Rabbinical Judaism, Islam, most midwit varieties of christianity, and voodoo are all solutions to the same problem.  The death of God.  In other words, the problem that the Almighty no longer seems to be speaking (and that if he did speak, it would not be what we want to hear).

I was reading a high level anthropological survey of voodoo and of related West African religious systems.  Their basic structure is a belief that there is in fact a creator who rules and has the power, in other words, God, but who is very remote and inactive in human affairs.

The solution is to make deals with lesser spirits.

The normal abrahamic religion response to the same problem is to get scholarly with scripture and philosophy.  The difference just seems to be if you are in an educated area with written materials and a scholarly tradition or not.

“While most bridge-jumpers are attempting to commit suicide, and others fall accidentally, it should be noted that there are two further groups of voluntary jumpers, both gamblers in a sense. The first of these are those, usually young males, who jump on a bet. Strangely enough, we have only one case of a known ‘bettor’ who has been killed. But frustratingly enough, there are seldom records of such cases, and the individuals usually, presumably clutching their winnings, elude official searchers. In recent cases of this nature, a Rhode Island youth leaped 60 feet from a bridge while his companion stood by yelling encouragement, and another jumped 135 feet and was last seen swimming to a pier. In Ohio, a 17-year-old boy jumped 65 feet, and in New York a 32-year-old man jumped 107-feet — for the third time — from a bridge on which 67 other jumpers have been killed.”

from Survival of High-Velocity Free-Falls in Water by Richard G. Snyder, Ph.D., April 1965, Federal Aviation Agency, Office of Aviation Medicine

There is a scripture that perfectly combines ambition and humility. Two virtues we usually think are in tension with each other.

For behold, thus saith the Lord God: I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little; and blessed are those who hearken unto my precepts, and lend an ear unto my counsel, for they shall learn wisdom; for unto him that receiveth I will give more; and from them that shall say, We have enough, from them shall be taken away even that which they have.

-thus 2 Nephi 28:30

Humbly learning bit by bit, always recognizing that you don’t know as much as you could, is not the opposite of ambition. It is the core of ambition. It is the stuff of which divinity is made.

Accounting for the difference in stations, this is morphologically the same as God saying

Worlds without number have I created…. The heavens, they are many, and they cannot be numbered unto man; but they are numbered unto me, for they are mine.

And as one earth shall pass away, and the heavens thereof even so shall another come; and there is no end to my works, neither to my words.

For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.

The original insight was not mine. It was a family conversation. Let me tell you how it came about.

I don’t remember how it started out. Maybe some silliness about Canada. Yeah, that was probably it. We were probably laughing about that Babylon Bee headline, If Elected Trump Promises to Create a Cool New Slur for Canadians.

President Polk

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I’m doing a chronology comparison for Nephite modernity, the extremely critical period from King Benjamin to the Savior’s return.  I wanted to give myself a feel for the events by comparing them to American and Church history.  You know, like the distance from the beginning of the reign of the judges to 1 AD is the same as the distance between us and the beginning of WWII.  You’ll see that posted over the next day or two.

Meanwhile I ran across some interesting points.  Probably nothing original, but new to me.

Omni —

-not all Nephites came with Mosiah.  Some of what the Nephites called ‘Lamanites’ were probably stay-behind Nephites.

-the chronology doesn’t add up here.  We have a son, a brother, and the brother’s son and grandson covering a period of 180 years.  Probably like with the genealogies in the gospels, ‘son’ just means ‘descended from’ and ‘brother’ means ‘related to’.  In support of there are indicators that Amaleki the last writer in Omni was not alive during the King Mosiah exodus though he still wrote about it, there probably wasn’t anyone acting as a custodian at that time, or at least not one who wrote

-the leading theory about the continual dissensions and wars in Nephite modernity is that it was some kind of subsumed ethnic conflict between Nephite and Mulekite elites.  But its interesting that the last of the Nephite-descended chroniclers was named Amalek, and the two leading dissenters were named Amlici and Amalickiah.  Similarly, Amulek strongly emphasizes his descent from Nephi.  Could the actual basis of the dissent be the old Nephite priestly lineage claiming preeminence once the kings abolished themselves?

After Cezoram is murdered in 23 BC, there still appear to be chief judges but none of them are named until Lachoneus in 1 AD.  Is this because the chroniclers considered them illegitimate in some way?

A history podcaster apparently went on Tucker Carlson’s show with a number of revisionist takes on WWII.  While I’m told the podcast itself was at least somewhat nuanced, the guy responded to attacks on Twitter with flamebait responses like Churchill Was WWII’s Greatest Villain.

A bunch of boring argument ensued.

FWIW I pretty much share the conventional view on WWII (Nazis boo, Soviets boo but not as boo in the short term, America yay, England yay, victory mismanaged) though I also don’t get worked up about people with chops arguing points or entertaining counterfactuals.  But here I am going to try to say something that hasn’t been repeated elsewhere already  (and I invite you to do the same).  It’s something that should have some application to Mormon history. (more…)

A rowing coach is looking at his freshman tryouts and musing on the coming years.  Victories?  Losses?  Championships?  The Olympics?

