On the steppe, when one tribe got big and genocidal and attacked the tribe next to it that tribe fought for a while and then fled, usually by launching a genocidal attack on the next tribe further on.  You got these domino effects.

(The Mfecane I mentioned yesterday worked like that also).

But the Nephites at the end stopped fleeing the Lamanites. Why?

Maybe they were completely surrounded by the Lamanites in great depth.  But that is not the picture we get from anywhere in the Book of Mormon, nor from the ending period.

Maybe they realize that in fleeing they would have to leave behind many of their people to die, especially the women and children.  But if they were all that wicked, why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they act on the wicked principle of each man for himself and devil take the hindmost?  King Noah and his wicked priests did.

That is one question – why didn’t the Nephites flee?  It actually takes quite a bit of courage and cooperation and self-sacrificing spirit, in other words, virtue, to stay and fight to the death when you have a chance to run away.

Here is the second question. Why didn’t the Nephites desert?

(more…)

200 AD — the children of Lehi live in a perfect society with visible miracles and deathless men who had seen the Christ walking among them

210 AD — wicked churches deny the Christ and try to kill the Saints

230 AD — They split again into warring Nephites and Lamanites

How quick the fall.

Why?  Or better yet, how?  Nearly every adult in 210 would have had the living experience of being part of that ideal gospel world.  10 years later, they are trying to burn people.

Corruptio optima pessimi.  That is the Book of Mormon’s answer.  When those most blessed of the Lord reject Him, the Spirit of the Lord withdraws completely and they perish.  With the ordinary wicked, the Spirit of the Lord continues to strive, so they can still muddle on.  Not so those who reject God, whom God rejects. (more…)

It only now occurs to me that the Lamanite atrocities in Mormon 4 where they sacrifice Nephite women and kids, well, those have the classic flavor of atrocity propaganda.  Mormon never claims to have seen them personally.  There is no reason to think they could not be–atrocity stories about the enemy are pretty nearly a human universal.

On the other hand, Mormon does say that he has personally seen awful scenes (Mormon 5:8-9). And atrocities and even gross atrocities also seem to be a near universal. The Holdomor. The Holocaust. The Mfecane (it has a very similar flavor to the Nephites’ end times).  The grotesque sacrificial practices of the Aztecs were almost unbelievably evil.

This post is about sex and I apologize in advance for those of you–you know who you are–for whom this topic is justly painful.  Would that it were not so.

I’m no Francis Berger–I have neither the depths nor the heights–but I do have some more Deep Thoughts about porn.  Or rather, my brain does.  Yes, at 3 AM.  It’s no literary affectation, poppets, from time to time my brain really does wake me up at 3 AM to brood about Deep Thoughts.  There seems to be no consistent connection to what I ate or my mood or my activity or mindset the night before.

In addition to the many more obvious problems with porn, one big problem is that it conditions men’s brains to associate sexual satisfaction with being passive and inert.  There is no masculine energy involved.  Further, because we have a celebrity culture where screen time is status, it conditions them to approach sex as an inferior.  Passive and low status, they are getting sexual reward from being passive and low status.  Like a rat that gets a little bunt of cocaine for pushing the button, but the button they push is the destruction of their own masculinity.

Oh, the crafty plan of the Adversary!  He’s a sly devil.

(more…)

Remember when our ancestors built their own meetinghouses?  I grew up in a little church by a stream that the ward there had built.  Some of the old men had laid the foundation.  Most of the people there had painted or remodeled or added a wing where we had classrooms.  There was a ‘cry room’ for nursing mothers that was built on a second story at the back of the chapel, with a little balcony, so they could still see the service.  Naturally, because there were no piped-in sound systems back then.

There were real joys to doing it that way.  At the same time, the hardship of building and paying was intense.  It is a blessing that we can now afford to hire builders.   But we only know it is a blessing if we remember there used to be another way.

Years ago I had the opportunity to preside over a stake whose roots reach back a great while. When the first ward was formed in that area, the local people, out of their own meager resources, bought the land and constructed the building without any help from the general funds of the Church. When that building became too small, they constructed a larger one entirely from their own resources.

By the time I came into the presidency of that stake the Church policy provided for matching funds, the Church to put up one dollar for each dollar provided by the local members. Under that formula, we in that area built six new chapels, in addition to providing funds for their maintenance and all of the activity programs carried on in the various wards.

There may have been a few murmurings, but the faith of the people overrode all of these. They gave generously, notwithstanding the stresses of their own circumstances, and the Lord blessed them in a remarkable way. I know of none who went hungry or without shelter. And I know something of the fruit of those homes which have produced a generation and almost a second generation who walk in faith and who have gone across the world and become men and women recognized for their various skills and integrity, as well as for their activity in the Church.

In those days we would have thought the Millennium had come if we had received word that the Church would bear all of the costs of providing land, all of the costs incident to building construction, operation, and maintenance, let alone an activity and administrative budget allowance of forty dollars per year per individual, based on the number who attend sacrament meeting.

