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I feel like I can relate to some degree. All I can share is my own experience. There came a day when I realized I couldn’t make what other people told me work for me. I couldn’t “feel” what they were telling me I should feel (or maybe my interpretation of what they were telling me).
I realized I needed to find my own truth. I found it in goodness.
The funny thing is in time I realized I could talk about my own understanding of goodness in ways that others relate to. In their words “I let God reveal himself to me in the way that He could, the way that I understand.”
I don’t expect to see things in the way that I think others see. I allow myself to see the way that I do.
I hope you can discover your own goodness.
Rob4Hope wrote:Orson wrote:Rob4Hope wrote:
Individual sin, if based on ignorance, is understandable. However, we can’t be saved in ignorance.We also cannot be saved without ignorance.
I’m curious…can you elaborate so I can understand you better?
We cannot become saved from ignorance if it doesn’t exist. We cannot progress if we remain forever in the garden. We cannot progress if we were never in the garden.
Without the contrast of light and dark everything remains meaningless.
It comes and goes. The feelings of betrayal run deep. In the worst of it I felt like I had been set up to look guilty by the one who actually committed the crime — and all my loved ones believed the guilty instead of me. I cannot think of a more effective seed of anger. I then learned something about forgiveness being the best revenge. The more I hold on to anger the more I lose.
You have probably heard this quote:
Quote:Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
A cool head and loving approach is so much more effective, no matter our objective.
Today I measure myself by my ability to forgive. I’m still striving and have a long way to go, don’t get me wrong, but what we focus on makes all the difference. The way I see it when I look for justice I’m sipping at the poison.
I am very sorry. These are the deep valleys of life, no fun. Fear can lead humans to do strange things. It makes us want to control circumstances and people, even revoke agency sometimes.
Fear is darkness, love is light. Sometimes the darkness we are called to wade through is thick and stubborn.
Rob4Hope wrote:
Individual sin, if based on ignorance, is understandable. However, we can’t be saved in ignorance.We also cannot be saved without ignorance.
Rob4Hope wrote:Anyone got a comment on my list above?
The list demonstrates the full range of humanness in the church. My comment about gold rich dirt applies here. After I fully acknowledge and internalize the level of regular people, actions, and thought, I can then move forward in my efforts: sifting and searching for “gold.”
The miners that make their living out of ground that is over 99% regular dirt don’t complain about all the rocks and dirt, they know that almost all of it is useless to them. They know what it takes to extract what they are looking for.
I do acknowledge that the situation is complicated by bad expectations. I see how many were holding and treasuring soil believing it had extremely high concentrations of the precious stuff, and when they learned the “truth” they see it as worthless and not worth the effort.
It does take a different process. Some of us have adapted and still see enough gold to make a high volume process pay off.
It’s simple gold but not fools gold, the opportunities to serve are real.
I don’t know if that helps. I feel like when people present a list they are looking for answers that change the nature of the issue, or in other words they are saying “show me that this dirt really has as much gold as I thought it did.” I have to say “nope, it’s mostly basic dirt, here is the high-volume process that I use.”
DarkJedi wrote:…as opposed to others in the church (e.g. Young) who were espousing the idea and pressuring him to expand it.
Maybe you have some evidence that I have not seen which supports this statement?
I have seen a theory that BY is actually the source of polygamy, and JS was innocent, but that theory is so full of holes no credible historian will back it up. Other than that flawed idea I have never heard of others pressuring Joseph to expand polygamy.
OTOH …you could certainly say once they became converted to the idea they were eager to live it. Maybe that’s what you were saying?
Thanks for the book reference Wayfarer, he brings out some fantastic points. One part also jumped out at me as an example of the paradoxical reality of life, and how our unique perspectives and definitions can make communication difficult. I have changed two words in the Greg Boyd quote below to demonstrate how it first hit me:
wayfarer wrote:
I’m reading a book by Greg Boyd, “Repenting of Religion: turning from judgment to the Love of God”. In this he equates our judgment of others as “religious sin”:Greg Boyd wrote:… religious idolatry embraces the knowledge of love and hate as divinely sanctioned and mandated. It gives the illusion of being on God’s side even while it destroys life and hardens people in direct opposition to God.
