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deaman said:
And if there were a god, he, by definition, would be the author of the consenting adults, and all that the consenting adults do.
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That's Yahweh for you. He has the power to create a universe that contains billions, perhaps hundreds of billions of galaxies, but spends all his time being concerned with what some advanced apes on one dirtball in an arm of one galaxy do with their sexual organs. At the behest of sex drives that he gave them.

Yeah, he's well-worth all the groveling that believers bestow upon him.
 
Empress said:
That's Yahweh for you. He has the power to create a universe that contains billions, perhaps hundreds of billions of galaxies, but spends all his time being concerned with what some advanced apes on one dirtball in an arm of one galaxy do with their sexual organs. At the behest of sex drives that he gave them.
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I'm still scratching my head over people worshipping such an utter clod.
 
He impregnated some woman himself, so he could die himself, in order to save us from himself??????

Wha.............!?!?
 
Empress said:
That's Yahweh for you. He has the power to create a universe that contains billions, perhaps hundreds of billions of galaxies, but spends all his time being concerned with what some advanced apes on one dirtball in an arm of one galaxy do with their sexual organs. At the behest of sex drives that he gave them.

Yeah, he's well-worth all the groveling that believers bestow upon him.
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Odd that god's and human's main interest is the same. Hummm...
 
Empress said:
That's Yahweh for you. He has the power to create a universe that contains billions, perhaps hundreds of billions of galaxies, but spends all his time being concerned with what some advanced apes on one dirtball in an arm of one galaxy do with their sexual organs. At the behest of sex drives that he gave them.

Yeah, he's well-worth all the groveling that believers bestow upon him.
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When you put it that way, it casts Mormon cosmology in a more realistic light.

For Christians, God is the god of the entire universe, so his focus on this planet seems rather absurd. To a Mormon, "God" is really a man who spent his entire life living virtuously so he could earn the right to be the God of his own planet. Jesus, being the son of this "god," has been given THIS planet as his domain, and to earn this planet he lived an entire life of faithfulness and virtue.

It's one of the ways the Mormons borrow heavily from pagan religions. Having a very localized, limited "god" sidesteps questions about the role of that "god" in a larger, universal context.

This also explains why Jesus is so myopically focused on our genitals. He's from a repressed family where sexual expression was looked down upon as dirty and disgusting. This dysfunctional attitude towards sex was carried forward with an "I didn't enjoy my life so you don't get to either" attitude in the laws made for humanity.

This image of "god" as the child of a dysfunctional home, also gives us a mechanism for the apparent evolution of God's will over time. The elimination of polygamy, the acceptance of non-whites into the priesthood and the growing influence of women and tolerance towards homosexuals are the result of "god" actually maturing as an individual, moving BEYOND the repression of his youth to see our lives and realize "Hey, I was WRONG. This idea of theirs is much, much better."

Remember, "god" can be argued and bargained with. Abraham did it. If Abraham can get him to change his mind about the criteria for destroying two cities, why can't we change his mind about women and homosexuals? We ALREADY changed his mind about blacks and polygamy. Like a bigoted father whose children each him racism is wrong, god is learning from us, seeing the flaws in the way he was raised and changing his laws to accommodate the lessons we are teaching him.

I think I just articulated a fairly decent liberal Mormon apologetic.

This discards the notion of God being infallible and perfect, but Mormon cosmology already closed that door for all practical purposes.
 
Craig4 said:
We'll assume for the moment there is a god. There isn't of course but that's not important for this post.

Why does god even care? How could a god possibly be an aggrieved party? God suffers no harm as a result of what consenting adults do in privacy. It doesn't matter if god likes what they do or not, he/she/it suffers no injury as a result.
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We end up with that cleft-stick problem that always seems to occur here. We could say that God need not be aggrieved except in the spiritual sense of wanting the best for and from us for our own sakes, but if we adopt this view we must presume, if we're in a Universalist mood, that he's awfully damned inefficient at best, and if in a more traditional hellfire mode, that he's utterly without scruple, playing a hide and seek game whose losers burn for eternity in Hell. Religion has defined a god who must be mean and stupid to exist at all.
 
halleyscomet said:
When you put it that way, it casts Mormon cosmology in a more realistic light.

For Christians, God is the god of the entire universe, so his focus on this planet seems rather absurd. To a Mormon, "God" is really a man who spent his entire life living virtuously so he could earn the right to be the God of his own planet. Jesus, being the son of this "god," has been given THIS planet as his domain, and to earn this planet he lived an entire life of faithfulness and virtue.
It's one of the ways the Mormons borrow heavily from pagan religions. Having a very localized, limited "god" sidesteps questions about the role of that "god" in a larger, universal context.

