Daniel Peterson wrote:Life is full of sorrow . . . and then you die.
You offer an interesting perspective. I can't think of anything urgent to say about it, though.
Life is full of whatever you make of it, actually. I tend to be a glass half full type of person, believe it or not, and I constantly seek and try to find the positive, uplifting ideas relating to our existence here, and don't approach it all as meaningless nothingless and pain where I'd be better of just killing myself.
One thing that troubles me is if there isn't this "cosmic justice" that religious people believe in, where people who are crapped on by accident of birth here in this life, like African children who die of disease and starvation, or get their arms hacked off when they're 10, or whatever, will have it a lot better in the next life. If there is no next life, then it really sucked to be these people*. I guess my only response to that is that if this is the way it is, then our human compassion towards each other ought to really kick in and prompt us to do all we can to try to improve the lot of people to the extent we can.
Dan, I think the problem with your responses here is that you're trying to play the shell-game we've come to know and love over on MAD, where the apologists deny the nose that's plainly on their face. This article was written by LDS-church paid staffers, approved by some committee to make sure it promotes what The Brethren want promoted, and printed in an LDS magazine aimed at LDS youth. It clearly does encourage LDS youth to avoid anti-Mormon literature, while making no distinction whatsoever between anti-Mormon "kook" stuff and scholarly works which inevitably challenge one's testimony. You can deny all you want that your average LDS Peter and Molly will conflate Charles Larson with Ed Decker, but every one of us on this board and I suspect on MAD has seen it in action, all over the place. I've had a lot of experience with people doing this personally. A sister-in-law, upon seeing Larson's book in her mother's house, being thumbed through by one of her brothers, remarked that she has no idea why anyone would even want such trash in their house at all. Just this last weekend I met up with an old Army buddy (from my National Guard years) with whom I was best friends for many years until I moved away from his area nine years ago. He's LDS, and I broke it to him on the way back from picking him up that I'd stopped believing in the church, just because he'd probably notice the lack of a garment line under my clothes anymore and stuff like that. During part of our ensuing discussion, I offered to refer him to books that I'd read, and his response was "no thanks", which is exactly the kind of response that this article I posted about in this thread, and lots of other subtle and not so subtle signals from church leaders, are trying to condition people to give.
*says this white American male - I guess it's pretentious to judge the quality of their lives from our own perspective, still, with all due respect, I cannot imagine how great their life is to be born to parents who die a year later from AIDS, having AIDS oneself from birth, and die a nasty death a few years later of disease and starvation in an orphanage.
Mormonism ceased being a compelling topic for me when I finally came to terms with its transformation from a personality cult into a combination of a real estate company, a SuperPac, and Westboro Baptist Church. - Kishkumen