Put On Thy Strength, O Zion

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Elder Bednar from conference:

Parables are a defining feature of the Lord Jesus Christ’s masterful approach to teaching. Simply defined, the Savior’s parables are stories used to compare spiritual truths with material things and mortal experiences. For example, the New Testament Gospels are replete with teachings likening the kingdom of heaven to a grain of mustard seed,¹ to a pearl of great price,² to a householder and laborers in his vineyard,³ to ten virgins,⁴ and to many other things. During part of the Lord’s Galilean ministry, the scriptures indicate that “without a parable spake he not unto them.”⁵

The intended meaning or message of a parable typically is not expressed explicitly. Rather, the story only conveys divine truth to a receiver in proportion to his or her faith in God, personal spiritual preparation, and willingness to learn. Thus, an individual must exercise moral agency and actively “ask, seek, and knock”⁶ to discover the truths embedded in a parable.

Here Elder Bednar implies that there is just one meaning, but as becomes clear in his discussion of the parable of the wedding feast, parables have lots of meaning packed in tight.  Because you have to think about them and feel them to get the meanings, parables are on the border line between messages delivered through experience and messages delivered through words.

Now lets talk about the parable of the royal wedding feast.  (more…)

One of my younger ones has been  thinking about honesty.  Or, according to her, honesty.

She has been mulling why people, including her, tell lies.  She was telling me her thoughts.

While she talked I wondered what a world where everyone said what they were thinking would be like.

We tend to think of it as a world of unflinching, brutal honesty.  But it wouldn’t be.  Not even close.

A true world of honesty would be a world where everyone said what they thought, and what they thought was true.

We tell ourselves that all the little white lies, the little polite kindnesses, are to protect others from hearing unpleasant truths.  They really are to protect ourselves.  If we did not conceal our thoughts, everyone would know how negative and petty and grudging, how malicious and small, how indifferent to favors and good things, how ready to take anything noteworthy for granted, we are.

We lie about what we think so that the lie of what we are thinking will not be revealed.

Don’t try to communicate your views.  Try to be honest.

This is the last of the fables/parables on strategy I’ve been doing lately.

There once was a certain company started to worry a about its core customers.  They weren’t buying as much as they used to. The number of core customers wasn’t growing like it had.  The product wasn’t selling quite as strong as before and the stock price was stagnant.

They got together in the board. They looked at charts. The presenter said, here’s our core customers. There’s a few less of them than they used to be. But we have all these marginal customers. There’s lots of them. What if we could appeal more to the marginal customers?.  They did a poll and a focus group and even a pilot program.  The poll and the focus group both said, yeah sounds great.   They did a pilot program—wow, the select group of marginal customers they focused on really responded with all the personal attention from HQ researchers, they picked up their buying a lot, almost to the point of being core customers.

A year later, they had another meeting.  They looked at charts again.  Their core customer base declined a lot more. Apparently, they were unhappy with the new approach. But now there were even more marginal customers.

Wow, they thought look at all those marginal customers. The strategy of ignoring the core and appealing to the margins is now more important than ever. So they doubled down.

Moral: results are the most important numbers. (more…)

I have an unorthodox view that sin is anything that deviates from the good. What we call sin conventionally is just that type of brokenness where part of what is broken is the person’s will.

Think about all the safety measures and automation around us. Here’s the sad truth.

Eliminating human error means eliminating human agency.

Obvious moral choices aren’t the only meaningful choices out there. Any choice that involves competing values, balancing efficiency and safety and different goals, is a powerful exercise in agency. People need to make these choices even if, especially if, they will sometimes fail.

Safetyism is one functionary, one choice, one time.

I figured out that time wasters aren’t as much a waste as you would think. First, for someone like me who comes up with ideas for new posts 6 times a day, and new projects 7 times a week, getting your brain to stop going all over the place is useful. I’m already buried enough under life changing plans as is.

Second, letting your mind wander is just too absorbing. You blink, and you’ve missed your stop or have forgotten to take your wallet with you to the store. Better to be messing around with a puzzle or something that leaves enough room in your head to remember tasks.

In its travels, the jay came across a bear, also dining on a bull buffalo calf. “And I suppose you are another one of these who dislike buffalo for some reason,” the jay observed.

“A little,” the bear said. “They are harder to hunt. Their flesh is less sweet.” (more…)

After more wanderings that same jay came across a pack that was nipping at a large herd of buffalo. They darted in and then darted out again before the thundering hooves could annilihate them. The jay watched for a bit and saw that, for all their effort, the wolves had not seemed to bring down any of the buffalo. When one wolf trotted out of the press for a breather, tongue lolling, the jay struck up a conversation. “I suppose,” he said, “that you are another one of these packs that resent the buffalo as interlopers and hope to drive them off your range.” (more…)

From President Monson (more…)

I had a dream where I saw an adobe wall.    It was a little scene.  The dream called my attention to the fact that there were three live things and three things not live.  The inanimate things were a rough pine ladder against the wall, a niche in the wall, and a stone on the ground.  The three live things were a santo in the niche (it talked), a bird on the ladder, and a flower by the stone.  The dream was pretty insistent on there being the three inanimate things and the three live things.  And that was it.  That was the whole dream.  It was very peculiar.

Wanted: Daniel.  Joseph would also do.

The allegory:

Mr. Romantic married Miss Practical.  She became Mrs. Romantic.

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Mr. Romantic married Miss Practical.  She became Mrs. Romantic.

Curious to see what you think this means.  I will post my explanation tomorrow.  It would be cool if someone had a good meaning that isn’t the one I intended.

Sunrise over the Marriott pool,

the commercial strip, and the warehouse zone

–God’s promise that even man’s rule

He’ll one day turn to loveliness.

Inspiration from thermodynamics for understanding the problems with p*rn

Fap entropy was particularly good

Alasdair MacIntyre rejects the idea that God knows what we do until we have done it.  Because, he says, we are free agents.  What we choose cannot perfectly be predicted.

Until the agent finally makes her or his decision her or his future action is undetermined. There is no fact of the matter about what she or he is going to decide or to do, nothing to make any statement about, true or false. Not only does she or he not know what she or he is going to do, no one else can be said to know this either, including God. . . . So, even if an omniscient God does exist, there have been and will be numerous occasions on which he cannot be said to know what will be done or happen, until it is done or happens.

Lecture video here.  A Catholic argument against MacIntyre from where I borrowed the above text transcription here.

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