1 Corinthians 3:16 - You are the temple of God

Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?

What does it mean to be God’s Temple? Our bodies have spiritual meaning, they are sacred and holy.

Several times Paul teaches the actual temple is our bodies, and Christ also taught “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21).

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints builds temples where special rituals and ordinances are performed. Going to the temple is a way to nurture our soul.

Unfortunately, since 2020 the church has had a policy that if a person transitions they will no longer qualify to attend the temple. Even something as simple as changing their names & pronouns or wearing clothes that fit their gender identity can cause them to be cut off from the temple. It is unfortunate and a mistaken policy.

It is worth keeping in mind that the actual temple of God is not a building but is your body. Just as the church builds a temple as an edifice to God, you build your temple to reflect the spirit of God in you. If you are trans, how can your body reflect the spirit in you?

I think it's a beautiful blessing that transgender people get to co-create with God in building their temple.

LDS LGBTQ Anniversaries for 2023

For 8 years I’ve been in charge of creating my stake’s calendar. In addition to stake meetings & activities, I include holidays and significant LDS anniversaries like when it was the 175th anniversary of the founding of Sunday School or 40 years ago priesthood and temple blessings were restored to members of African descent. 

This year there's only 1 significant anniversary I put on the calendar: Sept 21st will be 200 years since the angel Moroni first appeared to Joseph Smith.

For readers of this blog, here’s a few anniversaries this year that may be of interest:

75 years ago

April 1948 - Gay BYU students Kent Goodridge and Richard Snow met with church president George Albert Smith. They were in love and wanted to get a clarification of their ‘status.’ President Smith treated them with great kindness and told them to "live their lives as best they could" in their companionship. They had gambled making this appointment and worried they could be excommunicated on the spot, instead they left feeling loved and valued. 

Unfortunately, this live-and-let-live attitude didn’t last long as President Smith's successor, David O. McKay, felt homosexuals "should be excommunicated without any doubt, that the homosexual has no right to membership in the Church."

30 years ago

May 18, 1993 - Apostle Boyd K. Packer gave an address to the First Presidency, the Quorum of the Twelve, and the Presiding Bishopric, in which he stated there are three great threats to the LDS Church: the gay/lesbian challenge, the feminist movement, and scholars 

September - The September Six are excommunicated for publishing scholarly work against or criticizing church doctrine or leadership. This was widely reported in national press and resulted in a chilling effect on academics challenging approved church narratives

25 years ago

October - Mormon-raised Russell Henderson and his friend Aaron McKinney tortured Matthew Shepard and left him for dead in Wyoming. The shocking crime made international news. The outrage over this crime eventually lead to the Matthew Shepard Act in 2009 which expanded the federal law’s definition of “hate crime” to include sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2018, Matthew's ashes were moved to the Washington National Cathedral

15 years ago

Church Relief Society President Chieko Okazaki published a book in which she wrote “A family with a gay child is not a failed family. It's a family with a member who needs special love and understanding and who has love and understanding to give back.”

California’s Prop 8 - Church leadership heavily encouraged members donate time and money to pass Prop 8 which would ban same-sex marriage in California. About 1/2 of the money raised for its passage came from Mormons. The proposition passed and immediately there were protests at temples in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, and the church received a lot of negative exposure. Since then the church has preferred behind-the-scenes roles in its efforts to combat queer rights

10 years ago

Dec 20, 2013 - Same-sex marriages became legally recognized in Utah. Seth Anderson & Michael Ferguson, both former Mormons, are the first gay couple to get married in Utah 

5 years ago 

January 2018 - The documentary "Believer" featuring Imagine Dragon's lead singer Dan Reynolds premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Reynolds discussed the intersection of LGBTQ people in the Mormon community. Later in the year he appeared on The Ellen Degeneres Show and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and spoke of LGBTQ Mormons and suicides

January 2018 - Josh Weed, the most famous LDS gay man in a mixed-orientation marriage, announces that he & his wife will get a divorce. They apologize to everyone who ever had their story held up as an example that gay people can get married and stay in the Church.

