BYU is a mess, too many of our people are enthusiastically chanting “four legs good, two legs better,” but I continue to think that far and away our biggest problem is that no one is getting married and no one is having kids.

The problems with our marriage markets are over-determined, but among them are that increasingly no one shows up to buy until 10 minutes before closing.

What our society calls early marriage isn’t.  But not putting off marriage is great.

cockiness distorts confidence.
cockiness contradicts humility.
timidity distorts humility.
timidity contracticts confidence.

-thus Bookslinger

I can’t upload images today for some reason. Otherwise, you’d see a virtue chart here.

But what is really interesting is the synthesis of the opposite virtues and the opposite vices.

Confident Humility sounds like a contradiction. So does Arrogant Timidity. But they are common enough that they are almost archetypes.

Perhaps this is what Helaman meant when he spoke of growing stronger and stronger in humility.

Bruce Charlton has a wonderful post on God’s purpose.

For me, now, this is the key to the specifically Christian concern with love; it is by love that unique individuals are able-to choose-to cooperate in harmony (as we can imagine would happen in an ideal family).

Culminating in this vision of eternity,

My favoured analogy for Heaven is with an idealised wholly-loving extended family of immortals; continually being added-to by new and unique people – by descent, marriage, adoption, and true-friendship; but always – because of their mutual love – working together, and cohering in their work; because they each work for each other, as-well-as for themselves.

As above, so below. Because that is also the ideal vision for this life. Penhurst the poem.

Ever larger, ever-loving, that is the formula.

but you should also read Bruce Charlton post for the intellectual tool of reverse causality. It is a potent form of inquiry.

Helaman 3 speaks of the Saints getting “stronger and stronger in their humility.” I’m sure the primary meaning is that they became more humble. But I also like to think that their humility made them strong.

Who is stronger, the man who boasts he doesn’t need to be planted to take a blow, or the man who looks for granite on which to brace his feet?

(Follow up: in Helaman 4, the people realize they have become militarily weak in their transgressions).

Vague or esoteric speech comes from a lack of confidence. Lack of confidence in oneself, lack of confidence in one’s listeners.

Often quite justified.

A boy was set to watch a flock. After awhile he saw a peculiar thing come creeping over the hill toward the flock.

It had a sheep’s skin and wool, slightly askew. But it walked strangely low the ground. There were glimpses of what seemed to be darker fur down below. It seemed to have sharp teeth. And its eyes were set straight ahead like a predator.

It’s hide could appear tilted a bit because of a spine condition, the boy reflected. The same spine condition could cause a peculiar walk. The darker fun could just be mud. The teeth, well, the animal is far away, perhaps I am mistaken. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if some few animals in the flock had far-away binocular vision like a predator the better to see predators sneaking up? Finally, who am I to judge? I must be charitable.

So,

“Sheep!” the boy cried.

A crow with a malicious twinkle in its eye suggested to a goat kid that it come play in some sewage run-off.

“But that’s sewage,” the kid said.

“Look on the bright side,” replied the crow.

“Well . . . it’s organic, and mostly water. I’d be 80% bathing in a stream. This is fine!” And in the kid went.

Moral: The wise man looks on the bright side of circumstances he cannot help. The fool looks on the bright side of circumstances he can.

This is how Hell Works–you cling to your sins so tightly that you think of them as part of yourself and you make enemies of the people who want to free you.

-thus J. Bennett

There is an interesting passage in the Screwtape letters about folks who don’t think their appetites for food are disordered because instead of eating hyper quantities of food they are just hyper particular about the foods they eat. Vegans, basically.

Remember, appetites are good.

Babies won’t wait.

A feisty essay by a mother of 5.  Hardly a line it that I do not wish I had wrote.

For example,

There is no political ideology more vibrant these days than the baby-hating anti-natalist movement. It is pure No Lives Matter nihilism, dedicated to stopping humans from reproducing. It goes beyond abortion, even. Terminating children already in the womb is messy. This movement instead wants to convince you never to have them, and if you must, no more than 1.5. They wish to arrest potential children—those not yet conceived, the souls who exist as hazy figments in God’s imagination—from being willed into being.

 

It’s all the predictable result of 50 years of dual-income economic policies, anti-family social norms, abortion on demand, birth control pushers hooking prepubescents on the Pill, and climate harpies who see each baby as just another unwanted carbon footprint.

 

If you dare to visit mainstream millennial social media, like TikTok, you will encounter an army of self-sterilizing lunatics who shout their abortions, peddle their sex show livestreams, and brag about how many SSRIs they take. These young people, mostly girls, have been brainwashed into committing genetic suicide.

 

Even worse, they do it with joy. They are following the Pied Piper of Despair right over the cliff, along with the babies they’ll never have.

(more…)

It is with great whatchamacallit that I can report that yours truly has a spot of a gig with the Biden campaign.  They want ol’ Bertram as a speech consultant thingummy.  They put it to me that I was positively known for my lucidity and gift of blarney and all that, the words positively flying from my lips like bread from the hand at a Drones’ Club dinner.  “What ho!” said I, “I accept.  Dashed humbled and honored, you know the the thing.”

This post is about sex.

Specifically, a concept called activation.

(This is a dry post.  Not a titillating post.  But use judgment if the post is not for you.)

The flesh has its hormones and its natural drive for sex, sure.  But its a mistake to think that sexual desire is just some kind of purely natural phenomenon.  Instead, sexual desire is often activated.

Activation means that thinking about sex, seeing reminders of sex, being exposed to pre-sexual activity or to stimulants, make you feel more sexual desire.

To an extent, sexual desire is like static electricity.  The charge comes from somewhere. (more…)

In which I offend my friends…

You’ve heard the parable of the brass serpent. Now hear the parable of Disney+.

(more…)

I have just crossed a kind of threshold into middle age.

We were water fighting in the front yard on Saturday.  And I saw a weed and I stopped to pull it out. And I saw a dry spot and I stopped to water it.

Lord, preserve me from myself.

The mind sin-stocked on every shelf.

The smug and imbecilic grin

Within.