Excuse me I’m going to make a story.

Suppose we have a new scientific revolution.  These people figure out how to commune with stuff.  I mean they meditate and suddenly they are inside the rock or the tree.  Deep down there they learn stuff about rocks or trees no one could know by experiments.

Their institute is really cool.  They can basically melt rocks with their minds so the institute is all this one giant piece of fairy rock curving all over like a wedding cake.

There is a new employee.  On orientation day they meet with the director.  He’s an old guy who is pretty cool.  You know those guys who get really excited about things and talk fast with their hands?  That’s him.  He’s telling the new guy lots of things but one point he makes is that most of their discoveries don’t come from actually communing.  They discover stuff *trying* to commune.   They always say “to commune with, you must become as.”  To commune with something you have to become like it.  They keep adjusting how they think until they reach communion so all the adjustments along the way are amazing discoveries.  To commune with you become as.

They start him off with rock.  They know rock very well, everyone starts with that.  Afterwards he gets to pick his own communion research once he knows how.

He communes with rock.  Just getting the rock mind right is hard even though the people there tell him exactly how to do it.  Rock thinks of itself as a liquid it turns out just with a very slow beat of time.  He stills his mind, he closes his eyes and cuts off every sense except pressure and temperature.  He slows.  He casts his mind out into the dark and eventually one day he becomes rock.  He sings to the rock and the rock sings to him.  He can accelerate the tune and the rock flows.

The director calls him in again.  Congratulations, he says.  What do you want to do with your first research project?  The man says, I want to commune with God.

To commune with you become as.

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After some weeding and scripture reading this morning we had a bit of leisurely time getting running shoes on and such.  We aren’t in our usual tearing hurry because most of us are headed to a church camp at midday.  So we ended up informally in the parlor chatting.

Aside: we obviously need to be in much less of a tearing hurry than we are.  This moment was precious–it still is, they are still there and I am shouting out observations from the next room.  Though I wonder if maybe moments like this are the point of usually being in a tearing hurry.  Part of the leisure is the sense of being on holiday.

The particular vein of humor that welled up spontaneously was mixing sophisticated and complex Jane Austen dialogue with internet meme language.

“Much more rational, my dear Caroline, but much less like a ball.”

“Co-sign.”

What started it off was one daughter who was not part of a conversation about Jane Austen dialogue jumping in with what wasn’t but sounded like “Go kill yourself.”

By the end of the day, I think “go kill yourself” is going to be an established family  joke, just like, ‘Wait, Athens is real?!? (same daughter).

Here are a couple of recent Charlton posts that are pretty thought-provoking in our ongoing effort to “seek learning out of the best books.”  I wish there was one of those blog round-ups for JG-adjacent blogs.  But the reality is it would have to be someone from here who did it with all their free time.  If the Spirit whispers to one of you that you want to, drop a line.  Until then, we will be happy with occasional links.

Mainstream Christians blab a lot about love, but you can tell they understand love to be just an emotion. Their love takes place against a background of materialism, a lifeless universe of randomness and physics…

But a real understanding of love is that love is bound up with creation

-thus God is Love – but What About Creation?

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We of the Jr Ganymede have no intention of being accused of simply entertaining conspiracies. Nothing half way about it! We have the Lizardmen from the Hollow Flat Earth over for Sunday Dinner with their wives and lizard children. And Bigfoot.

If you have been carefully following the news, there are some seriously weird things going on, as in significantly weirder than normal. Which is pretty weird these days. On top of government officials discussing evidence for UFOs and massive conspiracies of deep black programs hiding things that terrify and unsettle all who know them. Things that are too terrible for the public to know, (but conveniently, not too much for the powers that be.) Seriously, I am not exaggerating. We have even had a Congressman suggest that perhaps these beings are not evolved on other planets, but stem from out own ancient history. And major congressional hearings to reveal what is known on July 26th.

Am I honestly willing to engage the scriptural aspect of these wild irresponsible lunatic conspiratorial rumors? (more…)

Deacon G. read the book of Acts almost as many times as he read the War Chapters.

Peter and the boys are heroes. They have dramatic confrontations where they drop one-liners, mass conversions . . .

. . . heck, they’re superheroes. Fire comes down from heaven. Angels waltz them out of jail. (more…)

It’s a Christian commonplace that the devil is God’s ape.  He imitates what God does, badly.   We Saints learn this in the temple.

Given this, what should Christians make of the devil’s offer to Adam and Eve that if they follow him by disobeying god, they would “become as gods, knowing good and evil”?  If he is offering to them that he will make them semi-gods, of what divine offer is this the pale shadow?

You know.  Becoming gods.  Being Gods with God.

Speaking of deification, I was thinking recently of the beatific vision at the end of the Divine Comedy.  It’s not just looking at God like a a gawker.  Its communion with Him.