February 2018 - Church-run Family Services states it no longer provides reparative therapy or sexual orientation change efforts

February 2018 - Richard Ostler starts a podcast called “Listen, Learn, and Love,” which has LGBTQ members/former members share their stories

March 2018 -  BYU sponsors its first LGBT campus event, a panel of four students--Kaitlynn Wright, Ben Schilaty, Sarah Langford and Gabriel Cano–answer student-submitted questions

As president of the LGBTQAI+ and Allies Club, Jill Stevenson worked with administration at Southern Virginia University, a predominantly-LDS liberal arts college, to get the university to officially recognize the club, and to allow same-gender dancing on campus

June 2018 - The Church’s Family Search website starts allowing same-sex marriages to be recorded

July 2018 - The Provo Freedom Festival allows LGBTQ groups to participate in the parade due to a contract it had signed with the city of Provo which included a non-discrimination clause.

Dec 2018 - Stacey Harkey, a cast member on BYUTV’s popular show Studio C, comes out as gay

this is the funniest shit ive ever seen in my life

Johnny Appleseed: America’s Forgotten Ronin

"Cowboys were an itinerant warrior class from meiji era texas"

I can't believe this an actual graphic released by the Navy and not a shitpost

just some of the pharaoh's curses I've collected during my travels through the ancient deserts

Check out our colllection of T-shirts Available HERE!

Yeah you're right. It WOULD be pretty fucked up if you were a swan but you were raised by ducks and you grew up never seeing another swan or even knowing that such a thing as a swan even existed so you just thought you were a duck with something super wrong with it.

VACCINATE YA KIDS FFS

The other thing about measles is that it resets your body’s memory of other diseases. So all those times you’ve gotten sick? Your body’s memory cells no longer remember those illnesses, so even if you get the same type of illness again your body will react like it’s the first time you’ve been sick.

It’s so much worse than “just a disease”. 

Measles does WHAT

Holy fuck

What the fuck what the fuck what the fUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK

antivaxxers also sabotaged the human lyme disease vaccine. they literally conspired online in usenet boards to go out and participate in the vaccine trials, and they all proceeded to complain of arthritis, the only symptom of lyme disease they were apparently aware of. this caused media hysteria about the vaccine. if you remember the flu vaccine hysteria around the swine flu epidemic, it was kind of like that. despite double-blind trials being unable to support their claims and instead displaying that the vaccine was safe and effective, the damage was done, and the vaccine was shelved in the USA. you can get a lyme disease vaccine in Europe, but Europe has a different strain of the bacteria that causes lyme disease.

Lyme disease can become very serious, it can infect the nervous system and cause neurological problems especially in young children who are often bitten on the head or the neck, undiagnosed it can cause chronic health issues that mimic other diseases. Without safe prophylactic measures beyond trying to minimize contact w ticks, this has driven people who have had lyme disease, have chronic effects from mass-disseminated lyme disease infection, or people who believe they have chronic lyme disease to go to quack doctors and undergo unsafe, unapproved medical treatment in an attempt to stop suffering.

This would not be happening on the scale that it is if antivaxxers didn’t straight up execute a supervillain plot to sabotage the lyme disease vaccine bc this happened the same year andrew wakefield published his fraudulent research on the MMR vaccine

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/7/17314716/lyme-disease-vaccine-history-effectiveness

these people are fucking dangerous beyond compare

Anti-vaxxers are a plague upon humanity. I work at a daycare, and we are REQUIRED by LAW to have those kids vaccinated, but somehow some parents find ways around these requirements and end up giving these preventable diseases to everyone else. I was given the mumps by one of these kids whose parents either didn’t care enough to get the kid vaccinated or fell for that Jenny McCarthy bullshit. The mumps is a miserable illness and I am damn lucky that it was a fairly minor case. But minor or not it is still beyond painful to swallow and my entire right cheek swelled up to double it’s size. It was awful. I had to go to the ER on fucking Thanksgiving Day because some parents decided they knew better than every doctor practicing medicine who urges people to vaccinate their kids. VACCINATE. YOUR. KIDS.

