Your normal best is the type of family you really are.

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There seems to be little buzz about the 250th, and most of what I hear of on the national level seems fractured and lame.

I have no specific plans yet but I’m looking to do something at least a little out of the ordinary.

What are you seeing out there?  What are you thinking of doing?

Three and a half years ago Gérald Caussé, at that time Presiding Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, spoke in General Conference on “Our Earthly Stewardship.” He started with a family visit to a garden in Giverny, a little town in France. “This amazing place is the result of the creative passion of one man: the great painter Claude Monet, who, for 40 years, tenderly shaped and cultivated his garden to make it his painting workspace. Monet immersed himself in nature’s splendor; then, with his paintbrush, he conveyed the impressions he felt with strokes of color and light. Over the years, he created an extraordinary collection of hundreds of paintings, directly inspired by his garden.” Later in that talk Bishop Caussé quoted Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, best known as author of The Little Prince: “When by mutation a new rose is born in a garden, all the gardeners rejoice. They isolate the rose, tend it, foster it. But there is no gardener for men.”

Listening to that talk, my mind thought: “To some are given tales of rednecks getting themselves into trouble in the desert, and to others French culture, that all may be edified and find something to draw them into lending closer attention.”

Seven years before Bishop Caussé’s Conference talk, there was another in 2015. (more…)

On the sweetness

Oh, that Danny.  Say what you will about him, tiny bowler and a one piece glove shirt is certainly a look.

• Interesting point on ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’:  yes, that is very different if you think of that as the pursuit of moral happiness, or the search for meaning.  Man’s Search for Meaning.
• The Constitution as a ‘heavenly banner’ is a much different thing than the Constitution as a set of rules and procedures
• “common principles…. that promote pluralistic societies”–the more pluralistic, the less common principles there are, by defintion.  Or the more the principles become bland generalities

But what really stood out to me was the end.

they were finishing up, at least Elder Cook thought so, but apparently President Christofferson wasn’t done, because he added one last bit.

Quoting John Adams, he said that the Constitution was made for a moral and religious people and cannot work with any other.

But we do not have a moral and religious people.  We are not going to have one any time soon.  It won’t be from missionary work–neither we nor anyone else is trying the social gambles that could result in mass conversion.  So, what now?

Posting this in advance of the religious liberty Sunday School today–I don’t know what is in it–so if I look like an idiot by afternoon so be it.  But I expect that I won’t.  I expect that it will follow the recent Church trend of laying out general principles, often in a pointed way, but with the knotty questions of application left up to us.

1.  Religious liberty is here to to stay.  No modern country, but especially not the United States, can go back to being a confessional state.
2. Religious liberty has a moral dimension.  God has allowed sects to proliferate.
3. For us–the Church–religious liberty is necessary from a purely structural standpoint.  The ability of people to check out when they want, the fact that the only people who stay are generally people who want to be there, is load-bearing.
4. A certain amount of religious competition appears to be healthy for the religions involved, up to a point.
5. The Church could have only come out in an environment of multiple competing sects and widespread freedom to be fringe–this is a point about legal religious liberty but not just a point about legal religious liberty–Joseph Smith and many others had to be in an environment where “[s]ome were contending for the Methodist faith, some for the Presbyterian, and some for the Baptist” in order to end up where they did.
6. Religious liberty in  the US and Europe was practical in origin–there were a number of settlers and groups with different Christian beliefs and organizations, plus Jews.  It was a modus vivendi.  It then became a philosophical position.  Some of that philosophy is pretty compatible with the Gospel–free agency, freedom to choose, etc.  But a lot of that philosophy is in tension with the Gospel (tension is not the same as contradiction).  Our principles of authority, prophets, the Church being the Kingdom and all other churches and religions being false to some degree, a certain degree of communal living and being intertwined with fellow Saints, strong families that indoctrinate–classical liberals in the 19th C. and liberals now were not wrong to identify us as opposed to ‘freedom’ as they understood it at least to a certain extent.
7. LDS citizens and rulers should use what they know to be good and right to inform law, policy, and the exercise. “Legislate morality.”
8. Any society has to have a certain amount of broad agreement on basic principles to be a free, high trust society.  The alternatives are low trust fragmentation or repressive authoritarian governments.  Somalia or the State.  Mogadishu or the muzzle.  Often you get both.
9. Utah being a mainly LDS state is a good thing.
10. The Saints favoring the Saints and trying to increase our power and influence as a people–and even dominance in some regions–is a good thing.
11. Religious liberty does not require utter societal indifference between religion and irreligion, nor between different religions.
12. Religious liberty does not require the mass immigration of Muslims.
13. Despite what many naive Saints think, respecting others liberties in no way guarantees your own.  Oft times it is detrimental to your own.
14. As with many things, the most interesting and hardest questions about religious liberty are not the sacred principles involved.  The most interesting and hardest questions are:

• What are the limits of religious liberty?  How to apply the principles here and now?
• Who has the power to maintain religious liberty?  Who gets to decide the application?

