Sometimes I wonder if there is really any hope for His Majesty.
A man will always be judged, full stop. A person will always be judged, full stop. You will always be judged for everything you do for every second you are doing it.
The judges are God, everyone else, and yourself.
Thing is, you want it. You want to be judged and found worthy.
The other day, when we were getting ready to put the kids to bed, our oldest pulled one of us aside and described a day he suddenly remembered from a few years ago, “when I was little.” It was nothing very unusual, just a funny way we were sitting next to each other and talking. But he recalled it with what was clearly a lot of fondness. Here was a seven-year-old waxing nostalgic about the good old days when he was four, and we thought how much more of this he has to look forward to, how many more years he has to pile up good memories before he leaves the nest for good. And all of us will have this to draw on for the rest of our lives.
-the Tracinskis
Today would be Betsey’s 14th birthday. This is what I wrote on her birthday ten years ago.
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The fear of change is the fear of death. They are not similar fears; they are the same fear, only manifested in different circumstances. (more…)
This is a dream. (more…)
I’ve discovered this week just how much His Majesty can be a pain in the
G. mentioned in passing the other day one of those quirky Mormon teachings that I’ve been curious about for a while: “Satan rules over the water.” The origin of this teaching is Doctrine & Covenants Section 61, in which the elders have to halt a river voyage when they see “the destroyer riding in power upon the face of the waters.” The Lord declared to them, “Behold, I, the Lord, in the beginning blessed the waters; but in the last days, by the mouth of my servant John, I cursed the waters.” D&C 61:14. And then later on: “I, the Lord, have decreed, and the destroyer rideth upon the face thereof, and I revoke not the decree.” D&C 61:19
What I wonder is whether “the destroyer” who rode upon the face of the waters was, in fact, Satan, or if it was instead a destroying angel sent by the Lord, as in the days of the Passover. (more…)
What do people collectively want? It’s hard to say. Voting gives you one kind of answer, but voting isn’t nuanced. Voters can only say yes or no to ballot questions as phrased and as they understand them. It’s possible that with more explanation they might feel differently, or with even slightly different phrasing they choose the other option. Or else they can only select between candidates. Different voting systems give different answers. Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem says that no voting system can ever perfectly capture voter intent. Polls are even more fallible.
That’s where the concept of the General Will comes in. What if someone knew the people well enough to have an intuitive, almost literary, sense of what they wanted? That’s why dictatorships claim to be democracies. They say they’re giving the nation what it really, collectively, wants.
The reason it’s hard to know what voters want is because it’s hard to know what a voter wants. Individuals are something like a collection of people over time. No man can step in the same river twice, the Greek said, because it’s never the same man. The mind is always engaged in editing memory to fit the needs of the present, which it wouldn’t need to do if we were really fully the same throughout, if we always had the same end in view. (more…)
Mormon Christianity has a lot of odd little teachings that don’t seem to add up to anything at first glance. Resurrected beings have bodies of flesh and blood. Heaven has three main degrees. Satan rules over the water. And Christ atoned twice, first in the Garden, second on the cross. (more…)
The presence of God is eternity. (more…)
“A lot of them have nice things to say about it, but none of them practice it anymore. I went a different route.”
The sovereign is the one that makes exceptions. That’s the famous aphoristic summary of Carl Schmitt on political theory. It’s intuitively compelling while intuitively incomplete.
Schmitt is usually thought of as a theorist in the fascist ballpark. His aphorism, however, points in a democratic direction. It suggests that every institution includes an implied arrangement for nullifying top down decisions by lower level individuals doing something different through recalcitrance. Every democracy is Irish democracy. (more…)
I could hear His Majesty cackling over the paper even before I emerged from the kitchen with his breakfast pancakes and porridge.
His Majesty was almost creepily cheerful this morning.