The best lessons in Sunday School happen like the Spirit. The lesson listeth where it will. That is because they are inspired by the Spirit.

Last Sunday a verse I hadn’t noticed on a question I would never have thought of turned into 10 minutes filled with the presence of God.

A brother who speaks only Spanish and who has never participated was apparently reading along enough to know where we were. He raised his hand and painstakingly read Mormon 9:10 in Spanish. Why, he said, does it say god, lower case and then god, lower case, and then God, capital letter?

And now, if ye have imagined up unto yourselves a god who doth vary, and in whom there is shadow of changing, then have ye imagined up unto yourselves a god who is not a God of miracles.

I translated.

I said, Well, what do you all think? (more…)

Chapter One records 25 generations between Ether and Jared. 22 of them are “son of” the prior generation, whereas 3 of them are “descendant of.” I would usually take this to mean they are a grandson, maybe through their mother, but Ether is listed as “a descaendant of Corianton” and in Ether 11:23 it says that he was the son of Corianton. “Corianton begat Ether.” So I have no idea what ‘descendant of’ means vs. ‘son of.’

But we do have 25 generations at least from the Tower of Babel to Ether, and I thought it would be interesting to see what that tells us about the dating of the Tower of Babel. The results are going to be wildly inexact so this is for fun only. Making it even more inexact is that fact that many of the links in the chain of descent were youngest sons begotten in their father’s old age, so how long each generation is is anyone’s guess.

Further complicating the issue is that we do not know when Ether lived. This post really is just for fun. Omni 1:20-21 implies but does not actually say outright that Coriantumr was alive sometime during the reign of the first King Mosiah (King Benjamin’s father). Assuming it was during King Mosiah’s range, I don’t know exactly when than reign was, so lets pick a date range of 200-150 BC for convenience.

So, anyhow, assuming an average generation length will give us an estimate for when the tower of babel would have occurred.

Generation Length 20 years. Tower of Babel 700-650 BC. Lol no.
Generation Length 30 years. Tower of Babel 950-900 BC.
Generation Length 50 years. Tower of Babel 1450-1400 BC.
Generation Length 100 years. Tower of Babel 2700-2650 BC.

For comparison, the traditional Bishop Ussher style chronology for the Tower of Babel puts it around 2200 BC. That would imply an average generation length of 80 years.

Let me say again that this is assumption and guess piled on top of assumption and guess. For mental toying only.

Nephi kept the plates in 4th Nephi from the Savior’s visitation in about 35 AD to to about 110 AD.
85  years.

Amos kept the plates until 194 AD.
84 years.

Amos II then kept the plates until AD 305.
115 years.

Check my math but those are some remarkably long generations. Especially the last one. Maybe they were supernally long-lived. Another possibility is that being the record-keeper was a title, much like being a king, and the guy who was nominally fulfilling that role wouldn’t even necessarily have to be alive. No idea.

Christians, Muslims, and Jews

Long-time readers know that I am sympathetic to creedal Christians.  I think they are sincere and even admirable about a great number of things and I try to avoid taking shots at them for no reason.  But here I am going to disagree with something they do taken even on their own terms.

Another thing I like to do is poke around in obscure corners of the internet.  I have an eccentric’s taste for eccentricity.  Most of what you find there is interesting as a spectacle but doesn’t add to your own stock of truth.  Sometimes you do find something worth taking back with you though.  For me, one such is the concept that one form of error people fall into is trying to be “holier than Jesus” or “more Christian than Jesus” if I have the phrase right.  The meat of it is that when people advocate for extreme and almost inhuman versions of some of Christ’s teaching such as talking about how you need to feel love for Satan or some other performative shibboleth of reified compassion or act like the presence of people “less compassionate” than they are is an intolerable insult to their purity, they are essentially trying to be “holier than Jesus,” who certainly pulled no punches but also recognized the messiness of life in many ways.

