Your world is dark.

Perhaps it was always dark.  You only see colors, if at all, in weird flashes in dreams.

Perhaps it came on you. You can still remember the light.

But  now you are blind.  Your eyes stare without sight.

There are compensations–your other senses get sharp  There are kindnesses.  But this is a world for those that can see.  Every hour, every day, you are blind and need help or to live in a rigid constraint.  Perhaps you are cheerful about it.  Perhaps not.  But if you could, you would see.

You cannot.

And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways

There once was a rabbit whose sire was named Recklessness and whose dam was named Cowardice.  Now in that warren at that time the weasels and other predators became so numerous and  bloodthirsty that the rabbits determined to leave.  They set out into the unknown forest but by ill chance a band of wolves came across their scent and started to follow them.  The rabbits fled in good order until they came to raging water flowing through steep and rocky banks.  They were almost in despair, because the wolves were not long behind, until one of the chief rabbits found a log laying across the rush of the waters.  It was narrow and uneven and wet, and rabbits were not climbers and balancers by nature, but the chief rabbit thought that by courage it could be done.  He cajoled the other rabbits and one by one they made the frightful attempt.  All except the rabbit whose sire was named Recklessness and whose dam was named Cowardice.  With great gasping breaths and wide staring eyes he sat immobile, frozen with fear.  The chief rabbit pled with him, bumped him, whispered love and affection and courage to him, but still he sat frozen, until in a few minutes the wolves came and the chief rabbit had to dash for the log and barely escaped with his life.

When the wolves came, the frightened rabbit fled madly, blindly, off the edge of the bank and plunged into the frothing current below, where he died.

The name of the rabbit was Panic.

When you are used to being clean, and you are dirty.  It gnaws at you.

When you are used to being attractive, and you are now scarred, or fat, or disfigured.

When you were never used to these things, but  you have always been scarred, or fat, or disfigured.   You see the thousand subtle ways people treat you differently without even realizing it.  Sometimes with kindness, but still treating you differently.  You are mostly used to it, but sometimes it stabs.

Sometimes you are invisible.  Sometimes you are acutely visible.  It hurts.  You find refuge in being alone or in being online or in charm and accomplishment.

he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.

My mother once observed she really didn’t understand the Doctrine of the Family. Please understand, I am the eldest of eight. And my mother is no doctrinal lightweight. It was real life and experience and problems that showed her the Primary-level version of the doctrine, that we sometimes teach, needs more depth. 

So why do certain people come to certain families? People of unlike skills and even unlike spiritual sensitivities. Is this arbitrary, or are people placed there on purpose?

There are families where a single theme dominate, like families of lawyers or doctors. There are even families of mathematicians, like the Bernoulli’s. There are some advantages to specialization. But I see more families with a spread of talents and abilities, temporal and spiritual. 

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(Bad) Romantic Comedy idea.

Man sees beloved masculine movie franchise turned into feminist woke garbage and gets angry. He decides he wants revenge. So he starts turning female movies into male movies.

Jane Austin, but with Martial Arts.

Sex and the City, but the main characters are now vampires. Plot changes less than you would think.

The anticipated sequel to The Devil Wears Prada, now includes the Three Stooges.

Thelma and Louise 2: Driving Lessons

Woman retaliates by trying to change the protagonist and enemy of the Aliens movie into a female. Also make it a thinly veiled allegory about men being raped. Maybe get Signorney Weaver to star in it.

With the addition of a third California native to the Quorum of the Twelve following the death of Jeff Holland, there are now five members of that quorum who were born in Utah. Looking at how that parameter has varied over the decades, the first native Utahn called to the Twelve was Heber J. Grant in 1882. A year before that Orson Pratt died, the last remaining of the Twelve called in 1835 with Thomas B. Marsh, Brigham Young, et al. (more…)

There once was a man who had a cancer of the throat.  Afterwards, he discovered that his voice was raspy and if he talked too much at a time, he got hoarse and eventually couldn’t talk at all for awhile.

He went to the doctor.  The doctor told him that this condition was permanent.  He would always be like this.  “Just don’t use your voice much,” the doctor said.  “Rest it a lot.”

But much of the time, the man kept talking until he went hoarse.

When asked why,  he replied, “voices are talking.  If I don’t talk, what am I resting my voice for?”

Economic laws would tell you focus on developing your strengths.  Your comparative advantage.  And,  indeed, that is often a good idea.

But in the long run, specializing is terrestrial.  Improving your weaknesses can be just as valuable, and more satisfying.  Everything you have is part of you and meant to be used.

