Jesus is quoted a couple of times in the Gospel of Matthew as saying “A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it” and in John as saying “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe.”

I can understand why religious leaders don’t want people to seek objective evidence for their claims, because, well…there is no objective evidence. Discouraging the desire for evidence is one thing, but labeling us “wicked” ad “adulterous”? By TSCC’s standards, I’m probably wicked in a few ways, but adulterous?????? For one thing, in more 30 years of marriage, I’ve certainly never been adulterous, and what the #@$% does desiring proof have to do with adulterous?

What leaders of Mormonism (and many other religions) fail to realize is that the burden of proof is completely on them. They claim to know of the existence and nature of god. They claim to know his mind and will. They claim to represent him in ordinances. They claim to convey his commandments. And yet, we are the wicked ones for wanting some proof.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. They not only don’t have extraordinary evidence—they have no evidence at all.

I'm relieved to know you were not describing me.

Maybe I was--have you been seeking signs? ;)

Good heavens!!

All you have to do is ask, with a sincere heart and real intent, if those things are true, and it shall be made known to you!

Would I make this up?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/23/2019 06:57PM by elderolddog.

That’s if those things are “not true”. Pure double talk. Hi EOD, how’s the golf game. I felt that you nearly had a hole in one. Is that not true?

Mr. O'Fitz, I have had two. One we saw roll in and the other we found leaning against the flagstick. They were in 1989 and 2017.

My favorite in person hole in one was performed by a former friend whom I "divorced" for cheating, in a very fierce wind, to an uphill par three. When he sent in for his Titleist certificate, he had to put down: 113 yards/3 wood.

The world is a wonderful place and I hope to see you in mid-August if I get invited to the wedding...

Did the Titleist company pray to know that your friend made the hole in one, or were they wicked and adulterous?

> My favorite in person hole in one was performed by
> a former friend whom I "divorced" for cheating...

And look where that golf cheater is today!

I don't actually know where he is. I haven't spoken to him since I found out that he'd cheated during a stipulated round.

Yes, I, too, am surprised at how seriously I take the game.

I hope to see you in Aug. Excellent. Thanks for the hole in one stories. I have some stories I’ll share with you when we play. To people who don’t know don’t understand: Golf is life. I know this with “every fiber of my being”. In the name of cheese and rice, Amen.

"All you have to do is ask, with a sincere heart and real intent, if those things are true, and it shall be made known to you!"

I don't remember the exact number of times this happened, but it was pretty rare that someone would actually read the book of mormon and pray about it. The sad thing was that about in 75% of the cases where some one prayed about it they either got no answer or they felt the book was not of God. I remember feeling very conflicted about this, since deep in my heart I felt it was a fraud myself, and I was just worthy enough to getthe the right answer while praying.

I stopped seeking signs when I got a GPS app on my phone.

I know! What does adultery have to do with asking for signs?

There are true believers who never question anything who are adulterers too.

What the heck association do those two things even have? What a stupid scripture.

The 'adulterous' idea might be metaphorical, meaning that if you are seeking after a sign, you are aiding (and in bed with) Satan in his desire to destroy the truth.

Then again, that might be stretching it a bit.

That is quite a stretch, but I've seen bigger (and more laughable) stretches trying to make scriptures mean various things.

Sounds like me!

CrispingPin Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

>
> What leaders of Mormonism (and many other
> religions) fail to realize is that the burden of
> proof is completely on them.


the burden of proof is on *anyone* who makes a claim or argument. be it LDSinc making claims about angels and golden plates, or a politician who makes a claim about the supposedly beneficial effects of their new law.

So reading the BOM and praying with real intent that the truthfulness of it be made known to me by the power of the holy ghost, isn't asking for a sign? OK, got it.

So the signs and tokens from masonic temple rites that are used as to signal the heavenly guards that you're in the club aren't signs? OK, got it.

So I shouldn't do what Matthew 7:7 say's to do? "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." OK, got it.

The usual contradictions of mormonism.

Damn it! If you had even just the faith the size of a mustard seed, you could move a mountain; You cuold tell it to do the Hokey-Pokey and it would! And you could teach it other dances!!

But I'm thinking that this biblical mustard seed was one of those 256Gb thumb drives and I simply never accumulated more than a couple of megabytes of faith, which was mostly the little bit of confidence I gained when I became adept at undoing bra straps one-handed. So, no mountains, just some nice sized mounds...

