7 You would be right here as well. The nature of the plan of salvation is everlasting growth, ever increaeing order.
Abr. 3:11-12
11 Thus I, Abraham, talked with the Lord, face to face, as one man talketh with another; and he told me of the works which his hands had made;
12 And he said unto me: My son, my son (and his hand was stretched out), behold I will show you all these. And he put his hand upon mine eyes, and I saw those things which his hands had made, which were many; and they multiplied before mine eyes, and I could not see the end thereof.
And those are just the creations of Christ. I should note that there is the possibility that the creations of the Father and Son are counted as one and the same, but nevertheless, the creations are always expanded.
8 Timothy Leary was a drug addled idiot. His declarations have resulted in more pain, death, tragedy, and anguish than the Nazis in World War II. Acid is death.
9 I will concede a little here, and say that some spiritual gifts are innate. I think there will be some judgement in how we used them.
10 I'm a little up in the air concerning sacred geometry. I know that math is considered important, and it brings further understanding in the sence of order. As far as ritual and magic is concerned, I don't think so. But in increaseing understanding of the order of things, then yes. The Drummer from Tool, Daney Carey, is really into this and wrote alot about it on his website.
11 That Prophets, when they are called, are shown a vision of heaven, and of the fullness of the Plan of salvation is testified in numerous places.(1 Nephi 1:6-15) The rest of what you say here I would disagree with. The plan of salvation is taught and instructed in increaeing degree to those who love God and seek to obey his commandments. Those who worship false gods and follow the philosophies of men are not counted in this group.
12 I'll agree with you here. But we can gain the mind of God by obedience to the principles he reveals to us, directing our imagination.
D&C 76:5-10
5 For thus saith the Lord—I, the Lord, am merciful and gracious unto those who fear me, and delight to honor those who serve me in righteousness and in truth unto the end.
6 Great shall be their reward and eternal shall be their glory.
7 And to them will I reveal all mysteries, yea, all the hidden mysteries of my kingdom from days of old, and for ages to come, will I make known unto them the good pleasure of my will concerning all things pertaining to my kingdom.
8 Yea, even the wonders of eternity shall they know, and things to come will I show them, even the things of many generations.
9 And their wisdom shall be great, and their understanding reach to heaven; and before them the wisdom of the wise shall perish, and the understanding of the prudent shall come to naught.
10 For by my Spirit will I enlighten them, and by my power will I make known unto them the secrets of my will—yea, even those things which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor yet entered into the heart of man.
13 This sounds like some teaching from eastern religions I heard. On my mission I ran into some religions leader in the home of an Indian (as in packistani) family. He rambled on about something similar to this. And he was wrong also.
This belief runs contrary to what all of the prophets have testified concerning the plan of salvation. We are the children of God, and the same sociality that exists among us here wil exist among us there. (D&C 130: 1-2, 20-22)
14 I have no idea what you are talking about here. Is this from "Hitchhikers guide" ?
15 I hope I can assist you in finding new evidence.
Lets look at this evidence:
An excerpt from Hugh Nibleys talk on the Meaning of the Temple:
Left to itself, everything tends to become more and more disorderly, until the final and natural state of things is a completely random distribution of matter. Any kind of order is unnatural, and happens only by chance encounters These events are statistically unlikely and the further combination of molecules into anything as highly organized as a living organism is wildly improbable. Life is a rare and unreasonable thing. [He belabors the point]: Life occurs by chance, and the probability of its occurring and continuing is infinitesimal.2
There is no chance of us being here at all. Furthermore, "the cosmos itself is patternless, being a jumble of random and disordered events."3 It is not just life that is improbable, but the fabric of life itself—matter. The nuclear physicist P. T. Matthews asks,
Why is the proton stable, . . . since this is clearly crucial to the world as we know it? From the atomic point of view, the proton is one of the basic building blocks. Yet from the behavior of the other hadrons, . . . there is no obvious reason why it should not disintegrate into, say, a positive pion and neutrino, which is not forbidden by any conservation law.4
(The only two stable hadrons are the neutron [n0] and the proton [p+]. The neutron has a mean life span of 3 x 103 sec [about 50 minutes]. All other hadrons have mean life spans of from 10–8 to 10–18 seconds). Matthews goes on to explain the factors that determine the stability of the proton: "The rate of decay of any particle depends partly on the strength of the interaction and partly on the 'amount of room' it has into which it can decay."5 To describe what he means by "amount of room," Matthews draws an analogy of a room full of objects: "For every object in the room, there are, of course, vastly many more positions in which it would be considered out of place. When these possibilities for all the objects in the room are multiplied together, the number of untidy or disordered states exceeds the ordered ones by some enormous factor."6
Then he moves into the domain of the second law of thermodynamics and a mathematical description of this concept. Matthews continues, "The logarithm of the number of different states in which a system can be found is called the entropy. Thus the entropy of tidy or ordered states is very much less than that of untidy or disordered ones."7 To give us an idea about the magnitudes of the numbers we are dealing with, he presents the analogy of a deck of cards:
