But to answer Steve’s question: The dancing sun sign that was produced to give a sign to the unbelievers seemed like a mass hallucination. I wasn’t there, so I can’t say exactly but based on what I read, it didn’t seem very uplifting or spiritual to those who witnessed it. In fact most were terrified. Based on those reports it seems more like the sign was a production of Satan than God. Of course it could had been a complexed production of man, but who knows?

Aren’t we suppose to add to the faith of others, not tear down what they already have? – Steve (FSF)

Should we add to the faith of others in something that’s not true? Should we use Paul’s techniques of squeezing a belief in the Invisible God into Christianity? Paul’s techniques were diffinately effective in adding members, but in the end I think it helped to contribute more to apostacy and false beliefs infiltrating the Catholic church. Its a two edged sword. It gives you Easter on a fertility Pagan holiday and Christmas during the pagan Celebration of the Invincible Sun. Harmless? Maybe… I’ll let each decide for themselves.

First, my quote of Alma was mostly a definition clarification. Alma says that if our hope is for something that is true then it is faith. Therefore if we sincerely hope for something that is not true it is not (at least by Alma’s definition) actual faith. The definition of faith is of course a large topic… Maybe I’ll post some thoughts on that and we can talk about here later on…

The key is did she feel the Spirit and did the Spirit testify to the accuracy of the sighting/vision?

And really thats the only key any one has about any sign or angel sighting.

That is of course the key to any communication from God. That is why serious skeptics have difficulty with spiritual things in general. All of the naturally skeptical questions about an angel sighting apply to every communication we receive from God. A skeptic can always claim every prompting and revelation is a hallucination and the person that experienced the communication from the outside has only her testimony of the event as support. Such is life.

God seems to have intentionally made his methods of communication with humankind indiscernible to modern measurement devices. Faith is still the only method to tap into that Celestial information source.

Re #6-What you are describing there is not actual faith but false belief. Alma said actual faith is “hope for things which are not seen, which are true.” – Geoff

False belief to believe that God answers prayers?! Or do you mean false belief to believe that God will answer every prayer? Or do you mean false belief that God does miracles? Of false belief that God would bother to cool down the food of a 2 year old? I’m not sure what you think is the false belief there.

The food does cool naturally. True. My wife wanted my son to wait to pray before eating and uses the “pray to cool down the food” card. I support her because I do that “yes, dear” thing sometimes (pick your battles men… pick your battles!).

[Personally I don't care much for praying over food. I can't think of a more redundant and repetitive prayer than a food prayer. I do this with my family since my wife is so adamant about it. I thank God for all I have at night and I feel that repeating it again at supper is just more vain repetition. I've gotten food poisoning after praying over food, so I don't see it as a protective measure either. But, thats a whole diff. topic so....]

To my son, it appears that prayer works. Not a bad thing to teach your son, but maybe an altogether unrealistic thing if he starts to believe that God is a magic box that produces whatever you ask for. Since I’m still confused over why God seems to answer some prayers and not others, I do not know exactly how to teach expectant results from prayer to my son. So I just go with the standards for now, of praying for good things (and what’s not good about asking God to cool down your food a bit before eating it?) with faith and expecting answers. Maybe the Blog-World participants here can give me some pointers. I’m willing to learn.

Thought your comment about teaching your child about prayers being answered and having faith interesting. – Kristen

I want my son to have great faith. I still believe that somehow, a person can get answers all the time from prayer. I’m still trying to figure out the somehow (seer stones? more faith? special type of prayer? being more worthy?)

I agree with your Santa Claus stuff Kristen. I actually go along with the J.W.s on the present giving thing too. I don’t want to have to have an excuse (Christmas, Birth Days, etc) to give my son a gift. (Although this leads my wife to accuse me of spoiling). So, we dont’ put up the pagan Christmas tree, we don’t talk about Santa Claus, and we tell my son that we give gifts to him on Christ’s birthday to celebrate since He’s not here right now and we take the scripture, what you have done to the least of these, you have done unto me to heart.