Anti-vaxxers would rather have dead children than vaccinate them because they believe lies. That’s what it comes down to: dead children.

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK

Reminder: Antivaxxers would rather have dead children than autistic children.

This whole thing started with a fear of their kids turning out… like us.

Please stop erasing us from this narrative.

Anti vaxxers ae usually the same people who will talk about vaccines being poison and all the horrible chemicals that are in vaccines and then turn around and give autistic kids bleach as a “cure” or will advocate for bleach. Although they don’t usually give kids straight bleach they give them “Miracle Mineral Solution” which has sodium chloride (aka bleach) and then the claims are that it cures …a lot of things including autism. Which 1) isn’t curable and 2) doesn’t need curing.

MMS has long been claimed to cure a wide variety of unrelated illnesses and conditions: HIV/AIDS, acne, cancer, autism, the flu, etc.

And when COVID appeared that was added to the list of things that could be cured by MMS.

MMS can’t cure anything . It can and does kill people, especially kids.

I would say that Anti vaxxers are ok with kids dying from measles/covid/etc instead of getting vaccinated but they are really really ok when it’s autistic kids die.

Way too funny not to share

unstained white shoes and an immaculate manicure. they absolutely did not dig for shit

You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.

For everyone in the comments asking how flamingos are extremophiles:

Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning

Don’t fuck with flamingos

….. Didn’t know most of that

Huh… so that’s why zoos don’t put them somewhere warm during winter.

Oh yeah, this leaves out what I *did* know about them–they can also survive hypersalinity. That is, water so salty it kills practically everything else–water so salty it burns your skin.

American flamingos just drink that shit

(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.

When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.

It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake:

Some species of flamingo actually subsist almost entirely on a diet of bacteria! In other words, there is a species of dinosaur that eats only bacteria and lives in lakes so toxic they would kill almost anything else—and it is best known to the average person as a kitschy lawn decoration.

Earth is an amazing place.

the lonesome boner seems to shoot a load at night

im not reblogging this shit man.

you literally just did dumbass

Tbh mever thought about that lol

Let’s expand this further. Think about how much driving is commuting to work or running errands like groceries. Think about how many of those could be easily removed with better public transit and walkable cities/neighborhoods. Think about how many fewer ambulances we’d need without over 40 thousand people dying from cars every year in the United States and over 2.8 million injured from cars every year.

These are not “accidents,” it’s structural violence churning our blood into profit for car and oil companies. This isn’t even touching on the other harm to our health from smog, rubber particulates in the air, other forms of pollution, the acceleration of climate apocalypse, the time and space wasted because of cars every day, everything spread apart and atomized because of how much surface area is dedicated to parking and stroads. Literally illegal to re-build the good cities bulldozed for cars because of single-use zoning laws.

We could all live near the damn jimmy johns and walk there or get it delivered by bike!! A better world is possible!! Drag the suburbanites from their beds kicking and screaming!!

You're a Warlock. But instead of drawing power from a higher being, people can choose to donate a portion of their magical power to you. In exchange, they can scry on your adventures and can send telepathic messages to you, as well as make requests. It can get annoying, but you make it work.

“Alright, we’re about to head into the dungeon. Daz has gone ahead to check for traps, but we’re pretty confident -- hey,  M’stha’venalth the Destroyer, thanks for the three months, really appreciate it -- yeah we’re pretty confident we got the, uh, we got the thing in the bag, shouldn’t take more than a few sessions at best. Who needs a long rest, am I right? Oh, just got a Sending from Gleek, ‘are you gonna need Darkvision again’, nah, comrade, torches all the way. You know we gotta keep it real around here. Plus I love the burning pitch smell. Okay, good vibe emojis only, viewers, we’re going in!”

inami_future