Flip Side of the Coin

[_palerobber]

more power to you, KevinSim.

if you can just refrain from voting for official discrimination then i have nothing against you or any other believer.

[_cafe crema]

Is a 3B mall enough? Do you know with certainty that that the mall is going to still be around in, say, a hundred years? In a thousand years, or ten thousand will the mall or even Salt Lake City still be there? How is the reduction of the "risk" of urban blight in downtown Salt Lake City beneficial the the welfare of the whole human race? Seems to me 3B could have gone a lot farther in benefiting the whole human race in hundreds of other ways. Why should a mall to fight an imagined urban blight be a better thing than a free health care clinic to cure the actual diseases and relieve the sufferings of real people.

café Crema, everything I do in my life pivots on the assumption that the LDS God has a plan that will span the eternities.

If you think your own personal plan would accomplish more long-range good than the LDS God's plan would, then by all means, usurp that God's position and put your plan in its place. Knock yourself out, and build as many free health care clinics as you'd like. If you succeed, then you will have proven your point. But if in ten thousand years there's no trace of your efforts, and yet the LDS Church is still alive and well (although in 10,000 years City Creek will probably not), then I certainly won't be surprised.

In short you can't answer the question.

[_Nightlion]

Sweet heavens man you are over fifty years old in the LDS faith and you need to defer to me to tell you how one really knows the Lord. You don't see a problem here? The only true church cannot instruct and raise up a single man to know the Lord in the true Biblical sense?

Nightlion, we're mixing up usages of the word know again. I know the Lord. I talk with Him every day. What I asked was how you know that God exists. I asked how you know that the things you experience in your life can't be adequately explained in the absence of any deity at all in the universe.

What ev. I already told you. Put on ears or remain deaf. What ev.

[_Nightlion]

How would you 'find out' you were gay?
(The Church has made it clear that gayness is a lifestyle choice)
That would be like 'finding out' you were driving.

Drifting, how do you come to the conclusion that the Church has "made it clear that gayness is a lifestyle choice"? I don't usually put a lot of emphasis on what Boyd Packer has to say, but he himself said at one point that Church leaders (like the Quorum of the Twelve) frankly don't know the reasons why people turn out gay. That hardly sounds like it's simply "a lifestyle choice."

My guess is that I would find out I was gay by realizing I was more sexually attracted to men than I am sexually attracted to my wife. Hopefully I would have found that out before I got married!

Boyd Packer says he does not know among his fellow key holders who do WHAT? Nothing? No seeking the answer and unfolding the mysteries of eternity? Just dumb stones today, dumb stones tomorrow, dumb stones forever? And you hang on their every world huh? lol

[_KevinSim]

That's fine, I guess, but it means you're not actually seeking for truth (at least on this subject), because you've already made up your mind.

I guess I just don't find the alternative something I can deal with. The alternative is that there is no God, or that there is a God but S/He isn't good, or at least doesn't care enough about us knowing that God's will that we can be sure S/He wants us to make contact. And as far as I can tell those last two possibilities are virtually equivalent to there being no deity at all, since as far as we can tell there probably would be no difference between an amoral deity or a non-caring deity and no deity at all.

But the simple fact is that the work of God must go on, whether there actually is a deity to carry it out or not. Perhaps I should modify that and say that the work of the good God must go on. If there is no good God, then the work of God falls squarely on the shoulders of you, Cylon, me, and anyone else who really thinks s/he has a conscience. If God isn't going to preserve some good things into the eternities, then you, Cylon need to take upon yourself the job of preserving some good things into the eternities. Are you up to that task?

I know I'm not. But I recognize it has to be carried out; I recognize that my conscience requires it to be carried out.

I'll ask you again, Cylon, are you up to that task?

Either you're not making any sense, or I'm just completely misunderstanding what you're trying to say here, because recognizing that there's no way to truly know if God exists does not logically lead to a conclusion that God is directly contactable by humans. If there is any connection at all there you've left out a ton of steps.

Well, I did leave out a few steps, but I think I've filled them in up above. I didn't mean to say that there is no way "to truly know if God exists"; I meant to say that if God has no desire to talk to us when we attempt to contact God, then that God is pretty useless, and is virtually equivalent (as far as we can tell) to no God at all. So if one is going to believe in God, one might just as well believe in a God that does want to communicate with us.

