“Where is your God now?”
In today’s marketplace—yes, in your own neighborhood, town, and cities—scheming, deceiving promoters are making available to gullible purchasers all kinds of enticing offers. We are sorry to report thousands within our ranks are being duped by the glib tongues of those who offer and solicit in whispers. “Once in a lifetime opportunities” and “Just for you” approaches are unusual no more. Such offerings and deals should be avoided like a plague.
I believe the Lord wants us to become alarmed and concerned when we see the wicked and unscrupulous taking unfair advantage of the weak and uninformed. No Latter-day Saint should exploit another man’s situation, manipulate, lie, steal, cheat, or deceive. Our responsibility is to assist each other in avoiding involvements that can be devastating to our welfare.
-Elder Marvin J. Ashton, from his talk “Give with Wisdom that They may Receive with Dignity”
I’ve seen any number of people express the regret that the brightest minds in our generation are devoted to inventing subtler financial manipulations and more addictive online ad platforms. (more…)
We live in a vast charnel house, a morgue, a knacker’s yard . . . Dead people, dead animals, odd ends of decaying meat are just laying around, heaped up there, rotting here, a stray piece rolled into that corner. Its easy to get sick. A little cut can swell into a great putrid infection. A little carelessness with your food, you can be puking for a week. Its easy to die.
If you want to thrive, you have wear masks at all times, have to be careful where you step, have to follow careful rituals, can’t afford to slack off. You and your whole house. You can’t do it by yourself. Every one with painstaking care when they are outside, at all times. Everyone following the most stringent procedures when they come back inside the House.
But not enough do it. Too many live diseased, crippled, and high-mortality lives. It is difficult not to. It is very difficult. And there are agitators who wander through the decay without mask or glove, proclaiming their freedom. No one else can shout as loud as they can, as they wear no mask. No one can easily refute their lies that careful living is joyless, because the joy is in the Houses, and no one can go to one, not really, until they have joined it and are washed and cleaned and passed through quarantine.
The strict rules of hygiene are hard, but now with the agitators they are harder. We can be mocked and attacked for our masks and our gloves.
Some of us wonder why we have be so extreme. (Those of us are getting the infections and dying off.) Some Houses wonder if they could not spread the word of hygiene better if they weren’t so rigid about it. Masks and washing and stuff appears so alien, we need a hygiene that speaks to today’s youth. After all, the message of hygiene is ultimately a message of health and hope, not despair and grimness. So these Houses wash without washing and ward off disease without warding it off, and perish.
Daily reminder that childlessness is death, libertinism is decay, and we Americans live in a strong, free, and prosperous . . . charnel house.
From Columbus Day, through Thanksgiving, we celebrate the rich heritage of Settler-Americans, including Colonial-Americans, Pioneer-Americans, English-Americans, Scots-Irish Americans, and Conquistador-Americans, and honor their vibrant contribution to our national fabric.
From their curious folkways such as freedom under law, square dancing, and white guilt, to their various scientific achievements and inventions, such as calculus, the Chia pet, toilet paper, and marketing, truly they are part of who we are!
I took my family to see Palmyra recently. My wife had been there before, but none of the rest of us had. One thing I’ve learned about Mrs. C is that she doesn’t really have the fourth-dimensional sense of wonder at occupying a historically significant spot of earth. I can personally attest that she’s much more excited to enjoy a Caesar salad than she was to visit Caesar’s tomb. Which isn’t to say she doesn’t find history interesting, just that she doesn’t take any special pleasure in retracing its steps.
“It’s a gift, you know, being able to feel history in certain places. My mom has it. We’d visit Church historical sites, and she would ask me, ‘Can you feel that?’ But I never really did.” (more…)
A friend of mine … asked his son what he wanted to be, whom he would want to be like. His son named a member of the ward who lived nearby, a man he had admired for some time. Don drove his son to where the man lived.
