Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
The bishops whining about this is really retarded. Their businesses are probably something like selling Tahitian Noni juice or something. I could see them offering an alternative like a stake activity day at This is the Place Park or Hogle Zoo, but not passing out flyers on the wondrous natural health benefits of the WoW-friendly Tahitian Noni fruit and inviting the stake members to a seminar instructing them on the products. That would be like having the dessert cart brought by your table, and your mother getting offended and pulling a stick of gum out of her purse and demanding that it be put on the cart and promoted as well as the other deliciously decadent-looking delicacies. Lagoon is a fun park, and so perhaps going to Boondocks may be a possible alternative, but when people start whining that the church should allow them to promote their own businesses too, that’s just apples and oranges. It has nothing to do with the price of rice in China. It isn’t about promoting a business, it is about promoting a common activity. I know wards organize canyon trips and go to campgrounds and picnic areas for activities all the time. As for the kids pressuring their parents, well, I have no kids, so I have nothing to say about that.
It seems to me that you are coming to understand the significance of the admonition of the D&C to “seek learning by study, and also by faith.” I too was irked by that political phrase being wormed into General Conference as general instruction for millions of people to hear. Every November the First Presidency encourages people to vote, but does not take any political stance or encourage anyone to vote according to any church-wide political endorsement. So when a church leader takes time in General Conference to use a political phrase like “social justice”, I think it muddies the waters a bit. Perhaps he doesn’t realize how much of a political term that is. Maybe it is something he heard about on the news one night and said to himself, “now there’s a phrase that sums up this idea under a concise and neat label.” Really, the term “social justice”, broken down, doesn’t mean anything more than what is right for all of society. It’s not a bad phrase, or idea, but it is a politicized phrase because it carries with it attached to a thick political chain images of socialism, universal healthcare, etc.
I would be just as irked if Elder Eyring were to use the Tea Party phrase “career politician”, or the left-wing phrase “migrant worker”. Politics and religion are gas and fire. I prefer not to mix the two. I choose to let my religion govern my morals and my politics to govern my ethics. And I don’t need to be told which way to vote.
So that’s why it bothers me, is because the church preaches so ardently against taking political stances, and then a general authority uses a strictly political term.
The pillars of my faith have been changed dramatically in the last year. Since the crisis of my faith, I stripped down my beliefs to what I truly believe in. The pillars of my faith are: 1. Believe in something bigger than yourself (God).
2. It is better to help others than to hurt others.
3. Try to leave this world better than you found it. Live your life so that when you die, people will have reason to mourn rather than rejoice in your riddance.
I don’t know what pillars others have, but as I tore down my irrational Tower of Babel I found great peace in building my beliefs on this firm foundation.
Church is boring when it doesn’t interest you. That I know from personal experience. I used to do the notebook thing. I’d sit throughout all 3 meetings and re-write the lessons and talks as they should have been given, not as they were. I have a few notebooks filled with some really good talks all referenced with scriptures and everything and full of true Gospel. I stopped going to church when I realized that I was having to make corrections to every talk and every lesson every week. That’s when I realized that I wasn’t being taught truth that would make me a better person. Maybe I’ll find another purpose in going to church someday, but for now, I find myself on the outside, and not looking back. I haven’t removed my name from the records, and I don’t intend to. I guess I am just what TBM’s call “inactive”. I don’t think I have it right in treating Sunday like an ordinary day, though. I think I would do well to go to the mountains or devote the day to something more spiritual in nature than yard work, or house cleaning. I think, ideally, it SHOULD be a special day. As for your drinking buddies, I don’t really know what to tell you. I don’t know where you are from, and I have never drank before. I have been pressured to drink when in company of drinkers, but they usually back off when I tell them alcoholism runs in my family, and I have problems enough without adding that gas to the fire. That usually shuts them up, because they all know alcoholics, and they don’t want to be the one responsible for turning me into one.
