This is a follow up to our recent post on Holy Madness, in which we discover it is all secretly a Christmas theme.

The god moved his arm and galaxies swayed.  He blinked and the universe shifted.  It expanded and contracted with his breath.  His light filled all space.

He smiled.

He said, “let there be a day and a night and a day without any darkness,” and it was so.  He said, “let there be a new star,” and it was so.  He said, “let there be choirs of angels singing,” and it was so.  He smiled wider, and the millions of trillions of stars shone brighter.

“And let me be a helpless baby,” and it was so.

Your time and attention is precious, especially at this time of year.  Whatever you spend on reading and commenting here, we are deeply grateful.

As is the custom, we have put up the Christmas page (see above) with a collection of stories and writings from past years.

Feel free to add your Christmas thoughts and wishes in the comments here.  You may also add your comments on any of the collection here also.

God bless you all.  Health and light to all.  Merry Christmas, friends!

(more…)

When I woke up there were gaps in what I could recall of the first part of the dream, but enough was left to be of interest.

In the dream my dad and brothers and me were down from our ranch in the Arizona mountains visiting some cousins out Phoenix way. First it was actual cousins, then we were visiting some dream cousins who were gods, which is less odd because we were the Norse gods, supreme among all the gods, and my dad was Odin (my actual real-life dad, he was Odin) and I was his heir, somewhere in the age range of 17 to mid-20s, the dream was a bit wobbly on the specifics.

So these cousins are acting a bit odd, there’s a bit of peculiarity involving something of ours that I can’t remember, and towards the end of our visit we are sitting around on cottonwood logs around the fire and their patriarch announces that they are taking over. They will be the supreme gods now. They have done something or other, or confiscated something or other of Odin’s, that means they have the whip hand now, and my dad observes wryly that that’s why they were doing the peculiar stuff earlier. We are still formidable so the patriarch says he’ll let Odin keep our ranch if we go peaceable and when the patriarch says he’s going to leave us with 15 of [x] (I really wish I could remember what [x] was) I angrily bid him up to 18 or there will be trouble. He isn’t real happy about it but accepts. Odin/my dad just watches.

My brother Thor (not one of my actual brothers–Thor, but in this dream Thor is my brother) is sitting among the cousins over on their side of the fire and my dad observes that it looks like they’ve got it all worked out so that when my dad passes on they can put Thor forward as the heir in my place and claim the ranch. Though, he observes, instead of running the ranch as sole owner Thor will at best be their Chief Minister of Finance. Thor nods and says that’s much better than nothing. (more…)

A coalition of several ant nests created a bioweapon–a highly contagious disease that could jump across species. At last, they believed, they would be able to wipe out their competition. While they themselves were also susceptible to the disease, they had discipline and social organization that other organisms lacked. They believed they would be able to impose hygenic measures and maintain a social focus on disease prevention that would largely protect them while animals perished.

Once the plague was operative, some animals did die. The main victims were the ants themselves. Not because of their susceptibility to disease, but because of their highly organized social nature. The combination of rigid adherence to rigid quarantine rules plus hysterical mass overcommitment to the goal of avoiding infection meant all the hives starved.

A man who read 30 minutes of scripture a day decided he could easily read 45, nay, 60 minutes a day.

One Sunday morning he forgot to set his alarm clock and woke up late.

He realized that his 60 minutes would mean being late to church. So he missed the sacrament that day.

Fully operational extended family.
That is all.

From “The False Gods We Worship,” Engsign, June 1976, Spencer Kimball, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:

“The Brethren constantly cry out against that which is intolerable in the sight of the Lord: against pollution of mind, body, and our surroundings; against vulgarity, stealing, lying, pride, and blasphemy; against fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and all other abuses of the sacred power to create; against murder and all that is like unto it; against all manner of desecration.

“That such a cry should be necessary among a people so blessed is amazing to me. And that such things should be found even among the Saints to some degree is scarcely believable, for these are a people who are in possession of many gifts of the Spirit, who have knowledge that puts the eternities into perspective, who have been shown the way to eternal life.