When you say “REALLY see an angel” I suspect you mean “with her physical eyes in a way that anyone else (wicked or righteous) would have seen too.” – Geoff

Let me clarify, being somewhat trained as a skeptic, when I say “REALLY see an angel” I mean, is she seeing just what she wants to see: her own personal hallucination and that it could had just as easilty been reproduced using drugs or hypnotism (suggestion)? Also, she not only wasnt’ using her physical eyes, but
1) she wasnt’ seeing anything that God used his powers for her to see, 2) she wasn’t seeing anything that was there in either a physical or spiritual sense,
3) she didn’t receive a telegram or teleconference or any other form of communication from an outside source

that all she saw was something that existed only in her own mind?

An example would be one of those UFO abducted people who swear up and down they were picked up by aliens and given some probing. It didn’t happen people! But, to them, it was very real.

Thats what I’m asking… that’s the difficulty in discerning stories like that. Because its really difficult to tell. She may had seen with her spiritual eyes an honest to goodness angel in the temple, but she also might had been so worked up about going that she psyched herself out and she saw her own personal hallucination.

For her story, does it really matter what she saw? Maybe. If this was a hallucination and she believes it… maybe next time the angel appears again and tells her some false doctrine (maybe some Benny Hinn preaching she picked up subconsciously while cruising the TV channels), she might believe it hook line and sinker. Heck, an angel told her!

This is why signs are so useless for the most part. Because when you show a sign to a skeptic, they are really good at telling you that it wasn’t a sign and why.

It’s also why false signs are a useful tool of Satan (think the Fatima prophesies [catholic] and the sun sign that backed it up), because those that are into signs, can be led to believe lots of false things.

The key is did she feel the Spirit and did the Spirit testify to the accuracy of the sighting/vision?

And really thats the only key any one has about any sign or angel sighting.

It’s funny though, most people I’ve told that to usually tell me that I’m no fun, too serious, etc. I guess I just feel my credibility as a their parents is way more important than Santa.

By the way, our oldest child, who is only 8, has already asked us if God was real. She did a lot of contemplating about life and such around the time of her baptism. We told her yes and she knows that we tell it to her straight on these kinds of things.

Thought your comment about teaching your child about prayers being answered and having faith interesting. Personally, I find that it’s much better to just be straight forward with my children in daily life, spiritual matters, etc. For instance, “Wait for the food to cool down or you will get burned.” Instead of tying the ordinary to the extraordinary. Then when the extraordinary comes around (and it will) the child will definitely know it.

Eventually that child will be old enough to understand that dad was full of crud and food always cools down whether it’s been prayed upon or not. Then when he/she is really trying to get a testimony of their own they will look back at events like these and say, “Dad wasn’t straight forward on the food so how do I know he’s being straightforward when it comes to Jesus Christ.”

I think that part of what makes our culture so skeptical is that dishonesty (I’m not calling you dishonest SU) is so rampant we don’t know who to trust is telling us the truth.

Sheesh, I didn’t intend to sound so jaded.

But if the question is whether or not we can establish zion, I’m not sure, but I hope so. You’ve posted before on the posibility of the Lord’s return being a function of the Church’s agency. I’m not sure about that either, but I find the prospect fascinating. It seems to me that the entire purpose of the church is not convert baptisms (I know, three-fold mission, yadda yadda), but the establishment of zion.

If any people in the history of the church had a chance at it, though, it would have been those who were able to share the communion of the Spirit together. It would have been those who had the faith for the extraordinary. No?

I wonder if it is impossible to have our cake and eat it too with this. I suspect that if we withdrew as a people completely from modern culture and truly made a physical effort to separate ourselve as Zion from the restof the world (Babylon) we would get that culture back. But is it really worth it? I’m not sure.

By integrating with what the scripures call spiritual Babylon we’ve gotten pretty good at the entry-level spirituality and it has done wonders for the numbers of convert baptisms. (How many converts do you think we’d have had if we required all converts to leave the world and move to a center place of Zion where we kept the worl out entirely?) But we certainly lose power at the high end of the spiritual spectrum by being dual citizens (of Babylon and Zion).

The method he gives to add to our real faith is to experiment and experiment and experiment.