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%.

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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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I just came across another instance of that old feminist cliche–wives are basically prostitutes because … sex!

Roll, mine eyes.  Anyone who has followed our virtue chart work knows that many vices are simply distortions of virtues.  That is  not a truth we have discovered.  The devil being God’s ape was a commonplace for thousands of years in antiquity and Christendom, so how can moderns . . . ok, now I see the problem.

The bottom line is that in the nature of things we should absolutely expect that there will be wicked versions of the greatest goods.  This should not shock us at all.  Sometimes it is only a hairs breadth of difference that separates shining glory from slimy abomination.  Prostitution is a soullless, sad, commercialized abomination of the glorious carnality and celestial interdependence of married life, which in no way tells us anything about married life.

Yet  you see this error all over the place, perhaps deliberately.

Wives are like prostitutes, so being a wife should be abolished.

Leaders are like tyrants, so reject all authority.

Manhood is like barbarianism, so do away with  manhood.

Anarchic rebels are like free citizens, so eliminate free citizens.

Mindless obedience and sterile conformity are bad,  so don’t obey ever and try hard not to fit in

Whole philosophies are just that stupid.

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Still beautiful after all these years.

Old Glory

Let’s do the usual JG thing and get unnecessarily nerdy and analytical and hopefully ending up in unexpected, beautiful territory.  Specifically, let’s talk about what it is people point to to justify their love of their country.  True, no reason is necessary–it is your country, that is reason enough.  But the reasons are still valid and therefore interesting.

I recently read a great Spanish novel from the midcentury that has a lot of Spanish and Catalan patriots talking about their patriotism, so the subject has been on my mind.  Their way of talking about their countries is pretty different from ours.

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In a land of sudden rains and roaring floods, the authorities were charged with supervising dams, baffles, culberts, channels, and so on to prevent the worst of the floods.

The flood authorities were troubled by some who ignored their advice and plans. These people built culverts or filled channels to suit their own convenience.

Where the authorities were most ignored was when they asked people to manage their own property in specific ways to cut down on run-off or to make individual houses more flood proof.

The authorities often had to remind the people of the need for obedience and not doing their own thing. The more public-spirited among the citizens encouraged each other also to heed the flood authorities.

One day there was a horrible storm. (more…)

This is another attempt to approach the gospel stories as something that were actually happening, not as Scripture.   I’ve tweaked some details to better capture the feel of it.

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(Inspired probably by @JRC and Bishop T.D. Jakes).  I dreamed I was on flat stone platform at the top of a low ziggurat, or later the stand in a church.  It was both in the dream.

With the stand with me were priests in black robes, or later preachers in 19th C. black.  They were both in the dream.

But whether seated in the congregation or standing in the square in front of the ziggurat, the audience was the same throughout.  Standard American.

It began with a young priest/preacher haranguing the crowd.

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Elder Bednar spoke in conference on the theme of the Savior saying “Abide in Me, and I in Thee.”

One of the men in my quorum was pretty touched by it.  He said he knew he was supposed to get closer to Christ but it was pretty moving that Christ also wanted to get closer to him.  Big truck, soft heart.  He said he loves coming home and people meet him at the door, or the little ones run out into the yard.

I thought of that prodigal son painting, where the father has run out onto the road.

I have a particular for thinking that going to heaven will be going home in just that way.  In the words of the old song, “we will all come out to greet you when you come.”

When we say “heaven is our home,” we are not primarily making a doctrinal point but a phenomenological one.

We were talking about Isaiah proclaiming woe for those who call sweet bitter and bitter sweet and somehow the conversation revealed that we had opposite interpretations of this passage from Lehi

15 And to bring about his eternal purposes in the end of man, after he had created our first parents, and the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, and in fine, all things which are created, it must needs be that there was an opposition; even the forbidden fruit in opposition to the tree of life; the one being sweet and the other bitter.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/2-ne/2?lang=eng

I interpreted the tree of life as sweet and the tree of knowledge as bitter.  She interpreted them the opposite. (more…)

You are commanded to become as a little child.

You are also commanded to be great,  impossibly great, as great as Christ.  Be ye therefore perfect.

These commandments do not contradict.  They are one commandment.

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