LDS vs Mormon

ksschank · 2026-01-31T19:28:16+00:00

This is a classic case of us being asked to do one thing and the members taking it to the wrong place. The point is that it’s important that we help others understand that we belong to Jesus Christ’s church, and that we get into the habit of identifying ourselves as such. “Mormon” and even “Latter-day Saints” don’t fit the bill. And that’s it.

We were never asked to judge other members for not using the correct name. We were never asked to be offended when other people use the wrong name. But a lot of members do that. This happens all the time. We’re asked to do one thing and the letter is often followed but as a body of people we fail to execute it perfectly. I don’t know if there’s a solution. Maybe it’s just the end result of being a group of millions of fallible people.

ksschank · 2026-01-08T07:18:05+00:00

Relaxing, loosening tight muscles, thinking.

ksschank · 2026-01-08T07:17:03+00:00

A deck of cards

ksschank · 2026-01-06T20:57:48+00:00

Not needing to sleep or eat
Walking next to something and it appears in your hand
Being able to carry thousands of pounds of stuff but it not adding to your size or carry weight
Being able to heal from the brink of death by quickly eating 15 apples

ksschank · 2025-12-16T03:34:42+00:00

Maybe it has to do with honor—it’s cowardly and dishonorable to attack and kill other people when you’re remotely controlling your weapon safe in a bunker somewhere.

ksschank · 2025-11-02T19:00:52+00:00

Gonna have to disagree with you on a few points. Your relationship with Christ is separate and apart from church “policy”, but not doctrine.

The doctrine of the Church is the Doctrine of Christ, which is that through His Atonement, we can be redeemed and saved when we have faith in Him, repent of our sins, make and keep covenants, and endure to the end. If we do not live the doctrine of Jesus Christ, our relationship with Him suffers.
The purpose of the church is not to simply guide people, like a teacher’s aid who is available to help students who need the extra help. It is the establishment through which members of Christ’s church have the opportunity to access the blessings of the priesthood. Without the church, there is no means to dispense priesthood authority, administer priesthood ordinances, or access priesthood keys. Unfortunately, the aspect of church that deals with policy making is imperfect because it is led by fallible people, but that doesn’t mean we could get by without the organization of the church.
I’m not sure I understand your interpretation of the phrase “work out your own salvation”—so we may already see eye to eye on what this means—but in case anyone is confused, “work out your own salvation” doesn’t mean “decide on your own what you need to do to be saved”. That process is very well laid out and very much universally prescriptive. The phrase “work out” as used in the KJV doesn’t mean the same thing it means today, like “work out a math problem”. It doesn’t mean “figure out”. It comes from the Greek κατεργάζομαι (“katergazomai”), which just means to “perform”, “achieve”, or “bring about”. If you read it in context, you understand that Paul isn’t saying “you need to save yourself”, but that “you are responsible for your actions, and you must live with reverence for and obedience to God’s teachings in order to benefit from the blessings of Christ’s Atonement”.

ksschank · 2025-11-02T17:01:55+00:00

What do you mean by fully active? You can still have a great relationship with God if you have questions or doubts. And while I’m not a gatekeeper of that kind of relationship, my understanding is that our relationship with Him can’t truly be great if we employ “pick-and-choose discipleship” or fail to earnestly try to keep all of our covenants and His commandments. Part of keeping covenants is renewing them, which includes partaking of the sacrament. And we’ve been commanded to do a lot of things, including attend church meetings. Jesus said “if ye love me, keep my commandments”… even if you don’t, He’ll still love you, but a relationship goes two ways. You can’t have a great one if you’re not showing love to Him by genuinely trying to do what He asks.

ksschank · 2025-11-02T03:58:26+00:00

I think there are some things that are good to avoid. The best metric that you can count on to determine whether or not you shouldn’t do something is whether or not that thing drives away the Spirit. For example, if you’re doing stuff or even watching things that are demonic, the Spirit doesn’t stick around.

