I dreamed that there were these woodland spirits of great beauty.  They did not have children in the normal way.  Instead out of the banks of the rivers they dug the shapes of rough beings of clay.

Animated, these crude creatures stumbled through the forests breaking things.  They shambled.

The spirits them subjected them to great force and pressure.  If they did not shatter altogether, they condensed and purified, more and more, until they were as the woodland spirits.

1. Rebekah’s relation to Isaac–they are first cousins once removed, right?

Genesis 24:15, a couple of other scriptures.

2. Why would ex-slaves require such detailed instructions on owning slaves?

Exodus 21 is the chapter right after the ten commandments.  It has detailed instructions for the law on holding slaves.  Verses 1-11, 20-21, 26, and 32.  Why?  Would the Hebrew slaves have owned a bunch of slaves?  It is possible.  I get the impression that they were held collectively in bondage but not necessarily individually, which means that as individuals some of them might have owned slaves among themselves.  The other possibility is that as ex-slaves they had a bunch of opinions on how slavery should be managed.

3.  Exodus 21:20-21, am I reading this right?

And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished.

Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money.

I am reading it to say that there is a punishment for killing your slave.  Not death, but a punishment.  But if you maul the slave but the slave doesn’t die right away, they linger on for a day or two, then no punishment.  Because the money you lose when the slave dies is itself the punishment.

Now, obviously, the world of the Old Testament is very foreign to ours.  That’s one of the reasons I have been saying ‘slave’ instead of ‘servant,’ to make the differences more clear.  And obviously having a different scale of punishments for offenses against servants/slaves was pretty standard in various areas of the ancient world.  Anglo-Saxon law, for instance.  Still, the idea that masters can be trusted to treat their slaves well because of the money they have invested in them is a remarkably libertarian view.   I.e., probably false.

And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.

….

And the Lord came down upon mount Sinai, on the top of the mount: and the Lord called Moses up to the top of the mount; and Moses went up.

And the Lord said unto Moses, Go down, charge the people, lest they break through unto the Lord to gaze, and many of them perish.

-thus Exodus 19:18-21

And the sight of the glory of the Lord was like devouring fire on the top of the mount in the eyes of the children of Israel.

-thus Exodus 24:17

I don’t think we’ve quite incorporated this into our picture of deity.  I know I haven’t.

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Some AI prompts for futuristic space temples. The pictures are rough and the details are off, but they are not without glory.

The heating and cooling would be a cast iron son of a gun.  But beautiful.

I love the lower left just because of how strange it is.  The lower right one is different, but really works.

The implementation of the top isn’t quite right, but the lower right one has real potential.

Alien but familiar.

Note: these are not real.

I happenned to see this displayed today in the Ronald Reagan Airport, across the Potomac from Washington, DC.

This article in the Vanity Fair was something else.  It’s about, heck if I know.

In my dream we had acquired an android personal assistant. She was horse-faced and spare, in her 50s.

I had butchered some animal or other.  After doing the main cuts, I had a number of scraps left which I had crammed into a large ziploc or freezer bag, something of that kind.

She came to me very worried.  She said that multiple sources claimed that packaged food was bad for you, and my meat scraps were clearly packaged food.

I explained that I was going to remove the  meat from the package before I cooked it, so it would no longer be packaged food.

This mollified her.

I had an odd dream.  In my dream each person in their core had two or three nodes that could be filled with some kind of trait.  Judgment, for instance.

Then they had a second layer of nodes that the inner traits were filtered through, leading to a third layer of surface nodes that consisted of actions.

In my dream some people were reproving each other for being judgmental or whatnot.  But I could see the inner nodes, and I saw that some people who had judgment on their third surface layer of nodes actually had something different in the interior.  Their outer judgment was just inner love filtered through middle layer concern for community norms or vision of the future or whatever it might be.  Whereas some of the people who did not have judgment on the exterior layer had it on the inside, it just was filtered and manifested differently.

In my dream, what mattered was what was in the inner layer.

Not a hair of the head shall be lost

He is resurrected, and his body the Church and his footstool the earth and everything that is in it.  It is all resurrected, every person, every moment.  It is all coming back.

The saints came out of the grave with him.  It is a symbol that everything comes out of the grave..  He drew them out, and they are one edge of a great net, tied to everything they ever loved or touched, in turn everything they ever loved or touched tied to what those things ever loved or touched, all one great net that he is drawing out with him, anything and all things that he ever loved, they all come back.

Oh, the glory of it. On Easter we discover that all the little bits of our lives are become the stuff divinity and eternity is made of.  They blare with light.  And oh the shame, because what have we done with them.   He is the resurrection and the life.  We are the resurrection . . . but whether of life or death or some ghastly mix remains to be seen.

But the glory overwhelms.  If we step out from our little mortal barques onto the shining waters of eternity and are buffeted by the storms we have raised, and sink, lift up your hand and cry for Him.  He will pull you up.

This resurrection is not of our own doing.  He is making and remaking us.

Christ is risen.

Hallelujah.

Christ is risen.

Hallelujah.

Christ is risen.

Hallelujah.

On and on the chant goes on.

It is sown in death.

I just ran across a rant about how more Disney movies are bad than you think, because they teach that monsters are actually cuddly and misunderstood.

Despite what you’d think, I’m actually pretty moderate and easy-going in real life.  But we have a couple of out-there hard rules in Chez G.  Meal times, and no books with good dragons.

I mostly pass it off as a bit of a joke, Dad working off his eccentric humors.  But underneath all that, I really do feel there is something wicked at work.  Monsters are monsters.  Dragons are evil.

Apologies to Elder Christofferson, but the old promises worked for me.

Sometimes absurdly so.  The blessings were not always subtle.  Sometimes it was blatant, in your face, crude.  Like I decided to stop doing homework on Sunday and blew through a test that Monday in a course that had me on the mat up till then.

I think Saints should continue to ask for these sorts of blessings and put them to the test.  God saying no is better than God saying nothing at all, because you haven’t asked.  It is fear that keeps us from asking.  Or even worse, sometimes a heretical and prissy belief that asking for earthy blessings is somehow unspiritual.

Elder Christofferson’s talk is excellent, by the way.   It’s about the bloody messy reality of the gospel.

I have a new take on the nameless virtue. (First nameless virtue post here).

Let’s look at something President Nelson said.

Discover the joy of daily repentance. Cut short your misery. He loves us especially when we repent.
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There is an oft repeated notion that our Heavenly Father never punishes or curses anyone; instead he may just withhold his bounteous blessings from those not prepared to receive. Opening the scriptures anywhere and reading the next ten pages would disabuse us of this notion that God would never actively punish us, yet as I heard the hearty, triumphant song Moses and Israel sang after crossing the Red Sea, I considered verse 19:

For the horse of Pharaoh went in with his chariots and with his horsemen into the sea, and the Lord brought again the waters of the sea upon them; but the children of Israel went on dry land in the midst of the sea.

The standard thing to expect driving forth on horse or foot into the midst of the sea would be to drown. The highly unusual thing was that Israel did not drown. Pharaoh mistakenly thought the miracle given Moses should be given him as well.