A goat kid was traipsing along a road when it saw a partridge attending to its domestic affairs in some bushes hard by a pear tree.  The goat kid bustled right up and started asking questions without any preamble.

“Why are you in this bush?

The partridge answered, “because its by the pear tree and I love pears.”

“Are there ripe pears right now?”

“Not yet.  Do you know when the pears get ripe, goat kid?”

“I don’t know, I’m just a goat kid.”

“I don’t know either,  I’m just a partridge.  But I have no other bushes I’d rather be in and these ones are where the pears are.”

Once upon a time a Princess finely dressed in scarlet and ermine lived by herself in an enchanted castle by the sea.   Just further north along that coast there was a thick forest where every day at the edge of the woods a gift appeared for her, whatever her heart desired. The women of the little village around the castle would go every day and bring that day’s gift to her. They were finely wrapped in silver and gold, with bows of red and white, and inside it could be chocolates and dried fruits from distant lands, or little mechanical toys that sang and danced, horns that blew clear notes like starlight, beautifully lettered books in a language no one could read, or any other manner of good thing.

Sometimes the princess went to the edge of the woods herself to see her gift of the day. But she never went in. The trees along the edge stood thick and vast and gnarled and leafless and needleless, as if in a drought or a weary winter, and appeared like nothing more than grim, fierce men. When she got too close, she could feel a chill from the woods, no matter what the season was, and the limbs of the trees would move threateningly and the whisper of the wind in the trees would deepen into a howl. None of her villagers would go into the woods either, for foreboding of the trees.

One day there was no gift. The princess leaned on a balcony looking past the white rollers of the sea that came padding up to the stone headlands, to the dark line of the forest and she wondered at this prodigy. It was then that she something flash in the sun from the direction of the forest and she saw drawing near her beating frantically through the air a tiny bird. It landed on her outstretched hand. It was no bigger than her hand, and its feathers were bright silver and bright gold. But blood dripped down over the feathers from a wound.

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This review of the book Sick Societies fits with the ending of the Book of Mormon (and of the Book of Ether).  In short, not every society is functional.  Societies can get locked into nasty and destructive practices that keep them back or even cause them to dwindle to extinction.  The Tasmanians, e.g. (not mentioned in the article).  Some of the societies mentioned were locked into cycles of genocidal violence and feuding among themselves, just like in the Book of Mormon.

I believe that our own society has a number of nonfunctional features, many of them comparatively recent innovations within the last decades or the last century  (serial monogamny and widespread divorce come to mind) but some even older than that, and we collectively are blind to it because our society is comparatively more functional than most.  But only comparatively.  Like Adam and Even in the garden, we keep accepting a simulacra of godliness.  ‘You shall be as gods,’ the serpent said, and we said, hey, close enough.  I say this as a proponent of Western civilization.  It really is superior in many, many ways.  But only comparatively superior.  We look down and think we are something.  We should look up, and realize we are nothing.

This has implications for the Saints.  The worst thing the Gentiles ever did to us was make us think our mediocrity was excellence because they were worse than mediocre.

Here’s another interesting aspect of sick societies that has implications for the gospel, particularly the 2nd Coming. (more…)

Recent events have helped me understand the Book of Mormon better. That’s no surprise. Since the Book of Mormon is written for our day, it follows that living through the events the Book of Mormon was written for illuminates the Book of Mormon. Expect it to become clearer and clearer as time goes on.

The people repent and then fall apart remarkably fast in the Book of Mormon. How? Why? One answer is that repentance isn’t flipping a switch between righteous and wicked. Repentance is some collective embrace of something good even if the people on the whole have a bunch of wicked practices they still adhere to. In the same way, the turn to wickedness isn’t them going all black, its the population choosing some evil, while still otherwise mostly remaining the same including the good they already have. Life goes on. Even as they choose wickedness after wickedness, each step may not have obviously changed a great deal. They continue to marry and be given in marriage.

It’s not some insane step function

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The Lovely One and I have been exploring the parallels between premortality—mortality—heaven, Eden—mortality—millennium, and childhood-adulthood-old age

She had an insight that surprised me. The very common desire to regress to Eden—the very common desire to regress to childhood—are both gnostic in that they are both deeply connected with a disgust with the body and the flesh. Sexuality and illness and fatigue and bodily functions and desires almost too strong for your spirit is what we were meant for. Going back is retreat. The way to salvation is through.

Flesh and blood, that is the way.

No more a stranger nor a guest, but like a child at home

I know what I want for Christmas and I know I can’t have it.

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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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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…)

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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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…)

Here’s a post that looks like it was meant for the election news but its actually something I’ve been noodling for the last couple of weeks.  This is a little deep for me, so if you can think of a pithier, better way of making the point I’m struggling to make, please drop it into the comments.   Here goes.