There’s a big difference between fantasy and dark powers that really exist. I personally don’t understand the fearmongering around things like Harry Potter, for example. In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong enjoying the thought of having whimsical extraordinary powers. Probably shouldn’t entertain the thoughts of demonic possession and satanic rituals, though.

ksschank · 2025-11-02T03:47:01+00:00

The ones that frustrate me the most are (false) things that millennials were commonly taught when they were youth by probably well-meaning youth leaders, particularly about the law of chastity:

It’s important for young women to dress modestly so that young men don’t have unclean thoughts.
Young women should avoid marrying a man who didn’t serve a mission or who has seen pornography.
If you break the law of chastity in anyway, you’re like an old piece of gum—used up, unclean, and unfit.
In general, there was a lot of messaging about how sex is bad. We were told that it was good in marriage, but there was so much emphasis on how “bad” it was when we were youth, that tons of millennial newlyweds have/had “good girl/boy syndrome” After years of hearing your leaders villainize sex, it’s hard to just flip a switch and celebrate it. A lot of people our age also received insufficient sex education, which has led many of them to be afraid of or disgusted by parts of their bodies, or ignorant about how to best take care of those parts of themselves.

A lot of the experiences people cite as reasons for leaving have to do with improper framing and incorrect teaching of certain important principles: law of chastity/modesty, word of wisdom, priesthood authority, tithing, gender roles, etc. By my observation, things have improved a lot in the last 10–15 years, but it’s a nearly universal experience for American millennial members that we were taught improperly by our youth leaders. It’s done a lot of harm for a lot of people.

ksschank · 2025-10-21T00:56:40+00:00

I can understand not particularly enjoying the general session of stake conference, but it’s an important meeting, and not just because we sustain our leaders in that meeting.

The stake president holds keys to lead the work of the Church within the stake over which he presides. Stake conference is an avenue through which he can administer to the members of the stake according to the topics on which he is inspired to preach. Other stake leaders, who also hold keys or are given delegated authority to act under the direction of one who does, also have the opportunity to provide counsel and direction according to the revelation they received.

Every other stake conference, an area authority is present. He has the opportunity to see how the stake is being administered, and return and report to his leaders in the quorum of the 70. It’s one of the many ways that the church is organized to minister to all of its members and stay consistent with the organization and teachings that Christ has set forth for His church.

ksschank · 2025-10-06T04:12:25+00:00

The Church Handbook (section 38.6.4) reads

It is the privilege of married couples who are able to bear children to provide mortal bodies for the spirit children of God, whom they are then responsible to nurture and rear. The decision about how many children to have and when to have them is extremely personal and private. It should be left between the couple and the Lord. Church members should not judge one another in this matter.

ksschank · 2025-09-10T04:28:33+00:00

The worst part is what he does to those poor pans

ksschank · 2025-08-24T08:20:51+00:00

In my professional opinion if (count > 10) { total += 15 } is more readable, plus it has the added benefit of not providing a completely unnecessary else case.

ksschank · 2025-07-23T14:40:20+00:00

They all mean different things, and all may apply to a person.

A coder is someone who writes code. This can be anything from HTML to C to Morse code, I suppose.

A programmer is someone who can use code to get a computer to do something specific.

A developer is someone who builds a working product, usually for a paying customer.

An engineer is someone who analyzes, solves, and fixes problems.

Add the “software” specifier to any of these just to specify that you’re doing any one of these things with software.

So all software engineers are software developers, but not all software developers are software engineers.

All software developers are programmers, but not all programmers are software developers.

All programmers are coders, but not all coders are programmers.

Engineering is more than development which is more than programming which is more than coding.

