The Church put out a statement on church use of AI recently.

No. 1 Daughter, who is a cheery little bird, drew our attention to this passage:

Elder Gong acknowledged that some people will weaponize AI tools. Of particular concern are deepfakes, the fictitious or malicious use of someone’s name, image, and likeness. These are most likely to happen to people — such as Church leaders — who have a recognizable face and voice, a significant amount of video and audio in the public domain, and known and motivated antagonists.

Yep.

She speculates that something like this may be the reason we are emphasizing home church and other forms of personal, direct priesthood leadership.  Increasingly nothing that isn’t face to face is secure or reliable.

BYU is adding a required intro course for new freshmen.  Hubbub has ensued among veteran hubbubbers because students will read a toned-down version of Elder Holland’s already very mild “musket” speech.

And now a special guest comment from special guest commenter Brigham Young.

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The First Presidency directed the Church, “To allow additional time on Easter Sunday for worship with family and friends, we have asked all wards and branches to meet only for sacrament meeting.” Worshipping with our families at home is a familiar concept, but how should we go about worshipping with our friends on Easter with our additional hour that we will not be at church? The option that comes first to mind is to attend Easter services that are not associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Perhaps an interfaith sunrise service, or a worship service in one of our friends’ churches. My own ward’s sacrament meeting on Easter will begin at 11 AM, so it should be easy for me to find another church service before that.

Another option would be for me to arrange some private Easter worship with a friend. Invite him to my house or elsewhere to sing a hymn, pray, and share expressions with one another of our joy in Christ’s triumph. I’ve never done anything quite like that. What do you think the First Presidency is telling the Latter-day Saints to do on Easter with our additional time for worship with friends?

The last time Easter fell on the first Sunday in April was 2021, and many of the General Conference talks on that day were what one might prepare with Easter especially in mind, while others focused on other things, such as President Oaks on “Defending Our Divinely Inspired Constitution.” Easter and General Conference will next coincide on April 5, 2026. If the pattern of last year and next continues, I suppose the Sunday sessions of Conference that day will be limited to a single hour, or perhaps omitted altogether.

I read a lot of low quality genre fiction.  Recently I’ve been going through some new genres popular with millennials.

Nearly 100% of the time, when the author wants to give their paint-by-numbers pulp a little emotional depth, they do it by giving the protagonist Trauma.  That’s it, always.  Trauma.  The trauma is usually caused by some cookie cutter family situation, abusive and/or distant mom or dad, but the abusive and/or distant mom or dad is never the problem, its always the Trauma caused by the abusive and/or distant mom or dad.

The stories are like this because it appeals to the readers, because we live in a culture that encourages trauma worship.  Trauma has become an idol.

Gossip is surprisingly hard to define but its real.  Like loud laughter, peace, and the Spirit, its one of those things you have to experience yourself to know what it is. (more…)

We are very interested in what you and yours are doing for the Easter season this year.  Please comment or post links.

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N. T. Wright quote:

We should be taking steps to celebrate Easter in creative new ways in art, literature, children’s games, poetry, music, dance, festivals, bells, special concerts. …

This is our greatest festival.

Take Christmas away and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else.

Take Easter away and you don’t have a New Testament;

You don’t have a Christianity.

Boo.  I hate that quote.   It’s Reddit-tier.

I had the unusual experience yesterday Sunday of hearing the quote twice, hating it both times and getting a rush of insight as to why, but also getting insight into how to make Easter more meaningful  this year.

Let’s talk about both: why you shouldn’t feel guilty if your Easter doesn’t have quite the same valence in the same way as Christmas, but also how you can make more of your Easter.

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It is well-known that some of our people have a persecution complex. It is unsightly the way they see a Baptist under every bush and an atheist worming his way into every apple. (Though abusus non tollit usum).

Less well known is the more common form of the persecution complex, which involves truckling to the persecutors to preemptively stave off persecution. In its secular variation, we call that Stockholm Syndrome or battered wife syndrome. The scriptures tell us in the day the Lord comes, that form of persecution complex will at last end.