I used to have faith proportionate to the size of a mustard seed. It got lodged under my eyelid and became sore and a spot of contention, limiting my choices and opportunities in life.....so I plucked it out and discarded it.

I moved the seed, now I can see the the mountain. Its fine right where it is.

CrispingPin Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary
> evidence. They not only don’t have extraordinary
> evidence—they have no evidence at all.

Although that is often claimed (famously by Carl Sagan), it is not logical. Extraordinary claims can be proved (if at all) by very ordinary evidence.

See my parable "The Man Without a Heart" at http://packham.n4m.org/heart.htm

The important part:
If "extraordinary evidence" means "clear and convincing" evidence or evidence "beyond a reasonable doubt," then the answer is clearly "yes." But that requirement is a statement about the sufficiency of the evidence, not its nature. The evidence itself can be very ordinary, and, in fact, must be (since improbable explanations are inadmissible). But if a miracle really happens, there is no reason why there should not be evidence to prove it.

Let me illustrate with an imaginary miraculous event. Suppose that a man is undergoing surgery for a heart transplant. As the surgeons remove his diseased heart, and before they can connect the replacement, the man dies. The surgeons stop the procedure, and the corpse is taken to the mortuary, where the embalmer begins to do his work. Suppose that the corpse sits up and says he wants to go home. The astonished embalmer calls an ambulance, which returns the living corpse to the hospital, where the surprised doctors examine this man, who has no pulse, no heart, no blood, and a still open chest cavity. They examine him, test him, photograph him, feed him, and finally send him home. He is contacted by news media, and he appears on talk shows, where he displays his empty chest. He posts a schedule of visiting hours at his home, where anyone for five dollars can see him and put a hand inside his chest. He survives with no heart for ten years.

Now, this event, if it actually happened, would indeed be a miracle, with no ready "natural" explanation. (Perhaps it would be a miracle for an inerrantist only if the man were brought back to life as a result of a minister's prayer to God.) The question then is, what evidence would "prove" that this "miracle" occurred? The evidence would be very convincing both in amount and weight: the testimonies of the doctors who performed the surgery and other disinterested doctors who examined him, the x-rays and other medical records, the video tapes and photographs, the testimony of the thousands of people who personally put a hand into his chest. Yet all these items of evidence are very ordinary, nonmiraculous things.

Point taken.

Since there is no chance they’ll ever provide even very ordinary evidence to back their claims, there’s no need to ask for extraordinary evidence.

RPackham Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> personally put a hand into his chest. Yet all
> these items of evidence are very ordinary,
> nonmiraculous things.


"15 And it came to pass that the multitude went forth, and thrust their hands into his side, and did feel the prints of the nails in his hands and in his feet; and this they did do, going forth one by one until they had all gone forth, and did see with their eyes and did feel with their hands, and did know of a surety and did bear record, that it was he, of whom it was written by the prophets, that should come."
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/3-ne/11.1-10?lang=eng

Dupes.

I think the implication of adulterous relates to people that are cheating on the church. I think it suggests that people would rather donate their time and money to other causes than to the whore-church (my word because I think of LDS Corp as a blood sucking vampire that is never satisfied). All of the promises that one makes in the temple are abundantly clear that it is the church that is to be honored and defended at all costs.

Maybe it’s more about the author of that gospel. Matthew was a tax collector, so capable of being a dick. Or it’s a bad translation from Greek. Either way it makes no sense. There’s no sex involved in asking for a sign.

But then you might as well fret about what Gandalf or Obi-Wan Kenobi said or didn’t say.

It's pretty simple, The evidence of mormonism is the book of mormon. That's what they are offering. If it's true then mormondom is true.

The evidence of god is our experience of the natural world and that it exists, sight, taste, smell, touch. The likelihood of complex systems being able to appear out of nothing is infinitely small. There is a little appreciated fact in science that doesn't get enough broadcast and that is the idea of 'entropy.' The universe is in a state of deterioration. Every generation loses some genetic code and dna, we are becoming corrupted. Yet the intelligentsia and academia continues to say evolution is true, ...complex organisms coming out of amoebas (less complex organisms). Which is ridiculous.

I suppose perhaps we could just be imagining it all? And nothing really exists. This is what the intellectual atheist has to grapple with.