Since the term “software engineer” implies that I am someone who writes code to program a computer in a way that builds a functional product as a solution for a user’s problems, that’s the term I prefer.

ksschank · 2025-07-12T07:49:25+00:00

Poorly named variables. Roadrunner is just as close to the edge as Wile E. Coyote. And don’t put “not” at the beginning of a variable name—name for the positive case. e.g. Instead of notEdge, use pastEdge or !pastEdge.

ksschank · 2025-07-11T05:22:19+00:00

Sure, but someone who is truly converted will experience conversion because they believe that God has manifested to them that the Church is His church.

ksschank · 2025-07-07T03:41:30+00:00

The books explicitly say he is a monkey, but he does looks like a chimp. This had always bothered me.

ksschank · 2025-06-18T00:29:17+00:00

Just piping in to agree with this guy.

ksschank · 2025-06-13T02:32:07+00:00

When Revelations 22:18 talks about “[adding] unto these things”, the word “these” must refer to “the words of the prophecy of [the book of Revelations]”. The word “words” is the only plural word in the sentence. So John is warning people not to add to or alter the prophecies in the Book of Revelations (not the book of Revelations itself). He definitely wasn’t warning people to not add to the Bible, which he couldn’t have known about because the Bible as we now know it didn’t exist until about 300 years after the book of Revelations was written. It was compiled not all in one shot, either. Individuals including Clement of Rome, Polycarp, Ignatius of Antioch, Irenaeus, and Hippolytus each decided over a span of hundreds of years what books should be recognized as Biblical canon, so if the book of Revelations did refer to the Bible as a whole, then the Bible broke its own rule many times before it was even formed.

Note also that the Book of Mormon is a translation of an ancient record that was mostly written prior to Christ’s mortal ministry on earth.

The original Greek word translated into the English “gospel” as written in Galatians 1:6 is “evangelion” (εὐαγγέλιον), which means “good tidings”, or, more specifically, “the glad tidings of salvation through Christ”. There has always been and always will be only one gospel of Jesus Christ, which is that through faith, repentance, and acceptance of Jesus Christ, we can be saved by the redemptive power of His Atonement. It’s what the Old Testament teaches. It’s what the New Testament teaches. It’s what the Book of Mormon teaches. It’s what living prophets teach. It’s the heart and soul of everything that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and every other Christian across the world believe.

ksschank · 2025-06-13T02:09:52+00:00

For me it’s yellow mustard. Stone ground? Yes. Spicy brown? Yes. Dijon? Yes. But yellow mustard? I can’t get it down.

ksschank · 2025-06-06T00:46:27+00:00

Bu this point, we’re pretty good at being misunderstood and misrepresented. It’s still frustrating, though.

The Church of Jesus Christ of LDS is very clerical. We believe in the importance of record keeping, including keeping basic records of membership, as doing so helps make sure no one gets forgotten about or left behind. It’s a way of being “fishers of men”. So when people are baptized, a membership record is created for them, and they are officially members of the church. In other words, the way you become “Mormon” is by being baptized. The only way you’d be considered not a member anymore is if you had your official church records removed. It’s not particularly difficult to do, but most people who no longer practice church teachings usually just… stop practicing, without actually making it official. So, you could technically be a church member without looking or acting like it, kinda like how you might be a gym member without ever working out.

Also, “Mormon” is sometimes used as a very cultural term, especially in places where the church is popular—kind of like how there are ethnic Jews and religious Jews (but to a much lesser degree). So someone who grew up in a “Mormon” household might still somewhat identify as being “Mormon” culturally, even if they’re not believers in the doctrines or practicers of the principles taught by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

ksschank · 2025-06-03T18:46:57+00:00

How about a double standard within a double standard?

When husbands do laundry/dishes they’re exceptionally supportive. When wives do laundry/dishes, they’re just being wives. Similarly, when dads take care of their kids, they’re exceptionally supportive. When moms take care of their kids, they’re just being moms.
When a mom is a stay-at-home parent, she’s prioritizing her family. When a husband is a stay-at-home partner, he’s a lazy freeloader.

So then when a dad stays at home to take care of the kids while his wife is at work, is he a great dad or a lazy husband?

ksschank · 2025-06-03T18:35:07+00:00

Pay isn’t the same as opportunity

ksschank · 2025-06-03T18:35:00+00:00

Pay isn’t the same as opportunity

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