As they sat in their automobile in front of his home, they observed the man’s possessions and his way of life. They also discussed his kindness and generosity, his good name and integrity. They discussed the price their neighbor had paid to become what he was: the years of hard work, the schooling and training required, the sacrifices made, the challenges encountered. The affluence and seeming ease with which he now lived had come about as the result of diligent toil toward his righteous goals and the blessings of the Lord.
The son selected other men whom he deemed models of successful and righteous living and learned from a wise father the stories of their lives.
-thus Rex d. Pinegar. What an excellent model. Young men in the church should be spending their time with older men. The primary good of a camp out is usually the conversations over the campfire or while hiking. It is really surprising how little the young know about the lives of their elders and how much they like to hear those stories when given a chance.
The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
What a nice sentiment, you are thinking. Wrong, child. It should be keeping you awake at night. Properly understood, it is cosmic horror. (more…)
This is a talk I gave at Church. I had a blast.
The Book of Mormon is for our times. We all know about the Great and Spacious Building that Lehi saw. It was towering up in the air and full of people with fancy clothes pointing and laughing and it had no foundation. It made lots of people lose their way because they were ashamed or wanted to get to it.
The Book of Mormon is for our times. It means that in our times we have to worry about bullying and mocking from prominent people, about trying to be high status, and fashions. So let’s talk about that. (more…)
13 years ago my little daughter died of cancer. This is what I wrote on her birthday that year, with slight updates since. Today would be Betsey’s 17th birthday.
My wife baked her a cake. I bought a few balloons and ordered flowers for her grave.
Happy Birthday, Betsey Pearl.
Today our grief for you is fresh.
The Governing Ones is one of the more unusual and interesting conference talks I’ve read. Still chewing on it, to be honest.
Brother Bradford starts with the principle that priesthood is a government. The rights of the priesthood are rights to govern. (more…)
A wolf found that a local lion frequently took the wolf’s kills. The wolf would patiently stalk and hunt and kill, only to have the lion drive him off before he had eaten more than a bite or two.
The wolf brooded on this injustice but could think of no other remedy than to avoid the lion in his hunting. But this often meant hunting in areas with less game, and still resulted with the lion driving the wolf off more than the wolf would like.
The wolf then hit on a clever plan. Instead of avoiding the lion, he would hunt only where the lion was. Over time, the lion would become dependent on the wolf’s hunting and would be unable to survive on his own. The wolf would then flee and the lion would starve.
The wolf then set about his plan and was well on his way to success when he himself died of starvation.
Moral: Your plans always affect yourself.
Comment: The wolf’s plan is clever in its way and could probably be the basis for a fable that illustrates the folly of becoming too dependent. Yet this fable makes what seems to me to be a more important point. Too many plans fail because they see the world as static. Even very smart and experienced people make plans of this kind. In the fable, one way the wolf’s plan could fail would be the lion figuring out the danger of dependency and hunting on his own occasionally just to keep his skills up. The wolf would have no way of preventing it. But an even graver error, and one that has a moral dimension, is that people forget that they themselves will be changed by their plans.
The Lovely One brought up the idea that Jacob getting the birthright from Isaac by deception was a type of us and Christ. We inherit all that our father hath by assuming our older brother’s identity just like Isaac. Of course what Jacob did was squirrelly and we were discussing whether even the unsavory could be types of Christ. So I brought up Laban. He is a type of Christ too, though wicked.
Bing! The light bulb went on.
What if we’ve missed the complete meaning of the Armor of God scripture this whole time? (more…)
I recently came to the surprising realization that there are important commonalities between the religious principles of Jordan Peterson and those of the Mormon Transhumanists. Surprising to me, at least, because I really like Jordan Peterson and find Mormon Transhumanism repellent. (more…)
My mother tells me that when I was a little fella, I would spend the late afternoon standing on the couch looking out the window for my father to come home. When he did, I would quickly sit down and act like I was absorbed in a picture book. But he was never fooled. In he’d come and we’d wrestle.
Kids waiting for you to come home is one of the pleasures in life. They are so eager. Its mostly the younger ones, though the older ones sometimes rush over with news they’ve been busting to tell you. (more…)
