There once was a church that was a secret.  The secrecy was sacred to them.  Anyone could learn about it, but you  had to do it this way.  You had to go to a certain place, a hidden alcove in a wall, and there you would be taught a truth and be given instructions for the next location to go to.  They would give you a token–the first one was a lumpy black polished stone turtle about the size of a chocolate.  If you wanted to know more, you would then go to the next location, present your token, and learn the next step.  Eventually you would have to make commitments and join.  If you see some of your neighbors slinking along a back alley on a Sunday morning and then fugitively disappearing into an apparently abandoned warehouse, you might suspect what church they belong to.

Of course any large organization has to have some flexibility built in, so there are other methods for the church to get people to come in on some of their secrets.  There was a young man who was not a member of the church but had done some important work for the leadership and knew them and a lot of their affairs–in confidence of course.  They complained to him that there was a church that was even more secret.  This even-more-secret church was out in the open and its doctrines were all openly taught and its rituals conducted in public, but all these had a hidden truer inner meaning that no one was ever explained, if you belonged you just figured it out in a moment of illumination.  The first secret church was desperate to figure out which of the many open churches around them was secretly the second even-more-secret church but so far they hadn’t been able to.

—

This came to me a in a waking dream.

* Peculiar that one of Alma’s first chief captains who led a victorious war against the Lamanites was named Zoram (Alma 16). Then just a few years later we have the Zoramites, who are named after their leader, Zoram. No apparent connection. Just a common name?

* Sometimes bad guys in the Book of Mormon are introduced as if they were randos. So in Alma 30 you have “there came a man into the land” (its Korihor) and then the leader of the Zoramites is introduced as “being led by a man whose name was Zoram.” I think this is meant to indicate a lack of legitimate authority or office. (more…)

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.

tfw having beautiful meaningful experiences that can only be described with cheesy cliches

— ?bosco? (@selentelechia) December 9, 2022

having beautiful meaningful experiences that can only be described with cheesy cliches

Reply — https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1601174924340887552

I wonder if this is an inescapable problem or if we just have no shared artistic vocabulary for it

Serious Artists are well acquainted with how it can go wrong from their own sordid personal lives, seemingly no familiarity with the joys

Most folks who come across this site probably think I’m nuts. Oh, that guy who rants about glory. Really over the top. Even some of our dear friends think I go a bit overboard at times.

I have been blessed with a family that hits real highs in domestic happiness. Sometimes the coziness is indescribable. In trying to make sense of it, I ultimately decided there was no way to do it without connecting it to the transcendent element: ineffable glory, worlds uncountable spilling like jewels through your fingers.

Eler Christofferson has a simple, logical way of thinking about how God can love us unconditionally but also love us for the good we do and are.

Love despite vs. Love for.

Unconditional love is love despite our faults.  Conditional love for is love for our successes.  Love despite vs. love for.  God has both.

The good man rejoices in being loved despite and longs to be loved for.

(more…)

16-year old Tate Myre died rushing a gunman.

The Dark was rising. It spread its influence over the land. It captured institutions, customs, lands — it put more and more peoples into its thrall.

When this had happened before, each time a Champion had arisen. Blessed with power and light from the Great God of Light and War and Justice, the Champion led the people with his blazing sword in driving back the lords of the Dark.

But this time no Champion came. One by one the peoples fell into the hands of the Dark powers.

Finally, of all the free peoples all that was left was a little band of a few hundred gathered around a hill to where they had been driven, awaiting the final assault of the Dark hordes in the morning.

They would fight and die.

(more…)

Here are a few more insights on righteous dominion. The quality here is high.

(more…)

We are all reading D&C 121 this week.

Here are some of the best JG posts on righteous and unrighteous dominion.

They are really good.

(more…)

it must needs be that there be an organization of my people, in regulating and establishing the affairs of the storehouse for the poor of my people, both in this place and in the land of Zion—

4 For a permanent and everlasting establishment and order unto my church, to advance the cause, which ye have espoused, to the salvation of man, and to the glory of your Father who is in heaven;

5 That you may be equal in the bonds of heavenly things, yea, and earthly things also, for the obtaining of heavenly things.

6 For if ye are not equal in earthly things ye cannot be equal in obtaining heavenly things;

-thus D&C 78:3-6

Like some of you, I have developed an allergy to the concept of equality, as who wouldn’t if the whipmasters shouted “equality” with each blow on you of the lash.  But that is the fault of the whipmasters, not the (sadly much abused) concept.

Paradoxically, I have become more alive to the idea of a group of people joining together as peers because of some great animating friendship and cause.  Like it says right there in those verses, “to advance the cause.”

But that isn’t the point of this post.

(more…)

How did I miss this gem from SPDI?

On Pills, Blue and Red

Here is an analogy I don’t think I’ve ever seen made (though it must have been): the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil <=> the Matrix’s “Red Pill.”

Something is lost when you start chowing down on red pills. You gain knowledge, but you lose innocence.

Adapting yourself to the world is (by definition) a utilitarian endeavor. We can become uglier even as we become more successful.

That’s the start.  He then treks off into Adam and Eve, sex roles, and on and on.

The stuff about sex roles strikes me both as deeply wrong, but also in some way I cannot put my finger on, a lot more right than my current notions.

In circles where manhood still has nominal rhetorical value, there is a tendency to say

Real men do X

Real men don’t do Y

Where X and Y are whatever the speaker happens to be for or against.

Real men brush their teeth

Real men don’t disrespect their wives

Don’t mistake us, my poppets.  We are four square for brushing your teeth and respecting your wife, preferably at the same time if possible.

But we are against mindlessly inserting “real men” in front of every piece of good advice (or, sometimes, bad advice).

It comes across as manipulative and meaningless and makes the concept of manhood pretty empty.

What there needs to be is some connection to an actual concept of manhood.

Elder Holland makes the connection here

(more…)

I put off linking to a marriage article because its framing is way more plebeian–One Weird Trick to Have More Sex with Your Wife!–than is suitable for the austere dignity of this blog thingo.

My poppets, my misgivings remain, but I have now relented.

The article is about how husband and wife should counsel together.  Good, and better yet it has a formula.  I like formulas, and this one fits with my own experience.  It isn’t anti-man like some marriage advice you see.  It also treats men and women as different and has a common sense explanation of how those differences each help when counseling together.    The Church puts big emphasis on the marriage counsel but even a lot of what you hear from members treats the counsel as if the two in it were fungible units.

That said, feel free to take issue with the advice if you are so inclined.

The more masculine I am, the more people respond to my compassion.  They eat that up.

the average 22-year-old man today has an testosterone level roughly equal to that of a 67-year-old man in 2000.

-read the whole thing