It is not the Millennium, but this long hoped-for and prayed-for day has come. Though I have been a party to its inauguration, I still stand in awe at what has happened.

-thus President Hinckley

Other Posts from the April 1990 Member Finances Fireside

Marilyn Nielson Let us not quibble or complain

The Nephites and the Lamanites have a complex history. They split, they merge, they have dissenters, they have converts, they split again…

In 4th Nephi they apparently completely merge and become just one people.  Then when they become wicked again they become Nephites and Lamanites again.  But it’s even more specific, they split into their individual varieties of Lamanites and Nephites–the old tribes that they used to belong to. (more…)

Goodness is always underrated.

It can’t be overrated.

Think of the goodness you know in your family and friends.  There is nothing better.

I dreamed Miss Swan went gliding along the sparkling water, white and sinuous and effortless, and as she came by Mr. Stork she gave a demure and graceful bob of her head.

Mr. Stork, he bowed.  His stilt legs pushed back and his stilt body pushed forward.

And just like from her, from him I had an impression of great beauty.  In his own way.  It was not curved and elegant.  It was angular.  But it was a real bow with real grace–his body lent itself to the essence of bowing–and it was distinctly like a stork.

Moral: achieve the glory that is yours.

I used to think that freedom should be afforded to all who were willing to afford it to us, i.e., pretty much everybody except for literal Communists and the like.

I still think the same thing, except now I worry that its actually boatloads of people whose sights are on us.

I have this idea that beautiful things are more likely to be true.  Friend of the JG Tanner Greer over at Scholar’s Stage has written a very beautiful piece, and I think a true one, about the best of the old America that was.  The 19th C. America where everybody had an ambition in their pocket; the 19th C. America of a 1,000 voluntary associations.

We are in a kind of twilight now.

G. once told us the rest of the story for the Emperor’s New Clothes.  It’s good.  I went back and it predicts Black Lives Matter.

I want to talk about the back story.

Swindlers come in, talk up their new clothes, tell lies about how only good people can see the cloth, and then social pressure and lies do the rest.  Everyone pretends to see it and half-believes that everyone else has.

You can believe that in a story.  It wouldn’t happen that way in real life.

Unless the court were already used to lies and  manufacturing opinions and fashion and trying hard not to be caught out with the wrong set of beliefs.  (more…)

I saw a motorcycle followed by a tiny truck followed by an old van going down my street.  Close enough it was almost a procession.

It caught my eye.

But the real unusual thing is the people, no matter what car they drive.

Each one a little world, an unfinished symphony, an avatar of themselves.

Every passerby is a parade.

It’s a baptismal talk for a new convert and its interactive.  (New converts haven’t always had the interactivity sluiced out of them.) So in the interaction a picnic comes up awhile back where the new convert and a bunch of us were there and one of the missionaries brought a tightrope thing to winch up between two trees.  We spent most of the hours trying it.

The next thing in my talk is ‘strait is the gate and narrow the way’; so I liken it to the tightrope.  But that’s bad, because none of us made it across the tightrope.  So I add that the way may be narrow but we’ve got plenty of tries.   Each and every sacrament.  Then I move on.

But I keep thinking about walking that narrow tightrope and walking the narrow way of salvation.

(more…)

I gave this talk in Church a few weeks ago.

There are things going wrong that we all know about.

-Fires breaking out around the world

-lockdowns and disease

-Massive debt and deficit

-gender issues, gender identity issues

-secret combinations, the Book of Mormon says

-BYU infected

-an aggressive China

-Coronavirus exposing how dysfunctional the US is

-all time low birthrates

-declining IQ

-trust levels in our society keep going down

-obesity is at an all time high, we are less healthy than we have ever been

-social media is more addictive and more soul-destroying than ever

-pre- Corona but death rates were going up and life expectancies were going back down

[I elaborated on some points a little but I still went through it like a list, boom, boom, boom.  I had a number of people afterwards tell me it was a really disturbing list, they knew about all or most of these things but hadn’t put them together] (more…)

Let us say that the coronavirus were real.  Oh, of course its real.  But I’m talking about the coronavirus of our hysteria and nightmares.  What if 5% or 10% or 25% were dying?

What kinds of measures would be appropriate?

My wife and I talked about this back in February.  We agreed that this disease wasn’t going to be it, but in the event of another plague, we would do things like utterly isolate, living off our stores; if I had to go to work I would never come back inside, I would eat and sleep out on the lawn; if one of us got sick we would house that person somewhere else and nurse them wearing improvising hazmat suits made out duct tape and garbage bags.  We would do things like that and so would you.  Extreme measures are not extreme in the face of extreme threats.

Now consider this.  We live in a spiritual plague land.  The dead souls are strewn everywhere.  They lay stacked in the streets.

What kinds of measures are justified?

When people tell you, ‘don’t be extreme’ because you don’t voluntarily hook yourself up to the IV of lies, what they are really saying is that the threats are mild.  Pornography, divorce, childlessness, mobs, gossip, wrath, depression, desolation–“It’s just the spiritual flu, bro.”

Remember life in a charnel house.