Whether you agree with that or not, it was the prompt for me to realize one issue I have with the creeds and their Jewish and Muslim equivalents.  Even if you believed, as they do, that its just not possible that God the Father has a body or is a person, that is how he presents himself in scripture.  By your own standards, he is ineffable and incomprehensible.  So what warrant do you have to think that you have a better way of understanding the Father than the one He himself gave you?  “Oh, that’s just for the common folk.”  Compared to God, you are all common folk.  Plato was a peasant.  So was Aquinas.  Much smarter than me, but that’s like saying the kid who has five bucks is richer than the kid who has a quarter.  True, but irrelevant in the presence of billionaires.  So maybe you feel sure that God cannot “really” be an embodied Man because he is clearly beyond anything we can comprehend.  OK.  So then the next question is what would be the best method to comprehend him as best as a human being can–the one you came up with, or the one God uses?

But “God is spirit”!  Yeah, God says he’s vitality and life.  The very essence of personhood.

But “God is love”!  Yep.  The deepest of human emotions.

The closest you can come to comprehending God is to think of him as a glorified eternal man.

Moroni says that when miracles cease–he lists a number of types of miracles in Mormon 9--it is a sign of wickedness and rebellion.  He then segues seamlessly to talking about the 3 Nephites (v. 22).  In fact the miracles he says go with the faithful are the miracles the 3 Nephites are recorded doing.

It occurred to me that this section isn’t abstract for him.  While it certainly applies to us, Moroni was aware of a day when the 3 Nephites were walking about openly performing miracles, and then withdrew from the population due to wickedness.  It happened in his father’s lifetime, when Mormon was 15 according to Mormon 1.

So while Moroni knew the 3 Nephites in a ‘miraculous visitation’ kind of way, Mormon knew them in a ‘they lived down the street’ kind of way.  There very existence was a literal miracle.

Imagine the Church if we had a Quorum of the Twelve and a First Presidency like normal, people being called, serving out their time, and dying.  Except Joseph  Smith, Brigham  Young, and Hyrum Smith were effectively immortal and kept right on doing their work as Apostles and leaders.  You saw them on the screen every conference.  Your parents met Brigham Young a few years ago, he came out to their stake conference.

Our Friend Kent Budge Has Died.

Vader Our Friend.

Kent Budge – A Great Friend, a Bright Intellect

Thereby have many entertained angels unawares.

Vader wrote me a letter just before he got in the wreck that eventually killed him.  He was at BYU Education Week, thought of me, and wrote a letter of testimony and concern for my spiritual welfare and, frankly,of just a touch of rebuke.  It is one my prized possessions.

When you drive a route you’ve driven before it goes faster.  You tend to zone out, time passes quickly.  Even a trail you’ve hiked only once before seems much shorter the second time.

As you get older time flies by.

I think both phenomenons have the same explanation.  When something truly novel is happening, you devote much more awareness to it so time passes slowly.  When  you are used to it you only devote part of your awareness to it, just a little part of your brain on minder setting to see if something that needs addressed comes up.  The older you get, the more even novel experiences pattern match to things you’ve done for so you don’t have to slow down your awareness to the max for anything.  Time flies by.  (I think this is why older people more and more get lost in their childhood.  Everything around you more and more fits into larger patterns and your mind increasingly goes back to when the world was new, when you first started seeing the picture that you know have more or less complete before you.)

I was thinking about  this, getting sentimental, thinking about my own parents getting older, when I had a thought.  What is it like after this life?  Perhaps genuine newness, perhaps you are like a child again. But also with time and time and time perhaps everything slows down.  I’m not serious about this at all, but it did occur to me that could be one explanation for the odd teaching that a thousand years for us is like an hour to God.

More seriously, it does help explain why the eternities are only attainable through love.  Only love can make seeing this mortal great great grandchild of yours, one of many, an experience that is still fresh.  Only by caring enough about him or her that you can enter into their own experience of freshness.

We already see hints of this in mortality.  As a parent and then grandparent, you relive your own life through these little ones.

A BYU professor tells students, if I’m parsing it correctly, that God is going to smite the nation for the sin of voting for Trump.

Well, politics breaks people.  It does.  The professor is more to be pitied than anything.  And frankly I always have a soft spot in my heart for people with extreme views who are willing to air them.  We are too locked down, a little free-wheeling vigor and a few sharp elbows including at BYU is all for the good.