I usually order ice water, and find people to socialize with who are social drinkers and not looking to get smashed or wasted. For other activities, like a movie or the theater, I would seek out a real true buddy. Find someone who you get along well with and someone who doesn’t have hands permanently shaped like a GI Joe’s waiting in that grip position for the next drink to be inserted. They don’t come easy, but it helps if you try to be that sort of friend to them first.
When I was in grade school, I had a lot of bullies. My parents never moved me to other schools, and I’m glad now that they didn’t. I learned to get along with people because of that. If I had just picked up and moved to a different school, then I would have been running away from people I don’t get along with all my life. Instead, I learned to schedule my classes different from my bullies, and on the rare occasions that I saw them in the halls, I would avoid and ignore them, though they wouldn’t always avoid or ignore me. It’s kind of the same way at social gatherings. You introduce yourself to lots of different people and learn who the boasters are who talk loudly because they think they are the most important person in the room, and off along the walls and in the corners you find the people who are usually nice, but shy people who would love a friend to talk to and don’t want to be in the firing line of one of the loud-mouths. Those are the people who are fun and interesting. Still waters run deep. Good luck to you in dealing with the social drinkers.
This post is interesting to me because I am 28 and not dating anyone. It was funny to me when I was attending BYU that Elder Oaks did a YSA fireside on dating and trying to prod us singles into going on dates and not “hanging out”. So when I read that your daughter is “hanging out”, I am amused that this is exactly what Elder Oakes doesn’t want singles to be doing because there is no intent or commitment in hanging out. He said the popular trend at BYU was for a dorm of girls to bake cookies to intice a dorm of boys to come over to eat them. After that, the boys would leave having eaten the cookies, and possibly snuggled in front of a movie with one of the girls. He actually defined a “date” for us. Dating is:
1. Planned ahead of time.
2. A formal invitiation.
3. An activity in public where the two can interact. Not in the apartment.
4. He walks her to her door when the date is over.
So based on what you have described, clearly, according to Elder Oaks, she isn’t dating. Otherwise the young man would be calling her up and asking her out for an activity and dropping her off at the doorstep when returning her home. So tell that to your ward gossip alliance.
Sad, isn’t it, when the church stifles young people from dating in their early teens and has to cattle prod them back into dating in their mid-late 20’s? This kind of reminds me of some female friends who have expressed sexual frustration at inhibiting all their sexual urges up until marriage and feeling dirty on their honeymoon and after because it had been so ingrained in them that sex was a bad thing. There needs to be some reform in the way the church deals with dating and chastity.
Brian is right, when I was serving my mission, I don’t think I ever had a single good day in 2 years. I looked at the misery I was suffering with some spark of hope to think that there was a certain amount of misery that had to be shoveled out onto the shoulders of the people of this world everyday. And every pound of misery I carried on my shoulders was a pound a brother or sister wouldn’t have to. I was very wrong. Misery is not a celestial chicken feed that God keeps next to the back door of heaven so every morning he can open the door and measure out the misery we need for the day and toss it randomly down to us for our consumption. He never once said that we had to be miserable. He said we must “suffer long” and “endure all things”, but He never said “and be miserable as you take your share of crap that makes up life.” I do remember many words about “my yoke is easy and my burden is light”, and “men are that they might have joy”, and “joy and rejoicing”. I don’t want to grimace my face when I fast, or pray for hours on a street corner with a phylactery on my forehead for everyone to see.
If I could go back and do it all over again, it wouldn’t be about BOLDLY declaring the truth of our message no matter who it pisses off. It wouldn’t be about working hard in the suffering of my tormented soul. It would be about rejoicing with people. My friend served what I like to call the perfect mission. He went about doing good and teaching people about Christ. And his numbers were always the highest in the mission as a result, because he wasn’t about doing his time and working hard. He was about rejoicing with people and sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ with them. That’s a much better way to be.
