Genuine Fake Watches for sale!

Today, I'm typing from the Kirkwood Highway Library, over in Newark.  It's a cool mid-size structure, with big plate-glass windows and a fancy decorative facade.  It's got a good selection of books, too, so it's not too bad.

I'm on an exchange with Elder Hidalgo, a cool elder from Chile.  About 5'5", he's a good elder with a good testimony.  Strappy little guy, too.  He is the smallest of the four spanish elders in our district, but he's always good for anything.  Little by little, he's overcoming his fears, and becoming stronger.  Just last friday, we had a wrestling match.  (A little uneven, I think:  Me, at 6'3" and 270 pounds, against him at 5'5" and maybe 170.)  I won, but in the course of the match, I shattered the crystal on my watch. 

So, here in Newark, I went to the Farmer's Market.  It's a nice little warehouse-ish thing, and has a jewelery kiosk where they sell cheap watches.  Now, I sport a  ten-dollar watch, and am feeling slightly guilty for supporting people who make cheap stuff in China.  Because I was actually able to inspect the watches, and check that they actually work, I was able to avoid buying a cheap, imitation product. (To read more about fake watches, click here and here.)

There was one watch that I really admired.  It was nice, shiny, had three dials, and I could see myself wearing something like that.  But, when I asked to see it, I took a nice close look at it.  Those three dials for date, month, and year?  Painted on.  Total fake.

In life, we need to check out what we do.  Really, that's all that we ask anyone to do.  We have a message.  As in all things, we need to check whether something is real or not.



A plastic hat is probably a good sign of a fake.

 Imagine that you're walking down the streets of New York city, and a stereotypical guy in a trenchcoat walks up and spreads his coat wide.  Inside, there's row after row of glittering watches: Rolex, Breitling, TAG Heuer, all in gold, leather, silver, and of course very expensive.  The man rubs his unshaved cheeks, and says, "$40 bucks. Take your pick."

Now, it's possible that the watches are real Rolex watches.  But, how can you be sure? 

The only way is to compare it with the genuine product.  That's really all that we ask people to do:  Look at what we have.  Compare it with the Bible, always having an open mind.  Most important, ask God.  I'm sure He knows what's true and what's not.  If you ask him, you can be confident that he will answer your questions.

Musings on Mormon

My voice is back to normal, thank goodness.  After a chili eating contest with a mexican, I was afraid that I had done some permanent damage.

I've been reading the Book of Mormon lately, and I am constantly amazed by the sweet Spirit that I feel whenever I read it.  In times of trouble, it helps me to rise up.  Life is easier, and I've actually found that I look forward to opening up this wonderful book.

The Book of Mormon sustains me.  It, more than anything else, helps me to know that this is the true church of Christ.  As it says in Matthew 7,

True or False?

I've always loved True or False quizzes.  Even if you didn't do anything to prepare, you still have around a fifty-fifty chance with each question.

Nowadays, I've found a new appreciation for the word truth.  It's a common word, bandied around like a cheap paperback book.  However, it actually goes much deeper than most people realize.

So, to start with, what exactly is truth?

Walter Cronkite is one of the most famous newsmen in the world.  For years, at the end of each broadcast, he would sign off, saying, "And that's the way it is."

I like that, and I've decided to steal that phrase for this blog.  Truth is "the way it is."  It doesn't need support from anything or anyone, and whether or not someone believes it has no effect whatsoever on it's truthfulness.  It's just the way it is.

The Oxford dictionary agrees; it defines truth as "that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality."

Let's say that someone comes up to you in the street, and tells you that two plus two does not actually come up to four.  Instead, it is actually five.  Is this man correct?  Is it true?

Of course not.  It's not true.  It just isn't the way it is.  It is an established fact that 2 + 2 = 4.  Nobody thinks to argue it, because to do so would be lunacy.

Unfortunately, there are very few things that are as clear-cut as the world of mathematics.  Rather, let us say that everything is that way, but that very few people realize it.

Let us take the question of God's existence.  Is there, in actuality, a God who is our Father, who loves us, who wants what's best for us?  Believe it or not, this is a true or false question.  Either he exists, or he does not.  If there is a 'higher power,' but is not God as most Christians imagine him, then that definition is not true; it does not accurately define reality, and should thus be discarded.

If we go back in time, we find Plato and other Greek philosophers.  They looked at all the evidence, looked at the sky, thought for a long time, and came to this conclusion:  We see the sun.  We see the stars.  They all move around us.  This earth goes on for miles and miles in every direction.  Therefore, the earth is flat, and the sun, planets, and stars all revolve around us.