My immediate question was: “how does the knowledge of love put people in direct opposition to God?”
The problem is when I read “good” or “righteousness” I instinctively see it as “Love” or synonymous with “charity” or “the love of God.” Obviously Greg Boyd had another concept in mind, one that involved details, commandments, or some tangent from love that can lose the original point.
My point is only to build awareness of how others often see things differently than ourselves. When we are discussing the finer details there is a good chance we mis-communicate more often than not.
Brian Hales believes he has found evidence, and apparently enough others agree with him that the statement made it into the essay. In my opinion he has in effect taken the lack of strong evidence, coupled with the words Joseph spoke, as the evidence that he needs. I understand the position but I am not comfortable declaring it with the same confidence. Yes. Absolutely. Speak up when it is more loving than staying silent. Tough call in many situations.
nibbler wrote:
You push another button that tells you whether pressing the original button told you the truth.:clap: 😆 :clap: Sometimes I imagine the good times we could all have hanging out IRL.
Rob4Hope wrote:
I hope everyone out there can tolerate my venom…I spew it all over the place. I know I do. I’m sorry for my end of being harsh as well….I personally can tolerate a lot. I have been there, felt the same feelings, thought the same thoughts. I appreciate your desire for personal growth, that’s what it takes.
Rob4Hope wrote:…the unity doesn’t grow, it widens.
Unity in Love can grow as we mature, even when we personally hold very different ideas.
Rob4Hope wrote:Hero worship. They are not “not extraordinary men”…they are “Men of GOD”.
I won’t begin to argue that what you describe does not exist in the church, but it does not exist in my mind, and frankly that is all that matters to me. By the way I have heard multiple local leaders speak out against hero worship, and one actually said, in a church meeting, “leaders are ordinary men…” and the context was the top 15.
I also had another thought regarding “specks.”
Expectations are everything. Many LDS writers addressing the topic of faith crisis have said the problem is when expectations are out of whack with reality, that is what causes faith crisis. Yes, our modern LDS culture plays a huge part in creating expectations, but some of the problem is our personal context.
There are a few gold mining shows on cable channels, watching these we can easily see that miners sift many tons of dirt to get a few ounces of gold. This is the “gold rich” dirt. Large nuggets are very rare, most of it comes in the form of tiny little flakes.
If I say “that is good dirt, it has a lot of gold in it” someone that is not familiar with that type of mining could easily assume there would be several ounces per cubic yard when the reality is 100’s of times less.
When we say “there is divinity in our church” context is everything. Some will expect a thick vein of solid gold, others may expect heavy nuggets. The experienced “gold miners” know that “good ground” can produce several ounces a day when you sift through a hundred tons per hour.
Every human has divine potential.
Understandably most of the complaints of people in FC revolve around the expectations that “the church” supports. My position is after we sit up and say “okay, I was wrong, my expectations were out of touch with reality” then we sit in the drivers seat. We don’t need to worry about who is driving wrong where, we can take our own path – follow our own light. Search for the gold, when you get the process down you can make a living off those tiny little specks.
It’s easy to see that my present context for religion is completely different from where Kirby is coming from. His proposal makes no sense to me, it’s like saying “if you could press a button to learn whether or not you truly love your wife…” I know some people speak in other ways, but I have no context for what they’re saying so their words simply don’t stick.
The comment “they can’t all be true” is craziness. I can have a million bicycle wheels and every one of them in true.
Pitting religion against science is a no-starter. They are completely different realms. “Afterlife” in human terms is a model that helps us live until death, then we all get to see what happens. I love a good mystery. A button could never give us the truth of such things because I don’t believe a mortal mind can grasp it.
