Yes, the public safety net should be available to those who need it. For me, the lapse occurred between the time that I realized the church is a cult, and when I was able to re-organize my life to continue without the church. Most people might think that this shouldn't matter so much. But when you have no template of who you should be, to fall back on, all you find are missing pieces that don't f
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I don't know if there is a common factor to success in life or not, and if there is, whether or not it can be given to someone at a young age. Growing up, most of my friends would get money from their parents whenever they needed it and certainly their basic needs were taken care of for them. If I wanted to wear clothes that matched my peers (lower middle income part of town) - instead of wear
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Kentish brings up a reasonable issue for discussion? Were the Native Americans given land or just allowed to keep some of the land that was theirs to begin with? If we consider only equity, then they were allowed to keep only some of the land that was theirs to begin with. But once again, equity isn't always possible. What would become of the country if full ownership and control of all lands in
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Back when Joseph Smith wrote the rules of excommunication trials, you could hold a kangaroo court in private and nobody would believe what the excommunicated person reported about his trial. After-all, he had just been excommunicated. Who would believe an excommunicated person said about the process anyway? These days, it's virtually impossible for church leaders to know whether or not you've got
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Casual Observer: For those who haven't noticed, the church is really in to real-estate. So they revoked the eternal deal and re-wrote the plan of salvation to take away all of your planets and give them to the Mormon church. At first you would become just like God, who creates worlds without end. Then, you only got your own planet. Now, that's all changed too. It's just a plan of happiness now. A
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Maybe the church is 'separating the wheet from the chaff' now. They are ritch enough now that tithing is probably the least of their income streams, especially if your contributions are meager. They want Ritch people. Poor people tend to become liabilities. But more than that, they want more real estate and shopping malls.
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I recently realized in some articles that I was reading, that the term "Equity" was often being used instead of the term "Equality". The differences are actually quite significant and make different statements. And yet these terms are often being used interchangeably in the media these days. Some people may not have noticed the differences (need for critical thinking)."Eq
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I think that critical thinking skills have more to do with how you interact with the world socially, more-so than how well your logic skills work. Your logic can help build a good BS detector in most people. But you need to locate the most relevant information before you can make good decisions. So when everyone else is saying "follow the prophet", if the prophet is giving bad advice
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It only seems logical that given equatorial weather conditions and everyone spending most of their waking hours working outside (as our ancestors did), that those conditions will turn anyone's lineage black, given enough time and many generations. The same holds true for white skin. When living in mostly overcast skies and winter conditions much of the year, that anyone's decendents will event
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I could just imagine a trans-gendered black guy in 1976 who smokes and drinks alcahol, suing the Mormon church for not hiring him to clean the temples. Churches are allowed to have their own government with certain exemptions from civil laws being allowed if there is a religious reason. For example, some Native American tribes are allowed to smoke Payote which is prohibited by law for the rest
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I saw a big he-man pick-up truck barreling down the highway today. It sported two large American flags waving from behind the cab, trailing the length of the bed. One of the two flags was a normal American flag. The other flag sent a message that I am still confused about. There were only white and blue stars and stripes (flag was almost only blue and white). But there were only two individual
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I suspect that Mitt Romney didn't ever win the Presidency because he is both a Mormon and also a former Mormon leader (Stake President). I might have voted for him myself if his allegiance to the Mormon church wasn't sealed with his own consent to have his throat, chest, and stomach cut-open as a "penalty" if he didn't keep his covenants to the church. The USA would have moved closer th
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You are free to believe whatever you want when it comes to what CRT really is. But the facts are that white people are being sent to training camps (sometimes disguised as "training") by employers, where they are forced to admit their guilt for being white or to admit their "white privilege", in shame. That is outrageous. If Jesus were here working a job, he might also be forc
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I have received Affirmative Action training where I work and find nothing wrong with it. Affirmative Action regulates behavior only, and does not require anyone to believe any kind of any ideology other than their obligation to comply with some fair and reasonable anti-descrimination laws. The concepts of collective guilt, racial identity issues, and neo-segregation are not taught nor are they re
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"Americans are naturally outraged that critical race theory promotes three ideas—race essentialism, collective guilt, and neo-segregation—which violate the basic principles of equality and justice." https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/critical-race-theory-fight/
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Theoretically, there should be large amounts of water as ice, in shadowed areas near the poles on the moon. If China wants to send more men to the moon, they should see if they can find some of that water. If they land near one of the Apollo sites, all they'll find is a 1960's era moon rover and the landing-base portion of the Luner excursion module. Any technology the Apollo astronauts left b
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For those who have seen the movie series "The Matrix", I see Mormonism so much like the Matrix. On the rare times that I've gone back in to a Mormon church building after having my name removed (or should I say that I was "unplugged"), I felt like Neo on his journeys back in to the Matrix after he was unplugged from it. The Bishops and Stake Presidents are the sentinels. A lot
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When you've got more money than God does, leaving the US and taking that money with you can be a risky proposition. If the hurch moves to a banana Republic, maybe the government there will decide to take away all of the church's money, simply because they have the power to do so and because they want that money. If the church moves to a country that doesn't respect religion much, maybe that coun
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Oh, I was mistaken. Maybe they were just trapped there without any means to make boats. I thought they had all died. But maybe they were just trapped there.
