HT Sutton

I think that understanding chiasmus is important, because it is part of how related concepts are explained. For instance here, the point about contention is deliberately contrasted with the Holy Ghost. You don’t fully understand it, if you don’t see that.

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Curse words get all their power from us. Any one who uses them is derivative of us. And to think they make fun of us for it? Its like making fun of the farmer for selling some of his food instead of eating it all himself. It’s like making fun of the generator for transmitting all its electricity.

There are two ways the sacrament is present in Lehi’s Dream. The first is the fruit (which is Christ) which is both fleshy and juicy. Blood and flesh of the tree.

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What is the significance of the Nephite monetary system in Alma 11?

We cannot say for sure. Perhaps Mormon was just male-brained and liked esoteric trivia for its own sake (the system he describes does not seem to have been his own). However, we should probably assume that it has symbolic significance.

Why should we assume that?

The Book of Mormon is an extract from a copious collection of sacred and historical records. Our default assumption should be that everything was selected with a purpose by the editor. In fact, the section on the monetary system has every appearance of Mormon adding it in personally.

Recall that ancient societies were almost all massively more inclined to symbolism than ours is.

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(with an unusual insight into the sacrament along the way.)

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The Western way is to define a term.  The definition should be as exact as possible.  There is another way, though, which I got from the ancient Greeks.  You define something by looking at the ideal or the paradigm of that thing.  Then whether you call something similar but not quite ideal by the same term depends on whether making the connection in context is useful or not.

So lets talk about what a covenant is.  We usually casually define it as a contract, but it would be better to think of it as a  contract with enhanced features.  As opposed to the ideal contract, a covenant is a mutual agreement that

1.  is sacred
2. involves oaths
3. is long lasting
4. is goal-oriented, not task-oriented
5. involves a joint goal–there is an outcome that the parties all want to reach
6. creates or reflects a relationship–the parties aren’t arms-length commercial
7. and where the parties do not have to be equals

I had a dream of a huge field next to a pine woods.  It was early twilight.  The trunks were dark but the sky was light.  there was a young couple who fled into the woods from the field.  There were men chasing them who were trying to shoot them.  As they fled the shots started.  They had to stop holding hands and break up to duck behind trees.  The slender pine trunks were just barely enough to offer one person shelter from the bullets.  There was an old rotten shell of the trunk of an oak that was large enough to shelter two, but it was too rotten to stop a bullet.  So the couple fled through the woods from tree to tree crying to each other.  The guns fired on.

An overhead half a phone conversation between two girlchild cousins

Girl: We should be called the Aspen Unicorns!

…

Girl: OK, the Aspen Spies!  But for short just ass!

No one wants to be innocent but everyone loves innocence when they find it.

For no particular reason this time through the Book of Mormon my understanding has been particularly drawn to the historical  narrative of the Book of Mormon as an authentic ancient text.  In that light, I am increasingly convinced that what we have is an extremely typical rise-and-fall arc that many other cultures and civilizations have gone through.

We’ve already covered evidence that the Nephites had a ‘modernity.’  The evidence that they had a fall is blatantly obvious, no one will disagree with that.

But still it isn’t immediately apparent reading the text that we are going through an overall Rise-and-Fall arc and I think there are three reasons why.

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OK, maybe not, but also maybe.  I’m going to vent.

I’ve got a teenager or two at EFY right now.  Well, not EFY, the other one.  FSY.  One of my girls is a swimmer, pretty good at it despite the fact that her parents will not pay for camps or coaches or much travel or anything.  She just had a swim coach from out of state who was in town for another reason hear about her and ask to meet with her for free.  He gave her some extremely specific tips on her starts and her turns and some very specific practice routines to develop those tips.  She was excited.  That was last week.  Now she’s at FSY.  They have free time built into the schedule and are encouraged to use it for exercise among other things so no problem.  They are staying at a small college and the college’s pool happens to be across the parking lot from the dorm she’s in.  We looked up the lap pool hours and sent her with the cash and ID and everything else the pool wanted for general admission.  Some of the pool hours coincided with free time.  The first day she’s call us.  They won’t let me, she says.

So we call them.  Not permitted, they say.  Liability.  I roll my eyes.  Fine, can I just sent you permission in writing or is there some kind of form.  Nope, they say.  The Legal Department has forbidden it.  Your only choice is to withdraw her from FSY.  Then the camp director had the blasphemous insolence to tell us that our daughter would be blessed by the Lord for complying with the dictates of the Legal Department, God rot his tongue.

There is no God but liability and the legal department is his prophet.

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You don’t escape to Narnia

https://www.google.com/amp/s/mereorthodoxy.com/you-dont-escape-to-narnia

An interesting juxtaposition of CS Lewis’s Narnia vs more modern media, like Harry Potter or Les Grossman’s The Magicians.

Throughout the whole saga, one point is made piercingly clear. There is no sense in which one loses themselves in Narnia. One does not go to Narnia in order to explore, out of a sense of sheer curiositas. Instead, one is meant to find something there, something beyond and beneath the surface level of experience, and the physical limits of Narnia all exist in service of that pedagogical end.

…

Narnia, that is to say, is not an escape. By its nature, it cannot be. Rather, adventures in Narnia are conditioning experiences by which individuals come to see reality properly. As The Last Battle concludes in eschatological splendor, the faun Mr. Tumnus remarks to Lucy that “you are now looking at the England within England, the real England just as this is the real Narnia. And in that inner England no good thing is destroyed.”^[18] Exactly so.

…

Indeed, I get the feeling, that too much modern fictional media has a seemingly unlimited world, with stunted limited viewpoints, while Narnia is a deliberately limited small world, where the people come out with more expansive views. That in fact, was the reason the children came to Narnia in the first place.

Fantasy at its best (Lewis, Tolkien, etc) is not an escape. It is a preparation for the real world.

King Mosiah institutes the rule of the judges in about 90 BC or so.   He does it because he believes that it is less common for a majority of the people* to go wicked whereas a ruler like King Noah can certainly go wicked and then drag a bunch of people down with him.  Therefore King Mosiah believes it would be better to have a system where the people were formally the ultimate backstop.

By somewhere in the range of 40-20 B.C., the Nephite system of government is totally corrupt and the majority of the people support wickedness.    The number of chapters in Alma obscure for us how little time has passed.  50 to 70 years.

In contrast, after King Noah’s death his people quickly rebounded to righteousness.

The baptism of Limhi, by George Ottinger

There’s a puzzle there.

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This is difficult.  The normal way is to feel righteous anger and so forth.  But you need to be able to feel peace and love.

The ability to be able to participate in the Spirit while  nonconforming is essential to modern life.  I say that without exaggeration.  Essential.

On the sweetness…

A daughter gave me a neatly hand-lettered booklet with a handsewn binding that contained a guide to morse code.

My deacon gave me an arduino that he had programmed a morse code fathers’ day message into.

I painstakingly translated it with the help of the booklet.

The message was B O O G E R