I typically avoid, strenuously avoid, discussion on the Mark of the Beast. This is a topic that brings out the crazies. I say this as someone who reads up on UFOs and a multitude of fringe topics.  Still, this one deeply resonates with me and I can’t easily forget it.

And of course, all the standard caveats about dreams and inspiration given to others.
So, a lady has an accident and Near Death Experience. She has a conversation with the Savior about the Mark of the Best. It was interesting how it was described as a solution to several problems, all very reasonable and the next big thing in tech. But what really struck me, was the counsel the Savior gave, both temporal and spiritual. He gave it in three sets.

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It started out with me musing about teaching even young children about budgeting and maybe trade-offs.

Imagine a young mother sitting at a table doing some budgeting by a woodstove.  The clear sunlight of winter streams in through the window.  She’s doing it partly in paper and pencil so her children can see and experience her doing it.  Having them learn about budgeting is important to her.

She gets an idea.

She calls over her little girl.  The child is maybe 3 to 4, maybe even 5.  The mother takes out some wooden blocks of different colors and labels them, including maybe with little drawings.  She uses some long plain blocks to create a square.

“Here,” she said, “let’s play the the Big Person Game.”  The kid is excited.  The mother explains that the square is the money they have to spend each month, the blocks have to fit inside it.  Any blocks that cannot fit they cannot use.  Fitting blocks is something the child does, so she understands.  Then the mother lays down some blocks.  “Here’s paying for the house, here’s a block for the lights and the electricity, here’s a block for the car, here’s the basic food we need, here’s some clothes.”  Then, as the mother designed, she shows the child there is a little space left and shows the child some blocks that could fit into it.  Ice cream, maybe.  Toys.  A trip to the ocean.  Small things that are discretionary where letting the child have some say can do no harm and possibly good.

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https://x.com/BradWilcoxIFS/status/1861412587704881386#m

https://nitter.poast.org/BradWilcoxIFS/status/1861412587704881386#m

Seventy percent of children in intact, stable families is low by the standards that prevailed within living memory, but when you look at how the gentiles are doing… Oof.

We need better gentiles. We live way below our privileges, content with mediocrity and failure, because the gentiles are doing so much worse.

The virtue set is a tool that was originally intended to help understand virtues and vices.*

*Briefly, every virtue had a vice that is its opposite but also a vice that is a distortion of it. There is a second virtue that the vice that distorts the first virtue of the opposite of. The vice that is the opposite of the first virtue will be a distortion of the second.

Surprising me, it turns out the Virtue Set has some uses for goods and evils in general.

Let’s take the town mouse and the country mouse childhood experience for instance.  (more…)

I have too many irons in the fire to give the virtue set theory the reach that it deserves. And in case I lack the intellectual marketing chops (Intellectual marketing is real.)

Too bad because it’s a useful cluster of tools even for ordinary people who are not inclined to abstraction or knowledge for its own sake.

For those of us who are infinitely curious of course we can use it to shake insights loose and that’s valuable to is. For everybody else I see two main uses of The Virtue set. (more…)

Overheard from some very young people:

-Elon Musk probably doesn’t even know who my ancestors are

-You shouldn’t assume the worst about people, that’s not nice

We were talking here a bit ago about how odd it was for the Nephites to have the Three Nephites living among them, could have been their  neighbor down the street, and the Nephites just go about their ordinary lives sinning and repenting and dissenting.  While they are face to face with a living, talking miracle.  I made the point that it would be as if we still mostly had our Apostles the way we do, this guy graduated from the U and worked in business, this guy’s a surgeon, this guy the former commissioner of CES, but also there’s Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and Hyrum, still rolling along, deathless immortals.

I bought a new copy of the Book of Mormon a year back. It’s from some publisher. Just the simple act of having the text in a slightly different format in a book that feels different in the hand made me see it with new eyes. Reading the Book of Mormon this year has been a real experience for me.

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Stop by on Thanksgiving.  We have something a little special that we think you will like.  It’s a short little three-minute read which we hope you will agree made your Thanksgiving better.

If you share it with your family and friends, feel free to claim it as your own unless they don’t like it.

Sunday School was split into two halves. The first half was Mormon 9:7-11, 16-25, on miracles and revelation. The second half was on the Brother of Jared’s stones. But we never got to the second half.

After Capital God and other discussion, we ended with Moroni 9:25

And whosoever shall believe in my name, doubting nothing, unto him will I confirm all my words, even unto the ends of the earth.

A missionary fresh to the field raised his hand, bravely it turns out.

So what if, he said, you do have doubts? I grew up in rural Idaho where every one is LDS. This is the first time I’m with people who are challenging me.

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Here is my religion

The best lessons in Sunday School happen like the Spirit. The lesson listeth where it will. That is because they are inspired by the Spirit.

Last Sunday a verse I hadn’t noticed on a question I would never have thought of turned into 10 minutes filled with the presence of God.

A brother who speaks only Spanish and who has never participated was apparently reading along enough to know where we were. He raised his hand and painstakingly read Mormon 9:10 in Spanish. Why, he said, does it say god, lower case and then god, lower case, and then God, capital letter?

And now, if ye have imagined up unto yourselves a god who doth vary, and in whom there is shadow of changing, then have ye imagined up unto yourselves a god who is not a God of miracles.

I translated.