Many Saints would like to use ‘religious liberty’ as a mechanical mantra to avoid these hard questions.  But sacred slogans cannot substitute for seership and rules do not replace revelation.

There is a part of Isaiah that has been weighing on my mind.

Ch. 2-5 Explain the dire situation of the people, with Ch. 5 having the prophet say, I have done everything I can do! I give up!

Ch. 6-12 Begins with Isaiah’s Vision of the Divine Throne and the Lord, in the Temple, and ends (Ch. 12) with a Testimony of the Righteous Men and Women.

Ch. 13-27 The Fall/Collapse of Babylon

13-20 – Temporal Collapse
21-23 – Spiritual Collapse
24-27 – We see the world bifurcated – the wicked exist in a ruined state, where nothing is working, like they all just ran out of steam. And the righteous live in a strong city, with great blessings and glory

The situation is not merely apocalyptic. It is a collapsed society. Nobody has anything, nobody knows what to do, nothing works. This affects everyone from the top to the bottom. Every idea, philosophy and idol have been tried and found wanting. The people are out of ideas. And repentance… well, they simply are not going to think about that!

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I strongly recommend Quarantine by Kevin Bates.  Of LDS interest (the SF supposal appears to be derived from Hugh Nibley).  The answer to the Fermi Paradox is … sin.

Man stood on a featureless plain.  Nothing but short grass and tiny wildflowers in every direction.  The breezes ruffled it first one way, and then another.

“I will walk until I reach the sunset,” Man said, and then he set off.

Dog whined.  “This is so boring and limiting,” Dog said.  “I miss the freedom of going wherever you want.  Every step we take has been predestined by the step before.”

And so Dog trotted off, and went where he would, and soon howled for loneliness.  He ran hard for days to catch up with Man.

– – –

Davy Crockett stood on a pleasant hilltop that stood out of the wilderness.  Across the tops of the trees, eventually blending into a seamless green, and the little gleams of rivers, and the haze of the far plain,  there rose a far, far shining mountain.

“I will go there,” Crockett said, “lo, though it lead to perils and even the very Alamo of my existence, for God is there.”  And his face shone also.

Johnny Europe stood by him  and scoffed.  “You would go back to the press of thickets, the flood, the wolves and bears, the lurking Indians, the days without food, the nights without sleep, never seeing more than a few yards in front of you, always fearful, never free to do whatever you might want?”

“We have achieved this summit,” Johnny Europe said, “here let us rest on our eminence.”

But Crockett set off down the hill and strode into the trees, and as he strode he sang.

As a science fiction fan I sometimes think of things that no one can know and that are none of my business. One of those is which American holidays would survive the end of the American government assuming there were something like an American people left.

You can make a case for any of them but my top two choices are Thanksgiving and Memorial Day.

Let their deaths hallow their lives and their memory.

On the sweetness of Mormon life–

You are reading Joshua 8 in the family about the way against Ai.  The kids insist on pronouncing it AI.

There is an interesting convergence of both holy, secular and some unholy dates, that I think we should be aware of. I do not recommend staring into the abyss, but I don’t recommend being entirely ignorant of what is there either. Take this all with a grain of salt and a sincere prayer.

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Sunday I was talking with my 17-year-old daughter, my youngest child, about the shift to “All or Nothing” spiritual preparation and outcomes for youth in the Church. Before her time the young women had Personal Progress, a program that held a lot of meaning for my late wife and others of her generation. My late wife said that experience of coming up with goals and executing them was a helpful preparation for her life as an independent married woman every day deciding what ought to be done, mostly accountable only to herself for the use of her time. Today, instead of organizing such preparation in the teaching of the church’s young women and recognizing progress in that publicly, the direction is that what youth need to prepare for is to receive the endowment in the House of the Lord, and entering the temple for that purpose as soon as they can be considered adults is the capstone they need, not a lovely medallion.

What then of the 18-year-olds who are not ready to covenant in the temple?

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The Old Testament is bloody, violent, militant, stern,  judgmental … and yet, more or less unplanned by the instructor (me), our last Sunday School on the 5 books of Moses ended on a tender note.

We read Deuteronomy 7:6-8—

For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.

The Lord did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people:

But because the Lord loved you . . .

–and then we read Deuteronomy 30:1-5-–

And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee, and thou shalt call them to mind among all the nations, whither the Lord thy God hath driven thee,

And shalt return unto the Lord thy God, and shalt obey his voice according to all that I command thee this day, thou and thy children, with all thine heart, and with all thy soul;

That then the Lord thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations, whither the Lord thy God hath scattered thee.

If any of thine be driven out unto the outmost parts of heaven, from thence will the Lord thy God gather thee, and from thence will he fetch thee:

And the Lord thy God will bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it; and he will do thee good[.]

–and then we were done.

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