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Some how, some way, eternal/etern-o (eternal but with a beginning) souls, by their own doing, acquired faulty hard drives. Too faulty to ever be fixed. God's job then is to sort through these and make calls on which is a cull and which is a keeper.

He sends them down to Thunderdome, throws some weapons in the ring, hides some useful hints in the corner, then sits back in his lounge chair with a Bud light and a score card. The score card though really just being a prop as there is no proper precise method for keeping track and it all is just based upon whatever particular mercy level our specific god has set the game at.

Then it's off to Everland. Where we get to spend the rest of ever trying to figure out how to entertain our senses. The folks with the better game scores get the better playthings.

The view from 20,000 feet. The reason I no longer believe in Mormonism is because this, by definition comes with it. And, there are enough holes in every part of this dogma to drive a handcart party through.

To me, it comes across that MG 2.0 thinks all the dominoes will fall if he can find those clues god surely left. But, for me, patterns of cleverness in the Book of Mormon, and J. Smith must be the guy because he's not smart enough to have done it with out supernatural help - might help one with Book of Mormon origination doubts - but that is the least of the hurdles to be jumped.

The problems the LDS Church faces with membership erosion are largely of their own making. Church Leaders have tried to explain too much, have tried to control too much, tried to claim too much “specialness”, have tried to be too prescriptive, about everything. They paint themselves into corners that don’t stand the test of time and they end up looking uninspired for doing so - polygamy, racism, prop 8, Hoffman, Book of Abraham facsimiles, naked shoulders, etc etc etc.

Then you’ve got the issue with the age of the Leadership. It’s set up so that Leaders are massively out of touch with younger people. It’s why the Church lags fifty years behind society at any one time. Because that’s how long it takes for someone young enough now to be in touch to reach an influential leadership position. But by then they are out of touch. It never catches up.

And of course the Church doesn’t tell the truth when it thinks nobody is looking. They declared a newfound transparency when they published ‘the essays’, but all they were really doing was publishing information that was already commonly available through non Church sources. They’ve been caught defrauding the tax system recently, because they thought they’d concocted a clever and complicated way of hiding how much money they’ve got stashed away.

Church Leaders really aren’t a good example to the members. It only works because kids are brainwashed from a very early age into treating them like unimpeachable rock stars. The more senior an Apostle becomes, the more elevated his own opinion of himself becomes. And some started with very inflated opinions of themselves.

The Church is treading water. Once you look past the temple announcements and claimed membership numbers, nothing much changes, nothing is really growing and flourishing, except in new areas. And there’s fewer of those these days.

It could be so much better as a community, and the key barrier to that is those fifteen geriatric male type A personalities living fifty years in the past who think they speak to an all-knowing supernatural entity, when all the evidence shows they don’t.

I Have Questions wrote: ↑

Wed Nov 06, 2024 9:48 am

The problems the LDS Church faces with membership erosion are largely of their own making. Church Leaders have tried to explain too much, have tried to control too much, tried to claim too much “specialness”, have tried to be too prescriptive, about everything. They paint themselves into corners that don’t stand the test of time and they end up looking uninspired for doing so - * * *

The control business model worked for the LDS church for decades. Specifically, instilling fear that if you don't do as they tell you, then as the OP puts it, you won't have as good of play things for the everafter.

Anecdotally, I have unusually met recently a recent convert (<1 year) and an investigator. The investigator (mid-30s) is not willing to change lifestyle to conform to Mormonism's control code, but wants the association in the area of the predominant religious organization. When I've explained the LDS plan of salvation, and the Gold Plates story in depth, the response was "cool." Not put off, but not looked upon as necessary to be Mormon.

The recent convert (age 23) chose to join for some life structure--likes the control. Never expressed any opinion or profession of belief in the theology of Mormonism.

Of course, this is anecdotal, but neither has mentioned anything about "the Spirit."

IHQ, SP, I'd say you guys both did a better job of explaining what the OP was shooting for - rearranging deck chairs can come in handy when one doesn't want the people to know the ship is sinking.

sock puppet wrote: ↑

Wed Nov 06, 2024 3:55 pm

Of course, this is anecdotal, but neither has mentioned anything about "the Spirit."

I think people join the church nowadays for reasons other than they believe the Restoration to be God’s work. I think they join primarily for reasons of community, association etc. they tend to be those people that don’t necessarily fit into other aspects of society. Older single people, people going through difficulty who need some social support etc. Now that’s not a bad reason, and local ward members are, on the whole, a nice bunch of people who will provide that support. The wards with which I’m familiar largely pay lip service to the more egregious dictates of the Brethren. No transitioned woman who attends Church is going to be asked to not attend Relief Society, for example. Church members (generally) are better humans than the fifteen Senior Church Leaders.

However, it’s not young people who come to fervently believe the base religious narrative of the Church, it’s not families, it’s not “lifeblood” converts. For that the Church is reliant on the baby production pipeline of existing members. Hence why they suggest getting married early and start having kids straight away. Hence why ‘devotional, (whatever that means) for young people are being held monthly now. Hence why singles wards exist etc. The Church needs that baby factory working overtime, regardless of the strain it puts on those young parents.

