The gospel is for comfort?   Yes, but not just for comfort.   Not by half.

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I prefer not to.

A young man, mission bound, gave a talk yesterday on how to become a real expert in something and then related it to the gospel.  The answer wasn’t credentials.

His first three insights were practice, study, working in an area where the underlying phenomenon is repeatable and not just random.  These all had obvious applications to the gospel.

But his fourth suggestion for expertise was feedback.  That was less obvious how we go about getting gospel feedback.  I suppose the answer is to lean into priesthood interviews.  But also to direct your prayers that way.  I usually report in prayers and ask for help with failures and for advice on what next, but I rarely ask for an evaluation of how well I did.

With the recent contretemps of the Aunt-majority parliament in Blighty (criminals out of the Big House, social media posters in), ditto similar hijinks in la Aunt France (the Telegram chappie arrested on the tarmac), one wonders if a sprightly young toff of impeccable pedigree and impeccable taste should not prolong his sojourn abroad?  It’s dashed unpleasant, being in the chokey.

Jeeves asseveres that the company of the other Drones would enliven the otherwise dreary confines and what not, and no doubt the good fellow is right.  Still and all, one prefers to do one’s own enlivening.

Last time, we noticed an interesting feature of Alma’s highly-crafted advice to his sons.  His advice to Corianton the fornicator refers to murder at the beginning and then returns to talking about death as a blessing from the Father towards the end.  In other words, we have good death and bad death.

I don’t usually think of death as a good thing (and still don’t really) but Alma seems to be saying that receiving a mortal body and a mortal death are both necessary preconditions to the resurrection.  I don’t know why he thinks that, more study needed.

Regardless, a sermon contrasting bad death and good death puts me irresistibly in mind of a virtue chart.

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Corianton went off fornicating on his mission and Alma calls him on it.  But even the rebuke portion of his sermon is pretty doctrinal.  Alma starts by situating fornication on the scale of serious sins.  First denying the Holy Ghost, he says.  Second, murder.  But next to those two, its fornication.  Rhetorically effective, but also interesting in itself for us and it sets up the later parts of Alma’s discourse to Corianton in ways that aren’t obvious to a casual reader.

Interesting in itself– notice how each part of that trifecta of serious sins corresponds to a part of the complete human, body and spirit.

Denying the Holy Ghost  —————>  Spirit

Murder  ————————————->  Sins against the end of the body

Fornication  ——————————->  Sins against the beginning of the body

If you wanted to stretch even further, you might analogize each of these three to a member of the Godhead.  Denying the Holy Ghost obviously corresponds to the Holy Ghost, Resurrection is an obvious role for the Son which corresponds with life creation/the (re)beginning of the body), but is God associated with death in some way?  It seems fanciful.  On the other hand, we are reading something fancy here.  Look at the elaborate beautiful chiasmus in Alma 36.  The idea that Alma’s discourses to his son are highly structured literary works is not something we should reject.  More to the point, the rest of Alma’s sermon talks repeatedly about Christ as the Resurrector and mentions several times that men are “appointed to die” and then in Chapter 42 says that it was “God” who appointed death.  That is very suggestive.

One of the blog’s greatest hits is MC’s essay the Military Mental Model of Mormonism. It continues to get attention and I recently discovered that the doofus who runs the blog has inadvertently marked it as private. That’s now fixed.

Once again, observations about the last two weeks of Book of Mormon reading when no one only the intellectual elite are interested in them anymore.

By Antiquary – This file was derived from: St Michael and All Angels, Brighton, stained glass 6.jpg, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77509103

We are hitting on everything from the flaming sword that blocked the tree of life to Alma’s take on how the Law is the schoolmaster (somewhat different from Paul’s).

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WJT has a pretty hilarious method for exposing AI companies’ crude efforts to manipulate their product results.

Ethnically Amnibaus.

Inasmuch as ye are not guilty of the first offense, neither the second, ye shall not suffer yourselves to be slain by the hands of your enemies.

–Alma 43:46

This is a game theory strategy.  In fact, it is the winning game theory strategy for a repeat prisoners’ dilemma.

The prisoners’ dilemma goes like this.  Two guys get nabbed.  The cops separate them and try to get them to confess.  If neither talks, they both get light sentences.  If only one talks, the other gets a heavy sentence and the crook who turned gets off scot free.  If both talk, they both get heavy sentences.

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because there were no more Calvin and Hobbes

The Books of Mosiah and Alma are this time of great cultural ferment that I’m calling Nephite Modernity.

Something odd I’ve just noticed.  The phrase “wives and children,”  “our wives and our children,” “their wives and their children,” shows up 20 times in the Book of Mormon.  16 of those times are in Mosiah and Alma.  1 is in Mormon, 1 in is 3 Nephi, and 2 are in Ether.

You: What does it mean, G?

G: I don’t know what it means, you.

It does reinforce the idea that the Mosiah-Alma era is a distinct era.  It also makes me wonder if  the translation of the Book of Ether is responsible for this phrase taking off with the Nephites.

Trials are the journey, not the destination.

Perfection is the destination, not the journey.

This misery will not last.  This imperfection will not last.  You are immersed in them now only so you can move beyond them.  You have to be immersed so that they can transform you enough.

We say that mortality means death–everything ends.  This is true.  But the other key feature of mortality is immersion.  We experience something called the Present as if it were Eternity.  This is an incredibly valuable opportunity to try out different things–to know good and evil from the inside the way the gods do.

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An interesting article I was linked recently about Israeli TFR (decent) has led to some speculative, preliminary thoughts on why the LDS TFR is what it is (bad).

First of all, don’t just accept everything the article says, at least when applied to non-Israeli fertility.  I’m just using it as a jumping off point to look at various explanations folks have offered for low fertility and see whether they apply to us.  This is more an attempt it is to find possible causes than it is a call for action.  Just because something is a root cause doesn’t inherently mean that it ought to be fixed or can be fixed.

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Alma’s approach with his wayward son is interesting.  He doesn’t just teach doctrine alone. He doesn’t just rebuke alone.

He starts specific:  identifies the sin, rebukes it, and discusses the consequences.  He also discusses the specific doctrine.  Fornication and harlotry is a great sin and will lead to damnation is not repented of.  He then spirals out to more general doctrine about the resurrection, choice, and agency.

I liked it.