Just as there are some ways in which faith seems to be a fluid or a type of electromagnetic field (and glory too), some parts of the scriptures sound like they are talking about magic, especially involving blood. Most but not all in the Old Testament.
Here is the scripture I just ran across that made me think of it. (more…)
I know this is a contradiction in terms, but even so I want an organized Calvinball League my kids could go to.
They’d go for water balloons and doggerel and get scores that were incommensurate with each other, meaningless but still somehow meaningful and to be treasured.
Here’s a half-baked line of inquiry.
Before we do, we might want to say where this blog is at with respect to the gospel. The normal run of LDS online presence is either faith-promoting, faith-doubting, or for the rare neutralish account, faith-debating.
Faith promoting is selling the gospel and sharing testimony. Sometimes, though less often, apologetics.
Faith-doubting is often the opposite. At best airing grievances and trying to sell alterations to the gospel and at worst just anti.
Faith debating means pros and cons. These kinds of accounts are rare because most people don’t have the temperament for it in the first place and those who do don’t long halt between two opinions. Sooner or later they come down on one side of the debate.
The Junior Ganymede is usually faith promoting. Our readers don’t always realize it because we aren’t the normal run of faith promoting blog. We don’t sell. We don’t try hard to mimic the focus tested output of the PR department because we don’t have to. We don’t have a world wide audience of millions of ordinary people where everything we say is put under a microscope by unfriendly media, thank goodness. Ordinary faith promoting material doesn’t often come in the guise of comic light poetry. Our sweetness material is faith promoting, though that’s not exactly why we do it. Sometimes we find areas where some members have got themselves into knots, or areas of gospel conundrums, and find out how resolving those can bring us back to the abundant beauty the gospel was meant to be. Sometimes we explore the gospel, trying to recast or recapture it so people an experience the awe as if for the first time.
Which brings us to the last and most unusual thing this blog is. We are faith exploring and faith compatible. We start with the gospel as a premise and then work out from there. We take secular concepts and see where they intersect the gospel. What if we look at this doctrine from a new angle? What if brainstorm the way these two different experienced truths can both be true? Instead of trying to get you to believe, here we take it for granted that you already do and then try to advance the ball. We try to avoid arid intellectual theories. We are exploring implications of the gospel that should be deeply meaningful and life changing. At the same time, we are not the gurus on the mountain top. We are at best the gurus who are climbing the mountain ourselves. We aren’t delivering final revelations. You must approach these explorations like you do when reading the best books like Jospeh Smith said. Be discerning, follow the spirit, pick and choose what is appropriate for you where you are at, notice when your spirit soars in delight, notice when the voice within says, “well reasoned, fellas, plausible, but it just ain’t so.” Sometimes you might say, rightly, what the heck.
Today’s actual post is going to seem like a comically tiny afterthought in comparison to all this prologue. We thought the prologue here was worthwhile because one of the half-baked idle speculations assumes that the Church has some of the limits of ordinary human institutions. We think this assumption is compatible with the gospel and with our belief that the Church is true. Just like spirits and revelations can come to frail mortal bodies with diseases and weaknesses, truths and priesthood are housed in mortal institutions that have, sometimes, some of the same challenges and capacities ordinary institutions do.
Here’s our promise to you.
First, feel free to rebuke us at any time. All corrections gratefully accepted. When we see good saints and others concerned for our welfare, it makes us love them and it makes us feel loved.
Second, if you want to know how something or other is compatible with our belief in the gospel and the church, ask us. We will be happy to answer. (more…)
The Prophet Nephi applied this chapter to the Book of Mormon, and that is it’s best and most significant fulfillment. But I would also suggest a wider interpretation also. This chapter is about rediscovering the scriptures (v. 1-14), and how the Holy Scriptures will transform the world (v. 15-24).
Nephi expands on this chapter, in 2nd Nephi 27, but I will leave that alone for now. But this is important for understanding. I used the Book of Mormon text and JST here, with textual clarifications. Nephi’s recording should be used with caution, because his explanation is clearly interpolating. What he says is true and important, but not all of it is the original text.
