Buffalo wrote:Just like not heeding the emotion you feel while watching Serendipity is tantamount to denying the fruits of the spirit.
Or even better, if you're in college and your emotions are telling you to be intimate with your girlfriend, that's the fruits of the Holy Spirit.
Buffalo, have you seriously ever met an LDS person who has said that every good feeling comes from the Holy Spirit?
Don't know about Buff, but I've heard about this dude, Moroni--maybe not a real Mormon--and he thought so. Moroni 10:5--"And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things". Not just some things, ALL THINGS. It must just have been some of that asschatting as a man apologetic tack you guys are so fond of.
sock puppet wrote:Don't know about Buff, but I've heard about this dude, Moroni--maybe not a real Mormon--and he thought so. Moroni 10:5--"And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things". Not just some things, ALL THINGS. It must just have been some of that asschatting as a man apologetic tack you guys are so fond of.
So knowing the truth of all things means, somehow in your mind, that all good feelings come from the Holy Spirit?
Love ya tons, Stem
I ain't nuttin'. don't get all worked up on account of me.
Yep, feel the spirit whenever I watch Remember the Titans, Hoosiers, The Natural and Mr. Hollands Opus. Not so much when I watch The Usual Suspects and Reservoir Dogs.
Just shows how discerning the spirit really is.
"This is how INGORNAT these fools are!" - darricktevenson
Bow your head and mutter, what in hell am I doing here?
infaymos wrote: "Peterson is the defacto king ping of the Mormon Apologetic world."
I know what you mean, zeezrom, but I think some religions/religious leaders are more inclined to maudlin sentimentalism than others. You especially see it in Mormon addresses to the Young Women given the conservative gender assumption that women are more "soft" and emotional. I suppose it also plays a traditional role in other parts of the contemporary church: I'm thinking of Monson's penchant for kitsch stories and poetry.
But not all religions/religious believers buy into this. I daresay it wasn't always a component of Mormonism either. It's instructive to look at church publications from other eras. Reading some of the stories in the Relief Society magazine from the 30's and 40's you might be shocked. These serials are as melodramatic as you might imagine, but their appeal to emotion is equal to their appeal rationality and not everything is solved by pat church responses.
I never really responded to the kind of thing you are talking about when I encountered it in church meetings/publications/events. I was always a total bookworm and had things like the Illiad and Jane Eyre (to use two of your favorites) as points of comparison. There was never anything in the Mormon narrative that was as compelling to me as "literature." When I read T.S. Eliot or James Joyce I felt I was being addressed as an adult even when I was literally a child. In church I always felt I was being spoken to as a child, even when I was an adult. And a lot of that had to do with gender: why was I reading all these books when I was supposed to be devoting myself to diapers and formula? As one Relief Society sister once said to me, "Oh, you just think you want to be an English professor. What you really want is to marry one!"
I know you are having fun discovering things outside of Mormonism, now, zeez. But, to tell the truth, I'm having a lot of fun discovering things in it: of course the best parts are those that seem to have been correlated out of LDS cultural memory. But there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in the COB; and some of that is the bristly and complicated history of Mormonism itself.
(The next time I visit Utah I promise to take you and Mrs. zeez to my spiritual center. I will baptize you near where the wild horses graze and the owls and pelicans fly.)
Last edited by Anonymous on Tue Mar 22, 2011 1:19 am, edited 3 times in total.
From the Ernest L. Wilkinson Diaries: "ELW dreams he's spattered w/ grease. Hundreds steal his greasy pants."
sock puppet wrote:Don't know about Buff, but I've heard about this dude, Moroni--maybe not a real Mormon--and he thought so. Moroni 10:5--"And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things". Not just some things, ALL THINGS. It must just have been some of that asschatting as a man apologetic tack you guys are so fond of.
So knowing the truth of all things means, somehow in your mind, that all good feelings come from the Holy Spirit?
How about giving situation a little logic. All things. That seems to imply, what?, all things. And if something is not true, the human gets a stupor of thought. If it is true, then a burning bosom. Remember, stem, it is canon scripture that it is ALL THINGS.
So the first time I had sex (not yet married, bub), and I felt warm and at peace, you are telling me that was a false positive, not from the HG confirming the truth of my experience. Even though Moroni said this worked as to all things. You, the mighty stem, the one with higher rank in elohim's big striated bureaucracy than even Moroni, have corrected the most perfect book on earth, the one containing Moroni's imperfect words.
stem, maybe you need to out yourself and your in real life identity as BKP.
As for me, stem, I agree with Moroni. The HG told me that sex is true and good.