My issue isn’t that the professor is mixing in politics.  If BYU mathematics professors, between theorems, are bellowing at each other in the hall about how abortion is ungodly vs. Trump is evil I would be cheered.  Civility and courtesy and putting friendship over politics is something that happens on the other side of getting right down to your painfully honest convictions.  Just being frozen solves nothing and is a false parody of real civility.  We are in an extremely fraught situation politically in this country that presents real conundrums from a gospel perspective and BYU among other places is actually a location where something new could emerge if we allowed ourselves to own the problem.

But that’s not what is happening.  Instead, how many professors at BYU are functionally emissaries for the elite culture to their benighted students?  Enter to learn, go forth to serve managerial class ideology?  If BYU is just any other university but with gospel quotations sprinkled on top, MSNBYU, then away with the foul thing.

I’ve been thinking lately about how there is a difference between being a peacemaker and making peace.  You can make a desert and call it peace, but you weren’t a peacemaker.

There is this weird phenomenon these days where people will decide who is on their side and then feel comfortable bullying those people and belittling them and dismissing their concerns, because they aren’t our enemies, as if the Savior’s command was to love only our enemies.  In the old days we picked sides so we could attack the ones we labeled as not on our side.  The Savior rebuked that, so now we label people as on our side when we want to attack them and still feel morally twee.

By becoming a neighbor to the beaten jew, the Good Samaritan did not thereby cease to have obligations to his neighbors in Samaria.

Here’s a post that looks like it was meant for the election news but its actually something I’ve been noodling for the last couple of weeks.  This is a little deep for me, so if you can think of a pithier, better way of making the point I’m struggling to make, please drop it into the comments.   Here goes.

Having possibility feels great.  The more possibility the better.  Like Christopher Columbus on the edge of a new continent, or Brigham Young looking down at the valley and saying ‘this is the place.’  That is a deeply spiritual feeling.  In fact its literally spiritual, that is what it is like to be a spirit.  As a spirit you are undefined and have every option in front of you.

But mere possibility is a prison.  Possibility without actuality is dead.  It is a horrible sin for the spirit to want to live forever in that sense of possibility and shrink from coming to earth as a mortal.  Not because God has arbitrarily defined it as a sin but because it is in the very nature of possibility, the very thing that makes it good, that it demands to be converted into a reality.  Spirit is possibility but body is actuality, and the spirit needs the body.  What we find limiting about mortality is what makes it valuable.  The struggle, the fact that as a body you can only be in  one place at one time with a limited life span in which to do anything, the fact that you interact with things around in a way that radically constrains your choices, the fact that you have to heave overboard most of the possibilities to even sorta achieve one of them, the fact that  mortality is difficult, is precisely what makes the mortal experience necessary and good.

(more…)

The title is deliberately provocative, obviously, but there’s a real point there that came out in Sunday School.

4th Nephi through Mormon 6 makes very grim reading.  It’s more horrifying when you think that the Book of Mormon was written for our day, as Elder Bednar confirmed recently.  Here is the good news.  The end of the Nephites was and is awful but they also could have stopped it at any time.   They had multiple chances to repent.  If they had taken any one of the off-ramps they would have been fine.  Perhaps they could even have repented on the very morning of the last battle.  The tragedy of the Book of Mormon is the tragedy of the addict who doesn’t even enjoy the addiction any more but who just won’t stop.

Here’s a way of looking at it.  Suppose we had a book of scripture that was written about one particular person in Moses’ time who was bitten by a snake but refused to look at the brass serpent representing Christ because “of the easiness of the way.”  The book of scripture  could be pretty hard reading as it chronicled the person dying.  The wound turning black, the creeping paralysis, the person turning pale, the struggle to breathe, the death rattles.  It could be arbitrarily awful to read.  But the ultimate message, as applied to oneself, would still be optimistic.  All of this can be avoided if you just look.

That is essentially what we have in the book of Mormon chapters 1-6.

(more…)

Angel showed Soul the earth below where it would go and explained how life was in a body.  Soul in Body would be helpless and need to grow.  This would require food, which would require planting seeds and preparing the ground, and raising animals, and, oh,  a myriad of things.  And shelter!  And clothing!  And warding off dangers! And relearning the gospel and sociality and…. Soul began to weep.  It is too much, Soul said.  I am just a little soul.  How can I do so much?

