An overhead half a phone conversation between two girlchild cousins

Girl: We should be called the Aspen Unicorns!

…

Girl: OK, the Aspen Spies!  But for short just ass!

No one wants to be innocent but everyone loves innocence when they find it.

For no particular reason this time through the Book of Mormon my understanding has been particularly drawn to the historical  narrative of the Book of Mormon as an authentic ancient text.  In that light, I am increasingly convinced that what we have is an extremely typical rise-and-fall arc that many other cultures and civilizations have gone through.

We’ve already covered evidence that the Nephites had a ‘modernity.’  The evidence that they had a fall is blatantly obvious, no one will disagree with that.

But still it isn’t immediately apparent reading the text that we are going through an overall Rise-and-Fall arc and I think there are three reasons why.

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OK, maybe not, but also maybe.  I’m going to vent.

I’ve got a teenager or two at EFY right now.  Well, not EFY, the other one.  FSY.  One of my girls is a swimmer, pretty good at it despite the fact that her parents will not pay for camps or coaches or much travel or anything.  She just had a swim coach from out of state who was in town for another reason hear about her and ask to meet with her for free.  He gave her some extremely specific tips on her starts and her turns and some very specific practice routines to develop those tips.  She was excited.  That was last week.  Now she’s at FSY.  They have free time built into the schedule and are encouraged to use it for exercise among other things so no problem.  They are staying at a small college and the college’s pool happens to be across the parking lot from the dorm she’s in.  We looked up the lap pool hours and sent her with the cash and ID and everything else the pool wanted for general admission.  Some of the pool hours coincided with free time.  The first day she’s call us.  They won’t let me, she says.

So we call them.  Not permitted, they say.  Liability.  I roll my eyes.  Fine, can I just sent you permission in writing or is there some kind of form.  Nope, they say.  The Legal Department has forbidden it.  Your only choice is to withdraw her from FSY.  Then the camp director had the blasphemous insolence to tell us that our daughter would be blessed by the Lord for complying with the dictates of the Legal Department, God rot his tongue.

There is no God but liability and the legal department is his prophet.

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You don’t escape to Narnia

https://www.google.com/amp/s/mereorthodoxy.com/you-dont-escape-to-narnia

An interesting juxtaposition of CS Lewis’s Narnia vs more modern media, like Harry Potter or Les Grossman’s The Magicians.

Throughout the whole saga, one point is made piercingly clear. There is no sense in which one loses themselves in Narnia. One does not go to Narnia in order to explore, out of a sense of sheer curiositas. Instead, one is meant to find something there, something beyond and beneath the surface level of experience, and the physical limits of Narnia all exist in service of that pedagogical end.

…

Narnia, that is to say, is not an escape. By its nature, it cannot be. Rather, adventures in Narnia are conditioning experiences by which individuals come to see reality properly. As The Last Battle concludes in eschatological splendor, the faun Mr. Tumnus remarks to Lucy that “you are now looking at the England within England, the real England just as this is the real Narnia. And in that inner England no good thing is destroyed.”^[18] Exactly so.

…

Indeed, I get the feeling, that too much modern fictional media has a seemingly unlimited world, with stunted limited viewpoints, while Narnia is a deliberately limited small world, where the people come out with more expansive views. That in fact, was the reason the children came to Narnia in the first place.

Fantasy at its best (Lewis, Tolkien, etc) is not an escape. It is a preparation for the real world.

King Mosiah institutes the rule of the judges in about 90 BC or so.   He does it because he believes that it is less common for a majority of the people* to go wicked whereas a ruler like King Noah can certainly go wicked and then drag a bunch of people down with him.  Therefore King Mosiah believes it would be better to have a system where the people were formally the ultimate backstop.

By somewhere in the range of 40-20 B.C., the Nephite system of government is totally corrupt and the majority of the people support wickedness.    The number of chapters in Alma obscure for us how little time has passed.  50 to 70 years.

In contrast, after King Noah’s death his people quickly rebounded to righteousness.

The baptism of Limhi, by George Ottinger

There’s a puzzle there.

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This is difficult.  The normal way is to feel righteous anger and so forth.  But you need to be able to feel peace and love.

The ability to be able to participate in the Spirit while  nonconforming is essential to modern life.  I say that without exaggeration.  Essential.

On the sweetness…

A daughter gave me a neatly hand-lettered booklet with a handsewn binding that contained a guide to morse code.

My deacon gave me an arduino that he had programmed a morse code fathers’ day message into.

I painstakingly translated it with the help of the booklet.

The message was B O O G E R

I’m speaking in Church today (I volunteered) but I am not going to bother putting  the talk here because you are already familiar with it.

The point is to talk about why fathers matter, why its good to become a father, and then connect it to our divine father.  Getting to that point mostly involves doing a quick tour of JG highlights–

Unrighteous dominion bad means righteous dominion is good

conditional love/glory

God’s amusement in our prayers and in his guidance

Throw in some ranting about birthrates and how no precious moment will be lost, and that’s about it.