But evolution is true. The assumption that it’s materially guided, maybe not so much. But science always catches up.

The arrow of time moves from past to future, so entropy. That’s a macroscopic effect. At a quantum mechanical level, time can go in reverse no problem. I consider everything in the Universe to be entangled in a sense. That’s why when a photon from a distant star hits my eye, the wave function collapse is felt by the star at exactly that instant, not millions of years in the future of the star. Photons experience no time. The fact that we’re not experiencing everything all at once is a miracle of existence.

I once learned that everything that can happen has already happened. Then I found out I wasn’t the only one to realize such a thing. But it makes the most sense if the arrow of time is pointing the other way. If everything has already happened, we are really running the clock in reverse toward a beginning. So while one dimension of time predicts the heat death of the Universe, another dimension should predict eternal life and an ultimate destination of divine perfection.

So what we’re really doing is pulling ourselves toward the future at the same time the past is pushing us, as Alfred North Whitehead postulated. This is where the Holy Ghost comes in. It’s a conscious connection with the future pole of self that only works through belief.

This is why evolution works. The successful adaptation pulls itself into existence. Random mutation explains a lot, but it doesn’t explain everything. The creationists are right about some chasms being impossible to cross. Life creates itself because it comes from the future.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/25/2019 12:18AM by babyloncansuckit.

> There is a little appreciated fact in
> science that doesn't get enough broadcast and that
> is the idea of 'entropy.' The universe is in a
> state of deterioration.

Good grief, will someone please teach this man what the second law of thermodynamics means? He's as clueless as someone who never mastered the quadratic equation.


-------------------
> Every generation loses
> some genetic code and dna, we are becoming
> corrupted.

Yes, and "corrupted dna" is what allows adaptation to new environments. Without random mutations, there would be no advanced life on earth.


----------------
> Yet the intelligentsia and academia
> continues to say evolution is true, ...complex
> organisms coming out of amoebas (less complex
> organisms). Which is ridiculous.

If you understood entropy, you would realize that your statement is utter nonsense.


--------------------
> I suppose perhaps we could just be imagining it
> all? And nothing really exists. This is what the
> intellectual atheist has to grapple with.

Hie once replied to one of your posts by saying, "I weep for some Americans' education." What he meant was that someone who thinks algebra and science are a waste of time and shouldn't be taught in school is, by definition, incapable of understanding what science teaches.

Don't make the mistake of assuming that something you never bothered to learn is "ridiculous." It's better to keep your mouth shut and leave some doubt in the minds of those who are tempted to question your intelligence.

"There is a little appreciated fact in science that doesn't get enough broadcast and that is the idea of 'entropy.' The universe is in a state of deterioration. Every generation loses some genetic code and dna, we are becoming corrupted. Yet the intelligentsia and academia continues to say evolution is true, ...complex organisms coming out of amoebas (less complex organisms). Which is ridiculous."


Where do you get your information about entropy, DNA replication and evolution? The Garner Ted Armstrong University bible lectures? The thing that is ridiculous is your understanding of entropy, DNA replication, and evolution.

This is the man, bear in mind, who once said the quadratic equation was a waste of effort and should be replaced with lectures on Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism.

All it takes to solve the Adriatic Equation is a good map.

I used to alternate after shave lotions, Hai Karate, and Manifest Destiny. But I always used Manifest Destiny on first dates.

You must be fun being married to. I suppose that would be hard to forget. The quadratic equation is why your car doesn’t bounce up and down going down the road. The science of critically damped systems is easy enough for any college kid to grasp. A beautiful example of mathematics in nature. Of course, many teachers find a way to make it boring. Maybe teaching is like cooking. You can serve the food bland or add in some spices.

"A beautiful example of mathematics in nature. Of course, many teachers find a way to make it boring."


One of my high-school math teachers was a short-statured, foul-tempered, ex Golden Gloves boxer who seemed forever on the verge of a volcanic eruption. We weren't bored ...

we were terrified.

Jesus was thinking our or time, not his.
Prophetic viewing of the day when GPS electronics will make road signs no longer needed?
His way early Highway Beautification project?

Maybe "adulterous" is meant more along the lines of "adulterated." A wicked and contaminated generation? Who knows.

Yeah, like so many things in the scriptures, we either have to redefine words, or find new explanations to not have the teachings be crazy.