Congratulations! You have grown from being a big fish in a little pond, or a big Kahuna on a little island to being a little kahuna on a big island! Okay, maybe that is as clear as mud, so let me expound: You have out-grown the little island, as wonderful as it was. Just like a mother eagle kicks her eaglets out of the nest so they can grow and fill the measure of their creation in this big world, we must leave our nests too when we are grown enough to fly. We may not feel like we are ready and wish we could stay in this safe, comfortable nest that we’ve known for so long, but in the end, it is for our own good and growth to leave the nest.
Lest anyone think I am telling people to leave the church, let me further explain:
This island, or the nest, or the little pond, is not representative of the church, but the stages of faith, or schools of thought. When we are ready to learn and grow, it won’t do for us to return to where we have been, no, we must expand our knowledge and spread our wings. We must continually broaden our horizons. We must continue to grow!
I was going to suggest a singles ward, but you said that the next ward is 30 miles away, so I guess you don’t live in Utah or anywhere that has a high enough density of mormon populous to provide a singles ward. I shouldn’t even recommend them anyways, since I don’t believe singles wards to be a divinely inspired program. That all being said, I don’t know how loud or distracting it really is in your ward, but I find that if I close my eyes and try to put myself in a proper mood, then all the distractions don’t seem to bother me as much and I can better relax and enjoy whatever situation I am in. I guess some people call this meditation. Apart from that, I think you are just going to have to make the best of it, but a little creativity couldn’t hurt. I’m sure there are some people on here that have far better ideas on how to change the ward than I do. Ray and Euhemerus have some good points in this post. 1.Who we are in this life is the same person we will be in the world to come. (Ray)
Personally, I don’t know, but I believe that death will be less of an event than a lot of people imagine it will be. I could be wrong of course, but I don’t imagine death being a great release of character flaws and weaknesses from which we rise out a perfect and flawless being. Instead, I imagine death will be a matter of laying down in a tired old body, or whatever condition our body is in when we die, and when we get up again, we don’t have a body anymore. There is a release, but only from the aches and pains of having a physical body. We still have all the quirks we had when we died, and all the desires, and flaws, and weaknesses. The only difference is we won’t have our physical body any longer.
2.We should focus more on what we can do in this life than what we can or can’t accomplish in the next. (Euhemerus)
I have stated in other posts that I don’t think anyone really “knows” what happens after we die or whether or not there is a God. But it is far better to live our lives as though there is a God and find that when we die there isn’t any afterlife, than to live our lives as though there is no God and find that after we’ve died there really is one. What we do in this life will either make this world a better or a worse place. And it is far better to give people a reason to miss you when you are dead than to wish you were dead already.
As for your talk, Hawkgirl, I wish you luck. I would offer some stories that I developed myself while I was on my mission to help illustrate the process of the Atonement and Repentance, but I’m not sure you wouldn’t find them to be as valueless as the mediator story, which I agree is also an abomination to the principle of repentance and atonement. I side with you on focusing more intently on the principle of “at-one-ment”.
Why do we need Atonement? In reading the BoM one morning on my mission 10 years ago, I came across 2Nephi 7:1 (at least I think that’s the reference. It is in the first verse of an early chapter of 2 Nephi for sure, right column, toward the top of the page, and I’m pretty sure it was on the right page too) It seemed like Christ was asking us “to whom have I sold you?…ye have sold yourselves [because of your sins]” I understood the Atonement as it really was that day because we all sell our souls to damnation every time we sin. I pondered on that scripture for a while and let my imagination conjure up this one and only story I will share with you:
Imagine a carnival has come to the edge of your town, and from your house you can hear the music, and the bells and whistles from the games, and the laughter and cheering from the patrons of the carnival. You become so excited, even though you don’t have very much money that without grabbing your purse, wallet, or any money, you just dart out the door and down the street. A man is standing at the entrance gate to the carnival. There is a large fence topped with razor wire surrounding it, but you think nothing of it since you are so excited to see what is inside this carnival. You talk to the gate keeper, and ask him if you can just go in and look around. He chuckles and says, “Of course you may come in! Everything in this carnival is yours for the taking, all the rides, the games, the prizes, even the food and drinks are all FREE!”
