Random Rationality

“Then you are at odds with Mormon theology. Welcome to the club. Learn your faith….” ——— - — Feel free to explain how grok “did a number on me”. And your arrogance is showing. … Pretending you know LDS theology … and supposedly I don’t. I guarantee that isn’t the case here. Since you are probably referring to the non-canonical King Follett discourse … let’s see what Joseph said… “God the Father lived on an Earth the same as Jesus Christ Himself did… will go back to the beginning before the world was, to show what kind of a being God is. What sort of a being was God in the beginning? ….I say, if you were to see him today, you would see him like a man in form, like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form as a man; for Adam was created in the very fashion, image and likeness of God, and received instruction from, and walked, talked and conversed with Him, as one man talks and communes with another… …The scriptures inform us that Jesus said, as the Father hath power in himself, even so hath the Son power, to do what? Why, what the Father did. The answer is obvious, in a manner to lay down his body and take it up again. Jesus, what are you going to do? To lay down my life as my Father did, and take it up again.…. ..What did Jesus do? Why, I do the things I saw my Father do when worlds came rolling into existence. My Father worked out His kingdom with fear and trembling, and I must do the same; and when I get my kingdom, I shall present it to My Father, so that He may obtain kingdom upon kingdom, and it will exalt Him in glory. … Jesus treads in the tracks of His Father, and inherits what God did before; and God is thus glorified and exalted in the salvation and exaltation of all His children”. The interpretation of this verse (John 5:19) given by Joseph, is that God the Father was giving Jesus a revelation showing Jesus Christ a vision of the Father’s life as the Christ of a previous universe/creation.

@grok Updated reconstructions still rest on the same low-end scaling choices. The LIA is the coldest multi-century interval of the last several thousand years and lines up with successive grand solar minima plus elevated volcanism. Models can attribute primary forcing to aerosols and sea-ice feedbacks, but that does not make the solar alignment a pure coincidence. Late-stage interglacials typically show increasing oscillations. One plausible driver is long-term hydrological cycles (shifts in monsoon strength, precipitation belts, snow/ice cover, deep long term ocean cycles, and ocean–atmosphere moisture transport). When one of those oscillations coincides with a cluster of grand solar minima and the associated albedo increases (plus volcanic aerosols), the combined effect can produce the deepest cold of the Holocene. Removing those factors… recovery of solar activity, reduced volcanic forcing, lower albedo, and the reverse of the hydrological/ocean-heat anomalies…. produces a significant rebound toward earlier Holocene norms. Sea levels were roughly 1–2 m higher than present around 3–4 thousand years ago under those warmer mid-to-late Holocene conditions. The rebound from the LIA trough is consistent with returning toward that range rather than requiring an entirely novel CO₂-driven regime. CO₂ contributes, but many other incompletely quantified factors (solar spectral/magnetic effects, long-term ocean circulation, hydrological feedbacks, and albedo changes) remain active on the relevant multi-century timescales. Here is a rough representation of the mechanisms…

When the Bible says “one” (hen/echad)… what does that mean? What did Jesus mean in John 17 when He said “even as”?

@grok said, “Other tselem uses are physical idols, yet Gen 1 links the phrase directly to dominion and draws on ANE royal-statue ideology of representative rule.” Exactly. All the other uses are understood as relating to physical shape. Nobody is denying the “dominion” and representative rule. For LDS it all goes together in a cohesive sense and is consistent across all the verses. “Force” is a strong word, but the LDS perspective is that Hellenistic philosophy influenced the interpretation away from the original understanding… just like Origen admitted.

@grok Don’t forget, the immediate context of Genesis is also where God was literally walking around the garden, Adam and Eve heard him walking there in the cool of the day, and he was talking to them. I think the burden of proof should be on the opposite side to demonstrate that humanity is not literally created in the image and likeness of God. It seems that the Hellenistic “philosophers” influenced people’s interpretation from what they believed previously, as Origen admitted.

I don’t think it has anything to do with race either. The text doesn’t say they “changed race”. It said the skin had a curse/malady/mark “like flint”. That isn’t a race change. The best interpretation is a skin disease. There are all kinds of possibilities.

It seems there is a lot of disagreement on this issue. xitter.gq/capitalismmag/status/2…

I think Nephi was using the description “flint” in two different ways. One was to describe the spiritual hardness of their heart and the other was to describe the outward skin condition. To me it seems like it would be a skin malady (skin color change that was not uniform, like a skin disease that resembled irregular discoloration …like the stone flint). See why that might not be “enticing”… especially if they thought it was contagious?

I always thought of the dark skin as like a skin malady/disease. I think it very well could have been literal.