Anyone who knows me knows that I'm an utter pragmatist. In college I found math difficult to focus on - unless I could see a practical point to it. Group theory? Not much. Complex variables? YES. Fast Fourier Transforms? DEFINITELY YES. It works - and will allow me to map rare earth elements (REE's) on the Atlantic Continental Shelf.
This is why I teach and study Jujitsu: as my oldest son said when he introduced me to it, "Dad, I finally found it! This is a Martial Art, not a martial business, and Dad - it works." I know I can stop a fight, I've watched a 5'1" grandmother take down a Navy SEAL Trainer not once but three times. I'm not wasting my time swatting air or flailing around at people wearing heavy pads and helmets. Jujitsu works.
This is also why I'm a geophysicist, and not a string theorist. Math is fine if it's beautiful, but unless there is a point to it, I'm not interested in wasting time on it. I successfully used an airborne EM system to map the groundwater beneath the 1,000-sq-km San Pedro Basin in 3D. It works.
That's also why I'm a Latter-Day Saint: it makes sense, it answers all my questions, and puts everything in a rational, systematic framework that I can use to process life experiences.
Question for you: What do the following have in common?
Malachi 4: 5-6
1 Corinthians 15: 29
1 Corinthians 15: 40-42
Jeremiah 1: 5
There are quite a few more like this, but these are some of the more obvious parts of the Bible that no other Christian faith understands. No other Christian faith has Temples, either. Christ taught in Temples. Israel was instructed to BUILD Temples. However, only Latter-Day Temples exist on this Earth - at my last count, at least 136 of them all over the world.
I find it both irritating and amusing at the same time that a small number of "christians" take it upon themselves to excoriate Latter-Day Saints for not being Christian. Yet they don't practice - nor even understand - simple and clear elements in the Bible like those verses, nor apparently how to be Christ-like. They also apparently never spent any time studying what happened at Nicaea in 325 AD, when a political decision was made to adopt a consensus understanding of who God the Father and Jesus Christ were. Whited wall, indeed.
I've seen old stories about Joseph Smith, written by excommunicated bitter men and long since disproved, dredged back up again and again. Why the animosity? Why would anyone care?
To me, it's a back-handed compliment: someone is motivating a small number of susceptible people to attack a man who managed to explain those and many other obscure scriptures, who gave us the TRUTH. There must be something to this. Something must be working that bothers some people.
As far as I can tell, the Book of Mormon (521 pages dictated start-to-finish in just 60 days without corrections or editing), is exactly what it claims to be. There are too many things in it - both content and structural - that were unavailable to anyone on Earth in 1828, but have since then been discovered. I feel good when I read from it, while I do NOT feel good when reading the Song of Solomon.
This Gospel has opened my mind to continuing personal revelation, something unavailable in every other religion I studied when I was searching, and that by itself is a gift beyond measure. My wife and I have received such amazing peace from it, and Joseph Smith is the reason I have this. Joseph Smith also gave his life and blood rather than deny what he had seen and learned. This Gospel works.
And I honor him for providing it, at great personal expense.
~~~~~
This is why I teach and study Jujitsu: as my oldest son said when he introduced me to it, "Dad, I finally found it! This is a Martial Art, not a martial business, and Dad - it works." I know I can stop a fight, I've watched a 5'1" grandmother take down a Navy SEAL Trainer not once but three times. I'm not wasting my time swatting air or flailing around at people wearing heavy pads and helmets. Jujitsu works.
This is also why I'm a geophysicist, and not a string theorist. Math is fine if it's beautiful, but unless there is a point to it, I'm not interested in wasting time on it. I successfully used an airborne EM system to map the groundwater beneath the 1,000-sq-km San Pedro Basin in 3D. It works.
That's also why I'm a Latter-Day Saint: it makes sense, it answers all my questions, and puts everything in a rational, systematic framework that I can use to process life experiences.
Question for you: What do the following have in common?
Malachi 4: 5-6
1 Corinthians 15: 29
1 Corinthians 15: 40-42
Jeremiah 1: 5
There are quite a few more like this, but these are some of the more obvious parts of the Bible that no other Christian faith understands. No other Christian faith has Temples, either. Christ taught in Temples. Israel was instructed to BUILD Temples. However, only Latter-Day Temples exist on this Earth - at my last count, at least 136 of them all over the world.
I find it both irritating and amusing at the same time that a small number of "christians" take it upon themselves to excoriate Latter-Day Saints for not being Christian. Yet they don't practice - nor even understand - simple and clear elements in the Bible like those verses, nor apparently how to be Christ-like. They also apparently never spent any time studying what happened at Nicaea in 325 AD, when a political decision was made to adopt a consensus understanding of who God the Father and Jesus Christ were. Whited wall, indeed.
I've seen old stories about Joseph Smith, written by excommunicated bitter men and long since disproved, dredged back up again and again. Why the animosity? Why would anyone care?
To me, it's a back-handed compliment: someone is motivating a small number of susceptible people to attack a man who managed to explain those and many other obscure scriptures, who gave us the TRUTH. There must be something to this. Something must be working that bothers some people.
As far as I can tell, the Book of Mormon (521 pages dictated start-to-finish in just 60 days without corrections or editing), is exactly what it claims to be. There are too many things in it - both content and structural - that were unavailable to anyone on Earth in 1828, but have since then been discovered. I feel good when I read from it, while I do NOT feel good when reading the Song of Solomon.
This Gospel has opened my mind to continuing personal revelation, something unavailable in every other religion I studied when I was searching, and that by itself is a gift beyond measure. My wife and I have received such amazing peace from it, and Joseph Smith is the reason I have this. Joseph Smith also gave his life and blood rather than deny what he had seen and learned. This Gospel works.
And I honor him for providing it, at great personal expense.
~~~~~
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