It sounds too good to be true, and you know there are other things you should be doing instead of playing in a carnival, and you know it is wrong to just assume he is telling the truth, but it’s all so enticing, that without much consideration, you give in to the temptation. So you run into the carnival, ride a few rides, play a few games, and stuff yourself with wonderful carnival junk food and the day passes with little consideration for the consequences of wasting a day at the carnival. You come to realize, in time, that it has gotten dark, and as soon as you realize how dark it is, the lights and the rides in the carnival all shut off. And it gets cold. You make your way back to the entrance to go home. And there stands the gate keeper who looks not nearly so jolly as you remember. He is very scary, and as you approach, he says, “Alright now, time to settle your bill. You’ve had a wonderful time, and now it is going to cost you.” In your defense, you remind him that he told you everything in this carnival was free, but he laughs at you and shoves a bill in your face. The entry fee alone is so expensive that you’ll never have enough money in a lifetime to pay it. And every ride and every snack is equally as expensive. You didn’t know anything in this carnival cost anything, but it does, and you’ll never be able to pay it ever again since you didn’t bring anything of value into the carnival anyway, not that it would have helped pay off such a great sum. Scared, you fall to your knees and beg for help from above. And immediately the grace of God frees you from the awful prison you have found yourself in. You go home, and every once in a while, you find yourself back in the same carnival perhaps a different ride or a different game, but the same carnival, and it always gets dark, but as often as we repent, the Lord forgives us.
Repentance means after you get our of the carnival, you avoid going back in because temptations always tell us that the rides are free and the entry to the carnival is free, but temptations are lies. Sin is fun, and attractive and desirable, but it isn’t right, and it certainly isn’t without consequences. When we do wrong, we need to change our ways, but the price of our sins still needs to be paid. Repentance doesn’t balance the scales of justice, punishment does. Payment for sin (punishment) can only come from one who hasn’t sold themselves to sin, and therefore is not bound by sin (Jesus Christ). If we commit sin, then we belong to sin, and we don’t have the ability to free ourselves. One who is sinless must pay the price for us to free us from our sins. What He asks of us is to have faith in Him enough to repent and be baptized and enter into all the other covenants and ordinances. By accepting these covenants, and partaking of His grace, we come to be at-one with God. Without that at-one-ment, we would be forever trying to repent to receive forgiveness without ever being able to find it since we have entered into sin and God cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance. So all sin, great and small, keeps us from God. And that At-one-ment brings us back again to God.
Since you may want to avoid references to sin in your talk, I also think it is important to remember that the Atonement also covers our infirmities and weaknesses and illnesses. Those things certainly get glossed over in most Atonement talks. But repentance, seems to be a direct reference to sin, since we don’t repent of weakness or being sick. So good luck with that one. You may reference repentance while focusing on the Atonement, so I’d be interested in seeing what approach you take to this talk.