I said, Well, what do you all think? (more…)

Chapter One records 25 generations between Ether and Jared. 22 of them are “son of” the prior generation, whereas 3 of them are “descendant of.” I would usually take this to mean they are a grandson, maybe through their mother, but Ether is listed as “a descaendant of Corianton” and in Ether 11:23 it says that he was the son of Corianton. “Corianton begat Ether.” So I have no idea what ‘descendant of’ means vs. ‘son of.’

But we do have 25 generations at least from the Tower of Babel to Ether, and I thought it would be interesting to see what that tells us about the dating of the Tower of Babel. The results are going to be wildly inexact so this is for fun only. Making it even more inexact is that fact that many of the links in the chain of descent were youngest sons begotten in their father’s old age, so how long each generation is is anyone’s guess.

Further complicating the issue is that we do not know when Ether lived. This post really is just for fun. Omni 1:20-21 implies but does not actually say outright that Coriantumr was alive sometime during the reign of the first King Mosiah (King Benjamin’s father). Assuming it was during King Mosiah’s range, I don’t know exactly when than reign was, so lets pick a date range of 200-150 BC for convenience.

So, anyhow, assuming an average generation length will give us an estimate for when the tower of babel would have occurred.

Generation Length 20 years. Tower of Babel 700-650 BC. Lol no.
Generation Length 30 years. Tower of Babel 950-900 BC.
Generation Length 50 years. Tower of Babel 1450-1400 BC.
Generation Length 100 years. Tower of Babel 2700-2650 BC.

For comparison, the traditional Bishop Ussher style chronology for the Tower of Babel puts it around 2200 BC. That would imply an average generation length of 80 years.

Let me say again that this is assumption and guess piled on top of assumption and guess. For mental toying only.

Nephi kept the plates in 4th Nephi from the Savior’s visitation in about 35 AD to to about 110 AD.
85  years.

Amos kept the plates until 194 AD.
84 years.

Amos II then kept the plates until AD 305.
115 years.

Check my math but those are some remarkably long generations. Especially the last one. Maybe they were supernally long-lived. Another possibility is that being the record-keeper was a title, much like being a king, and the guy who was nominally fulfilling that role wouldn’t even necessarily have to be alive. No idea.

Christians, Muslims, and Jews

Long-time readers know that I am sympathetic to creedal Christians.  I think they are sincere and even admirable about a great number of things and I try to avoid taking shots at them for no reason.  But here I am going to disagree with something they do taken even on their own terms.

Another thing I like to do is poke around in obscure corners of the internet.  I have an eccentric’s taste for eccentricity.  Most of what you find there is interesting as a spectacle but doesn’t add to your own stock of truth.  Sometimes you do find something worth taking back with you though.  For me, one such is the concept that one form of error people fall into is trying to be “holier than Jesus” or “more Christian than Jesus” if I have the phrase right.  The meat of it is that when people advocate for extreme and almost inhuman versions of some of Christ’s teaching such as talking about how you need to feel love for Satan or some other performative shibboleth of reified compassion or act like the presence of people “less compassionate” than they are is an intolerable insult to their purity, they are essentially trying to be “holier than Jesus,” who certainly pulled no punches but also recognized the messiness of life in many ways.

Whether you agree with that or not, it was the prompt for me to realize one issue I have with the creeds and their Jewish and Muslim equivalents.  Even if you believed, as they do, that its just not possible that God the Father has a body or is a person, that is how he presents himself in scripture.  By your own standards, he is ineffable and incomprehensible.  So what warrant do you have to think that you have a better way of understanding the Father than the one He himself gave you?  “Oh, that’s just for the common folk.”  Compared to God, you are all common folk.  Plato was a peasant.  So was Aquinas.  Much smarter than me, but that’s like saying the kid who has five bucks is richer than the kid who has a quarter.  True, but irrelevant in the presence of billionaires.  So maybe you feel sure that God cannot “really” be an embodied Man because he is clearly beyond anything we can comprehend.  OK.  So then the next question is what would be the best method to comprehend him as best as a human being can–the one you came up with, or the one God uses?

But “God is spirit”!  Yeah, God says he’s vitality and life.  The very essence of personhood.

But “God is love”!  Yep.  The deepest of human emotions.

The closest you can come to comprehending God is to think of him as a glorified eternal man.

Moroni says that when miracles cease–he lists a number of types of miracles in Mormon 9--it is a sign of wickedness and rebellion.  He then segues seamlessly to talking about the 3 Nephites (v. 22).  In fact the miracles he says go with the faithful are the miracles the 3 Nephites are recorded doing.

It occurred to me that this section isn’t abstract for him.  While it certainly applies to us, Moroni was aware of a day when the 3 Nephites were walking about openly performing miracles, and then withdrew from the population due to wickedness.  It happened in his father’s lifetime, when Mormon was 15 according to Mormon 1.

So while Moroni knew the 3 Nephites in a ‘miraculous visitation’ kind of way, Mormon knew them in a ‘they lived down the street’ kind of way.  There very existence was a literal miracle.

Imagine the Church if we had a Quorum of the Twelve and a First Presidency like normal, people being called, serving out their time, and dying.  Except Joseph  Smith, Brigham  Young, and Hyrum Smith were effectively immortal and kept right on doing their work as Apostles and leaders.  You saw them on the screen every conference.  Your parents met Brigham Young a few years ago, he came out to their stake conference.