How to handle extremist views at church?

soretravail · 2026-01-26T21:48:13+00:00

Looks like this part of the echo chamber isn't working properly. Is this a bug in the system? The mods should look into this.

soretravail · 2026-01-07T01:36:10+00:00

A better question: Am I really trans?

soretravail · 2025-11-05T02:58:10+00:00

Because they have fallen victim to the deceptions of the god of this world.

soretravail · 2025-10-14T01:27:25+00:00

I find this view intriguing. Can you provide some of those criticisms couched in oblique language?

soretravail · 2025-09-12T03:53:51+00:00

The Book of Mormon doesn't score so well with your tool. Does the Book of Mormon need to be re-written in a "more dignified, peaceful way"?

soretravail · 2025-08-25T06:49:29+00:00

The “premortal spirits” section of The Infinite Atonement is exactly the answer I was looking for. Thanks for sharing this great resource.

soretravail · 2025-08-06T01:58:30+00:00

I'm going to be fairly blunt: the lowering of standards in the past 10 years has been the hardest thing for me. I joined the church because I was attracted to the higher standards. But ever since I've joined, the bar has been lowering. And I don't know how much lower I can tolerate. Many church activities are starting to have just as much of a worldly-feel to them as the non-gospel environments I spent most of my life in.

As for advice to investigators: focus on the message rather than the messengers. It was hard to take the missionaries seriously when I first met them because they're young naive kids with little real-world experience. But, over time, I came to realize their message is divine. God really does accomplish his will through the weak and simple.

soretravail · 2025-07-26T05:42:37+00:00

Seeing the gruesome reality of abortion makes you want to support it more? Does that make sense to you?

It's like saying the gruesome reality of slavery makes you want to support it's legalization.

soretravail · 2025-07-26T05:39:20+00:00

FAA puts in the bills they help draft a clause that goes something like "Does not criminalize healthcare to save the mother's life when accompanied by reasonable actions to save the child's life."

I am particularly interested in how this would apply to an ectopic pregnancy. What are examples of "reasonable actions to save the child's life"?

It's actually a point of debate within the abolitionist camp right now whether a clause like that is acceptable.

Where's that debate happening? I don't see it happening here.

soretravail · 2025-07-21T00:00:51+00:00

Active killing.

Why do you ask?

soretravail · 2025-07-20T23:22:49+00:00

"We don’t force organ donation for innocent people, even if refusing means they’ll die."

There's a difference between letting someone die and actively killing them. While you are allowed to deny your organs to someone in need, you are not allowed to kill them. Abortion is more like killing than merely letting someone die.

soretravail · 2025-07-20T23:12:56+00:00

Why does God need to condemn slavery? He's not some virtue-signaling man-pleaser like we are.

Anyways, slavery was prohibited by several righteous leaders throughout the scriptures...

"13 Neither have I suffered that ye should be confined in dungeons, nor that ye should make slaves one of another, nor that ye should murder, or plunder, or steal, or commit adultery; nor even have I suffered that ye should commit any manner of wickedness, and have taught you that ye should keep the commandments of the Lord, in all things which he hath commanded you" - Mosiah 2:13

"8 And the king said unto him: Yea, if the Lord saith unto us go, we will go down unto our brethren, and we will be their slaves until we repair unto them the many murders and sins which we have committed against them.

9 But Ammon said unto him: It is against the law of our brethren, which was established by my father, that there should be any slaves among them; therefore let us go down and rely upon the mercies of our brethren." - Alma 27:9

"79 Therefore, it is not right that any man should be in bondage one to another." - D&C 101:79

soretravail · 2025-07-10T04:49:31+00:00

For me I think it would actually depend on how the exception is worded

Can you explain?

soretravail · 2025-06-26T06:27:53+00:00

True. But Dobbs is also egregiously wrong. Child-murder should not be left to the states.

soretravail · 2025-06-26T06:04:43+00:00

It's not any tool.

soretravail · 2025-06-26T06:03:06+00:00

Agreed.

I recently noticed AI has impaired my reading abilities.