This also explains why Jesus is so myopically focused on our genitals. He's from a repressed family where sexual expression was looked down upon as dirty and disgusting. This dysfunctional attitude towards sex was carried forward with an "I didn't enjoy my life so you don't get to either" attitude in the laws made for humanity.

This image of "god" as the child of a dysfunctional home, also gives us a mechanism for the apparent evolution of God's will over time. The elimination of polygamy, the acceptance of non-whites into the priesthood and the growing influence of women and tolerance towards homosexuals are the result of "god" actually maturing as an individual, moving BEYOND the repression of his youth to see our lives and realize "Hey, I was WRONG. This idea of theirs is much, much better."

Remember, "god" can be argued and bargained with. Abraham did it. If Abraham can get him to change his mind about the criteria for destroying two cities, why can't we change his mind about women and homosexuals? We ALREADY changed his mind about blacks and polygamy. Like a bigoted father whose children each him racism is wrong, god is learning from us, seeing the flaws in the way he was raised and changing his laws to accommodate the lessons we are teaching him.

I think I just articulated a fairly decent liberal Mormon apologetic.

This discards the notion of God being infallible and perfect, but Mormon cosmology already closed that door for all practical purposes.
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Which would mean that Jesus must have had his Joe Smith to teach him how to live right.
 
tsig said:
Which would mean that Jesus must have had his Joe Smith to teach him how to live right.
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EXACTLY.

Earth's problems are the consequence of a deity who is ultimately no different than a very old Mormon. Frankly, that would explain a lot.
 
Pixel42 said:
I'm happy to discuss the morality of going back in time to kill Hitler so I have no problem per se with using theoretical impossibilities to explore issues.
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That has nothing to do with evaluating the BoM on its merits as literature. What, pray tell, does Hitler have to do with that?

It's just that (as Kopji's post so eloquently demonstrates) Mormons are well known for insisting that obvious fiction is historical fact, so it seemed a good idea to check that you at least recognise that the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall not only never happened but is indeed theoretically impossible before launching into a discussion as to whether explanations and justifications of it can be considered spiritual insights.
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Again, you miss the point by several country miles. Are you sure you didn't mean to respond to a different post?
 
skyrider44 said:
That has nothing to do with evaluating the BoM on its merits as literature. What, pray tell, does Hitler have to do with that?



Again, you miss the point by several country miles. Are you sure you didn't mean to respond to a different post?
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So, about those tapirs...
 
And the elephants.
Don't forget the elephants mentioned in the BoM.
 
And the steel, and the fact that the BofA is nothing more than an Egyptian funerary document, and that the American Indians are not of Middle Eastern heritage, or...........................
 
Belz... said:
It's amazing, the ability of the human mind to hold contradictory beliefs simultaneously, isn't it ?
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Yes, but perhaps not why one might think. In his book, The Community of Mind, Marvin Minsky argues that the mind is hodge podge of mental modules. Susan Blackmore argues that we think of as our conscience is an illusion, not that it doesn't exist, but that it isn't what we think it is. There is lots of empirical evidence but to date the Split Brain experiments remain, IMO, the most compelling.

In the following video Ramachandran explains how a single person can be both a theist and an atheist.



I dare say we all hold contradictory positions to some degree. We just don't realize it because at the end of the day the brain isn't fundamentally a logic machine. It's a rationalizing machine. It is this feature that magicians and illusionists exploit. And that is what makes them such skeptics. They get that the world is not always as our brains perceive it.
 
On a separate tangent, while LDS is most obviously a cult of woooo spun off another cult of slightly less woooo spun off Judaisim (and woooo) - I can't help but comment having only encountered LDS believers outside of Utah - they seem uniformly "nice." Literally in the 1950's "Leave it to Beaver" degree of nice. I'm certain there are dirty rotten LDS as much as with any social group but what is it that makes them seem to dang nice?

You could also replace LDS with "Canadian" and my question would remain the same.
 
Robrob said:
On a separate tangent, while LDS is most obviously a cult of woooo spun off another cult of slightly less woooo spun off Judaisim (and woooo) - I can't help but comment having only encountered LDS believers outside of Utah - they seem uniformly "nice." Literally in the 1950's "Leave it to Beaver" degree of nice. I'm certain there are dirty rotten LDS as much as with any social group but what is it that makes them seem to dang nice?

You could also replace LDS with "Canadian" and my question would remain the same.
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LOL
 
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