I have a very low opinion of institutionalised religion, it’s always, always, corrupted. I have a high opinion of local people doing good things for other people regardless of what some geriatrics in SLC say.

dantana wrote: ↑

Thu Nov 07, 2024 1:57 am

- rearranging deck chairs can come in handy when one doesn't want the people to know the ship is sinking.

Much like the British saying of keeping a stiff upper lift, especially when looking past the bow and seeing a bunch of icebergs. Don't worry, Trump will make sure the gates for third class are securely locked.

Moksha wrote: ↑

Thu Nov 07, 2024 11:18 am

Much like the British saying of keeping a stiff upper lift, especially when looking past the bow and seeing a bunch of icebergs. Don't worry, Trump will make sure the gates for third class are securely locked.

I miss the old days. Back before the classes. No one knows when it began. Not even god's god's god's god can remember. As the story goes though, a brash young developer from the suburbs of Kolob came on the scene. He had a sweet hip sway-fist pump dance move, a hawkish Roman nose and a stunning dead orangutan hairdo. A demagogue demigod, and before you knew it, it was pay to play.

You wanna go down in a delight-some body - cough up some kronkites. You wanna spend the hereafter in a posh apt. with a pop-up wife pez dispenser - lets see it.

Too bad about the losing losers though. Every system it seems another one third get deported. Simply because they asked: who is this Jesus fellow and why was there no primary - 50 billion souls get to spend the rest of ever groping around the homeless camp in the dark wearing nothing but a spirit body ... With their starlink turned off.

When, where and how did souls acquire the undesirable personality traits that require they be tested, rated and sorted. If god is making souls from scratch, putting them in bodies and sending them off to trials, wouldn't he make them all identical and perfect? Why would he then need to examine them by putting them through such unequal, cluttered up, low quality trials? It appears to me it's more like he is just testing bodies.

If entities must be rated and sorted to permanent disposition, then obviously they must have something about their base component, or their hard wiring that cannot be fixed. Ever. If entities can move through existence gaining knowledge and experiences. If Intelligence can be added to entities, then it can be taken away. It is all then superficial to some sort of blank slate hard drive. How can an entity be personally responsible for having a bad hard drive it couldn't possibly have itself created?

Sending a soul to eternal ouchies because god randomly dolloped a wad of spirit dna onto the cookie sheet from a vat with cooties in it would be like sending an Irishman to prison for having red hair. Right?

dantana wrote: ↑

Thu Nov 21, 2024 10:24 pm

When, where and how did souls acquire the undesirable personality traits that require they be tested, rated and sorted. If god is making souls from scratch, putting them in bodies and sending them off to trials, wouldn't he make them all identical and perfect? Why would he then need to examine them by putting them through such unequal, cluttered up, low quality trials? It appears to me it's more like he is just testing bodies.

If entities must be rated and sorted to permanent disposition, then obviously they must have something about their base component, or their hard wiring that cannot be fixed. Ever. If entities can move through existence gaining knowledge and experiences. If Intelligence can be added to entities, then it can be taken away. It is all then superficial to some sort of blank slate hard drive. How can an entity be personally responsible for having a bad hard drive it couldn't possibly have itself created?

Sending a soul to eternal ouchies because god randomly dolloped a wad of spirit dna onto the cookie sheet from a vat with cooties in it would be like sending an Irishman to prison for having red hair. Right?

Hmmmm, interesting idea. My "spin" on it follows.

I wonder if god has a quality management program - ISO9001, perhaps - or if the quality control is all at the back end, when it's too late to fix certain errors. So then perhaps the "testing" is to determine which of god's creations he messed up so badly that they are not suitable to be in the top levels of his heaven.

Kind of like the way that the processors on a silicon wafer are designated after being tested: apparently early (pre-8th gen) Intel Core processors all started off as potentially i9 chips. The best performers were sold as Core-i9, the next tier as Core-i7, then i5, and i3. There is no i1 - any chip that isn't at least an i3 might be scrapped - sent to outer darkness, as it were.

[note: the above para is roughly how I understand the process to have worked, but I'm not an expert in this area, so my explanation may be lacking technically. I got some of the details from answers to a Quora question: https://www.quora.com/Are-Intel-i3-i5-i ... ty-control]

Part of the issue, maybe a big part, is that the leaders in the Church pretend to have more answers than anyone else about the afterlife and why we are here on earth. They put themselves up as Prophets, Seers, Realtors…oooos, I mean Revelators. But over time, with the advent of information at our finger tips, all the Mormon leaders who have claimed such a thing can now be seen to have not been special. To have not known more than anyone else.

Just think about shoulders as an example. Past leaders have involved themselves as authorities on how young women should dress so as not to corrupt the young men. That included the notion that naked shoulders were the equivalent of pornography. We now see that naked shoulders are okay if it’s warm.

They’ve set themselves up to be special, with special insight, but everyone can see (if they want to look) that they are no more special than anyone else. And in some respects they are much worse. I don’t know many people who have wilfully and convolutedly schemed over many years to commit fraudulent financial reporting, whilst simultaneously promoting the idea that being honest is a crucial attribute.

The problem ain’t the members.