Having possibility feels great.  The more possibility the better.  Like Christopher Columbus on the edge of a new continent, or Brigham Young looking down at the valley and saying ‘this is the place.’  That is a deeply spiritual feeling.  In fact its literally spiritual, that is what it is like to be a spirit.  As a spirit you are undefined and have every option in front of you.

But mere possibility is a prison.  Possibility without actuality is dead.  It is a horrible sin for the spirit to want to live forever in that sense of possibility and shrink from coming to earth as a mortal.  Not because God has arbitrarily defined it as a sin but because it is in the very nature of possibility, the very thing that makes it good, that it demands to be converted into a reality.  Spirit is possibility but body is actuality, and the spirit needs the body.  What we find limiting about mortality is what makes it valuable.  The struggle, the fact that as a body you can only be in  one place at one time with a limited life span in which to do anything, the fact that you interact with things around in a way that radically constrains your choices, the fact that you have to heave overboard most of the possibilities to even sorta achieve one of them, the fact that  mortality is difficult, is precisely what makes the mortal experience necessary and good.

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The title is deliberately provocative, obviously, but there’s a real point there that came out in Sunday School.

4th Nephi through Mormon 6 makes very grim reading.  It’s more horrifying when you think that the Book of Mormon was written for our day, as Elder Bednar confirmed recently.  Here is the good news.  The end of the Nephites was and is awful but they also could have stopped it at any time.   They had multiple chances to repent.  If they had taken any one of the off-ramps they would have been fine.  Perhaps they could even have repented on the very morning of the last battle.  The tragedy of the Book of Mormon is the tragedy of the addict who doesn’t even enjoy the addiction any more but who just won’t stop.

Here’s a way of looking at it.  Suppose we had a book of scripture that was written about one particular person in Moses’ time who was bitten by a snake but refused to look at the brass serpent representing Christ because “of the easiness of the way.”  The book of scripture  could be pretty hard reading as it chronicled the person dying.  The wound turning black, the creeping paralysis, the person turning pale, the struggle to breathe, the death rattles.  It could be arbitrarily awful to read.  But the ultimate message, as applied to oneself, would still be optimistic.  All of this can be avoided if you just look.

That is essentially what we have in the book of Mormon chapters 1-6.

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The beasts were preparing for a great assembly at which to choose their next king.  The candidates were a lion or a wildcat.  One bird spent all its time for many months of its short life flying back and forth all over the wild telling every critter it could find that the wildcat was a menace to birdkind and all small things.  The assembly happened, and perhaps in some small part due to the bird’s efforts, the animals chose the lion.

The bird flew back to its favorite tree.  Safe–but with no nest, no mate, and no younglings.

The bird died sad with no descendants.

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As both Zen and Bruce Charlton have pointed out here, having low birth rates is bad but having low birth rates that are dropping is worse.

It’s bad if your expenses exceed your income.  Its worse if every year your income gets smaller and your expenses get larger.

Here’s the bottom line.  Based on recent trends, the really low American birth rates are declining by about 1.5% per year.  Based on recent trends, the low LDS birth rates are declining by 3.43% per year.

At these rates of decline, it will take America 52  years to get to the catastrophically low unprecedented birthrates of South Korea.  YtSK=52.  For the LDS, 34 years.  YtSK=34.

However, there is some small glimmer of hope in the LDS numbers for the last couple of years.

(Figures are based on limited data, should be treated as ballpark and directional only).

From here.  There was another drop in 2023.  The number of births per is now 54.4.

The  implication is that every year more people look around and decide to have less children, or no children.

I don’t believe we will continue to decline at the same rate.  It will slow once we catch up (catch down?) to the Gentile population.  The gospel is true and beautiful but for many LDS in First World countries the fruits of the gospel are increasingly only in areas that are unmeasurable and intangible.

Analysis below for those who are interested.

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Success is dangerous, but good.

Elder Bednar this conference taught that success is a challenge.  Our choices can make it a curse.

He was talking about the Book of Mormon, and of course this is a very Book of Mormon viewpoint.  The promised land is blessed and cursed and the blessing and the cursing are the same.  At one level, the blessing and the cursing are that here the people will get what they deserve.  At an even deeper level, the blessing and the cursing are that any little bit of righteousness will get rewarded with success, and our choices too often make success into a curse.

Whether we live in the promised land or not, I believe we Saints have the same blessing and cursing.  If we try, we will often succeed–but that’s dangerous.

Many of us try to avoid the danger.  Probably we shouldn’t.  Elder Bednar’s point isn’t that success is bad.  It’s that success is a challenge.

Success with humility is godliness.