A BYU professor tells students, if I’m parsing it correctly, that God is going to smite the nation for the sin of voting for Trump.

Well, politics breaks people.  It does.  The professor is more to be pitied than anything.  And frankly I always have a soft spot in my heart for people with extreme views who are willing to air them.  We are too locked down, a little free-wheeling vigor and a few sharp elbows including at BYU is all for the good.

My issue isn’t that the professor is mixing in politics.  If BYU mathematics professors, between theorems, are bellowing at each other in the hall about how abortion is ungodly vs. Trump is evil I would be cheered.  Civility and courtesy and putting friendship over politics is something that happens on the other side of getting right down to your painfully honest convictions.  Just being frozen solves nothing and is a false parody of real civility.  We are in an extremely fraught situation politically in this country that presents real conundrums from a gospel perspective and BYU among other places is actually a location where something new could emerge if we allowed ourselves to own the problem.

But that’s not what is happening.  Instead, how many professors at BYU are functionally emissaries for the elite culture to their benighted students?  Enter to learn, go forth to serve managerial class ideology?  If BYU is just any other university but with gospel quotations sprinkled on top, MSNBYU, then away with the foul thing.

I’ve been thinking lately about how there is a difference between being a peacemaker and making peace.  You can make a desert and call it peace, but you weren’t a peacemaker.

There is this weird phenomenon these days where people will decide who is on their side and then feel comfortable bullying those people and belittling them and dismissing their concerns, because they aren’t our enemies, as if the Savior’s command was to love only our enemies.  In the old days we picked sides so we could attack the ones we labeled as not on our side.  The Savior rebuked that, so now we label people as on our side when we want to attack them and still feel morally twee.

By becoming a neighbor to the beaten jew, the Good Samaritan did not thereby cease to have obligations to his neighbors in Samaria.

Angel showed Soul the earth below where it would go and explained how life was in a body.  Soul in Body would be helpless and need to grow.  This would require food, which would require planting seeds and preparing the ground, and raising animals, and, oh,  a myriad of things.  And shelter!  And clothing!  And warding off dangers! And relearning the gospel and sociality and…. Soul began to weep.  It is too much, Soul said.  I am just a little soul.  How can I do so much?

O little soul, Angel said, you don’t have to.  You will have Parents.  They will give you food and shelter and teach you the gospel.  They will help you grow.

And so it happened.

Soul was now an Adult in mortality.  Soul looked around and wept.  I have to figure out food and shelter and clothing and safety for myself in these wild and unpredictable times, and courtship, and marriage, and I have to take care of children and raise them and I don’t know how.  It is too much.

Angel said, o little soul, it is too much.  It is impossible for you alone.  But you are not alone.  Christ will lead you.

The next night after dreaming about the drowning prophet, I had this dream.

It was on the huge capital city of a decaying interstellar empire. The capital itself was run down. It had grand old architecture and futuristic architecture too but it was subject to the late-stage processes of physical and moral decay we are all familiar with at that stage in a civilization. It was dirty.  It was shabby.

There were refugees. They were simple rural folk of the founding stock of the empire, perhaps even from elsewhere on the planet. They had fled their homes because of natural disaster and because of the devouring of all things that happens in decaying, corrupt polities. Like everyone and everything, they had gravitated to the imperial center.

I will pass on describing the atmosphere of the dream at this point, but it struck me immensely. The cobble stone streets, the stone and brick and stucco buildings rising many feet high only a step or two from the road. The heaps of trash. The gleaming metal arches crossing half the sky overhead. The broken drones. The sullen police standing by and staring vacantly at the middle distance.

The refugees were widely disliked by both the high and the low in the city and as the dream began a number of them were being casually chivvied through the nighttime streets by street gangs.

There was a man they were particularly after who had some sort of preeminence among the refugees, though he was also simple and uneducated.

Turning down one street he saw a door opening directly onto the street for a large imposing structure. Blank towering walls, fortress type architecture. His pursuers were close behind. He stepped in and the refugees with him came in also.

