The view from 20,000 ft.: the origin of sin

[dantana]

Hmmmm, interesting idea. My "spin" on it follows.

I wonder if god has a quality management program - ISO9001, perhaps - or if the quality control is all at the back end, when it's too late to fix certain errors. So then perhaps the "testing" is to determine which of god's creations he messed up so badly that they are not suitable to be in the top levels of his heaven.

Kind of like the way that the processors on a silicon wafer are designated after being tested: apparently early (pre-8th gen) Intel Core processors all started off as potentially i9 chips. The best performers were sold as Core-i9, the next tier as Core-i7, then i5, and i3. There is no i1 - any chip that isn't at least an i3 might be scrapped - sent to outer darkness, as it were.

[note: the above para is roughly how I understand the process to have worked, but I'm not an expert in this area, so my explanation may be lacking technically. I got some of the details from answers to a Quora question: https://www.quora.com/Are-Intel-i3-i5-i ... ty-control]

Good one malkie. That's really about the only answer there is. It does kinda demote God from God status to spaceman. That's fine. It still doesn't explain why it's the soul's fault for having a lower end processor. That's fine too, 'cause now we can get back to talking about the important stuff like, what the three Nephites are up to just now.

[dantana]

Part of the issue, maybe a big part, is that the leaders in the Church pretend to have more answers than anyone else about the afterlife and why we are here on earth. They put themselves up as Prophets, Seers, Realtors…oooos, I mean Revelators. But over time, with the advent of information at our finger tips, all the Mormon leaders who have claimed such a thing can now be seen to have not been special. To have not known more than anyone else.

Just think about shoulders as an example. Past leaders have involved themselves as authorities on how young women should dress so as not to corrupt the young men. That included the notion that naked shoulders were the equivalent of pornography. We now see that naked shoulders are okay if it’s warm.

They’ve set themselves up to be special, with special insight, but everyone can see (if they want to look) that they are no more special than anyone else. And in some respects they are much worse. I don’t know many people who have wilfully and convolutedly schemed over many years to commit fraudulent financial reporting, whilst simultaneously promoting the idea that being honest is a crucial attribute.

The problem ain’t the members.

Kinda reminds me of the world we're in just now. Trump says something stupid and a bunch of people have to run around trying to fix it up. J. Smith laid out a wagon load of Rocky Road, and 200 years later now his successors are still trying to turn it into Vanilla.

[dantana]

Well, since I couldn't ever get MG2.0 to come over and take a shot at this question, (How did souls create their own hard drive) I went ahead and ran it over at the MAD board. I did get a little bit of push back but, in the end even the most ardent of - test, rate, execute theory fanatics - conceded that it is a bit paradoxical, and agreed to go along as long as I agreed to not blame Jesus for testing them anyway.

So, with that, I believe the peer review portion can now be deemed complete. And so with out any further objections I will go ahead and hire a writer and a parliamentarian to have this added to the canon. (Bible, Book of Mormon, etc.) The gist of it being: Since it is impossible for souls to have created themselves, the age old tradition of testing, rating and sorting them is Kaput.

https://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/76 ... /#comments

[drumdude]

The main difference I see between your characterization and LDS apologists is just that, the characterization. Someone like DCP puts a lot of weepy eyed gloss on the story, embruing it with a lot of vague transcendental meaning he conjures out of thin air. “Isn’t it all so beautiful that these hard drives can be repaired and be together forever in the great storage unit in the sky?”

Say what you did with a tear in your eye, a waiver in your voice, and you can convince a credulous Morgbot that it’s true.

[Physics Guy]

I've read this thread with some interest, because it sounds as though it may be putting a finger on a basic absurdity in Mormon—and at least some other Christian—doctrine.

Thinking about it more, though, I find dantana's idea elusive. It's expressed in metaphors about hard drives and gladiators. That's fine, I like metaphors. The drawback of metaphors, though, is that they can give one an impression that one understands more than one actually does.

Can we re-state this 20,000-foot view in plain, non-metaphorical prose? Can we articulate it bluntly and explicitly, without hand-waving or nudge-winking? What exactly is the point?

I ask this with the expectation that it can be done and that a cogent point will appear. I think dantana is onto something. I do also think, though, that considerable effort will be required to express it clearly and explicitly.

First attempts to do that may sound embarrassingly banal. I wouldn't worry about this. Almost anything sounds banal when it's clearly expressed. That's just because things that are hard to understand well usually aren't understood well, and so are not clearly expressed, and so we associate obscurity with profundity.

[Rivendale]

Well, since I couldn't ever get MG2.0 to come over and take a shot at this question, (How did souls create their own hard drive) I went ahead and ran it over at the MAD board. I did get a little bit of push back but, in the end even the most ardent of - test, rate, execute theory fanatics - conceded that it is a bit paradoxical, and agreed to go along as long as I agreed to not blame Jesus for testing them anyway.

So, with that, I believe the peer review portion can now be deemed complete. And so with out any further objections I will go ahead and hire a writer and a parliamentarian to have this added to the canon. (Bible, Book of Mormon, etc.) The gist of it being: Since it is impossible for souls to have created themselves, the age old tradition of testing, rating and sorting them is Kaput.

https://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/76 ... /#comments

Thanks for that thread. I haven't finished it completely but what I have read I felt like I was in Wonderland. When I finish it I will add more . It reminds me off another post where an apostate of over 20 years went back to church and was trying to reconcile the bizarre tapestry of the rituals. Claim after claim of this wizard that is supremely powerful but with no mechanism as to how he got a leg up on all the other eternal beings.

[dantana]

Physics Guy, drumdude, Rivendale, you guys are great! This is indeed the One True Board. Knucklehead immersion school is fine to visit and for academic studies, but I wouldn't wanna live there.

[Moksha]

The problem ain’t the members.

The Saints can be wonderful people. They constitute what truth can be found in their church.