I ask you, was this true?

Turns out, it wasn't.  In 1492, Christopher Columbus conned three ships off of the Queen of Spain, and sailed off into the sunset.  He believed that the world was round, but not in the traditional sense.  Instead of a humongous disk with water endlessly pouring off of the sides, he theorized that the world was actually a sphere.  If he sailed west far enough, he'd come out in the East.  It's too bad he didn't count on there being a new world in between Spain and the coveted Indies.  Either way, he disproved the flat-world theory.  It wasn't true.  It didn't accurately represent reality.  Saying that the world is flat just is not "the way it is."

Later on Nicolaus Copernicus published a book, On the Orbits of the Celestial Spheres, stating a theory.  Perhaps, the truth was not that the universe revolved around the earth.  Maybe, the earth and all the planets actually revolve around the sun, and then the stars revolve around that.  His theories caused so much stir among the intellectual elite that he almost did not publish his book.  This heliocentric, or sun-centric, model then became the accepted version.  Was it true?

Turns out, it wasn't.  The stars do not revolve around the sun.  We are a speck of blue among many other stars, each moving in its own motion.  This is the truth, as we know it.  However, even this could turn out to be a false representation of reality, "the way it is."

Should we be surprised that sometimes things are not as we think they are?  Plato, Copernicus, many scientists, all thought with all their soul that they were correct.  Isaac Newton invented calculus, to the dismay of college students everywhere.  His mathematics explained why things behaved.  It made sense.  However, his explanation and some of his mathematics were proven to be inaccurate by Albert Einstein.

I bet you're kind of wondering why I'm going off on all these tangents.  After all, what do Copernicus, Columbus, Newton, Plato, and all those other dead guys have to do with the Gospel?  As it turns out, everything.

Just as things are either true or false in mathematics and science, things are either true or false with religion.  Either Jesus was the Son of God or he was not.  Either he died for our sins, or he did not.  Either he came back from the dead, or he did not.  There is no middle ground.  It is either true or false.

It's important to distinguish here between truth and philosophy.  Truth, as I've been saying, is the way things are.  Philosophy is a bit like an opinion.  It is a truth that Jesus Christ was the Son of God.  It is a philosophy to say that Jesus is God.  Philosophy is what people interpret from the Bible about certain subjects.  It could be false, it might have some truth.  The difference between Methodists, Baptists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics, it's all a matter of philosophy.  People have interpreted the Bible, and some of them have not represented the truth.

I don't want to offend anyone by writing this.  I am recording my own observations.

Surely, the thing we all want most is to have the most truth we can.  Why would we waste time with philosophy when we can have truth?  

This applies to my church just as much as any other.  Did God the Father and his Son Jesus Christ really appear to a fourteen-year-old boy in upstate New York?  Did they really talk to him?  Did they really tell him that the church that Jesus Christ established had fallen away?  All of these are simple yes/no questions, and they can be answered by another yes/no question.

Is the Book of Mormon true?  Y / N

If the Book of Mormon is true, everything else falls into place.

How can we know?  By ourselves, we could not.  We could study, and examine, tear apart and deconstruct to the best of our ability, but in the end it would still be human beings trying to find the truth.  And you know that humans are very reliable, not changing at all.

Luckily, we have a lifeline to someone who does know.  If God says that something is true, don't you think he might know?  God doesn't lie, so if he tells us, we can know for a fact that something is true.

I know that Joseph Smith did see God and Jesus, and that they did in reality speak to him.  I know it because I've read the Book of Mormon, and I have prayed about it.  God has told me that the Book of Mormon is true.  By the feelings of the Holy Ghost within me, I know that this is the path that God wants me to travel.  And I promise all within the reach of my blog that if they do the same, God will tell them.

And that's the way it is.

Oh say, what is truth? 'Tis the fairest gem
That the riches of worlds can produce,
And priceless the value of truth will be when
The proud monarch's costliest diadem
Is counted but dross and refuse.

Yes, say, what is truth? 'Tis the brightest prize
To which mortals or Gods can aspire;
Go search in the depths where it glittering lies
Or ascend in pursuit to the loftiest skies.
'Tis an aim for the noblest desire.

The sceptre may fall from the despot's grasp
When with winds of stern justice he copes,
But the pillar of truth will endure to the last,
And its firm-rooted bulwarks outstand the rude blast,
And the wreck of the fell tyrant's hopes.