It was a college. Inside the door was a hall, the entrance area for the college, and it so happened that the dean of the college was standing there. The rural refugee and the dean recognized each other with some shock. Brother? Brother?  They were literal siblings.

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When I first heard this idea, I was horrified. Yet, even bad ideas in the hands of a talented author can be well written. Hollywood, in general, just isn’t well written.

What I imagine…

Young 15 year old Aragorn is pining after Arwen, and Elrond can see there are mutual feelings.

Elrond and Aragorn chat for a minute…

“Do you love her? She is a princess and she deserves a king.”

“I don’t know that I could become king. Or if I want to.“, Aragorn protested, more out of trying grasp the magnitude of this task, than genuine rejection.

“It is your gift, what some might call destiny. If you do not do it, you will feel dissatisfied all your life. It will weigh on you as a burden you can never put down. What was once fresh will become foul. If you are capable of it, and refuse, you curse yourself.

And I will not allow my daughter to marry someone who refuses to live up to his potential. I am not faulting your father’s. Their trials were different. But you can be king. You are the rightful king of Gondor.

Will you do what is necessary?”

“I really don’t know how.”

“No one can tell you how. That is your life’s work to figure that out.”

And with that, the difference between men and elves became immediately apparent. Aragorn wasted no moment. He devoured books and maps. He practiced sword play with Elladan and Elrohir. He learned all he could in Rivendell, until he knew what he had to do. A king could not stay safe within an Elvin kingdom all his life. He needed real experience. And he rode off into parts unknown, far lands where the stars are strange, among both noble barbarian kings and vicious savages, that even the Noldor knew little of.

For the love of an elven princess.

This is his tale.

Who are these dashed people one sees everywhere on the TV these days?  The woman of indeterminate pronunciation and the elderly bridge player fellow?  I dare say that the marked American cussedness is more than a little marked.  In fine fettle, as it were.

On the sweetness of your second primary program this year.

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In Sunday School this Sunday someone summarized 3 Nephi 8-10 as “Christ punishes and pleads.”  There is a magnificent oratorio waiting to be written from those chapters culminating in Christ’s appearance.

In 3 Ne 11 (insight not my own), the people first hear, then see, then touch.  Amazingly physical.  Amazingly bodily.  Appropriate for the resurrected Lord.

Source: Area Seventies page at ChurchofJesusChrist.org
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What if the fairy tales were true?

Once upon a time, there was a boy who found a great treasure in the woods…

Christ’s in his heaven,

delightful’s his earth,

The Saints are a leaven,

bubbling with mirth.

https://nitter.poast.org/UniverseBYU/status/1848507056581709921

I just took G’s numbers and did a crude simulation.

These are for US national and LDS numbers, where P0 is the childbearing population and P1 is the older non childbearing. Can you tell the difference?

We are the one with the tiny bump. But both show a half life of childbearing population of about 50 years and a total population of roughly 150. Basically indistinguishable.

This is a crude simulation and I don’t promise there are no mistakes. Still, all is NOT well in Zion.

And just for fun, this is the ratio of childbearing vs non-childbearing populations.

So, mostly old people.

The grandmaster is back.

After a lengthy delay, we return with more Isaiah!

As I mentioned in the previous post, chapters 40 & 41:1-20 are the gospel proclaimed, to Israel. In the next post, this will be extended to the Gentiles. But this has more depth than you might guess at first glance. The central part of this chiasmus askes the question, Do you really understand, or believe the Doctrine of the Creation? Then we look at future events (it would have been future events for the people of Isaiah’s time) and ask, Do you still believe God is in control? Let’s look at this in more detail.

Three Voices of Comfort (40:1-11)
* The Voice of him that crieth in the wilderness  (40:3-5)
* What shall I cry? All flesh is grass (40:6-8)
* O Zion that bringeth good tidings… say unto the cities of Judah, Behold! Your God!  (40:9-11)

The Lord is a Creator, who rules his Creation (40:12-31)
The Lord is the Ruler of history and of the world  (41:1-7)

Three Examples of Comfort (41:8-20)
* I will help thee (41:8-13)
* From worm to harvesting mountains (41:14-16)
* Needy sustained in the desert (41:17-20)

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