Well, we are technically terribly off-topic, but that is what makes this list great :-) We can discuss what matters to us. As long as you reference something that was said in a previous post, you are on topic. The topic has changed.
So, anti-depressants among Latter-Day Saints. One problem I frequently observe among the members is trying to live the routine without understanding the purpose. Usually there is an element of trying to somehow circumvent the purpose of the routine - something you would naturally expect when somebody follows his understanding of the instructions when he fails to understand the principles behind them. This naturally leads to frustration, overwork, and eventually depression. Money. Nick - have you considered that the cost of building and running temples all over the world, or sending thousands of missionaries that cannot pay their way on missions, or numerous other similar things could cover the discrepancy in your accounting? Happiness. The Book of Mormon contains a recipe to happiness. It is there, I found it. You can find it as well - do not get frustrated by the amount of work it takes and give up early. Many people fail to learn how to program for the same reason. Deception. Of the numerous agnostic/atheistic philosophers that tried, Lenin was actually successful in building something around his ideas which he borrowed and adapted from Marx. He was a very smart man. Of such philosophers he was perhaps the most successful. Yet what he built fell apart after 70 years. Lenin wrote volumes and volumes but failed to produce a tool that equaled in effectiveness to the Book of Mormon, which has a proven record of over 180 years of being able to convince a man not only to follow its teachings himself at great sacrifice, but cement it into posterity for generations. This works in a free society where people can read, watch, and listen to whatever they want, and without a secret police monitoring the ideological reliability of the members and sending those that are unfaithful to labor camps. It also works in places where the faithful are persecuted. For me to believe that Joseph Smith was smarter than Marx and Lenin is harder than to believe that he learned all this from heavenly beings. Believing the latter is facilitated by the many specific prayers that have been answered either exactly how I asked or with something much better than what I could have thought, and many communications of the Holy Ghost in which I was directed to the right place at the right time with immaculate precision. I know there are people that struggle to get what I have gotten. Thus it is natural for me to assume that I stand somewhere in the middle and thus to conclude, that there is the other end of the spectrum - people that actually see heavenly beings. They do not talk about it much because those experienced are sacred, but we've heard enough to be able to go on faith from then on. -- Sasha Pachev Fast Running Blog. http://fastrunningblog.com Run. Blog. Improve. Repeat. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
