Week 89

Sorry I'm not going to write a weekly today. I had a grand plan last week to plan out a series of emails to convert all who read them. I didn't make that plan. I don't know when I would. Maybe during a personal study one morning or a night when the APs are gone. It's kind of hard to do productive stuff with four Elders all in the same apartment. I don't know if you all can imagine that at all but it's a thing. :) I think I might call that email series "The End is Near" or something like that. That sounds plenty dramatic to me. I bet it will grab the attention of all of the readers. :)

I bought some shoes today. They're Nike. Unfortunately there weren't too many other options. I got the second cheapest ones there. I might take a picture in just a second.

I've been thinking about perspective a little bit lately. This isn't just a this-week thing, I'm not quite sure how long it's been since I first had this thought but I thought I might share it. I guess we'll see if I can write it down and if it makes sense at all. Here we go: I read a comment on the internet one time. It was for a scientific article. The comment was something to the effect of "Here is science making progress while religion makes excuses". I didn't really like it for a few different reasons. One is because science people are way stuck-up and self-satisfied in how "conclusive" their results are. They're probably all BMW X5 drivers. I've decided I don't like those people. Anyway, the fact that they can keep making discoveries like they do means that there are still plenty of things to be learned about nature, space, and the world; which all happen to be God's creations. But somehow they think that each discovery they make is convincing evidence that God is not there. Hmm. That's like me opening the fridge and "discovering" milk, orange juice, pears, spinach, and however many other things I was interested in. And each time saying that the existence of those things means that there is no expired kimchi in the fridge. There are actually two expired containers of kimchi in our fridge right now. I've wanted to throw them away but haven't ever because they're on the other Elder's shelf. These kind of people ask things like "where does God live?" and take the fact that I don't have a post address as a reason to smile smugly and continue on with their silly version of "real life". Surface checkers.

Anyway, there are a couple of mistakes these kind of people make. The first one I would like to call the "refrigerator fallacy". I made it up just now. Just kidding there's probably a better name for it, but the fact that one thing exists does not cancel out the possibility of something else existing. They would have to know the existence of literally every single particle in the universe to use that logic and they're not too close to doing that yet. The other is to say that the evidence that God exists is too small to believe. This is what I planned on typing about when I said I was thinking about perspective. I got a little distracted. :) Anyway, I thought a little bit about how little evidence of God's existence we could have and still believe in him. Does God have a little evidence control that he sets for each of the worlds? Is the amount of evidence we have a lot? Is our setting only at 5%? Is it at .000001%? We have records of God and Jesus Christ coming to the Earth. The Bible is one of the most read books in the world. Is it too old? If it were 5000 years older would it be too old? If it were 100000000000000000000000 years older would that be too much? Would those accounts become untrustworthy? We don't have any idea how hard it is too believe in God because we don't know anything about any other existences. We forgot everything when we came to Earth. I don't know if we have "all" of the evidence that God exists, but all the things we do have are evidence of God. We have the testimonies of Book of Mormon prophets as well as Bible prophets. We have current living prophets today and modern-revelation guiding our church. We have commandments and covenants which when faithfully kept help us out immensely (that's becoming obvious even to those not of our faith). We have bodies made in the image of God received through the divine appointment of families. BYU has a surplus of beautiful women that make me want to have a family of my own. We have super-fancy technology that's getting better all the time. We have Subaru Impreza's and Mazda Roadster's (which I happen to appreciate. I might get one someday). We even have Pacific Raceways less than ten minutes from our house. What more could we ask for?? I'm not sure. But some people disregard all of that saying that it's somehow "not enough". I don't think they know what would be "enough". I didn't even mention the fact that we can study this stuff for ourselves and recieve a personal witness from the Holy Ghost that it's true. That was actually on purpose. I think that kind of destroys any chance the scales had of balancing.

Those are my thoughts on perspective. We don't know anything else so it's hard to say things like "too much" or "too little". Or even "too hard". Making judgements like that exalts ourselves to a level higher than He who sent us here. No level of experience we can have on this earth is more experience than God has.

I hope you all weren't bored by my thoughts on perspective. I thought it was a pretty cool idea even if I didn't write it out very well. Maybe you could all study and ponder about that this week and tell me how it goes next week. :)

I love you the most!!
BEN

 Some happiness I found at a fruit stand while we were knocking on doors. 

They were only 100 yen (93ish cents)

My new shoes