Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.

Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten.

Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. 

James 5.

The cankered gold that eats the flesh like fire is obviously a spiritual metaphor.  But in our prosaic way, we got to talking about what kinds of reactions can actually corrode gold.  We couldn’t think of anything and a little research shows there isn’t much under normal conditions.  Gold cleans up nicely.

Then someone mentioned Alas, Babylon.  There are some striking passages about irradiated gold which slowly kills the wearer.  If you want to really get what James is saying, read Alas, Babylon.

Long-time perusers of this web site may remember the birthday greetings issued here to Ken Mattingly following his 75th, 80th, and 85th birthdays. This morning at breakfast looking through the pages of the newspaper I noticed the photo above and knew why it would be appearing. (more…)

The obituary for Elder Ballard says he is survived by seven children, 43 grandchildren, 105 great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild. So at first glance at least one of the Elder Ballard’s children had as many children as Ballard and his wife did. The ratio of great-grandchildren to grandchildren is 2.4. What might that ratio grow to with future births?

I am not interested in Elder Ballard’s family per se, but I find it a case put in my lap of a faithful Mormon public figure, who had several children and whose children had several children, that I might use to ponder what the drop-off in fecundity may be for the current generation involved in having children. It is also a big enough family that individual cases of involuntary limited fertility shouldn’t throw off the population-scale picture.
(more…)

https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/president-m-russell-ballard-dies

He was a window to an older Church run along family lines.

A founder of Spain’s rising anti-establishment party was shot in the face in an attempted assassination yesterday.

(more…)

I for one welcome our new Mongol Israelegyptistan overlords

https://nitter.net/BirthGauge/status/1720550649799077991#m

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzROOMRr0A7/

Quoted by Elder Oaks:

Mortal lifetime is barely a nanosecond compared with eternity. But what a crucial nanosecond it is!

-thus President Nelson

Infinities and eternities are mindwrenching when you really come to wrestle with them.  In comparison with infinite time, your  mortal life and the stillborn child’s life and Methuselah’s life are all 0.  A point on an endless line.  Infinitely small.

That is why mortality is so precious.  The  memories and associations and experiences you have here will be fresh in your mind, “before your face,” forever.  You will never, ever, ever again know what it is like to be a mortal under these skies.

I have had this idea percolating in my mind for a few years now.  I am just not sure where it goes from here.

Colonies in space have been known to fail because of pirates, invading armies or ancient apocalyptic doomsday devices. There are spectacular stories that you hear of valiant struggles for survival.
But most of the time, when a colony fails, it is far more mundane, if just as intractable. There are personal conflicts, and toxic group dynamics. Adultery, stealing, fighting. Those kind of things.
But often times, it is harder to pin what the real problem is. And as in all things, there are experts with experience in that.

As the ship finished rotating out of N-space, the constellations outside the window snapped back into a physically familiar form. Anabraxis was not fond of travel, which was a strange thing for a man who spent every other month on a different world. He much preferred to have something solid underneath his feet. Even if it were an ocean world, of a gas-giant, or any of the other millions of permutations he had visited.

This particular colony was having issues. There are engineering challenges and social issues, but nothing they shouldn’t have been able to handle. And yet, the colony was on the verge of collapse. That happened a lot. That is how you got abandoned colonies like the Planet of the Chili Peppers. He was the Master Engineer they called to help fix their problems. And his wife, Lakshmi  was the Astrologer.

And she was a very highly renowned Astrologer for most of the Virgo Cluster.

Astrology, off Earth, is not trivial. You have to really understand a world and what is spiritually significant. You have to understand the people, the culture and the seasons, and timekeeping. And of course, the stars and constellations, the planets and moons, planetary rings, etc. Which of those are important? Some worlds with rings, you spent a great deal of time pondering the portents in the planetary rings. Some worlds, you focused on the winds and the clouds.

It is easy to say such things didn’t matter. But of course, that is how you end up with the issues you had here.

I am beginning to think that the strongest argument against sexual sin, is what cowards it makes everyone. If people feel guilt, instead of repenting of their faults, they are compelled to find more and more faults elsewhere. No matter how stupid. And if someone says something stupider than you, you don’t dare speak against it.