O little soul, Angel said, you don’t have to.  You will have Parents.  They will give you food and shelter and teach you the gospel.  They will help you grow.

And so it happened.

Soul was now an Adult in mortality.  Soul looked around and wept.  I have to figure out food and shelter and clothing and safety for myself in these wild and unpredictable times, and courtship, and marriage, and I have to take care of children and raise them and I don’t know how.  It is too much.

Angel said, o little soul, it is too much.  It is impossible for you alone.  But you are not alone.  Christ will lead you.

The next night after dreaming about the drowning prophet, I had this dream.

It was on the huge capital city of a decaying interstellar empire. The capital itself was run down. It had grand old architecture and futuristic architecture too but it was subject to the late-stage processes of physical and moral decay we are all familiar with at that stage in a civilization. It was dirty.  It was shabby.

There were refugees. They were simple rural folk of the founding stock of the empire, perhaps even from elsewhere on the planet. They had fled their homes because of natural disaster and because of the devouring of all things that happens in decaying, corrupt polities. Like everyone and everything, they had gravitated to the imperial center.

I will pass on describing the atmosphere of the dream at this point, but it struck me immensely. The cobble stone streets, the stone and brick and stucco buildings rising many feet high only a step or two from the road. The heaps of trash. The gleaming metal arches crossing half the sky overhead. The broken drones. The sullen police standing by and staring vacantly at the middle distance.

The refugees were widely disliked by both the high and the low in the city and as the dream began a number of them were being casually chivvied through the nighttime streets by street gangs.

There was a man they were particularly after who had some sort of preeminence among the refugees, though he was also simple and uneducated.

Turning down one street he saw a door opening directly onto the street for a large imposing structure. Blank towering walls, fortress type architecture. His pursuers were close behind. He stepped in and the refugees with him came in also.

It was a college. Inside the door was a hall, the entrance area for the college, and it so happened that the dean of the college was standing there. The rural refugee and the dean recognized each other with some shock. Brother? Brother?  They were literal siblings.

(more…)

When I first heard this idea, I was horrified. Yet, even bad ideas in the hands of a talented author can be well written. Hollywood, in general, just isn’t well written.

What I imagine…

Young 15 year old Aragorn is pining after Arwen, and Elrond can see there are mutual feelings.

Elrond and Aragorn chat for a minute…

“Do you love her? She is a princess and she deserves a king.”

“I don’t know that I could become king. Or if I want to.“, Aragorn protested, more out of trying grasp the magnitude of this task, than genuine rejection.

“It is your gift, what some might call destiny. If you do not do it, you will feel dissatisfied all your life. It will weigh on you as a burden you can never put down. What was once fresh will become foul. If you are capable of it, and refuse, you curse yourself.

And I will not allow my daughter to marry someone who refuses to live up to his potential. I am not faulting your father’s. Their trials were different. But you can be king. You are the rightful king of Gondor.

Will you do what is necessary?”

“I really don’t know how.”

“No one can tell you how. That is your life’s work to figure that out.”

And with that, the difference between men and elves became immediately apparent. Aragorn wasted no moment. He devoured books and maps. He practiced sword play with Elladan and Elrohir. He learned all he could in Rivendell, until he knew what he had to do. A king could not stay safe within an Elvin kingdom all his life. He needed real experience. And he rode off into parts unknown, far lands where the stars are strange, among both noble barbarian kings and vicious savages, that even the Noldor knew little of.

For the love of an elven princess.

This is his tale.

The beasts were preparing for a great assembly at which to choose their next king.  The candidates were a lion or a wildcat.  One bird spent all its time for many months of its short life flying back and forth all over the wild telling every critter it could find that the wildcat was a menace to birdkind and all small things.  The assembly happened, and perhaps in some small part due to the bird’s efforts, the animals chose the lion.

The bird flew back to its favorite tree.  Safe–but with no nest, no mate, and no younglings.

The bird died sad with no descendants.

(more…)