognizing that this thing we call ‘time’ is really, in many ways, a creation of our finite minds. For example, after reading a couple articles such as:

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists ... -backwards

https://www.space.com/21675-time-travel.html

One understands that we are so limited in our understandings of time and space. If the God we recognize as creator is able to move through time and space at will is He still subject to the ‘grandfather paradox’? If so, how would that dovetail with free will, etc.? So many questions and so few answers when it comes to some BIG questions. If God is ‘in and through all things’ then yes, He knows the end from the beginning and would also be able to fathom the thoughts and intentions of our hearts.

Would God go back and make it so a Hitler or a Laman and Lemuel were struck down so as not be in a position to cause so much grief and pain?

Grandfather paradox?

Is the thing we call the plan of salvation dependent on the free flow of the natural world?

Just when and where would God step in to the workings of the natural world so as not to interfere with this natural flow of events that results in YOU or in ME?

So many questions. I look for evidence that a creator is revealing himself through his works and creations and then I pay attention. And I personally believe He reveals himself throughout ‘time’ in many ways, means, and ‘disguises’ so as not to blow his cover completely. To some he reveals more of himself than others.

Knowing how little we understand about space time, however, puts me in a position where I feel somewhat comfortable letting God do what he does best.

Run the universe.

Regards,
MG
honorentheos
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Re: SeN: "Hope for immortality" is a Useful Salve for Childhood "rape and strangulation."

Post by honorentheos »

The god of the gaps approach to answering questions works well if one ensures the gaps stay nice and wide. It's a gig, and a gig is a gig is a gig I guess.

Given the god of Mormonism is a material being of flesh and bone whose brain is a collection of resurrected neurons, what makes the relationship of hypothetical Mormon god with space-time different from an observable human being's?
mentalgymnast
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Re: SeN: "Hope for immortality" is a Useful Salve for Childhood "rape and strangulation."

Post by mentalgymnast »

honorentheos wrote:
Mon Nov 23, 2020 8:07 pm
The god of the gaps approach to answering questions works well if one ensures the gaps stay nice and wide. It's a gig, and a gig is a gig is a gig I guess.

Given the god of Mormonism is a material being of flesh and bone whose brain is a collection of resurrected neurons, what makes the relationship of hypothetical Mormon god with space-time different from an observable human being's?
Trying to equate the relationship of the God of the universe with ours as being essentially the same is going to muddy the waters as you are suggesting. Unless, of course, that God is substantially disparate from us except in form. Equating bone with bone and flesh with flesh may sound good on the surface, but it breaks down as you really start to think about it, right? But if bone/flesh are disparate (God and man’s) but same in form, we have something else going on.

Blake Ostler’s stuff is difficult to keep up with, at least for me, but I might suggest this essay:

https://www.fairmormon.org/archive/publ ... en-parrish

Specifically section 1.3

I think that as Mormons we often fall into categorical traps of equating one thing with the other. As though there are only two ways of looking at things. I suppose Mormons are not alone in doing this. Ostler suggests that we need to at least try to dig a bit deeper in looking at the embodiment of God.

Looking at God as having form doesn’t necessarily prohibit His abilities, as creator, to move through time and space and everywhere in between and forwards and backwards, does it? Why are you placing limits on God a priori?

Regards,
MG
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