Posting this in advance of the religious liberty Sunday School today–I don’t know what is in it–so if I look like an idiot by afternoon so be it.  But I expect that I won’t.  I expect that it will follow the recent Church trend of laying out general principles, often in a pointed way, but with the knotty questions of application left up to us.

1.  Religious liberty is here to to stay.  No modern country, but especially not the United States, can go back to being a confessional state.
2. Religious liberty has a moral dimension.  God has allowed sects to proliferate.
3. For us–the Church–religious liberty is necessary from a purely structural standpoint.  The ability of people to check out when they want, the fact that the only people who stay are generally people who want to be there, is load-bearing.
4. A certain amount of religious competition appears to be healthy for the religions involved, up to a point.
5. The Church could have only come out in an environment of multiple competing sects and widespread freedom to be fringe–this is a point about legal religious liberty but not just a point about legal religious liberty–Joseph Smith and many others had to be in an environment where “[s]ome were contending for the Methodist faith, some for the Presbyterian, and some for the Baptist” in order to end up where they did.
6. Religious liberty in  the US and Europe was practical in origin–there were a number of settlers and groups with different Christian beliefs and organizations, plus Jews.  It was a modus vivendi.  It then became a philosophical position.  Some of that philosophy is pretty compatible with the Gospel–free agency, freedom to choose, etc.  But a lot of that philosophy is in tension with the Gospel (tension is not the same as contradiction).  Our principles of authority, prophets, the Church being the Kingdom and all other churches and religions being false to some degree, a certain degree of communal living and being intertwined with fellow Saints, strong families that indoctrinate–classical liberals in the 19th C. and liberals now were not wrong to identify us as opposed to ‘freedom’ as they understood it at least to a certain extent.
7. LDS citizens and rulers should use what they know to be good and right to inform law, policy, and the exercise. “Legislate morality.”
8. Any society has to have a certain amount of broad agreement on basic principles to be a free, high trust society.  The alternatives are low trust fragmentation or repressive authoritarian governments.  Somalia or the State.  Mogadishu or the muzzle.  Often you get both.
9. Utah being a mainly LDS state is a good thing.
10. The Saints favoring the Saints and trying to increase our power and influence as a people–and even dominance in some regions–is a good thing.
11. Religious liberty does not require utter societal indifference between religion and irreligion, nor between different religions.
12. Religious liberty does not require the mass immigration of Muslims.
13. Despite what many naive Saints think, respecting others liberties in no way guarantees your own.  Oft times it is detrimental to your own.
14. As with many things, the most interesting and hardest questions about religious liberty are not the sacred principles involved.  The most interesting and hardest questions are:

• What are the limits of religious liberty?  How to apply the principles here and now?
• Who has the power to maintain religious liberty?  Who gets to decide the application?

Many Saints would like to use ‘religious liberty’ as a mechanical mantra to avoid these hard questions.  But sacred slogans cannot substitute for seership and rules do not replace revelation.

There is a part of Isaiah that has been weighing on my mind.

Ch. 2-5 Explain the dire situation of the people, with Ch. 5 having the prophet say, I have done everything I can do! I give up!

Ch. 6-12 Begins with Isaiah’s Vision of the Divine Throne and the Lord, in the Temple, and ends (Ch. 12) with a Testimony of the Righteous Men and Women.

Ch. 13-27 The Fall/Collapse of Babylon

13-20 – Temporal Collapse
21-23 – Spiritual Collapse
24-27 – We see the world bifurcated – the wicked exist in a ruined state, where nothing is working, like they all just ran out of steam. And the righteous live in a strong city, with great blessings and glory

The situation is not merely apocalyptic. It is a collapsed society. Nobody has anything, nobody knows what to do, nothing works. This affects everyone from the top to the bottom. Every idea, philosophy and idol have been tried and found wanting. The people are out of ideas. And repentance… well, they simply are not going to think about that!

(more…)

I strongly recommend Quarantine by Kevin Bates.  Of LDS interest (the SF supposal appears to be derived from Hugh Nibley).  The answer to the Fermi Paradox is … sin.

Man stood on a featureless plain.  Nothing but short grass and tiny wildflowers in every direction.  The breezes ruffled it first one way, and then another.

“I will walk until I reach the sunset,” Man said, and then he set off.

Dog whined.  “This is so boring and limiting,” Dog said.  “I miss the freedom of going wherever you want.  Every step we take has been predestined by the step before.”

And so Dog trotted off, and went where he would, and soon howled for loneliness.  He ran hard for days to catch up with Man.

– – –

Davy Crockett stood on a pleasant hilltop that stood out of the wilderness.  Across the tops of the trees, eventually blending into a seamless green, and the little gleams of rivers, and the haze of the far plain,  there rose a far, far shining mountain.

“I will go there,” Crockett said, “lo, though it lead to perils and even the very Alamo of my existence, for God is there.”  And his face shone also.

Johnny Europe stood by him  and scoffed.  “You would go back to the press of thickets, the flood, the wolves and bears, the lurking Indians, the days without food, the nights without sleep, never seeing more than a few yards in front of you, always fearful, never free to do whatever you might want?”

“We have achieved this summit,” Johnny Europe said, “here let us rest on our eminence.”

But Crockett set off down the hill and strode into the trees, and as he strode he sang.

As a science fiction fan I sometimes think of things that no one can know and that are none of my business. One of those is which American holidays would survive the end of the American government assuming there were something like an American people left.

You can make a case for any of them but my top two choices are Thanksgiving and Memorial Day.

Let their deaths hallow their lives and their memory.