20 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the remnant of Israel, and such as are escaped of the house of Jacob, shall no more again stay upon him that smote them, but shall stay upon the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, in truth.

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This was my dream.  Probably because all of the waking time I have spent thinking about Lehi’s Dream.

In the midst of dry and forbidding wilderness that no one had ever crossed nor indeed knew if there was anything beyond it, there was a great fountain of water that gave life to a village that was all the people in the world. This was no ordinary fountain. Its water was so sweet and pure that it made the land it watered greener and lusher than ordinary water, and the people who drank it happier and healthier than ordinary water would.

But the water had one peculiarity. It made the people who drank it want to follow the fountain’s river down to the end. For the fountain, naturally, gave rise to a great river that wound its way through the dry lands to some mysterious end lost in the blue haze and shimmer of the horizon.

But there was a problem. The wonderful water of the fountain soon became dirty and brackish in the river, and as the people knew from short jaunts along side it, the further the river went the worse the water seemed to become.

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Mortality is divisive and is supposed to be.  That is what it’s for.

Your first clue is that Satan’s plan was so inclusive.

One soul shall not be lost. . .

But the main reason is in the nature of mortality.

Now, its true that mortality is divisive in all sorts of ways.

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

But the only inescapable divisiveness is within yourself.  The essential point of mortality is to divide you from yourself.  What is precious about mortality and what makes it important is that you are limited in time and limited in space.  You can only do one thing at a time.  That is what makes choice possible.  Every moment that you choose you are choosing to exclude all the other options.  You are dividing the potential from the real.  Your agency creates a chasm and thousands of possibilities are left on the other side.

I made two unusual decisions about prayer.

The first was several years ago when I decided to pray for ridiculous amounts of blessings. Absurd excess. But I soon realized that I would not be able to handle such a bounty of blessings. A flawed character does not benefit from a wider scope in which to express the flaws.  So then I started praying for much better character and then a fire hose of blessing.

Today I realized that this was not the order of heaven. You don’t become fit for a trial before you have experienced it indeed, probably cannot, it is impossible.  This morning I prayed for vast unmerited Good Fortune and the grace of Christ to bear it when it came here

A bull was grazing near a bull calf.  The bull contemplatively chewed his cud and then spoke about how much he loved the pasture.  It was rich, green, with deep roots.

The bull calf disagreed.  The grass was greener on the other side of the fence, he said.

The bull examined the rank, brown, patchy grass in the wildlands outside and asked the bull calf what he could possibly  mean.

The bull calf replied that a crow had told him that the founder of their herd had eaten too much alfalfa once and almost died of bloat.  The same crow had said that founder had also got into a bloody fight with a cougar.

The cougar was attacking the herd, the bull replied.

The bull calf replied that whenever he tried to voice his honest concerns the herd replied defensively and with excuses like the bull had just done, and that was his final reason for thinking the grass was greener on the other side.

Moral: the spirit and the fruits are the proof you  need

WORDS by Dana Gioia

The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other—
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper—
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always—
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

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God is divisive.

God divided the light from the darkness. (Genesis 1)

Nephi’s describes his father’s dream, which includes “the awful gulf which separates the wicked from the tree of life.” Nephi comments that his father “saw that the justice of God did also divide the wicked from the righteous.” (1 Nephi 15)

Towards the end of his reign, Nephi concluded, “For the time speedily cometh that the Lord God shall cause a great division among the people, and the wicked will he destroy.”

In the last days, Christ will divide his people like a shepherd divides his sheep from his goats. (Matthew 25)

Behold, I am God; give heed to my word, which is quick and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword, to the dividing asunder of both joints and marrow; therefore, give heed unto my word.

(D&C 12)

God is divisive.  He will divide and divide and divide. He doesn’t want you to end up on the other side of the divide. He doesn’t want anybody to. But he will divide. You can’t stop it anymore than you can stop the Mississippi rolling, nor should you want to. Let God divide.

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