Then say, what is truth? 'Tis the last and the first,
For the limits of time it steps o'er.
Though the heavens depart and the earth's fountains burst,
Truth, the sum of existence, will weather the worst,
Eternal, unchanged, evermore.

C. S. Says...

C. S. Lewis is a genius.  That's all there is to it.  He was so in tune with the Spirit, he knew the restored Gospel before being taught it.  He wrote some of my favorite quotes, stuff like:

"You don't have a spirit; you are a spirit.  You have a body."

"God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing."

The best of all is that he's very logical about his theism.  Have you ever read Mere Christianity?  It has a very logical progression.  Read it, it's one of my favorite books.

Another one of his quotes, this one taken from The Magician's Nephew.  In this quote, Aslan says,

"I cannot tell that to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him.  He has made himself unable to hear my voice.  If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings.  Oh, Adam's sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!"

 

I guess I'm just talking about this because some of the people that I've talked to over the past couple days have just made me better appreciate all that I have.

The first was a man named Bill.  He reminded me of Bill Cosby, to tell the truth.  He was just cracking jokes and telling stories about his family, his daughters, how eager he is to be out of the house if all the daughters are coming over.  We were all laughing up a storm.  He told us about his wife, his grandson, and his motercycle.

"Hey Grandpa, can we start up the bike?"

"Son, you don't need to beat around the bush!  What you mean to say is, 'Will you take me on a ride?' We're men! Say it like it is!  If you want to take a ride with grandpa, ask me, 'Can we go for a ride?'"

"Well, can we go for a ride?"

"No."

Then, he got really serious and started talking about life, talking about something his friend had told him.  "Bill, your life would be so much better if you trusted Christ with your life."  What followed was about twenty minutes of him talking to us about life and hypocrisy.  All those so-called Christians at church were not living according to how Christians should live, he said.  For example, if they saw a man robbing a woman, they would call the police, but not interfere.  Meanwhile, Bill is in the middle of the fight actually doing something.

He went to church once, and a big woman ran up to him and gave him a hug.  "Oh, a new member!  Oh, I looove you!"  And what if she tripped two feet from me, he asked.  It'd be like in Indiana Jones, where Indy runs away from a giant rock!  Who are you to say you love me?  You just laid eyes on me!  What's more, he told us that he's a realist.  Even if you're supposed to love everyone, we don't.  Moreover, you certainly don't love everyone in church.  Knowing that you don't and saying that you do, that's hypocrisy. 

He told us about how most of the people in the so-called Christian churches were looking down their noses at him.  He drives an old beater to work, lives in an old, small house, and rides a motercyle on occasions.  Why would a man who has accepted Christ be driving something like that?  His answer was that, yeah, he drives an old car; a car that has been entirely paid off.  Yeah, he lives in an old house; a house that has been entirely paid off.  And what's more, he doesn't have to worry about anything in his house, because he's living well within his means, instead of having a twelve-hundred-dollar a month mortgage, all in the name of keeping up with the Joneses.

He told us about how he had been in Vietnam, and had almost died.  A twelve- or thirteen-year-old child had stepped out of a bush and leveled a gun at Bill, and then pulled the trigger.  The safety was on.  The child turned off the safety, and was going to shoot again, when Bill shot the child.  He asked us, "Blessing? Or curse?  Why would God make me shoot that child?  I don't know.  The only thing that's keeping me going is the knowledge that eventually, I will know."

It just makes me hurt, because I know that the restored Gospel has the answers for him.  If he would listen, he could know all the reasons why bad stuff happens, why there is suffering, whether God really exists, why we're here.  All these things could be his, but he doesn't seem to be that open to listening to us.

Another person that really made me grateful for what we have is a man named Huey.  He's a friar at a Church of England, recently retired.  We got talking churches.  He explained about how he doesn't really thing that any church has all the truth.  We all have different pieces.  The Anglicans have a piece, the Catholics have a piece, the Mormons have a piece, and all the other denominations.  When we asked him whether Jesus might have an idea which church has all the truth, he said to be careful with our words; no church has all the truth.  He explained that he's studied all the churches, and he's convinced that the only way that we'll know is when Jesus comes, he'll tell us.  It's not possible to know the truth.

It really made me grateful for what I have.  I am able to tell everyone I meet the things that I know.  I know that this is the truth, the true church of Christ.  If we are willing to listen to him, we will know the truth.  Isn't that really what we're all looking for?