We would be happy to share our sermons! We have lots of in-detail information about what God wants, which He has revealed in various ways. Prophets, mystics, and in the fullness of time, God became one of us, gave details about what He wanted, and returned to heaven again. So I'm sure you will love hearing all that we know about Him and His will.

We're certainly happy to read yours as well. 

This is a popular sermon called Powers of Ten (Large).

A person is about six feet tall. If you multiply that by ten, you get about the length of a truck. If you multiply that by ten, you get about the height of a skyscraper. If you multiply that by ten, you get about the length of a bridge. If you multiply that by ten, you get about the length of a city. If you multiply that by ten, you get a watershed; if you multiply that by ten, you get a large portion of a continent. If you multiply that by ten, you get the diameter of the earth. If you multiply that by ten, you get the diameter of Jupiter. If you multiply that by ten, you get the Sun.

At that point, we run out of new things for each power of ten! But if you multiply the diameter of the Sun by a hundred, you get the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The distance to the nearest star is two hundred thousand times the distance to our Sun. The distance across the galaxy is twenty-five thousand times the distance between the Sun and our nearest star!

This is pretty huge. We should marvel at the magnificence of God, and bless It for Its splendor and glory. 

There are lots of helpful pictures that are intended to give the viewer a sense of how large the universe is.

This section of the sermon book includes basically similar sermons about how small various things in the universe is and how long the universe's history is, as well as basic introductions to many other physics concepts. 

That's certainly . . . interesting. I can't say I've ever seen a sermon of ours like that, unless it concludes with some mention that, in all the vastness of the universe, you are an insignificant speck, and therefore ought to be grateful that God noticed you at all.

A popular sermon style we have here is as follows.

First, the priest (it is usually but not always a priest) goes over some of the ills of the world today. Crime, premarital sex, suffering, death, and so on. Next, the hearers are reminded of their own faults--the priest suggests some common faults people might have, sins they might have committed, encouraging the hearers to examine their own conscience. This should remind the hearers that they are flawed and unworthy of anything good.

Then we are reminded that Christ, seeing us in such a pitiful condition (both the world as a whole and each individual hearer) chose to love us anyway and be tortured to death for love of us. Then the sermon hits its high note, talking about how good things can be when one accepts the love of Christ. While the beginning focused on things like sin and death, now the priest talks about eternal happiness after death. All this can be ours if we conform our life to what Christ wants. We are reminded that we owe it to him, since he sacrificed so much for us. (The specific tortures Jesus endured are dwelled on in affecting detail.) The sermon wraps up with some specific tips of things we could do better than we are currently doing them, such as making more sacrifices or spending more time in prayer.

Uh, probably we're a little confused but what does the torture have to do with anything?

Ah, you see, when Jesus (God, in human form) came to Earth he was brutally tortured to death. People are a little divided on how meaningful this is, with some of us saying that each individual torment was necessary to wipe away our sins ("on him was the chastisement that makes us whole, and by his stripes we are healed") while others say it was just a sign of how much he loved us that he was willing to come to Earth at all considering he knew it was going to turn out like that.

Either way, dwelling on how much he suffered for us can help us see how much he loves us and, consequently, love him more in return. He commands us to love him, so everything we can do to make ourselves love him more is time well spent.

Oh, we're pretty sure that it's the second one, because you don't have to self-harm in order to forgive other people their sins. We're very sure of that. Here are some sermons on the subject!

The sermons explain that you might want to hurt yourself to expiate other people's sins, but actually that is wrong and none of that is necessary. The logos has forgiven everyone of everything they have done wrong already. Compassion is a good impulse, but if your compassion is leading you to hurt people for no benefit you have gotten confused somewhere. The logos doesn't want anyone to suffer. When you have the impulse to hurt yourself as a way of compensating for other people's sins, try being nice to yourself! Maybe you can get yourself a nice cup of tea or read a book you really like or listen to some music or hug a stuffed animal. 

Also, we discourage concentrating on torture because this tends to lead to people trying to get tortured in order to prove how much they love other people. Here is another sermon about the subject!

The sermon says that you might think that suffering proves how much you love someone. However, in fact the best thing you can do if you love someone is to help them to be happy and good. It is bad for people to know that other people are suffering for them, because it makes them sad, and sometimes makes it hard for them to express preferences because you will hurt yourself about them, and because if you love someone probably they also love you and therefore they don't want you to be in pain. Of course, some people want you to suffer to prove how much you love them, but in their hearts they don't want this. They just don't believe that you can really love them unless you prove it by being in pain. If you think about it, suffering for someone else's sake is actually saying you don't love them, because you're feeding that insecurity! Of course, sometimes, in emergencies, it is necessary to suffer for other people, but that is a tragedy. (The term "tragedy" is unexplained but seems to be important in Teachingsphere thought.) If it isn't an emergency, you should try to think of other ways to show the person you love them, like tidying their room for them or writing them a poem or giving them a hug. 