The rate at which numbers build up in the Second Law situation can be illustrated by considering a pack of playing cards. We can define an ordered, or tidy, state to be one in which the cards are arranged by value in successive suits. There are just twenty–four such configurations which arise from the different possible orderings of suits. This is itself a surprisingly large number, but the number of different ways the fifty-two cards can be arranged is about ten thousand million, million, million, million, million, million, million, million (1052). The chance of finding a shuffled pack in an ordered state is the ratio of these two numbers [24/1052].8
Matthews continues:
The relevance of this to our problem is that one may think of a proton at rest as a very highly ordered condition of a certain amount of energy—the rest energy of the proton—which can exist in just one state (strictly two if we allow for two possible orientations of the proton spin). If the proton can decay by any mechanism into two or more lighter particles, these serve to define an alternative condition of the system which is relatively highly disordered, since it can exist with all conceivable orientations. The number of allowed states depends on the relative momentum of the decay products much as the number of points on the circumference of a circle depends on its radius. The decay interaction is the shuffling agent . . . If it exists and operates on a time scale comparable with the age of the universe, then by relentless operation of the Second Law, essentially every proton would by now have decayed into lighter particles . . . Clearly the opposite is the case, and there must be some very exact law which is preventing this from happening.9
Had all the protons decayed, there would be no stable atoms, no elements, no compounds, no earth, no life. When the biologist said that life was wildly improbable, a rare unreasonable event, who would have guessed how improbable it really was? "A human being," writes Matthews, "is at very best, an assembly of chemicals constructed and maintained in a state of fantastically complicated organization of quite unimaginable improbability."10 So improbable that you can't even imagine it. So "wildly improbable" that even to mention it is ridiculous.11 So we have no business being here. That is not the natural order of things. In fact, he says that "the sorting process—the creation of order out of chaos—against the natural flow of physical events is something which is essential to life."12 So the physical scientists and the naturalists agree that if nature has anything to say about it, we wouldn't be here. This is the paradox of which Professor Wald of Harvard says, "The spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible . . . In this colloquial, practical sense I concede the spontaneous origin of life to be 'impossible.'"13 The chances of our being here are not even to be thought of, yet here we are.
So as I say, in my school days it was fashionable to brush aside Paley's watch argument with a snort of impatience. If you're walking on the beach and find a beautifully made Swiss watch, you should not with Archdeacon Paley conclude that some intelligent mind has produced the watch. It proves nothing of the sort. Finding the watch only proves, quite seriously, that mere chance at work, if given enough time, can indeed produce a fine Swiss watch or anything else. Indeed, when you come right down to it, the fact that Swiss watches exist in a world created and governed entirely by chance proves that blind chance can produce watches. There is no escaping this circular argument, and some people use it. Today Professor Matthews states the same problem more simply:
If, after seeing a room in chaos, it is subsequently found in good order, the sensible inference is not that time is running backwards, but that some intelligent person has been in to tidy it up. If you find the letters of the alphabet ordered on a piece of paper to form a beautiful sonnet, you do not deduce that teams of monkeys have been kept for millions of years strumming on typewriters, but rather that Shakespeare has passed this way.14
But to Professor Huxley or Professor Simpson this is sheer heresy or folly. It was the evolutionist who seriously put forth the claim that an ape strumming on a typewriter for a long enough time could produce, by mere blind chance, all the books in the British Museum, but did any religionist ever express such boundless faith? I don't know any religious person who ever had greater faith than that. Yet serious minds actually believed such an impossibility. They say it is impossible, but then it happens.
Remember, "the decay interaction is the shuffling agent [and] . . . by the relentless operation of the Second Law, essentially every proton would by now have decayed into lighter particles . . . Clearly the opposite is the case." Now "there must be some very exact law which is preventing this from happening."15
Kammerees new law of seriality is in direct opposition to the second law: there is "a force that tends toward symmetry and coherence by bringing like and like together."16 That is a very interesting point. We say that light cleaves unto light, etc. What is that force? Nobody knows. They say it is there because you see it working. Buckminster Fuller calls it syntropy.17 The greatest Soviet astrophysicist today, the Soviets' foremost man in that field, Nikolai Kozyrev, has been working for years on this question. He claims that the second law of thermodynamics is all right, but it doesn't work. Something works against it, something stronger. He says,
Some processes unobserved by mechanics and preventing the death of the world are at work everywhere, maintaining the variety of life. These processes must be similar to biological processes maintaining organic life. Therefore, they may be called vital processes and the life of cosmic bodies or other physical systems can be referred to as vital processes in this sense.18
The article in full can be found here:
http://farms.BYU.edu/display.php?table=transcripts&id=58 Please read it in full to see his conclusions and view that tie to this.
God is in control, and the testimony of hundreds of Prophets is available to us in testimony of his presence, and will concerning us his children. You state Keene that there are many spiritual viewpoints, but what you fail to see is that many are false spirits, and the conclusions need to be viewed and compared with what we already know. What makes sence, what is edifying?
More to come....
Gaz