Subtle Shift in Genesis, reading between the lines

There is a subtle change as you read Genesis, where the Gospel as revealed to Adam goes from a known thing for all nations, where they all know the prophets, even as they slide into idolatry, to one where the Gospel is unknown, and every nation just does their own thing, with their own gods. Abraham and Israel become the focus of covenantal knowledge and revelation.

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There are some scriptures and other sources which suggest that our first parents really did sin (or transgress).  At least, that there may have been a better way to do what they were trying to do.

I think the sin of the Fall may have been thinking that since it had to be done, it must be possible to do it.

Like, you are on a high mountain and you have to get down.  You notice there is high avalanche risk but you can’t think of any other way to get down.  So–this is human nature–you assume it must be possible.  It isn’t.

Down you go, and down goes the avalanche.

The sin of many Christians is different, though.  It is to take the Fall as an instructive story about how we are to behave.  As if it were primarily a moral lesson.  “Watch where you step,” they say.  “Speak softly.  You don’t want to trigger an avalanche.  That’s avalanche behavior, bro, that’s what got Adam and Eve in trouble.”

But the avalanche already happened.  We are born in the avalanche.  The avalanche is still roaring down.  As anyone knows in our moments and days and seasons of despair and frustration and sickness and evil.  We are being tossed in the air and then buried again under tons of plummeting snow.

A vice pair, from a reader:

and when I speak the word of God with sharpness they tremble and anger against me; and when I use no sharpness they harden their hearts against it; wherefore, I fear lest the Spirit of the Lord hath ceased striving with them.

–Moroni 9:4

–with sharpness, they tremble and anger

–with no sharpness, they harden their hearts

They respond to pointed rebukes by getting mad at the rebuker – ‘how dare you talk to me this way’

But if someone tries a gentler approach they ignore it, laugh ‘em off.

they have made themselves impervious to criticism and therefore to improvement.  Being unable to progress is the definition of damnation.

A lot of popular modern psychotherapy is designed to achieve damnation as far as I can tell.  There is a non-damnable version of “learning to love myself” but that version doesn’t seem to be what’s often on offer.

A man stood on a peak at sunrise.  He saw the world turn pink before him and then the pure radiance of the sun warm his cold.

The man stood there all day long.

The man stood on the peak at sunset.  He saw the world turn yellow and gold, then slowly fade into a turquoise at the horizon.

When it was dark, an angel came down to him.  “Choose,” the angel said.   He gestured east with his left hand and west with his right.

“It is too hard,” the man said.  He climbed back down the mountain and went home.

Your spirit and your body are dying all the time.

It struck me recently that there are some pretty strong parallels between the 4th Article of Faith and the traditional schematic of the Plan of Salvation

Faith –> Premortal Life   We don’t have experience, we have to take the plan and basically everything else on trust

Repentance –> Mortality  A time of change and growth

Baptism –>  the Spirit World  A spiritual state after symbolically or literally dying

the Gift of  the Holy Ghost –> the Three Degrees of Glory the presence of a member of the Godhead

Bonus step below the fold (more…)

There is a well-known literary device in Hebrew called a merism. A merism expresses two extremes in order to signify the whole range between them. When Christ calls Himself Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, He is not limiting Himself to those endpoints but claiming everything they encompass.

In my study of Isaiah, I began to notice that this meristic logic often operates beyond the phrase or verse level. Frequently, a text presents two bounded domains, and then follows them with a third unit that does not introduce a new idea, but enacts what the first two already defined.

The third unit is not a summary. It is not a synthesis. It is the first lived traversal of the space the merism establishes.

When a meristic pair is followed by such a realizing unit, I refer to the pattern as an Extended Merism. When this occurs across chapters or major literary blocks, I refer to it as an Extended Architectural Merism.

This framework clarifies a question that has generated an extraordinary amount of unnecessary speculation: why do we have two creation accounts?

Rather than multiplying theories, we can observe the structure.

This pattern is present in Genesis, but it is far clearer in the Book of Moses. The Book of Abraham employs a different meristic axis, but preserves the same underlying logic.

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For awhile I have been dissatisfied with the conventional LDS schematic for the plan of salvation.  It’s missing the stage of bodily innocence.  In time (and in the temple) that’s Eden.  In our lives its childhood. Christ’s commandments to become as a little child and the temple both tell us that this is an important stage.  So important that many many souls are allowed to skip their mortal existence as adults, but are not allowed to skip being a child.

I now see that if we take the ‘premortal existence’ to mean our existence before we are accountable mortals, our schematic does account for the stage of innocence in the body.  The pre-earth life is the pre-existence of the spirit, and childhood is the pre-existence of the body and soul.

Ideally the pre-earth life ends with a decision to go down into death, and ideally so does the pre-adult life into the waters of baptism.