Deacon G. read the book of Acts almost as many times as he read the War Chapters.

Peter and the boys are heroes. They have dramatic confrontations where they drop one-liners, mass conversions . . .

. . . heck, they’re superheroes. Fire comes down from heaven. Angels waltz them out of jail. (more…)

It’s a Christian commonplace that the devil is God’s ape.  He imitates what God does, badly.   We Saints learn this in the temple.

Given this, what should Christians make of the devil’s offer to Adam and Eve that if they follow him by disobeying god, they would “become as gods, knowing good and evil”?  If he is offering to them that he will make them semi-gods, of what divine offer is this the pale shadow?

You know.  Becoming gods.  Being Gods with God.

Speaking of deification, I was thinking recently of the beatific vision at the end of the Divine Comedy.  It’s not just looking at God like a a gawker.  Its communion with Him.

I have come to think that any real communion means becoming as He is.  You cannot commune with what you are not.

This is the beatific vision.

Chapter 28 & 29 were comprised of three sections. Each of these sections has a corresponding section in 30-35. This chapter corresponds to the same section as Ch. 28 and we see a lot of callbacks to that chapter. Both chapters deal with the rejection of God’s word (28:9-10; 30:9-12), rejecting the rest God offers (28:12; 30:15), seeking false security (28:15; 30:2-3), the discernment of God (28:26,29; 30:18). The purposeful farmer of 28:23-29 with his plowing and harvesting, corresponds to the destruction and punishment (30:12-17) and redemption (30:18-27).

Likewise, Ch. 31-32 corresponds the first part of Ch. 29, including the verse about “a marvelous work and a wonder” and the end of Ch. 29 corresponds to Ch. 33-35. So if you enjoyed Ch. 29, you have more to look forward to.

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This post starts with a dream I had about being an Inkling, and ends with I don’t know what.

For those who are not full blown sufferers of Anglo-Catholic Fiction Disorder, the Inklings were an informal discussion group with Lewis and Tolkien and a number of others at various times.

I dreamed I was ripped through time and woke up in the Oxford area in the 30s.

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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%.

***

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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