Possibly the greatest title for a medical journal article I’ve seen. You might think with a title like that, the article can’t help but be a dud. However, it delivers the promised payload. The charts especially blew me away.
This is a dream. (more…)
G. mentioned in passing the other day one of those quirky Mormon teachings that I’ve been curious about for a while: “Satan rules over the water.” The origin of this teaching is Doctrine & Covenants Section 61, in which the elders have to halt a river voyage when they see “the destroyer riding in power upon the face of the waters.” The Lord declared to them, “Behold, I, the Lord, in the beginning blessed the waters; but in the last days, by the mouth of my servant John, I cursed the waters.” D&C 61:14. And then later on: “I, the Lord, have decreed, and the destroyer rideth upon the face thereof, and I revoke not the decree.” D&C 61:19
What I wonder is whether “the destroyer” who rode upon the face of the waters was, in fact, Satan, or if it was instead a destroying angel sent by the Lord, as in the days of the Passover. (more…)
What do people collectively want? It’s hard to say. Voting gives you one kind of answer, but voting isn’t nuanced. Voters can only say yes or no to ballot questions as phrased and as they understand them. It’s possible that with more explanation they might feel differently, or with even slightly different phrasing they choose the other option. Or else they can only select between candidates. Different voting systems give different answers. Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem says that no voting system can ever perfectly capture voter intent. Polls are even more fallible.
That’s where the concept of the General Will comes in. What if someone knew the people well enough to have an intuitive, almost literary, sense of what they wanted? That’s why dictatorships claim to be democracies. They say they’re giving the nation what it really, collectively, wants.
The reason it’s hard to know what voters want is because it’s hard to know what a voter wants. Individuals are something like a collection of people over time. No man can step in the same river twice, the Greek said, because it’s never the same man. The mind is always engaged in editing memory to fit the needs of the present, which it wouldn’t need to do if we were really fully the same throughout, if we always had the same end in view. (more…)
Mormon Christianity has a lot of odd little teachings that don’t seem to add up to anything at first glance. Resurrected beings have bodies of flesh and blood. Heaven has three main degrees. Satan rules over the water. And Christ atoned twice, first in the Garden, second on the cross. (more…)
The presence of God is eternity. (more…)
“A lot of them have nice things to say about it, but none of them practice it anymore. I went a different route.”