In our universe, sin does have to be punished. However, because God is the one sinned against in all cases, he can take the punishment on *himself* and thus the rest of us get forgiven. So it's a special case--perhaps in *most* cases, suffering for people doesn't help, but in God's case it does because he can literally take the punishment you deserve! Isn't that nice?

Now in our universe, suffering can be salutary when we do it as well. Imagine it as a sort of bank, where you "deposit" your personal suffering, and God can withdraw it to pay off other people's sins! But this wouldn't work without God getting involved.

Now this mainly is for people who are already suffering, to give some meaning to their suffering by uniting it to Christ's, meaning he can then use it to forgive sins or whatever else he might want to do with it. We don't exactly encourage people to make themselves suffer on purpose. But some saints have done just that and we have no reason to think it doesn't *work.*

It must be hard for suffering people in your universe, if there's nothing they can do with all that suffering! Since I assume illness, depression, injury, loneliness, etc. still exist there. Much worse than suffering is for suffering to be meaningless and useless!

... ... ...

This is a bizarre way for punishment to work and we are pretty sure you got confused somewhere. 

Punishment is bad, because suffering is generally speaking bad. Ideally, there would be no punishment, because everyone would listen to the voice of God and do the right thing. But if they have a hard time listening to the voice of God then it can help to go "also, if you do this thing that hurts other people, you will have to pay a fine or get an official ruling from an appropriate committee that you're an asshole," because that can be more motivating. It doesn't even make sense if the suffering of totally unrelated people helps, because you have no particular reason to avoid it. 

Unless the idea is that if everyone behaves well then there will be no illness or depression or injury or loneliness anymore, and that is all God making you pay a fine for not listening to It...? And also It arranged to get tortured so people would feel bad about doing bad things...? We suppose this would work if people are more motivated by bad things that happen to other people than they are in our universe. 

Wow! You can empirically determine what things are wrong by checking whether, when people do less of a particular behavior, there are fewer sources of suffering that one would expect to be unrelated to that behavior! You could probably use natural disasters as a proxy? People's behavior doesn't affect how many natural disasters there are. You might have to do some complicated statistics and experimental design to work this out but you've probably done that already. 

Surely even in your universe, you've noticed the correlation between sin and suffering? For instance, if I sin by punching, someone suffers a nosebleed. Or if I sin by failing to clean the kitchen, someone may suffer food poisoning. This connection is so consistent and undeniable that we feel it is part of the nature of the universe! This does not, of course, mean that all suffering is the result of sin. Plenty is simply natural in origin.

But, on this earth, we can't deny that sometimes the person who has sinned is not the person who suffers, or is not the person who suffers the most. And we think it goes without saying that the person who should suffer is the person who sinned. This is what we mean when we say anyone deserves anything--good people deserve reward, and bad people deserve suffering. So we believe (and, indeed, God backs this up in the information we have from him) that it is all evened out in the afterlife. Those who are good are compensated for any earthly suffering by infinite happiness, and those who are evil receive the full punishment for all the sins they did (this is infinite).

Since no human being is actually perfect, we all deserve infinite punishment. But God intervenes here specifically to take the punishment himself so that everyone who believes in him won't suffer that much. Instead our afterlife will contain only limited suffering which purifies us and makes up for some of the sins we did in life.

We... all... deserve... WHAT???????

We're confused about what part you don't understand. Do you disagree that every human being has done evil things sometimes? Or do you not think doing evil is particularly bad? Or what?

Um. People don't deserve to be tortured, actually. No one deserves to be tortured no matter how bad they are.

--Uh, we're not sure that continuing this discussion would be productive because God will lead you to the truth in Its time, do you want another sermon about something nice and noncontroversial? Romance, maybe. How could there ever be controversy about romance.

Given how the fiction transfer went we have our doubts, but go ahead.

...Right yes okay. Maybe something else.

Here are some sermons about hearing the voice of God because you desperately need help.

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Human beings are fundamentally good. As such, all human beings can hear the still, quiet voice of God in their hearts. No matter if you're less intellectually able than someone else, or if you have bigger feelings that someone else, or if you feel worthless, or if you've done something incredibly wrong-- the voice of God still speaks within you. 

The advice given by the voice of God is infallibly correct. You can think about it like math, which is also God. In principle, you could sit down and listen to the voice of God telling you about mathematics and learn everything there is to know about math. In practice, this would take many, many human lifetimes, and it's better to get guidance from other people so you know where to listen to God. But that's always just guidance-- you have never learned math until you can hear the voice of God telling you that the math is true. Similarly, it's good to listen to sermons so you know where to listen to the voice of God. But unless you hear God yourself instead of just repeating by rote the things the sermons say, it does you no good. 