On the sweetness of Mormon life–

You are reading Joshua 8 in the family about the way against Ai.  The kids insist on pronouncing it AI.

There is an interesting convergence of both holy, secular and some unholy dates, that I think we should be aware of. I do not recommend staring into the abyss, but I don’t recommend being entirely ignorant of what is there either. Take this all with a grain of salt and a sincere prayer.

(more…)

Sunday I was talking with my 17-year-old daughter, my youngest child, about the shift to “All or Nothing” spiritual preparation and outcomes for youth in the Church. Before her time the young women had Personal Progress, a program that held a lot of meaning for my late wife and others of her generation. My late wife said that experience of coming up with goals and executing them was a helpful preparation for her life as an independent married woman every day deciding what ought to be done, mostly accountable only to herself for the use of her time. Today, instead of organizing such preparation in the teaching of the church’s young women and recognizing progress in that publicly, the direction is that what youth need to prepare for is to receive the endowment in the House of the Lord, and entering the temple for that purpose as soon as they can be considered adults is the capstone they need, not a lovely medallion.

What then of the 18-year-olds who are not ready to covenant in the temple?

(more…)

The Old Testament is bloody, violent, militant, stern,  judgmental … and yet, more or less unplanned by the instructor (me), our last Sunday School on the 5 books of Moses ended on a tender note.

We read Deuteronomy 7:6-8—

For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.

The Lord did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people:

But because the Lord loved you . . .

–and then we read Deuteronomy 30:1-5-–

And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee, and thou shalt call them to mind among all the nations, whither the Lord thy God hath driven thee,

And shalt return unto the Lord thy God, and shalt obey his voice according to all that I command thee this day, thou and thy children, with all thine heart, and with all thy soul;

That then the Lord thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations, whither the Lord thy God hath scattered thee.

If any of thine be driven out unto the outmost parts of heaven, from thence will the Lord thy God gather thee, and from thence will he fetch thee:

And the Lord thy God will bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it; and he will do thee good[.]

–and then we were done.

(more…)

In all sorts of things, I fear that we Saints live far below our privileges because the Gentiles are doing so bad that we think we are OK.

In the land of the blind, as they say.

Or perhaps we need a new saying.  On the land of the barren, the one-child man is king.

There are two sections where the Lord promises Israel abundance, and they put to shame our modern materialistic and accounting way of thinking of abundance.

Deuteronomy 7:13-15

And he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee: he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep, in the land which he sware unto thy fathers to give thee.

Thou shalt be blessed above all people: there shall not be male or female barren among you, or among your cattle.

And the Lord will take away from thee all sickness

Deuteronomy 30:9:

And the Lord thy God will make thee plenteous in every work of thine hand, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy land, for good:

To our modern mindset, the blessing of abundant crops seems clearly good, put that one in the asset column; the extra cattle depends on the carrying capacity of the land, otherwise that just means more extras to cull; and the extra children seems like a solid drain on resources, put that one in the debit column.

To make the accounts square, we tell ourselves that children back then were actually an economic asset and so forth.  I am skeptical that this has ever been the case.  If there was an economic payoff to having a kid, then as now the payoff was measured in decades.

What is really going on is these verses is that for them abundance was a concrete, tangible thing.  It was fertility and vigor and growth and everything bursting out anew.  It was spring and pregnancy and new hopes.

It was blessings that you didn’t deserve and hadn’t paid the costs for.

Once upon a time there was a woman who got in a serious crash.  She was in the hospital for a long time and then in painful physical therapy.  Her fiancee was a gem to  her the whole time.  He was by her side, helping her live and function, cheering her on when she was pushing herself a little farther each day.  Everyone thought it was super sweet.

Finally she was mostly back to normal.

She broke off the engagement.

The burden of gratitude was too much for her.

(more…)

I have been thinking more about the difference between meekness and humility, especially on the commenter formerly known as Brackets’ comment, and I realized something:

Jesus explicitly calls himself meek, but he never calls himself humble.

With no basis other than  my own gut, I think ‘meek’ is something like ‘not asserting every claim to which your power or status or simple justice entitle you,’ whereas ‘humility’ is something like ‘not too big for your britches’

I was sad about the nature of things and decided to visit the King of America, though I didn’t have any specific purpose in mind.

It is quite a long hike to get there.  He lives way up in the mountains but well off the beaten path.  He has a log cabin he built himself tucked into a piney slope just above a sedgy pond with clumps of tall grass right up to the edge, and a small peak behind him.  He has ricks of firewood he cut and split himself, a few cattle he raises, and his books to read.

He is an old man, even in the summer he wears a jacket.  He has an old red-and-black check flannel jacket that he wears, and other times a wool Navajo southwest style jacket that used to be bright before it faded. But to be fair to him, it is cool up there even in the summer.

His cabin is not large, but he does have a porch with some rocking chairs.  That is generally where we converse.

On this visit, after we had talked about this and that, idly, him asking after my family and me after the cattle and the state of the grass, and staring at the pond, he considered me for a bit and then told this story.

(more…)

I was ruminative in Sacrament Meeting today and this is what I wrote:

Mom wanted us to be well fed and not hungry, so she cooked and shopped on a budget and canned. She wanted us to look presentable, for people to see us the way she saw us, so she sewed and patched and washed and worked on our manners and cleanliness. She wanted us to be healthy so she made good food, did first aid, made us wash our hands, plunged infected feet into epsom salt and hot water,… She wanted us housed and comfortably housed, so she cleaned and quilted and tucked us in. From the beginning, from the very beginning, when for each of us food and shelter and clothing and health were her own flesh and blood. And almost as much for the first few months of life.

(more…)