I’m not sure what the ponds would be in my analogy, but it seems like we go from being a small fish in a big pond to being a big fish in a small pond, then we get moved to an even bigger pond with even bigger fish, and once again we feel like a small fish in a big pond again. Maybe the ponds represent James Fowler’s Stages of Faith, maybe they represent the developmental stages of life (i.e. childhood, adolescence, adulthood, etc.), maybe they represent something else, but the point is that I think as we grow and develop, we see the world differently. So to sum up, I think the Church has indeed shrunk in your mind, and the minds of many other people here. Or maybe it would be more correct to say that the church hasn’t shrunk, but our minds have grown. So much easier to say than to do. It takes practice to become so genuine and authentic. One of my favorite quotes from Shakespeare is “this above all: to thine own self be true.” That being said, I’m not perfect in being true to myself, but I do work at becoming so. One day it would be nice to be able to talk to anyone from any walk of life and be the exact same person with them as I am when I am alone. That’s one goal I am working toward. Old-Timer, once again you have brought into the light an aspect of truth and wisdom. It is very important to accurately understand ourselves. Christ wasn’t a proud man, but he was still confident. Could you imagine someone telling Jesus how marvelous it was of him to cleanse that leper and hear him say in return, “Oh, it wasn’t so much. Anyone would have done it if they knew how…”? I rather imagine He would have used the opportunity to teach a valuable lesson as when he told the parable of the good samaritan. I don’t think He would have boasted of himself either. He did acknowledge His divinity and what His mission in life was, but he didn’t go around making a fuss out of it. Didn’t he tell the blind man to tell no one he was healed? Still other times he told others he healed to go show themselves to the high priest. It really is important for us to acknowledge what we are and what we are not. We may offer our services to those who could use them whether that be our woodworking abilities to build a shed or our cooking abilities to help a family who has had a hard time. I don’t know how many of you have heard the story of the family who was getting ready for a funeral and one neighbor came over and shined the shoes for the whole family. That is a good example of using our talents, be them what they may, to help others. Now, it would not be helpful for me to offer to sew a prom dress for my neighbor’s daughter, because I can’t sew that well, but when I see their dad broke his arm, and the snow sitting on their sidewalk, I can run over and shovel his walk after I’ve finished mine. Someone else can sew the prom dress. I can do what I know how to do.
I remember when I was a little boy, the ward had an activity where every family in the neighborhood got together and split up into teams. Each team took one block, and went from house to house finding projects to work on. At one house, all the men took their shovels, and chainsaws and trimmers and cleaned up the shrubs and trees outside, and mowed the lawn. All the women went inside with their scrub brushes, and sponges and cleaning solutions and washed the walls and windows and cleaned the kitchen. The whole project took about 2 hours with so many hands working together, and when it was done, we all went to the church for an ice cream social. That’s one of my favorite ward activity memories I have. Everyone did what they knew how to do, and some people learned new skills in the process. It was a good way for everyone to use their talents in a modest way. It wasn’t about picking on the dirty houses in the neighborhood, it was about helping those who needed it.
It is a good thing for me to pick up my rake and go help my neighbor rake up his leaves, but not for me to stand over the fence from him and tell him how good I am at yard work while he toils in his own yard after a long hard day in an office cubicle. It’s also not good for me to see him working so hard, knowing I have the time and the knowledge to help him get the job done faster, and pretend not to notice him working in his yard as I sneak into my own house. He can refuse my offer, and probably will, but it would be easier for him to accept my help if I just quietly showed up in his yard with my own rake and just started working alongside him. That isn’t being “puffed up”, that’s just being neighborly.
I don’t know that I’m as good at this as I should be, but I know it’s the right way to be. I guess we’ll both have to work at acknowledging our strengths and our weaknesses as well, Ray.
These things you are putting away are no longer things you value. They don’t reflect who you are or your beliefs anymore. It’s perfectly normal to get rid of things just as you would get rid of a Teletubbies poster when you reach the 3rd grade. You aren’t into the Mormon Culture anymore, so it changes. I still want to get a picture of Christ in my house that paraphrases Matthew 13: “I never said it would be worth it, I only said it would be easy.” Mostly as a slap in the face to the other fabricated picture we’ve all seen so very often on TBM walls. You will notice that the way a person decorates is very revealing about the way they see themselves and the way they believe. We’ve all been into a standard TBM household. There is going to be church-approved artwork, lots of right angles, and pictures of the Mormon Jesus as well as family pictures. In my Mom’s house she has reflexive quotes all over the walls. Sayings like, “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care”, or “Sometimes the Lord calms the storm and sometimes He calms the sailor.” I’ve grown to loathe such statements. But I digress.
The point is that anyone who no longer views the Work and the Glory as valuable or valid reading will strike it from their shelves. On my shelves I still have the Storm Testament series because it was the first books that ever turned me on to reading. I still have a copy of The Singles Ward movie, though I can’t stand it. Why do I keep these things? Because they are a part of how I came to be who I am today. I have one picture on the living room wall in my house, and it isn’t the temple. It is the last page of the children’s book “You Are Special” where Punchinello is walking out the door and a dot sticker falls to the ground. I had it blown up and framed about a year ago to remind me that it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks of me.
