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dangermom

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Posts posted by dangermom

  1. I live in a small city of 100K in a rural part of the state. We have 6 wards in town. Add a few small-town wards and that's our stake. We did have 7 but the recession has shoved quite a few people out of state (CA is not doing too well and this is a poor part of CA). My ward is the largest, because it covers the countryside north of town and that includes the Church farm. Several families live on the farm and a bunch more started off there and then bought houses within the same ward when they moved off. Also any new building in town mostly happens on the north within our boundaries.

  2. We had a nice Sunday. For once the chapel wasn't an oven--somebody always cranks the heat up so we all sit and swelter, grrr. The RS teacher (a good friend of mine) likes to put her foot in her mouth every so often and told us a story about her husband's girlfriend. :laugh: (She meant her husband's brother's girlfriend.)

     

    Amber, your story cracked me up!

  3. I've done very little posting on my reading lately, except a review of Ally Condie's Reached.

     

    I've read 3 books that I need to review: Anna Karenina, The Violinist's Thumb, and Portrait of a Lady.

     

    But all my blogging energy has gone into this month's project of profiling lesser-known classic children's authors.

  4. I would advise you to research very, very carefully into the CA landlord laws, which heavily favor tenants. It is really hard to get rid of a tenant who doesn't want to go. And from what I've heard from friends who have been landlords, it can turn into a huge pain in the neck. People can be horrible and will sometimes tear an apartment apart as they leave.

     

    It's a beautiful house in a nice area. I can understand your temptation! But it could very easily be a money sink and a horror show, so be careful.

  5. It seems to have made a lot more sense back in the day, apparently a lot of teens identified with it and saw it as a search for identity. Now, after 40-50 years of societal change, maybe not so much. My husband liked it, but he's the only one I know.

     

    By the end of the book, I just want to give Holden a big sandwich, a glass of milk, and a long nap. Then, once he was rested and rehydrated, I would give him a job in construction for the summer. That oughta fix him up pretty quick.

  6.  

    Confession and communion are not necessary for salvation either. Neither is baptism. They are all very nice and if they mean something to you, then by all means continue in their practice, but they will do nothing towards your salvation.

    That's your belief (and fine by me), but in the Bible, Jesus says that baptism is necessary. I think you can argue about whether Jesus' words at the Last Supper constitute a commandment (I think they do), but it's hard to get much clearer than Mark 16:16. If even Jesus felt the need to be baptized, then it's probably an important thing to do.

     

    And there we have an example of what I was saying. We can't both be right. Either baptism is, or isn't, necessary for salvation. Thus we have denominations.

  7. I am LDS, which means that a lot of other Christians would not consider me to be a Christian at all. (Would you?) I think the answers to your questions are going to vary a lot, and sometimes I'm going to say yes and no at the same time.

     

    I just want to chuck it all out the window and just believe, read the Bible, and love others. I wonder though if it matters. If God thinks you must be Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, etc. Do you need to follow a specific set of rules to live out what God wants or are the denominations for our benefit and God doesn't give a hoot.

    The Bible gives us rules for living, so I figure that yes, God has rules. He is also a loving and forgiving God who meets us where we are and encourages us to walk further along His path. I don't know if He's worried so much about where we are on the path, as whether we are moving in the right direction. We're going to fall down and make mistakes all the time, and sometimes we're going to fall very badly, but He's got a plan for that. So, while I think that yes, God cares about how well I am keeping the rule about loving my neighbor, He also knows that I'm not going to keep it all that well.

     

    I think that denomination matters in some ways and not in others. I think that good Christians exist in all denominations, and God loves all His children, and that he has plans for each of us. He can certainly inspire a Baptist and a Methodist and a Catholic to do His work in the place where they are. At the same time, I think an objective reality with a moral law exists, that human beings are not too good at seeing that reality, and that various denominations are our attempts to define that objective reality--hopefully, but not always, with the help of divine revelation. As such, some denominations are going to be more correct than others, though they might be patchily correct. For example, Protestants believe in the priesthood of all believers, RCC and Orthodox believe in a priesthood handed down from St. Peter that must be transferred, and LDS believe similarly to RCC and EO but believe that it was lost and then restored. We can't all be right, and someone must be more right than the others, unless we're all completely wrong. If we were all completely good at receiving revelation, there would only be one united church.