Joseph wrote:Yep, feel the spirit whenever I watch Remember the Titans, Hoosiers, The Natural and Mr. Hollands Opus. Not so much when I watch The Usual Suspects and Reservoir Dogs.
Just shows how discerning the spirit really is.
The spirit obviously does not have good movie taste. The Usual Suspects and Reservoir Dogs are much better movies. by the way, I was at the first showing of Hoosiers back in 1987, at Sundance Film Festival, in a gymnasium no less. It did not resonate with the crowd the way it did with movie audiences around the U.S. later. I guess it took the spirit a little while to catch on to Hoosiers, or maybe the spirit was boycotting Sundance that year.
Stemelbow, my wife and daughter visited a local Christian kilochurch (not quite big enough to be mega yet, but certainly larger than a dekachurch) not that long ago with a sister-in-law of ours. They really got all worked up by the music, the words, and so forth, and my daughter told me how they ended up bursting into tears and crying with very powerful emotion.
First question: was this the Spirit, telling my then-wavering-LDS wife that this local born-again Christian church was in fact the true church?
Several weeks later, they went again, and I went with them. It was a pretty good time. Other than the insipid message of the music, I enjoyed it (it rocked out reasonably well). I definitely felt the heartstrings being pulled, though my overly-analytical mind probably nipped it somewhat in the bud as, rather than just giving myself up to the emotional manipulation, I recognized it and analyzed it in realtime, instead.
In a subsequent conversation with this sister-in-law, she was trying to convince me that this church has the Spirit, and she needs that, and appreciates that. When I didn't look convinced, she reminded me of the time I went and asked me "didn't you feel that? I know you did!"
I simply asked her if she's ever watched a Hollywood chick flick, feel-good-hit-of-the-summer, or whatever. She said of course. And didn't she ever cry, or feel all verklemmt, get all emotional at some point during the movie? Of course.
Well that's because human beings know how to create situations in which emotional responses will be evoked in others. Hollywood chick flicks are absolute proof of this, and they do it all the time. People have got this "set up a situation where we can pull the heartstrings" thing down, probably literally, to a science.
So I asked my sister-in-law, and I ask you now, if Hollywood proves that human beings are very good at setting people up to feel touched, emotional, inspired, heartstrings pulled, etc., how is it unreasonable to assume that churches, such as the local Christian kilochurch, and the LDS one during its various conferences, etc., do the same thing?
In fact, I continued to my sister-in-law, I absolutely know, 100%, that this was human-created emotion rather than some "Spirit" testifying to me, because part of the message they taught the day I went to the Christian kilochurch included references to Creationism, Biblical inerrancy, and the literal Adam and Eve story, which I know to be false.
Boyd K. Packer himself said that emotion and "the Spirit" are so closely linked that we often mistake one for the other. I can't agree with him, because I am convinced that it's all emotion and other psychological phenomena (eg: euphoric states), and there's no "Spirit" at all! But even within the Mormon paradigm, Packer admits people often confuse the two. So how, other than what I read recently on MDD "when you feel the spirit, you just know", can one reliably differentiate between the two?
Mormonism ceased being a compelling topic for me when I finally came to terms with its transformation from a personality cult into a combination of a real estate company, a SuperPac, and Westboro Baptist Church. - Kishkumen
zeezrom wrote:So many of these marketing engines used by the LDS church make me feel that way. Why? Because they still have the ability to pull my heartstrings just like they did all my life. I can't just turn it off now that I realize the church is not true. But now that I know about their warts, I just feel used when those good feelings are aroused in me.
Does anyone else feel this way?
The Mormon Tabernacle Choir can almost always pull my heartstrings, especially when they sing hymns that are etched in memory. I sometimes go on You Tube and listen to them. It's very inspiring for me at times, but it doesn't in the least make me feel to set foot in a Mormon chapel. Not because I think the Church is "not true", but that behind this beautiful and inspiring music is a "bureaucracy" I abandoned long ago, and never intend to return to. That's the sour note, but it doesn't for me diminish the Tabernacle Choir's "high notes".
I'll listen to anything Mormon I find inspiring, but listening to a stake president yelling that he wants "99% home-teaching" is not something I find inspiring.
sock puppet wrote:Don't know about Buff, but I've heard about this dude, Moroni--maybe not a real Mormon--and he thought so. Moroni 10:5--"And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things". Not just some things, ALL THINGS. It must just have been some of that asschatting as a man apologetic tack you guys are so fond of.
If the Holy Ghost will tell you the truth of all things, why don't Mormons cure cancer? Science cured smallpox. How did religion do with that one?