All that Ulbrickson knew, had to start here on this dock, with the boys who were now wandering off into the waning light.  Somewhere among them–those green and untested boys–lay much of the stock from which he would have to select a crew capable of going all the way.  The trick would be to find which few of them had the potential for raw power, the nearly superhuman stamina, the  indomitable willpower, and the intellectual capacity necessary to master the details of technique.  And which of them, coupled improbably with all those other qualities, had the most important one: the ability to disregard his own ambitions, to throw his ego over the gunwales, to leave it swirling in the wake of the shell, and to pull, not just for himself, not just for glory, but for the boys in the boat.

-The Boys in the Boat

Thanks to the felicities of the LDS website’s ever-improving search function, I messed up last time in counting the references to ‘wives and children’ in the Book of Mormon.

The phrase ‘wives and children’* appears 32 times in the Book of Mormon.  25 times in what I call Nephite Modernity, or the Nephite Warring States period, the books of Mosiah and Alma.

The great majority of those are references to defending wives and children as a justification for warfare.

Outside of Nephite Modernity, the two ‘wives and children’ references that refer to defense are Mormon 2:23, where Mormon uses wives and children rhetoric to inspire this soldiers.  It kinda works–“and my words did arouse them somewhat to vigor.”  And Ether 14:2, where each Jaredite man has to sleep with his word to defend what is his during the night, including wife and children.  Its pretty clear that fighting to defend their homes was a huge part of Nephite ideology during the Mosiah-Alma period.  The other two references are, I suspect, Mormon being a Captain Moroni fanboy.  The first one is clearly Mormon modeling his speech on what worked during the Nephite glory days and the Ether chapter could be a Mormon summary where he inserted his own concept of what the Jaredites were fighting for, though I don’t know for sure.

*or some variant thereon, such as ‘our wives and our children’.

* Some decisions only success can justify.  We don’t like that because we want the rightness of our acts to be judged by our intentions. Even so.  Power is good, and holding power only lends more weight to preaching, so giving up power in order to preach is one of those decisions. In the case of Nephi Helaman’s son the decision succeeded spectacularly.  He and his brother converted thousands in areas they could not have gone to had they still been Nephite leaders

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I prefer not to.

Last time, we noticed an interesting feature of Alma’s highly-crafted advice to his sons.  His advice to Corianton the fornicator refers to murder at the beginning and then returns to talking about death as a blessing from the Father towards the end.  In other words, we have good death and bad death.

I don’t usually think of death as a good thing (and still don’t really) but Alma seems to be saying that receiving a mortal body and a mortal death are both necessary preconditions to the resurrection.  I don’t know why he thinks that, more study needed.

Regardless, a sermon contrasting bad death and good death puts me irresistibly in mind of a virtue chart.

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Corianton went off fornicating on his mission and Alma calls him on it.  But even the rebuke portion of his sermon is pretty doctrinal.  Alma starts by situating fornication on the scale of serious sins.  First denying the Holy Ghost, he says.  Second, murder.  But next to those two, its fornication.  Rhetorically effective, but also interesting in itself for us and it sets up the later parts of Alma’s discourse to Corianton in ways that aren’t obvious to a casual reader.

Interesting in itself– notice how each part of that trifecta of serious sins corresponds to a part of the complete human, body and spirit.

Denying the Holy Ghost  —————>  Spirit

Murder  ————————————->  Sins against the end of the body

Fornication  ——————————->  Sins against the beginning of the body

If you wanted to stretch even further, you might analogize each of these three to a member of the Godhead.  Denying the Holy Ghost obviously corresponds to the Holy Ghost, Resurrection is an obvious role for the Son which corresponds with life creation/the (re)beginning of the body), but is God associated with death in some way?  It seems fanciful.  On the other hand, we are reading something fancy here.  Look at the elaborate beautiful chiasmus in Alma 36.  The idea that Alma’s discourses to his son are highly structured literary works is not something we should reject.  More to the point, the rest of Alma’s sermon talks repeatedly about Christ as the Resurrector and mentions several times that men are “appointed to die” and then in Chapter 42 says that it was “God” who appointed death.  That is very suggestive.

One of the blog’s greatest hits is MC’s essay the Military Mental Model of Mormonism. It continues to get attention and I recently discovered that the doofus who runs the blog has inadvertently marked it as private. That’s now fixed.

Once again, observations about the last two weeks of Book of Mormon reading when no one only the intellectual elite are interested in them anymore.

By Antiquary – This file was derived from: St Michael and All Angels, Brighton, stained glass 6.jpg, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77509103

We are hitting on everything from the flaming sword that blocked the tree of life to Alma’s take on how the Law is the schoolmaster (somewhat different from Paul’s).

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WJT has a pretty hilarious method for exposing AI companies’ crude efforts to manipulate their product results.

Ethnically Amnibaus.

Inasmuch as ye are not guilty of the first offense, neither the second, ye shall not suffer yourselves to be slain by the hands of your enemies.

–Alma 43:46

This is a game theory strategy.  In fact, it is the winning game theory strategy for a repeat prisoners’ dilemma.

The prisoners’ dilemma goes like this.  Two guys get nabbed.  The cops separate them and try to get them to confess.  If neither talks, they both get light sentences.  If only one talks, the other gets a heavy sentence and the crook who turned gets off scot free.  If both talk, they both get heavy sentences.

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