“Sadly, however, we find that to be shown the way is not necessarily to walk in it, and many have not been able to continue in faith. These have submitted themselves in one degree or another to the enticings of Satan and his servants and joined with those of “the world” in lives of ever-deepening idolatry.”

From “Statement on the Signing of the US Respect for Marriage Act”, December 13, 2022, Elder Jack Gerard, General Authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and currently Executive Director of the Church Communication Department, who participated in the celebratory White House signing of the Respect for Marriage Act:

“We extend a heartfelt thank you and our congratulations to all who played a part in the passage of the amended Respect for Marriage Act. Their efforts to protect religious freedom as Congress sought to codify the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision are both historic and commendable.

“The amended Respect for Marriage Act specifically recognizes that ‘diverse beliefs about the role of gender in marriage are held by reasonable and sincere people based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises.'”

“The Church has been pleased to participate with many others in the difficult but worthy work of civil engagement that accompanied the passage of this bill. Like the Church-supported Utah law in 2015, our efforts are helping the nation pursue freedom, fairness and respect for all.”

The villagers at the mouth of a deep defile watched with concern as it rained and rained and rained on the mountain. Years before a landslide had blocked the defile much further up but now water was building up and up and up behind it.

It occurred to a village genius to imitate the landslide. He told the other villagers to strew boulders in the defile to slow the rush when it came and to build a kind of lined channel in the landslide to at least put off the catastrophe. Meanwhile, he himself would build a second landslide. He called it a dam. He had the whole thing envisioned in his mind, the stone foundations thick and anchored into the surrounding rock, the combination of logs and earth, the diversions to allow a moderate flow through. But the foundations were very important, he believed, to hold the weight of the water. He spent a lot of time figuring them out and constructing them very carefully. When the villagers asked for help, he told them ‘not yet.’

Meanwhile the floods built up and scarcely had he finished his foundations but everything, foundation and village and all, were washed away.
(more…)

Hard to finish:

At an institutional level, we are creating a cursed generation of females expert at every imaginable permutation of sex with an infinite number of partners, while largely shunning the other thing, the main thing, the only thing still emitting any heat in the cold, merciless hearth of contemporary life: the dream of forming a family.

Exaggerated, I hope.

Preventing tyranny and oppression by removing the capacity for tyranny and oppression is just a microcosm of Satan’s plan, I realized. it is the same trick of eliminating the bad by eliminating capacity for anything, good or bad.

Which makes sense of a certain line in the temple that has always puzzled me.

A mouse fell into conversation with a stray heifer calf. “You cattle have your good points,” the mouse said, “but sometimes you aren’t always careful about watching where you step.”

The heifer calf was furious. “That’s not true, you liar. I hope you get crushed in the next stampede!” (more…)

To live with regret is to be whole.

tfw having beautiful meaningful experiences that can only be described with cheesy cliches

— ??? bosco ??? (@selentelechia) December 9, 2022

having beautiful meaningful experiences that can only be described with cheesy cliches

Reply — https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1601174924340887552

I wonder if this is an inescapable problem or if we just have no shared artistic vocabulary for it

Serious Artists are well acquainted with how it can go wrong from their own sordid personal lives, seemingly no familiarity with the joys

Most folks who come across this site probably think I’m nuts. Oh, that guy who rants about glory. Really over the top. Even some of our dear friends think I go a bit overboard at times.

I have been blessed with a family that hits real highs in domestic happiness. Sometimes the coziness is indescribable. In trying to make sense of it, I ultimately decided there was no way to do it without connecting it to the transcendent element: ineffable glory, worlds uncountable spilling like jewels through your fingers.

These are true stories, though only partly factual.

There once was a small rural post office. One day the local postman heard something faint in the wind blowing from the far off sea. “The true king has landed,” he said. He closed the post office, went home, grabbed his shotgun and his horse and his pack of hounds. He then went to the town police department and attacked it with a shout of ‘long live the king.’ After burning it down, he then rode to meet the true king out of the west with his hounds trotting alongside him. He was hundreds of miles away. Nothing daunted, he attacked little government offices along the way that did not proclaim their allegiance.
(more…)

Fall, friendly rocks

https://neal.fun/asteroid-launcher/