Inasmuch as ye are not guilty of the first offense, neither the second, ye shall not suffer yourselves to be slain by the hands of your enemies.

–Alma 43:46

This is a game theory strategy.  In fact, it is the winning game theory strategy for a repeat prisoners’ dilemma.

The prisoners’ dilemma goes like this.  Two guys get nabbed.  The cops separate them and try to get them to confess.  If neither talks, they both get light sentences.  If only one talks, the other gets a heavy sentence and the crook who turned gets off scot free.  If both talk, they both get heavy sentences.

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because there were no more Calvin and Hobbes

The Books of Mosiah and Alma are this time of great cultural ferment that I’m calling Nephite Modernity.

Something odd I’ve just noticed.  The phrase “wives and children,”  “our wives and our children,” “their wives and their children,” shows up 20 times in the Book of Mormon.  16 of those times are in Mosiah and Alma.  1 is in Mormon, 1 in is 3 Nephi, and 2 are in Ether.

You: What does it mean, G?

G: I don’t know what it means, you.

It does reinforce the idea that the Mosiah-Alma era is a distinct era.  It also makes me wonder if  the translation of the Book of Ether is responsible for this phrase taking off with the Nephites.

Trials are the journey, not the destination.

Perfection is the destination, not the journey.

This misery will not last.  This imperfection will not last.  You are immersed in them now only so you can move beyond them.  You have to be immersed so that they can transform you enough.

We say that mortality means death–everything ends.  This is true.  But the other key feature of mortality is immersion.  We experience something called the Present as if it were Eternity.  This is an incredibly valuable opportunity to try out different things–to know good and evil from the inside the way the gods do.

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An interesting article I was linked recently about Israeli TFR (decent) has led to some speculative, preliminary thoughts on why the LDS TFR is what it is (bad).

First of all, don’t just accept everything the article says, at least when applied to non-Israeli fertility.  I’m just using it as a jumping off point to look at various explanations folks have offered for low fertility and see whether they apply to us.  This is more an attempt it is to find possible causes than it is a call for action.  Just because something is a root cause doesn’t inherently mean that it ought to be fixed or can be fixed.

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Alma’s approach with his wayward son is interesting.  He doesn’t just teach doctrine alone. He doesn’t just rebuke alone.

He starts specific:  identifies the sin, rebukes it, and discusses the consequences.  He also discusses the specific doctrine.  Fornication and harlotry is a great sin and will lead to damnation is not repented of.  He then spirals out to more general doctrine about the resurrection, choice, and agency.

I liked it.

This blog will never be a popular Come Follow Me site. What people understandably want is a site that gives them cool insights when they are reading the material. But I get most of my insights in Sunday School when we are discussing the lessons from the last two weeks, or even in the days after when I am thinking about the Sunday School conversation. I believe that there is an intensification of the available spiritual insight as more and more of the Saints simultaneously turn their attention to a subject.

So here goes, thoughts and comments on the part of the Book of Mormon you are no longer reading.

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As you  know, I am reading the Book of Mormon this year in light of Lehi’s Dream.  My main insight from Lehi’s dream is that it describes an iterative process where people take of the fruit repeatedly, and where many of the images in the dream are actually repetitions of the same process of coming to Christ over and over again in an upward spiral.

So it was interesting to have a belated insight about Alma’s seed in Alma 32–a chapter with obvious connections to Lehi’s dream since Alma describes the ‘fruit’ of the successful seed with references to the fruit in Lehi’s Dream.

Here is the belated insight–Alma is also talking about an iterative repeated process.  That’s evident for two reasons.  First, he says that when you cease to have faith that the seed is good because you know it is, you still need to nourish the ‘tree.’  Second, in Alma 32:34, when someone reaches a stage of knowledge he doesn’t say that their faith goes away.  He says it becomes dormant, i.e., waiting for the next time you need it.  Dormant and dead and done are not the same thing.

Actually, the reign of the judges did, title deliberately eyecatching.

I continue to reel from my realization this time through the Book of Mormon that switching from the kingship to the judgeship was a disaster that resulted in stacks of corpses year after year after year.  (Which is not the same as saying it was wrong, Mosiah was in a genuinely tough spot and perhaps there was a window for a better response that key people chose not to take.)  But setting aside any moral judgment it was just a disaster in fact and a case could be made that the entire destruction of the Nephite people hundreds of years later was just the result of the judgeship (it’s not a slam dunk case because of the supervening Savior, but the argument would be something like Judges–>Gadiantons–>rot of Nephite culture that revived after the Savior’s influence wore off.  I’ll sit down to think about it more seriously at some point.)

Anyhow, these were my thoughts in the dark.  It’s 3 AM and I’m lying in the dark trying to solve the problems of a foreign culture 20 centuries in the past.  What my brain is telling me is that what the reign of the judges really needed was a king.  It was an experimental system and it really needed someone running the experiment.  The judge couldn’t be that person because the judge was a product of the system.  It needed Eternal Mosiah.

I am impressed with how much truth Alma 32:32 packs into a simple sentence.

Therefore, if a seed groweth it is good, but if it groweth not, behold it is not good, therefore it is cast away.

There’s nothing in there about whether the seed is unblemished or whether it might need some pruning when it grows, or suffer some partial dieback at one point.  Nothing at all.  If it grows, its good.

Perfection is the destination, not the journey.  Enjoy the journey.

Salt Lake announced a BYU medical school.  Good.  I love the ambition.

unlike many medical schools, the BYU medical school will be focused on teaching with research in areas of strategic importance to the Church

On the sweetness of Mormon life.

Your speaker at Church is a hardbitten, no-nonsense type who just got back from 6 months of hardbitten, no-nonsense type highly paid contract work in an African country where the Church has no presence (and is not allowed to).  To take the sacrament, he had to get permission from a branch president in another country several hundred miles away using WhatsApp and Google Translate.  Saturday mornings he read the Bible with a 7th Day Adventist fellow contractor.  Sundays he sang hymns, blessed his own sacrament, then had “2 Apostles speek at every meeting.”  He said he had a favorite picture from his trip he wanted to show us.  It was a picture of a white plate with a rip of bread on it, a white teacup with water, both on a white napkin.  He started to cry.

You are singing Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee and idly check the notes in the footer.  Translated in the 1800s from a medieval text by St. Bernard of Clairvaux.  The weight of years comes crashing down you, hundreds of years between you and the translation, hundreds more years to the monk in his cell, and a thousand years from him to Christ, like you are looking down the wrong end of the telescope.

The sun hasn’t quite set on America’s vacation from history but for  Alma, as for many souls throughout the history of mankind, mass death was a reality.

And from the first year to the fifteenth has brought to pass the destruction of many thousand lives; yea, it has brought to pass an awful scene of bloodshed.

And the bodies of many thousands are laid low in the earth, while the bodies of many thousands are moldering in heaps upon the face of the earth

–Alma 28

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I do not recommend.

It starts out winsome.  Extremely winsome.  A cozy alternate history where England is still half-medieval, half-Victorian.  Ornate trains whisk sturdy yeomen over Channel-spanning bridges on pilgrimages to Rome.  Diplomats gather to pay their respects to England’s fallen king as the sung notes of the funeral mass soar in a time-hallowed cathedral.  (The protagonist is one of the choir boys singing said funeral  mass)

It’s fun.

But the one thing you can’t have in a mid-century novel is fun.

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