Chap wrote:mental gymnast wrote:... That [the Mormon deity] can be involved in one way or the other along the way isn't something that I would conclusively 'write off'.
If your child asks for bread, will you give him a stone? If he asks for fish, will you give him a serpent? Or so Someone once asked.
Well, a lot of the time, stones and serpents does seem to be all that is on the menu in the Mormon deity's diner. Or, as in the example quoted above, calorie-free froth.
Would you like fries with that?
(I do wonder - really I do - how mentalgymnast can summon up the chutzpah to respond to a post like consiglieri's in this vapid manner. It is simply degrading to read.)
Agreed. These are the stock answers given to explain, but I'm not getting a sense that they are the end result of a thought process, but rather a case of the required conclusion having to be explained after the fact.
And consider this:
The thing is, if life is meant to be a place of testing/faith...there is going to be a certain sense of ambiguity 'built' into the system...
Why is that? Why does a "sense of ambiguity" have to be built in? I think of this in terms of teaching my students. I want my students to learn, I make it as clear as possible what they need to learn, and I am completely open about how I will test their ability to explain what they have learned. I am open that it is not easy, but I am also completely open about the level of competence I expect. My classes are difficult and students have to work very hard to get an A, no question, but we're not talking about hard work here, we're talking about being prepared for a test but failing for the sole reason that the questions were "ambiguous," and then calling that failure a good thing because it is supposedly part of the process.
Why, if I care for my students, would I build ambiguity, simply for ambiguity's sake, into the learning process? That would be mean and petty of me as a teacher. This after the fact explanation of ambiguity from God is the same.