But, I do sincerely appreciate your statement that one can have a conscience without a belief in deity. Many believers just cannot comprehend that.

You're welcome!

[_palerobber]

I think you will find that most don't want to kill themselves.

And yet many of them do kill themselves, you say. Why do they kill themselves? Like I said, if I found out I was gay I wouldn't kill myself. Why do those large numbers of gay Mormons kill themselves?

maybe this will help, from a letter Stuart Matis wrote a few weeks before he shot himself on the steps of a stake center in Los Altos back in 2000:

Feb, 2000
Clay,
At the outset, I’ll tell you that the events surrounding this initiative [Proposition 22] have been painfully difficult for me to endure. Last July, I read online that the Church had instructed the Bishops to read a letter imploring the members to give of their time and money to support this initiative…I cried for hours in my room, and I could do very little to console the grief of hearing this news.
[...]
Apparently, the Church has raised $1 million in support of this initiative. This is so disheartening because I feel that my own peers are attacking me….In July, I realized that I was going to have to endure viewing millions of dollars of television ads designed with one intention in mind: raise fear against gay and lesbian Californians. What’s worse is that this fear campaign has been orchestrated by my own friends.
[...]
Straight members have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up gay in this Church. It is a life of constant torment, self-hatred and internalized homophobia….The Church has no idea that as I type this letter, there are surely boys and girls on their calloused knees imploring God to free them from this pain. They hate themselves. They retire to bed with their finger pointed to their head in the form of a gun….They are afraid of their parents. They are afraid of their bishop. They are afraid of their friends. They have nowhere to go but to lay on their floors curled in a ball and weep themselves to sleep….On the night of March 7th, many California couples will retire to their beds thrilled that they helped pass the…initiative. What they don’t realize is that in the next room, their son or daughter is lying in bed crying and could very well one day be a victim of society’s homophobia.
…. Most of my gay friends (and I) were suicidal at one time in their lives. I have friends who have swallowed pills, cut their wrists, burned their arms, placed bags over their heads. I have friends who have taken anti-depressant pills as if they were candy. Years of internalized homophobia have deeply scared my friends and me. It is only after we began to accept our identity that we have been able to heal our minds.
[...]
Warmly,
Stuart

more here.

and lots more here.

[_KevinSim]

Kevin, that was 36 years ago, maybe they became proxy satans since then???

When I asked God if the LDS Church was true in 1976, one of the prophets of the church that God answered me regarding was Wilford Woodruff, who said that God would not permit that he or any other president of the church would ever lead the Latter-day Saints astray. So by telling me that the LDS Church was true, God was also telling me that the LDS Church would always be true.

[_KevinSim]

You use unusual titles for your God (i.e. good God, LDS God etc.). I assume this means there are other Gods that are not LDS and/or good?

Not really. I'm just trying to differentiate between the deity Latter-day Saints believe in, and the deities that other groups (like Evangelicals, Methodists, etc.) believe in. I'm not trying to say that those other deities actually exist.

[_KevinSim]

more power to you, KevinSim.

if you can just refrain from voting for official discrimination then i have nothing against you or any other believer.

Palerobber, I could probably try to guess what you mean by "official discrimination," but it would probably be a lot more productive if you told me what you mean yourself.

[_Chap]

Kevin, that was 36 years ago, maybe they became proxy satans since then???

When I asked God if the LDS Church was true in 1976, one of the prophets of the church that God answered me regarding was Wilford Woodruff, who said that God would not permit that he or any other president of the church would ever lead the Latter-day Saints astray. So by telling me that the LDS Church was true, God was also telling me that the LDS Church would always be true.

Maybe:

1. You did not get actually through to a deity at all, but just got a burst of spiritual static that your brain misinterpreted.

2. The deity you got through to was not Yahweh but Loki, who had fun setting you up to spend years and pay many tithing dollars as a Mormon.

How do you know that neither of those things happened?

The answer cannot of course be that the entity who answered you said it was speaking the truth (circular reasoning). You need some kind of independent deity-verification software. How do you know that yours works?