I have come to think that any real communion means becoming as He is.  You cannot commune with what you are not.

This is the beatific vision.

Chapter 28 & 29 were comprised of three sections. Each of these sections has a corresponding section in 30-35. This chapter corresponds to the same section as Ch. 28 and we see a lot of callbacks to that chapter. Both chapters deal with the rejection of God’s word (28:9-10; 30:9-12), rejecting the rest God offers (28:12; 30:15), seeking false security (28:15; 30:2-3), the discernment of God (28:26,29; 30:18). The purposeful farmer of 28:23-29 with his plowing and harvesting, corresponds to the destruction and punishment (30:12-17) and redemption (30:18-27).

Likewise, Ch. 31-32 corresponds the first part of Ch. 29, including the verse about “a marvelous work and a wonder” and the end of Ch. 29 corresponds to Ch. 33-35. So if you enjoyed Ch. 29, you have more to look forward to.

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This post starts with a dream I had about being an Inkling, and ends with I don’t know what.

For those who are not full blown sufferers of Anglo-Catholic Fiction Disorder, the Inklings were an informal discussion group with Lewis and Tolkien and a number of others at various times.

I dreamed I was ripped through time and woke up in the Oxford area in the 30s.

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On the sweetness of Mormon life.

Your younger kids offer you a magazine they made.  “Thanks!” you say.  “That’ll be a dollar,” they reply.

Your wife calls the sister missionaries to find out what time they want to eat on Thursday.  After they are done eating, they tell us that we had the day wrong.  Our appointment isn’t until next week.  “See you then,” they chirp.

You pass out writing assignments for Sunday School and so you also pass around a small tub with pens in it.  When it comes back to you, a couple of jokers have tossed in some dollar bills.

It turns out the words are “the fields grow greener still” and always have been.

https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1408&context=dlls

Somehow I slipped from the Berenstein timeline into this one.  Your universe stinks, I want to go back.

Crazy notion– would there be any interest in trying to arrange a little courting between our manly bachelors and our winsome maidens?

If you or someone you know might be, drop a line below or send an email to one of us (me at jrg…dotahg at geemale dotcom, don’t literally write dot)

Ditto if you might be willing to help out.

This is all exploratory, so no firm commitments needed,  just expressions of interest.

Thoughts,  suggestions, considerations, and insights also very welcome.

Recently I discovered, to my surprise, that I believe this.  Love conquers all.  Despite it not seeming very logical.

But before we decide that something is not logical, it behooves us to look at its logic.

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There is a mood called exaltation. It is akin to the mood they call fey.

It feels good and is sometime spiritual but I have learned it is not always.  I have learned it is not a reliable indicator of the presence of the Holy Ghost.

The sister missionaries told us our mission is about 50% sisters.  It fluctuates, sometimes its a little less, but right now its 50%.

***

So now lets talk about why courtship is broken these days.

In a recent post on birthrates, Bobdaduck (if you like the JG, you’ll love the duckstack) laid the blame for bad courtship squarely on men:

As for what’s broken, this is a problem that has been driving me for a while now, and there are so many factors at play. Broadly speaking, an exponentially growing margin of young men are encountering catastrophic motivation failure. Some of it is justified- inflation has made all the hills boys must climb much, much steeper, but basically they don’t ask.

The specific major issue he blames is real and as bad as he says it is.  Where he goes wrong is in thinking that is the only major issue. (more…)

People have tried different ways to calculate our birthrate.  They look at Utah’s birth rate (bad) but Utah is only 50% LDS these days.  Sad.  They look at the birthrates in Utah County and  heavily LDS counties in Idaho (plummeting).

Here’s another effort.

There are two main ways to measure birthrate.  One is simply births per 1000 people.  The advantage it has is that it is a solid, easily determined number.  The disadvantage it has it that it doesn’t account for things like generational bulges.  Total Fertility Rate, TFR, is the other measure.  It tries to determine on average how many children each woman has over a lifetime.  Its advantage is that it does account for things like generational bulges.  Its disadvantage is that it is a derived measure that relies on calculation and assumptions, its not something that  you can 100% directly measure.

This post is going to look at births per 1000.  I’ll use the CIA’s World Fact Book figures to compare births per 1000 and also TFR (I for one welcome our CIA overlords).    I’ll also use the chart above which is from Church statistical reports.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/birth-rate-by-country

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate

Births per 1000 do not directly match Total Fertility Rate, which are births per woman. The reason is that TFR is normed by age cohorts. If a country had a youth bulge 25 years ago they may have a lot of births right now but still not have a great TFR. The converse would also be true. So while I can calculate births per 1000, converting that to TFR is an educated guess and could be off in either direction. When I am comparing our birthrates with country birthrates, I will put TFR in parentheses to give you an idea.  But it is only a rough idea.  The church knows what our TFR is worldwide and in North America, but the church isn’t saying.

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