The Gospel Is Beautifully Simple

[Everybody Wang Chung]

“The gospel of Jesus Christ is beautifully simple and simply beautiful.” Apostle Matthew Cowley,

As a missionary, I wish I had access to this simple flowchart. It’s true, the beauty of the gospel really is found in its simplicity.



https://mollymuses.wordpress.com/2012/0 ... your-soul/

[Rivendale]

Elder Holland said "we already know who wins, you just need to decide which jersey to wear".

[drumdude]

It all makes perfect sense when you diagram it out like that

[Physics Guy]

I always have to stick up for old Ptolemy. His geocentric theory of the solar system was not at all just a stupid idea propped up with many ad hoc excuses. It was almost correct.

The orbits of the planets are not quite perfect circles. They are almost perfect ellipses, and pretty darn close to circles, which are the simplest kind of ellipse. The error involved in approximating the orbits as circles is small enough that there would be no point in worrying about it at all unless you had either (a) really precise and reliable observations over many years, (b) a compellingly coherent theory that made slight eccentricities important and expected, or (c) both of those. We‘ve had (c) now since Newton, so circles are out, but until Newton, circles were the clearly best theory.

If you take the planetary orbits to be circles, then it’s literally true that every planet runs steadily on a circle whose center moves steadily on another circle around the Earth. That point that moves around the Earth is in fact the Sun: motion is relative, and the Sun going around the Earth is just the same as the Earth going around the Sun, from the Earth‘s point of view. The other planets go around the Sun, so from the Earth‘s point of view, they go on circles that go on a circle. The only thing wrong here is that the circles are not really quite perfect circles. Apart from that, it‘s all completely correct, just from the Earth‘s point of view.

That nested circle model is the Ptolemaic deferent and epicycle. There are not tons of epicycles stacked onto epicycles as fudges to prop up the theory. There is just one epicycle per planet, no more and no less. It’s a lean and clean theory, and it works really well.

Why just two circles per planet? Why not one or three or more? Why is the time for a full rotation of the inner circle exactly the same—and exactly one year—for Venus and Mercury, while for Mars and Jupiter and Saturn it’s the outer circle that goes around in one year? Why not all different times for all circles? And what about those little errors that just don’t quite fit with circles at all, and that slowly add up over years to big errors?

If you care about those things, you’ll really want to listen to Newton. And you’ll have to learn calculus, to see how the basic pattern is actually really simple even though it’s not perfect circles. Ptolemy was not really right.

But by no means was he stupidly wrong, or making excuses for dogma.

[Philo Sofee]

“The gospel of Jesus Christ is beautifully simple and simply beautiful.” Apostle Matthew Cowley,

As a missionary, I wish I had access to this simple flowchart. It’s true, the beauty of the gospel really is found in its simplicity.

[SNIP!]

https://mollymuses.wordpress.com/2012/0 ... your-soul/

THAT is E.P.I.C.!!!

[Moksha]

Everybody Wang Chung, that flow chart now enriches our understanding of the eternities!!!

[Dr Moore]

I am still scrolling…

[Philo Sofee]

I am still scrolling…

[msnobody]

I am still scrolling…

It does sound exhausting. I did a lot of scrolling too.

[MG 2.0]

“The gospel of Jesus Christ is beautifully simple and simply beautiful.” Apostle Matthew Cowley,

As a missionary, I wish I had access to this simple flowchart. It’s true, the beauty of the gospel really is found in its simplicity.

I didn't get any farther than the second sentence, "Your souls were berthed on a planet near a star called Kolob." This person apparently has been reading some Cleon Skousen and some Orson F. Whitney. Neither who, as far as I am aware, speaks doctrinally for the church. If this person started off on the wrong foot...where do we go from there? Next sentence: God's wives had bodies? No doctrine on that. There might be some actual doctrine mixed in with all the other conjecture and non-doctrinal stuff.

Yada, yada, yada.

By the way, read this person's personal history. She had some personal issues.

The final blow to my faith came when I endured spiritual abuse by a bishop and stake president who meddled in my life and told me they knew God’s will better than I did. My bishop exercised authority over psychological issues that he was unqualified to understand, advising me to stay in an abusive marriage. He told me that I had a duty to correct my husband’s waywardness, and that God would be angry with me if I forsook my temple covenants. I felt in my heart that it was in my best interest to leave, but I trusted my Bishop as my priesthood leader. After reaching a point where I knew that my life would be at risk if I stayed any longer, I finally decided to stop listening to priesthood leaders and do what I knew was right. I finally saw that the top-down structure of the LDS church has no resources for abused members when the system fails. My trust is broken, and I will not go back to be mistreated again by a system that brushes aside those who don’t fit in perfectly.

Trust but verify. And there is no way to do that. People can get personal issues all tangled up in everything else. Yeah, some will say we ALWAYS give the benefit of the doubt to the person claiming abuse...but that has its own potential concerns/issues.

She MIGHT be telling the truth...but who really knows? Anyway, she got it wrong just in the second and third sentence of her cute little...I mean huge...diagram. Huge doesn't mean its all true.

Regards,
MG