I dreamed that preparatory to a long drive, I did some internet research and discovered a big discount food warehouse along the way. I stopped off to get supplies. I shopped there, read the signs, picked up items, returned some, went up and down most of the aisles, then checked out. That was the dream. There were no jumps, symbols, or background knowledge like you usually get in dreams.
In a certain kingdom, in the court of the king, there was an enchanted bell of old bronze that rang only when a great tragedy had culminated.
One day it rang. As it deep tones were still fading, two scribes of the court pressed a tuning fork to it. The vibrations still in the bell set the tuning fork aquiver. They then took the Book of the Bell and set forth.
Their task was to find the tragedy and record it in the book. The tuning fork was their instrument to find it. It rang truer in the direction they should go. (more…)
There is a parable called Dives about a rich man (unnamed) and a beggar named Lazarus. The beggar begs for scraps from the rich man’s table. Then they die and the roles are reversed. The rich man in hell begs for a drop of relief from the beggar in paradise. Which is refused. The rich man then (this seems noble of him, actually) asks that Lazarus be sent to the rich man’s brothers, so that seeing one risen from the dead they would believe and not end up in hell. Abraham in heaven retorts that the brothers already have the law and the prophets. They don’t believe those witnesses, so they wouldn’t believe Lazarus risen from the dead. Luke 16:19-31.
Is this the only parable with a named individual in it? Every other parable I can think of just has types. “A certain rich man,” “servants,” “the sowers.”
Why this one parable with a name in it? (more…)
When you feel guilt, there is no way to know whether it’s good guilt or bad.
It depends on what you do with it.
For a long time I was not happy with the common explanations of what faith was. They either seemed to describe a weird exercise in willpower where you tried to make yourself believe something really intensely because you felt you ought to; a statement that you believed something despite having no good reason to; or hoping or wanting something to be true and therefore trying it out, which was a definition that made sense, but which wasn’t any different from ‘hope.’
The scriptures and the prophets don’t have to use terms with a precise constant definition, especially because we are working with truths that are probably at least a little beyond us all. But for my own purposes, I wanted to have a meaning I could get. I also wanted to know what faith felt like from the inside. What feeling or experience that I had had was “faith”? If this doesn’t make sense to you, my amigos, sorry, but I never claimed to have a standard issue personality type.
I eventually hit on two ways to understand faith that made sense to me.
Some time ago I listened to a podcast on the conundrum (from a certain point of view) between our lowliness before God and our own desire for more and greater things for ourselves which desire we sense in some aspect is right. Put crudely, whose kids are these? Is God their Father or am I?
The man thought the answer was stewardship. We possess what we possess as stewards for the owner and thus we and God both have them in some sense.
There is some scriptural basis for this idea. I don’t like it all the same. I wrote in my notes, similitude, not stewardship.
These relationships we form here are not just on someone else’s behalf. They are not even practice. The relationships we make are the foundation of eternity.
Sonship, not stewardship.
The blessing of burden
Lowing, the oxen
pull steadier with the load
Amigos, Mike Fink here to let on to an entirely natcheral moment o’ doubt. Yep, some fellers are inveterate boasters but Mike Fink don’t cotton to none o’ that. I hold strictly to the dadgum provable truth, yessir, my Daddy was George Washington and my mother was a geometric proof and I’m 150% factual, I cain’t nohow tell a lie.
It is therefore in the intrists of exactitudinous precisement and muh congenital humilities that I fess up that the US government has challenged me to a fecklessness contest, and I am in no ways sartin that I will win the whole shooting match. It will take a powerful lot of preparation.
At a certain dinner the host said that he would soon be going on a journey and therefore meant to lay his hands on a good walking stick.
A guest congratulated his host on his good luck. By chance the guest was something of an expert on the subject of walking sticks and could put his host in the way of acquiring an excellent specimen. (more…)
Matthew 19:
20 The young man saith unto him, All these things have I kept from my youth up: what lack I yet?
21 Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.
22 But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.
23 ¶ Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven.
24 And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
Sunday School didn’t work quite like I imagined. (more…)