I have a few pictures of my family throughout the house, but as I’ve stripped away so many things from my testimony, I no longer decorate those beliefs on my walls. I have a few mirrors in my house, but no pictures of God or men. I do believe in God, but I don’t believe in a European God with red hair and blue eyes. In fact, I no longer like to picture what God looks like. I prefer to wonder what possibilities He could assume the form of. As I said, I have pictures of my family and myself. I believe in those things. But I don’t have pictures exalting the first presidency of the LDS church and I certainly don’t have them posted beneath a picture of Jesus illustrating the chain of command. This weekend I’ll be decorating for spring, so there will be changes in my home, but the mirrors will stay and my Punchinello picture will stay, and my family will stay. All else is just to make it fun for the season because I value holidays and celebrating. Hopefully we all have a little celebration in our homes all the time. Without celebrations, what makes life enjoyable?
I have often said that no one will ever be able to prove the church or God true or false. It is an arrogant attitude to say that because I haven’t had a witness that nobody else has either. I don’t know that I have the faith to follow “spiritual witnesses” anymore for reasons that others have touched on in their posts. I believe Euhemerus mentioned that Muslims have faith too, so what’s the difference. In fact, the Bible mentions that Jesus himself said that even the demons believe in God, but not to their salvation. This year has been a rough one on my testimony. I have stripped my testimony down to the most solid base of beliefs that I can sincerely put effort behind in following. On top of this foundation I will build my testimony anew. I won’t build off of warm fuzzy stories that my mom emails to me about people paying tithing instead of eating and finding a sack of groceries on their porch in the morning. That wouldn’t be wise. I won’t likely ever find a sack of groceries on my front porch just for paying my tithing. But what I put my faith in is not the ritual acts of the church, but even more fundamental than that. I believe there is something greater than myself that flows throughout the universe. That is my God. Whether or not this God will judge me after I die, I don’t know.
When I die, if I spend my life doing good, and helping instead of hurting, then I will leave this world a better place for my having been there, and should I find a God that holds judgement on me, then I will be confident in living according to my faith that it is better to help than to hurt. I will have lived according to the knowledge that I have been given up to this point in my life and I can expect an eternity of my own glory independent of the glories of anybody else’s. If God is going to expect more of me, then He’d better teach me line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little between now and my death.
I’m intrigued by science, but sometimes I think they have the same problems as most Christians when it comes to what I shall refer to as the “religion of science”. The Christians read the Bible, and accept it as truth. The scientist on the other hand goes to universities and is taught from Darwin’s Origin of Species, and accepts it as truth with equal zeal. I’m not so naive as to think this is the only book scientists refer to, but if you like, substitute any textbook or scientific writing for Darwin’s Origin of Species and I still maintain my point.
No one KNOWS how the earth was created or when it was created. No one was there, no one saw it, no one KNOWS! Lately I’ve seen a lot of evidence leading away from evolutionary uniformitarianism, but I don’t know that everyone else has. So if a person needs to hold on to their beliefs in science to convince them to do good, then I won’t rob them of that. If, on the other hand, someone needs to hold on to their beliefs in God to convince them to do good, then I will not rob them of that faith either.
The D&C says to “seek learning by study and also by faith”. Faith does play a role in our learning, but how big of a role is yet to be determined. I guess we gather all the facts we can, and then use our faith to grow from there. Perhaps faith is like a bandage that is there to hold our thoughts together while study grows in underneath and fills in the gaps of our reasoning.
If I live a life of goodness and kindness toward my fellow man, and I die, and find there is no God, then my soul can rest in peace knowing that I made this world a better place for my having been here. The only gamble would be to live my life in ways that only serve me and lead to the destruction of others. If I live that way, and find that there is a God, then I have much to answer for, and the world will be glad of my riddance rather than mourning my passing.