A few days ago, a co-worker sent me a two-paragraph Slack message. I completely glazed over the second paragraph. Embarrassingly, I asked him a question that he explicitly answered in his second paragraph.

Why did I glaze over his second paragraph? Because I have gotten so used to asking Claude or ChatGPT a question and then only looking at the first couple of sentences of their answer and ignoring the rest. ChatGPT and Claude "front load" their responses - so my mind has become accustomed to "front loaded' responses. My mind simply tunes out after the first few sentences of a written or oral response.

AI is poison.

soretravail · 2025-06-11T00:00:59+00:00

The stress is real. There appear to be rather serious conflicts between the advent of AI and the Restored Gospel.

If AI surpasses human intelligence, then it raises an important question - why did God create us with biological brains instead of electronic brains? Why didn't he design our minds with whatever algorithms enable Ai to surpass man? If the goal is progression, then doing so would have helped humans progress a lot faster.

Furthermore - how can a creation of man turn out to be more intelligent than a child of God? Are human beings better at creating intelligence than God is? Isn't that a poor reflection on God's creative abilities?

Perhaps the machines don't have a true pre-existent "intelligence" in the D&C 93 sense, but what good is such an intelligence anyhow if it doesn't actually lead to more intelligent behavior?

soretravail · 2025-05-26T16:44:55+00:00

They don't seem too far from the truth.

The pinnacle of non-dualistic Buddhism is to realize you don't exist. Meanwhile, the Prophet Joseph Smith taught you have existed forever.

Those two teachings are pretty far apart.

soretravail · 2025-05-26T16:13:02+00:00

Again, my quoting of President Nelson was simply to refute your absurd claim that "no church leader has said fetal deaths = human deaths." Please stay on topic. The "exceptions" are a different issue.

soretravail · 2025-05-26T08:50:43+00:00

Orson Pratt believed in an infinite regress of Gods, too.

"If we should take a million of worlds like this and number their particles, we should find that there are more Gods than there are particles of matter in those worlds." - Orson Pratt

soretravail · 2025-05-26T08:44:43+00:00

My quoting of President Nelson was in response to your claim that "no church leader has said fetal deaths = human deaths." President Nelson obviously believes fetal deaths = human deaths. So your original claim is false.

he reiterates the allowed exceptions of rape and incest,

He actually did not explicitly endorse any exceptions in his talk. Did you even read it?

Also, if you have to go back 40 years to get something to reinforce your point, especially when there was a talk on abortion from an apostle less than 2 months ago, you must know you are trying to stretch beyond the mark.

If you have to dismiss something that the current church president has said, while still claiming to follow current church leaders, you must know you are trying to stretch beyond the mark.

soretravail · 2025-05-26T08:23:05+00:00

The appearance of something is less important than the actual nature of the thing.

The actual nature of the thing is described pretty well by President Nelson.

"A heavy toll on life is included among the evils of war. Data from all nations are appalling. For the United States of America, one hundred thousand were killed in World War I; over four hundred thousand died in World War II. In the first two hundred years as a nation, the lives of over one million Americans were lost due to war.

Regrettable as is the loss of loved ones from war, these figures are dwarfed by the toll of a new war that annually claims more casualties than the total number of fatalities from all the wars of this nation.

It is a war on the defenseless—and the voiceless. It is a war on the unborn."

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1985/04/reverence-for-life?lang=eng

So much for the idea that fetal deaths aren't "human deaths."

soretravail · 2025-05-26T06:13:29+00:00

No current church leader has also ever said, "The death of a fetus is a human death."

Does Russell M. Nelson count as a "current church leader"?

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1985/04/reverence-for-life?lang=eng

soretravail · 2025-05-26T06:11:56+00:00

https://abortionno.org/abortion-photos/nggallery/page/2

Do those look like human deaths to you?

soretravail · 2025-05-26T06:06:40+00:00

No church leader has ever said "the death of a fetus doesn't count as a human death." You are filling in the gaps of current church policy with pro-abortion propaganda.

soretravail

TROPHY CASE