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You can commit financial felonies and still afterward become a Mormon bishop... as long as the financial felony was not against the church itself. You can molest children and still be put in positions of trust around children in the church, as long as no one else knows. Anyone else here want to add to this list?
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With these kinds of lies, you would be justified in hiring a private investigator to catalog his life for you. Find out the names and contact information of the other wives. Find out what his third-grade school teacher said about him. Contact the other wives and get their sides of the story. Then ask him a lot of questions, stringing him along like you know relatively little, to see just how big
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Just look at Easter Island. It was once an island forest. The population exploded there because of prosperity. Everyone cut down trees to build and heat homes. Then all at once, they ran out of trees. The last tree was cut down at one point. In that moment going forward, no one could build or heat their homes. They couldn't even build boats to leave the island. Some people may have left early at
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Has anyone ever done an extensive genealogical study of Joseph Smith's lineage? If you could find any member of Joseph Smith's ancestry who had African origins, then the whole church would cease to have ever been true (not that it was ever true anyway). The "one drop of blood rule", said that even one drop of African blood was enough to disqualify a person from holding the priesthood. S
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To experience the same unprecedented temperature highs in Phoenix Arizona that Seattle and Portland have experienced in the past few weeks, it would have to get up to 128 to 130 degrees here. Our high for the year so far is only 118 degrees. That's pretty normal for June in Phoenix though. We haven't seen any abnormal temperatures here so far in Phoenix this year yet. It's actually been cooler th
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It's a crime to leave your dog alone in the car in the summer time here (and rightfully so). It's totally legal to bash-in someone else's car window to save a dog or a child from a locked car in the Summer here. To stay out of trouble you have to: 1.) Notify the police first, 2.) Honestly believe that the dog or child's life is at risk, 3.) Stay with the dog or child until the police arrive. h
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I think that the Mormon church leaders in Salt Lake would rather deny that Joseph Smith was a prophet if that is what it took to keep from loosing their 500 Billion dollars in net worth. It'll be interesting to see where this lawsuit goes. If 100,000 people join the class-action and if the church loses the case and then has to pay each class member a million dollars (including punitive damages
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When the other kid's parents call you to complain, tell them their kid got it wrong. Tell them that what the guy on the radio actually said was "oh God, hear the words of my mouth". Then hang-up.
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Most of shrodinger's posts are rants about the injustices of racism. Like none of us understand the concepts and agree with him and so we need our daily reminders just to make him feel better. I don't know why he needs to constantly write about the same things. It does get old.
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But, to the point of the lawsuit. If you don't really believe what you say and you just promote falsehoods to bilk people out of their money, that's fraud and you can be sued for doing that.
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Thanks for the update Subaemnotlogedin. I read both the Amended complaint and the Church's recent motion to dismiss. It looks like Kay Burningham is just a much better attorney than the attorneys for the church. The church just keeps trying to recycle the same lame claims of religious persecution and first amendment rights, while Kay nails the issue down pretty hard that her lawsuit is not about
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