On a lighter note, perhaps we should convince people that ‘bird’ with a hard ‘d’ is racist. You now have to say ‘birb’. My main hesitation is that it might be completely successful.

US ornithological society says dozens of birds will be renamed

The Magellanic Clouds must be renamed, astronomers say

That is all

The Messiah as the Suffering Servant

Spiritual Salvation and Judgement of Individuals
Ch. 40 – 55

In part one, we saw the temporal salvation and triumph of the kingdom of God. We saw the Messiah as the King of Jerusalem.

But here we shift from judgement and salvation of nations, to individuals. From Temporal to Spiritual.

It would be folly to pigeonhole the Savior as merely one or the other. His mission is much greater than that.
In deed, while we saw the Gentile nations mentioned earlier, here the thought is given greater expansion. The Gospel is for all nations.

Universal Gospel Message

Message to Israel (40 – 41:20)
Message to the Gentiles (41:21 – 42:17)

Promises of Redemption

Temporal Redemption (42:18-43:21)
Spiritual Redemption (43:22-44:23)

Agents of Redemption

Cyrus – Temporal (44:24-48:22)

Task and Servant: Cyrus (44:24-28)
Task confirmed: To Israel & World (45:1-7)
Response: Prayer (45:8)
Israel’s Disquiet (45:9-25)
The Lord’s Care for Israel, from the past to the future (46)
Babylon: from throne to the dust (47)
Redemption from Babylon (48)

The Suffering Servant / Atonement – Spiritual (49-53)

Task and Servant: Messiah (49:1-6)
Task confirmed: To Israel & World (49:7-12)
Response: Praise (49:13)
Israel’s Despondency (49:14-50:11)
The Lord’s Care for Israel, from the past to the future (51:1-16)
Zion: from dust to the throne (51:17-52:12)
Redemption from sin (52:13-53:12)

Universal Invitation

Invitation to Israel (54)
Invitation to all the World (55)

Church president Russell Nelson exhorted the saints to “Think celestial!” As one point of difference between what he was encouraging and its alternative, he taught, “Thus, if we unwisely choose to live telestial laws now, we are choosing to be resurrected with a telestial body. We are choosing not to live with our families forever.” Some detractors of the prophets and Christ’s church characterize this doctrine as a threat to take away from those who won’t toe the line something important to them. The more I see of non-celestial thinking, though, the more President Nelson’s words feel like a restatement of choices, explicit or implied, that people deliberately make. For some, family life is not a desired eternity.

Some righteous people through the circumstances of their lives and bodies are for now denied the blessings of spouse or progeny, and prophets have taught that these desires will be fulfilled in the eternities if they live faithfully. Others have these blessings in mortality, but do not value them, and will not be burdened or blessed with them in eternity.

Many choose to be “childless by choice,” or cheer on those who so choose. Many who are married decide to abandon wife or husband, and others do not seek marriage. Their like-minded friends who are happy enough with their spouses for now cheer on the separateds’ and singles’ lack of attachment. Older people declare that their retired, empty-nest years are “my time” and reject any notion that they will be wasting significant swathes of it fortifying relationships with six-year-olds. Married, single, separated. Five children or two dogs. It’s all the same to them, neither good nor bad, all a compound in one. And thus dead, or as President Nelson’s taught, not celestial and alive forever. Think celestial.

A man in Elders Quorum volunteered he was cleaning up after his kids.  The way he cleaned up their chicken mcnuggets is he popped them in his mouth.  An hour old, they were disgusting.  He says he craves fresh chicken mcnuggets, they are a real temptation for him, but no wonder they sit so heavy on his stomach.  Once they are no longer hot, he can taste how nasty they are.

Sin, he said, is chicken mcnuggets.

• Brother Waddell’s talk with its jab about hero worship of celebrities reminded me of The Contradiction of Celebrity

• In a real sense,  birth and death and resurrection are also ordinances

•  Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled with the Holy Ghost.  This is one reason why non-baptized gentiles are still often full of the Holy Ghost.  One suspects that it is more of a natural law than a divine policy.  The Holy Ghost fills you because if you hunger and thirst after righteousness, the Holy Ghost cannot but fill you.  T0here is a divine greed to fill every corner with love that can so be filled.