But the phantom limb still tingles.

(A metaphor too good not to steal repeatedly.)

I have been regarding Michelangelo’s great work.

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The Emperor, $75.  Data, $50. Darth Maul, $40.  —   This weekend, in Indianapolis.

I recently noted an unusually deep thinker I have encountered on the blogosphere: William Wildblood.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/review-of-william-wildbloods-meeting.html

Over a long period of spiritual searching and enlightenment, Wildblood had some unusual spiritual experiences which led him by an unusual route to a non-denominational but broadly ‘traditional’ Christianity – and this path seems to have led to some carefully considered views and evaluations.

His current post on sexuality may make a good start for interested readers:

http://meetingthemasters.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/some-questions-about-homosexuality.html

As so often with Wildblood’s writing, he brings to a notoriously polarizing subject a calmness, thoroughness and truthfulness that I find both satisfying and enlightening.

“As the rain clouds dispersed over Madison High before a recent Saturday afternoon game, a throng of pro scouts in a rainbow of Major League Baseball caps crowded along the backstop, eyes focused on two seniors who may not even be playing baseball in two years.”

In the Washington Post, with quotes from former missionary Jeremy Guthrie and not-former missionary Bryce Harper. (link)

I think the main problem is in the common negative attitude towards Mormons by other types of Christian – which means that correcting even egregious errors (e.g. I heard from the pulpit that Joseph Smith claimed he was Jesus) has little effect.

Because, even though the specific belief about Mormons may be, and usually is, false – the truth is often just as shocking to non-Mormon Christians as the false belief.

For example, those who repeat with horror the common error that Mormons are polytheists are wrong – but the truth (for example that our Mother in Heaven is God’s consort) is equally shocking.

So, in general, I feel that the best strategy is to try and expound Mormon beliefs without argument or defence; in the hope that – if someone listens for long enough – they will eventually recognize that these beliefs are coherent and Christian and at-least-potentially valid, despite their extreme strangeness.

After all, the beliefs are a ‘package’ (i.e. a metaphysical system) that only make sense when taken as a whole – and someone with a positive attitude who makes overall comparisons may, at some point (as I did), get a personal revelation that the Mormon package is the one that happens to be true!

Amending the Constitution would be more than worth it to make it happen. I’m pretty sure Simon Schama had to be carried out of this debate on a stretcher:

We live – in the West – in times of unprecedented physical comfort and convenience – and unprecedented spiritual darkness.

Most of the darkness relates (more or less directly) to sex and sexuality – the sexual revolution has been used as both a lure and a battering-ram to subvert and destroy religion (specifically Christianity), to hollow-out and recolonize its institutions as inverted parodies of the truth.

So why have you and I and so many others been born into this situation? (You can be sure there is a reason why we are born here and now, and not some other time or place.)

Given that God is our loving Father, the reason must be some version of ‘for our own ultimate good’ – or ‘because this is what we, personally, most need‘.

Everyone’s case is different – indeed unique – but I suppose that the main source of ‘opposition’ to good in our time does seem to imply the main necessity of our souls.

Presumably, many of us alive today most needed strengthening by this particular type of opposition – that the sexual domain was (in some way) the particular weakness of our pre-mortal selves – the main factor holding us back from spiritual progression, perhaps.

At any rate, overall the particular nature of corruptions and temptations – of opposition – in our time and place must be some kind of tough love, or bitter medicine; a necessary challenge for our particular souls and the souls of Men in general: a kind of make-or-break opportunity to deal with some extremely serious problem.

**

These are reflections on Elder Oaks’s talk at CJCLDS General Conference earlier this month. 

https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2016/04/opposition-in-all-things?lang=eng

From Music and the Making of Modern Science by Peter Pesic, page 28:

In his earlier Tractatus de commensurabilitate vel incommensurabilitate motuum celi (Treatise on the Commensurability or Incommensurability of the Celestial Motions, written sometime during 1340-1377), Oresme staged this problem in the form of a debate between personified figures of Arithmetic and Geometry, enacted at the command of Apollo himself. The whole dramatic scene is unique among his works, which he generally phrased in the traditional Euclidean style of geometrical propositions.

Appearing as a character in his own drama, Orseme expresses his perplexity whether incommensurability is actually present in astronomy or only a purely theoretical possibility. Then Apollo, accompanied by the Muses, Arts, and Sciences, appears to Oresme “as if in a dream.” Apollo rebukes him for being “ignorant of the ratios relating the things of this world” and hence subject to “affliction of the spirit and an unending labor.” Apollo phrases the problem trenchantly; “an impreceptible excess—even a part smaller than a thousandth—could destroy an equality and alter a ratio from rational to irrational.”

Are hereby categorically denied.

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… These are people suffering from a form of phantom limb syndrome. Instead having had a leg chopped off that they can still feel, it is their sense of the divine that has been amputated. The result is this weird nature cult run by billionaires.

–Thus “Mokita“

With a Mormon theme. 

Partially vindicated.

Nudity is vulnerability. To go nude before millions is to signal one’s relative invulnerability.

Trigger warning: Kardashians are mentioned in the article. (Really, how could it be otherwise?)