     

    Someday we might be able to learn more and gain more knowledge about God. Probably mostly after this life (I mean, we might each gain more individual knowledge of God throughout our lives, but until the Second Coming, there probably isn't going to be a single clear public answer for everyone). I'm quite sure that all of us will have quite a lot to learn, don't you think? I'm sure we've all got some mistaken ideas. Happily, God wants us to keep learning and growing.

     

     

    I know there are denominations that believe there way is the only way, does that mean they believe everyone else is going to hell? Or not a Christian?

     

    It depends who you're asking. An LDS Christian takes the word of anyone who claims to be a Christian. If you believe in Jesus Christ as Savior, then that makes you a Christian. You might not have as much truth as someone else, but we're all in that boat to some extent or another. LDS belief does not put a lot of people in hell. Rather, it seems that we will all gain the desires of our hearts--if we want to be close to God, we can learn how to do that. If we don't want to be very close, we don't have to be. Some few people won't want to have anything to do with God at all and will reject all His works. They have to be free to make that choice.

     

     

    I'll give an example that made me ponder. I was at my church many months ago. This church has very specific rules on confession and communion. Sometimes it bothers me because I know they believe that Jesus is present at the service and I asked the priest would Jesus deny someone that just walked off of the street communion? What if this person instantly believed and wanted to be a follower, would Jesus deny him the bread and body? He said he didn't know but he was responsible for it and he would deny them. I asked him then if Mother Teresa walked in, would she be denied communion and he said yes because he doesn't personally know Mother Teresa. She isn't the same denomination and would have to attend confession before communion. I guess that just blew me away...I mean we are talking Mother Teresa here. She would be denied the body and blood?

     

    Well, like Parrot said, Mother Teresa wouldn't expect to walk in and take Communion--nor would I. Communion is a specific thing that comes with weight. In LDS thought, it happens after baptism and is a renewal of baptismal covenants. By taking Communion, you're promising to always remember the sacrifice of Jesus and to keep the commandments. Taking Communion renews your bond with God and has to be done worthily; it's a problem to take it unworthily.

     

    From an LDS perspective, if Jesus was there and a person walked in off the street and was converted, we'd teach a certain amount of doctrine to make sure the person knew what he was getting into, and then we'd fill up the baptismal font. It would take a little while. There are steps to take before you get to the Communion part; does that make sense?

  8.  

    I started The Eyre Affair . I like the writing enough that I'm reading selections out loud to DS as examples of good writing - "a small puffy man who looked like a bag of flour with arms and legs."

     

    I love that book, and the whole series. Really ought to read Eyre Affair again...

     

    Physics and Engineering for Future Presidents

     

    I've read Physics for Future Presidents by Richard Muller--is that the same book or a different one? I thought it was excellent and plan to make my kids read it before graduating from high school. My husband took physics from Muller in college, and thought he was great.

  9. I have finally actually finished a book. I have all these books going on at once and they are mostly very very long, so this is my first finished book of the year! It's Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon, by Iosif Shklovsky, and I thought it was great. It's a memoir sort of book, personal stories about his life as an astronomer in the USSR--from grad school in 1940 (evacuation and manual labor) through the Stalin regime up to the start of SETI. Lots of Soviet stuff, and funny stories. If you're interested in the USSR or science, it's a good read.

     

    Also, all this month I've been doing a series on lesser-known children's classics. Today was Tove Jansson but I've done a bunch of them. I'm sure that WTMers already know all the books I'm highlighting but IME most people don't!

  10. Julie, I keep thinking that what you do now will show your kids what to do when things are utterly horrible. What they see you do, they will do themselves. If you check out, they will do that. If you keep going through this awful thing and stay for them, broken as you are, they will do that. Or, as Elizabeth says, they'll go to their dad and he'll be much worse.

     

    I'm thinking of you and praying for you.

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