The point of this post is not to give opportunity to arguing whether evolution or no death before the fall (NDBF)is correct. It is not to look at whether S. McMurrin and H. Eyring Sr. or J. Fielding Smith and B. Packer more accurately state the official position of the Church. If you have perspectives along those lines, table them, because those sorts of comments will be deleted here, even if you do have a fancy ™ on the end of your name.

The attempt here is to take the two positions, or for the sake of this post, assume BOTH are true. Then we can look at possible ways that both can work together.
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I am always hearing this idea that the Word of Wisdom is important because our physical appetites will go with us to the spirit world, but we won’t be able to satisfy them since we are absent our physical bodies. This is offered as a reason we should not develop addictions to tobacco and recreational drugs. Apparently the spirit world will double as a giant rehab center with lots of people quitting cold-turkey. (more…)

Most of us Mormons believe God reads our minds. I pray to God in my thoughts regularly in the belief that God hears and understands my thoughts as clearly as I hear and understand them. Now how God could read the minds of billions of humans all at once is a mystery but since this is God we are talking about such mysteries are par for the course.

The other thing that Mormonism teaches is that God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Ghost are “one God”. This is generally believed to mean that the members of the Godhead have completely unified purposes and enjoy what is sometimes called an “indwelling unity”. One would assume that indwelling unity among the members of the Godhead means they read one another’s minds just like we generally assume they read all of our minds.
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I set my tray on the table with a clatter and flop back in the chair. I let my 200 pound backpack slide to the floor and my shoulders sing in relief. It had been an exhausting day. Every day is exhausting when you are a college freshman living in the dorms and your only form of transportation is your feet. (more…)

Mondo Cool, or Walt Cowart, is my Father in Law. He is a great man, with a great lineage. Anyway, I asked him, on a whim, if he had a post he’d like to put forth. He did.

My father is an old man. I do not say that disrespectfully, but matter-of-factly. He recently retired after 50+ years of practicing medicine. Truly, he is a unique example of service to his fellow beings. He converted to the Church over 40 years ago and has also been an exemplar of service to God. He was a child of the Depression; an onlooker of WWII, Korea, and Viet Nam; and a concerned observer of the societal change of most of the past eight decades. Genetics, however, has been his toughest challenge. His health has been mainly determined by a predisposition towards hypercholesterolemia which has affected his heart, and now his brain. The father I have known as a Lion of the Lord is now, because of health conditions, feeble – physically, mentally, and emotionally.

This, of course, is hard on me. And, it has intensified my thoughts about the purpose of aging. I, after all, am not getting any younger. I think we all wish we, and our loved ones, could be vibrant until the very end of our mortal probations, much like Pres. Faust. But for many, that is not the option.

What are your thoughts on the lessons to be learned by these final years? We all have challenges throughout our lives, but what, in particular, is the “purpose” of old age; or, what does old age teach us that the rest of life does not? Is it just part of the package or does it have special significance in our earthly sojourn? How does this phase of life, in particular, relate to our salvation? How should we prepare to care for our elder families and church members? What are the things we are doing to prepare ourselves for the “twilight years?”

I recently asked Nitsav at FPR about the correlation between Gen 3:16 and Gen 3:7. This is my own answer to the question. (more…)

Yesterday, I bore my testimony at Church about Geoff, of all people. (The worst is, I couldn’t even keep the facts straight…) Anyway, I was also thinking of a question Geoff asked. This is my attempt to answer.

I love to go to church. I mean I really enjoy it. Yesterday, for example, I got to substitute teach CTR-5, and I enjoyed church so much I was horse from screaming in the classroom and every member of the bishopric, several concerned parents, and the 2nd Councilor of the Primary presidency all peeked in to make sure no one was seriously injured. (You’d think no one else ever let five age five boys reenact Helamen’s stripling warriors vs. The chairs in the room. What can I say? Lessons were learned, chairs were slain, children screamed.) But I digress.

The Point is, I love going to church, and I want everyone else to love going to church too. I am all about getting the rears in the pews, as it were. But why? Why should we all go to church?

Some common reasons I hear are to take the Sacrament, to hear the words of the prophets, and to commune with Christ. I think these are incomplete. First, I have the priesthood, I can take the sacrament in my own home. Second, It is currently 2007. The book has been in existence for millennia now, and add to that television, radio, mp3, the internet, etc, and I have plenty of means of hearing the words of the prophets. Finally, the words of the prophets have taught me to create a sacred space in my own home, to pray in my closet, as it were, and that I can commune with the Almighty anywhere and at anytime. So these reasons, while all good, I think are insufficient.

I think the purpose of Church is to create the proper order so that we can establish and practice the correct type of interdependent society to come unto exaltation. Call it “building up Zion” if you like. I believe the Gospel teaches that we are all in this together, and that we are all weak alone, and much stronger together. It is only when we come together that Christ is with us. Finally, I believe that it is through the order and organization of the church and our communing with one another that we will “all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”

For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things.

-2 Nephi 2:11

When I was young, there was this comic book “What If?” which answered all sorts of brilliant questions, such as “What if Mary Jane were Spider-man and not Peter Parker?” Or “What if Captain America were the Incredible Hulk?” In order to get at and understand the question of LFW versus CFW. I would like to ask a “What if” question myself.
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UPDATE Ok, I have gotten a sample set of 23 different wards at this point, so I thought I’d give you a bit of info which can be gathered from what I have. The Average size of a Ward, with all the data I have, is about 165 people attending church on Any given sunday. This means that if we take the 13M members of the church and divide them into there 27.5k congregations, 165 on average of the 473 average members are at church any given sunday. This is about 35%, or 4.5M mormons attending church on any given sunday. END UPDATE

I am trying to figure out what the average sized congregation is in the church. If you would please post whether you are in a ward or branch, where you are at, and the average sacrament meeting attendance.

Here’s my Ward, for Example.

Ward
San Antonio, Texas
145

One of the conundrums for me has been in resolving how the effects of the atonement were efficacious before the cause of those effects had even occurred.
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After two long debates on the issues of free-will and determinism, Joshua summed up his response in this comment. His description gets to the heart of the matter in my opinion. At the end of the day, I think we are left with a fundamental problem on both sides and I think the problems are unanswerable. This creates a dilemma that I find quite fascinating. (more…)