Several young architectural students were surveying a grand old building.  Mostly they were criticizing it.  They pointed out various real flaws here and there.  That window was misaligned.  That cornice was damaged.  They then went back to their school to resume drafting cheap McMansions to be built en masse on sandy soil.

But one student stayed behind.  He was starstruck.  “Look how solid those foundations, are!”  he said.  “This building can last forever.  Look how it was built to be easily repaired and even added on to!”

Some people say that the Book of Mormon makes an argument against racism. Others that it makes an argument against military defense (and for pacifism)  Not because it really says anything against them as such but because it shows them both turning out badly.
You could make the same case that the Book of Mormon is against democracy and religious freedom. Not that the Book of Mormon is against these things–its not, the text is strongly for them–its just that they don’t work out.

I am against all three arguments. If you are against racism, against war, or against democracy and religious freedom, it shouldn’t be because the Book of Mormon has a secret structural message against those things that the actual writers were not aware of.  But it is true that there’s an argument to be made from the Book of Mormon that none of these things work out.

So lets talk about democracy and religious freedom in the Book of Mormon, how they went wrong, and why.

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Certain “outward observances” are private by design.  It’s very hard to virtue signal or be conspicuous about them.

Hypocrisy is the vice of claiming a high degree of righteousness in public while excusing your black sins in private. Hypocrisy is a satanic parody of the virtue of upholding standards that you yourself fall short of. We call this the nameless virtue.

The virtue that is the opposite of hypocrisy is obvious. It’s where you do good in private so you don’t get social credit for it. Virtue non-signalling, we could call it. Christ was big on this virtue in the gospels. ‘that which do in secret your father will reward openly’ ‘let not your right hand know…”

Probably any type of virtue can be hypocrited, but the two classes of virtue are the most vulnerable. One is whatever type of virtues are involved with publicly signalling your allegiance to good stuff.  We don’t normally think of these as virtues because virtue signalling is so common in our world.  But there are virtues like that, they are just buried under the vice of virtue signalling.  The other one is when doing good requires outward observances, where virtue consists of identifiable acts that people can see.  This was the type of hypocrisy that the Pharisees embraced.  Super-large phylacteries, tithing their herb garden, etc.

It’s interesting that most of our restoration outward observances are things that naturally occur privately.  Wearing the garment, fasting, paying tithing, are all things that no one really knows whether you are doing it or not.  To an extent the same is true with sabbath observance and even with the Word of Wisdom.  Of all these I think garment wearing is particularly interesting.  It is *by design* private.  People can tell if you are not following the standards, but it is hard to tell if you are.  Wearing the garment is in a sense the opposite virtue to the nameless virtue.

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Ice gets less cold and less cold but is still ice. The changes are literally just a matter of degree. Than a degree or two more—and it is no longer ice. It’s water. That is called phase change.

You keep growing and changing throughout life, but sometimes you go through a phase change. A discontinuity. You look around at all the same things as before and recognize nothing.

Svalbard, Arctic Ocean.

The first time you go to school.

When you move out of the house.

When you marry.

Your first child.

And then as a parent you go through equal phase changes yourself when your children do these things, especially the first child. (more…)

Durn tootin‘

For behold, after the Lord God sent our first parents forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground, from whence they were taken—yea, he drew out the man, and he placed at the east end of the garden of Eden, cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the tree of life

-thus Alma 42:2

Drawing out is an interesting phrase.  It suggests getting someone who is shy or inert to participate in an activity.    For a tool, like a sword, it means getting it out to use.  In the sense that ‘drawing out’ means unsheathing the Lovely One thinks there may be a sexual metaphor or at least a reference to Adam and Even discovering their ‘nakedness.’

In the sense of ‘unsheathing a sword,’ there may be a small chiasmus

• he drew out
  • the man
  • he placed cherubim
• and a flaming sword.

I would love to know more.

By Frshanadu – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=112091294

When Adam and Eve were driven out, an angel in all his angelic ferocity was put to guard the tree of life so Adam and  Eve would not be cursed with undying mortality.  There is no record that the tree of life was barred to them before them.  So if they had already eaten the fruit of the tree of life, why would barring them after make any difference?  Why would shutting the barn door help when the horse is already out?

There are a variety of answers, but one answer is that the fruit of the tree isn’t just a one time thing.  You have to keep eating it.  So Adam and Eve were deathless only so long as they had continued access to the three.  Once the angel cut them off, their mortality became mortal.

We broke some new ground in our understanding of Lehi’s Dream this year.  Instead of the normal static interpretation we discovered that it was possible to view the dream as a series of vignettes all of which have the same point–you have to keep coming back to the source.  We discovered that the key difference between those who fall away from the tree in Lehi’s Dream and those who don’t is not whether they endure to the end but whether they enjoy to the end–in other words, whether they keep eating of the fruit after their first one.

Hmm.  Now isn’t that odd?  The tree of life in Lehi’s Dream and the tree of life in the Garden of Eden may both have as key features that to continue benefiting from them you have to continue partaking.  Since these are at least symbolically these same tree, it seems we may be on the right track.  These interpretations are mutally confirming.