And  more!
(The Book of Mormon version, not the Arizona ruin.)

When I was young, the war chapters in Alma were my favorite.  I read them over and over of a Sunday.  Today I would say its the story of Zeniff and his people.  There is something about being surrounded and hanging on that hits me.  You can see it it in my favorite talk.  You can see it in my enthusiasm for Hodgson’s The Night Lands and John C. Wright’s superb Awake in the Night Land.

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There once was a wealthy man with a crippled child.  He asked two friends for help.

The first friend said that with sufficient funding he could build an exosuit for the child that would move his body around as if he were not crippled.  With the proper programming, the exosuit could even cause the boy’s body to move through complicated motions like a dance.

The other friend said he would prefer to try a difficult course of surgeries and especially of physical therapy.  It might not work, but if it did the boy’s body would be healed.  The boy would be able to move of himself.  He would dance instead of being danced.

The first friend scoffed at the pain and risk involved, but the wealthy man chose the second friend anyway.

“But we need to let them have agency!”

Yes, we do.

Agency is primarily a question of choosing your identity.  I.E., your relationships.  Specific moral choices are usually downstream from that.  Are you a progressing, repentant son or daughter of God, or are you something else?  From that choice, everything else follows.

Children and teenagers in particular are primed for wanting to choose an identity.

Among humans, where there is no boundary there is no identity, and where there is no boundary enforcement there is no boundary.  An identity that does not demand anything is not an identity.  Similarly, a relationship that does not demand anything is not a relationship.  There is nothing there to choose.

Boundaries, rules, and standards with teeth make agency possible.

Yes, we need to let them have their agency.

The dead of the graves, the graves of the dead,

the crosses white spread overhead

Too young to die, too old to live–

today we them memorial give.

If I were not working on Isaiah, I would be working on the books of Abraham and Joseph.

There is a possibility that the church *might* have some of the Book of Joseph, and that part of what inspired the Temple Rituals.

Also, we effectively have a facsimile from the Book of Joseph.

I more and more see arguments that look like this parable below.  Originally confined to the internet.

There’s a dude who’s jackhammering a hole into a dam and packing it with explosives. Along comes a man who asks what he’s doing. (more…)

The Nephites always seem outnumbered by the Lamanites.  Yet Nephite ethnography describes the Lamanites as hunter-gatherers who live off of game.  It’s possible that this is just a trope, some kind of traditional form of ethnic prejudice, and the Lamanites didn’t really live that way.  In support of this is that the Gadiantons are later described in the same terms.  I don’t think its just a trope.  I think the idea came from somewhere.  So if we take the scriptures seriously, the Lamanites are hunter-gatherers at least until part way through  the book of Alma, while the Nephites grow things, yet the Lamanites outnumber the Nephites.   This is  real puzzle.  Usually agriculture supports much higher populations than hunting does.

I have a speculation.

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I dreamed that Hell was an exquisitely confected array of interlocking corporations and trusts.  All prepared with the most careful art.

But it mattered little, because there were very few things at all to be owned, most of what little there was was broken, and ignoring the corporate forms altogether the devil jealously kept those few things heaped up in a little pile of trash on which  he sat like a mountebank dragon.

On the sweetness of Mormon life.

The young man bashfully starts his talk by making eye contact with the lectern.  He says, I gave a really good talk two years ago for mothers’ day so the bishop asked me again.  The thing is, my mom wrote that talk.

On the sweetness of Mormon life.

You are driving to St. George probably for the first time when you see a sign for a town coming up.  Its called Kanarraville.

Hey, one of your daughters says, I think that’s where Elder Hollands talk happened.

She’s right, so you put it on.

The town is beautiful from the road.  There is a storm, the black clouds heaped up in great piles over the mountains and silver sheets of rain.  Meanwhile Elder Holland’s sonorous voice from the speaker.

Don’t give up, boy.  Don’t you quit.

 

 

A great little short short story about looking at maps.

I’ve been having flashes of a dream about an old dead hollow tree trunk in a fen; a swirl of bats issue from the hollow in the twilight. There was some kind of minor problem with it that I was addressing.

In my other dream flashes, we were preparing a church program at a small, flat rectangular building. Probably a small branch building, one of those where its just one room that gets used for church but also everything else. There was a grape vine that sprung up next to one of the walls and was causing some kind of trouble with the building, so I dug it up.

Last night, the dreams converged.

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16-year old G. was making fun of his mother’s singing by singing in an exaggerated operatic way when his mother happened to wander in. She listened for a bit. “You’re sounding better,” she said. “I knew if you stuck with it you’d get better.”  And he was better after that.

19-year old G. was at the MTC learning Spanish. He thought it would be funny to say something in class with an exaggerated Speedy Gonzales accent. “Hey,” his instructor said, “your accent is getting pretty good. That was pretty good.”  He meant it. (more…)

It’s time to play another round of wild guesses using calculation.  Let’s use LDS activity rate data to rough up a ballpark idea of what the LDS birthrate might be.

There’s an interesting study going around, using cellphone data to estimate actual church attendance as opposed to what people self-report.  Not very precise, probably only useful for comparing attendance across denominations.  The Deseret News has a write up.

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I was listening to a recorded speech and noticed the platform had an option for an AI-assisted summary.

Here is what I got

In today’s society, the dynamics of loyalty and commitment are shifting due to changes in the availability of certain proteins in food. According to Speaker 1, the body’s ability to produce these proteins has been affected, leading to a decline in loyalty and commitment. Unknown Speaker, on the other hand, argues that the rise of fragmentation in times has led to a growing inner Scorpion that stings even when it will lead to mutual destruction. Both speakers emphasize the need for social technologies to insource loyalty and commitment over the long term.

Knowing the original does not make this any more sensible.

It is either nonsense, or deep wisdom.