We apply rules of ethics, just like we apply rules of math. But sometimes we misapply rules of math, and our innate number sense goes "hey, wait, that's wrong-- there's no way that multiplying two two-digit numbers should get you something in the ten thousands." Similarly, if we misapply rules of ethics, our innate moral sense will go "hey, wait, that's wrong-- there's no way that we're supposed to hurt someone!"

It's important to note that God doesn't tell us any facts. You can still make mistakes listening to the voice of God if you are wrong about things about the world! This is why it's so important to believe true things. 

What if the voice of God tells you you should do something but everyone else disagrees? You should listen very carefully and make sure it is genuinely the voice of God. Then, you should do what the voice of God says, because the voice of God is infallible. Maybe everyone else has made a mistake; maybe God wants you to do something shouldn't do. If you do your best to listen to the voice of God, it will have the best outcomes in general, even if you've made a mistake in this case. 

How do you tell if something you're listening to is the voice of God? God wants you to be kind to everyone, to preserve life, to ease suffering, to never change something that grows and lives well in its own way, to believe true things, to make beautiful things, to do your work well, and to treat everyone with respect. So if God tells you to do those things, it is probably God. When you are listening to God, you feel a sense of inner peace and rightness. If you look back through your life, you can probably think of times that you felt that! (Think about decisions that worked out really well.) 

How do we practice listening to the voice of God? The voice of God is very quiet, so it's hard to listen to it if you're filling up your mind with other things, like busyness or strong emotions. You should ideally set aside two times a day, in the morning and the evening, to practice listening to the voice of God. This time is very personal, and different people benefit from different things. Some people journal, some people meditate, some people pray, some people read sermons, some people listen to music or sit in nature or contemplate math and praise God for Its majesty, some people give thanks for things that have gone well for them, some people think about situations they're going to face and plan about how they're going to solve them, some people practice particular habits of mind that they have trouble with, some people repeat a mantra like "love, kindness, forgiveness" or "thy will be done." Most people do most or all of these at different times. 

When you're in a situation and you want to hear the voice of God, you should stop whatever you're doing, perform any calming exercise that works for you, observe the details of the situation factually and without applying interpretations that might not be true, pray for guidance and any virtues you think the situation calls upon, and then proceed with mindfulness and care for everyone involved. 

This is a very beautiful sermon and we agree with most of it.

We call figuring out if you are hearing the voice of God "the discernment of spirits." Obviously God does talk to some; just as obviously, it is possible to think you are hearing God when you are really hearing something else (a mental illness, a bad dream, or an evil spirit). We know not everyone who claims to hear God is correct, because different people's accounts of God conflict.

We agree that checking what you heard with what you already know of Him, meditating, and cultivating inner quiet are good ways to hear the voice of God. However we would also like to add the importance of having a trustworthy spiritual guide of some kind. After all, you may be wrong. Humans are wrong a lot. So speaking to someone God has designated as an authority, eg a priest, is very helpful. If you know you heard the voice of God but your spiritual authority forbids you from following it, you should obey your authority and God will find another way to work with you. We have many stories where this has happened to people; their obedience was rewarded and God was not displeased.

How most people hear the voice of God is not audible, but instead the workings of conscience. Your conscience is the part of you that knows right from wrong, and God can indeed speak to you this way. However, a conscience can be deformed. For instance, if you constantly ignore its prompting and do a thing you know is evil, you might cease to believe it is evil. You might even feel strongly it is the right thing to do! This shows the danger of falling into habitual sin; it will make you unaware of future sin. You can also deform your conscience by listening to irreligious material, being influenced by the wrong people, or by approaching the teachings of God with an attitude of questioning and debate instead of the submission of mind and heart.

With all these ways of deforming a conscience, no wonder it's safer to listen to the authority of the church than your personal feelings, even if they're coming from what you think is your conscience. A person whose conscience is always completely aligned with church teaching should trust their conscience and follow it, but if your conscience sometimes comes up with an answer that isn't what God has already revealed. you should ignore it and instead do what the church says you should do. However, if you follow the best advice of your conscience, and it turns out your conscience is wrong, God *probably* won't be upset about it and *most* of us agree you will not go to the bad place for that.

...okay but what happens if your spiritual authority tells you to do something straightforwardly bad, like murder people or have sex with them or give them all your money or try to overthrow the government or beat your children? This kind of thing happens to us all the time. We think this is not a system that is very robust to the difficulties of human authority. 

Also, for us, God likes it when you question and debate about morality. It brings you a better understanding of morality, the same way that questioning and debating math brings you a better understanding of math. We guess it might be different if God is specifically telling a group of people what its will is. 

We're not sure we believe in a deformed conscience? Even if you do wrong things a lot the little voice inside of you is still telling you they're wrong, if you listen.