Matthew.B wrote:As for who the true "Wild men" sent from God are- we can all disagree on that. But the idea that the Lord couldn't/wouldn't/hasn't sent an "outsider" or someone of low authority to preach repentance is not based on scripture.
The point is not that he cannot. The point is, why should he, when we are doing fine? Here we go again, and somebody will come back and tell me we are NOT fine. There is a big difference between blatant breaking of the ten commandments and people who fall into small errors. We have a bunch of General Authorities that are human. When general authorities are caught in blatant, gross sin, or blatant open apostasy, nobody stands for it. Elder Lee, as an example, who was dealt with swiftly. And there was Elder What's his name in the 20th century who secretly had a second wife who was dealt with swiftly. Simply put, those who say that the General Authorities are in blatant sin have no foundation for that claim. And as far as I know, the only reason you should ever raise your hand in not sustaining someone is if you know of an actual problem along these lines, not along ideological lines where the brethren aren't doing what someone personally feels they should be doing, or that the revelations they are getting are not the type of revelations people thing they should be getting, or whatever. This Church is led by very righteous men, for the most part.
From the fundamentalist factions, they seem believe that somehow the brethren are binding them down, or that if the Church is in some kind of condemnation only because it isn't going the way they think it should, and they think it affects them in some way. As far as I can tell, they claim to have the ability to get their own calling and election, and their own revelations by way of the Spirit and/or heavenly beings. So why should they care what the Church does? Why don't they just go do what makes them feel good, and let the hierarchy deal with the Church? Personal doctrines and personal growth has absolutely nothing to do with the hierarchy, or correlation. Absolutely nothing. Who cares what is taught in Sunday school? I mean seriously? How does it bind you down when you have your own personal beliefs? It doesn't. Is it because one cannot spout off one's own personal beliefs in Sunday School? That, I submit, is WRONG and out of order to begin with. Who cares what the brethren spend the Church's money on as far as money that has been made from investments, apart from tithing funds? Oh, says one, they ought to be spending it on helping the poor of the other countries and not on a mall. Well, why don't the fault-finders go use their own personal funds to give money to the Christian Children's fund rather than worrying what the Church does? If people like that want money to go to those countries, why don't they become the temporal salvation of those people? It's not their calling to meddle in what the Church does. They are constantly on the lookout for ways that they can charge in this way or that that the Church in general is condemned and needs reprimanding from above, and hey, they are here to offer their services to do it. How cool is that? How convenient.
Besides, some people take it upon themselves to warn other people of their own volition, for example, of the consequences of finding fault with the Lord's anointed, or whatever else. Or friends that warn their friends against walking off a spiritual cliff, or friends that go to help their inactive friends become active again. Those types, I submit to you, are actually the ones that are being sent from the "bottom," that the Holy Ghost works through, not the ones that are trying to organize and become everyone else's spiritual mentors, and trying to figure out how to defame the brethren to build themselves up. A certain book out there, as an example, offers an alternate spiritual path, because of the percieved condemnation.
In other words, it doesn't matter if the Church is actually under condemnation in the grand scheme, because it is SELF CORRECTIVE in that regard, and the people who are sent as a warning voice from below to their fellows of their own volition are not here to steady the ark. There is simply no circumstance where the ark is in need of steadying from below, and those with the keys have built in methods to ensure that their fellow General Authorities maintain a very high level of ethics and morality.
Airliners didn't cause the collapse. They were a diversion. You go ahead and comfort yourselves with the "speaking as a man" thing, but, guess what, folks, they're men, period. How many people have had the wrong conclusion confirmed to them by this erroneous statement because they sustain him as an infallible mouthpiece of the Lord? 