One of our friends has a light review of Ender’s Game.    Some good incisive points and you should read it.

There are two main claims I’d like to make.

1.  None of the other books besides Ender’s Game are canon or should be treated as such.  I can give reasons for this but the assertion came first and the reasons came second.  Mostly you just either get it or you don’t.
2.     Ender’s Game is a sympathetic book about Faustian man.  Amazing capabilities married to juvenile maturity.  It is a Faustian tragedy in two senses.  The first sense is that it showcases the real successes but also limits of the Faustian approach.  Not every concern is a discrete problem with a sociotechno solution.  But Ender’s only hammer is to analyze a problem, find the areas in solution space that have been ignored because of convention, and then exploit them ruthlesslessly–so that is the hammer he uses over and over again.  It is also a Faustian tragedy in that the Faustian world view tries to push to the very limits, including in the tragic form.  Whereas the classical tragedy considers someone who is flawed, Faustian tragedies explore how good intentions and good actions can still cause disaster.  Faustian tragedies explore how the same thing that makes the character great also leads them to their fall.

(The review is mostly right but goes a little too far trying to counter the yay total war view of Ender’s Game (and ignores real America’s own very Jacksonian character).  The thing with the Faustian bargain is that you can’t unmake it.  Once you  see the buggers in terms of threat analysis eliminating them entirely as a threat is probably the “right” solution even if the buggers sincerely assure you it was a misunderstanding.  In a real Faustian tragedy, there is no ‘if only the hero had done X, everything would have been better.’)

The price one must pay these days for the bread rolls one playfully hurls at the Drones Club beggars belief.  Rather!  One is used to the potations flowing like water in situ Drones Club, but not the dashed shekels.

A coquettish little pinch of inflation from time to time is all very well, dash it, but one doesn’t wish to be manhandled as if enduring the roguish courting of a 14-stone barmaid with a stevedore’s bicep.  I mean to say!

C.S. Lewis talks about ‘trough sexuality.’  The idea being that most human things go through peaks and troughs.

Trough spirituality is a great gift.  It is the gift of integration.

The spirituality you experience when you are not feeling the burning fire helps you tie the ordinary things about you into your spiritual life.  If your only spirituality were peak spirituality, you would be a divided person.

the tares shall be bound in bundles, and their bands made strong, that they may be
burned with unquenchable fire.

No fire fueled by straw is unquenchable.

The flame that burns the tares is not a flame from the tares.

Left to themselves and their own fire, tares would burn out and turn to ash.

Left to themselves, the wicked would become colder and smaller and darker and ever more nothing.

But the flame goes on.  So . . .

The flame is either the flame of reality itself, the burning light of God that cannot be turned off.

Or is something actively provided by God, in which case we must assume it is a kind of a mercy. That being ever colder and darker and smaller is worse.

I figured out how to really obey the Word of Wisdom.

D&C 89:7

And, again, strong drinks are not for the belly, but for the washing of your bodies.

Next Sunday I will douse myself liberally with whiskey before I head to church. Let all know, and smell, how righteous I am.

I had the odd experience stretching a tendon lately. I was talking to a trainer type who said my hamstrings seemed tight. Did I want help stretching them? Sure. (I don’t know that what happened next was actually a good idea, I am not recommending it). I laid down, put my leg up, and then he leaned into it. He pushed it to the point I normally go which is the point where it really hurts. Then he pushed it farther to a pain so intense it was all consuming, I had nothing to compare it with. Then he pushed my foot down. The pain became so much it was almost a transcendent experience. This is hard to describe. It was like I had gone beyond ordinary sensation to the point where I was almost dissassociated. Mentally it felt almost like transcedence, no joke. Then he stopped and something happened that has only happened before when I have done an exercise to the literal point of muscle failure where the muscle literally just won’t move any more. I burst out laughing.

I had the odd experience of resisting a temptation lately. (more…)

We are all supposed to be a little amused at the fundy types who won’t drink cokes because tea and coffee have caffeine.

(Actually there’s no bad reason to not drink coke.)

The fundy approach is assuming there is a general principle behind the specific rules from the Word of Wisdom, trying to figure out what the Word of Wisdom general principle, and then applying it generally.

That’s their logic with caffeine. They reason that coffee and tea should be avoided because they contain lots of addictive caffeine and therefore maybe we should avoid other products with high levels of caffeine. And we are supposed to think this is stupid and low class. How ignorant to think that the commandments are unknowable and arbitrary. How nekulturny to trying to be an agent instead of just doing exactly what they are told and only what they are told. How pharisaical.

Whereas the Pharisees were doing something in the opposite direction. Putting a hedge about the law means making extra sure you try not to violate any arbitrary commandment. Generalizing means assuming they aren’t arbitrary.

The reality is that treating the commandments as arbitrary and unknowable is stagnant and small. Whether its in big areas like sex roles or the male priesthood or in little things like coffee and tea.

The real problem with the fundy approach is they don’t generalize enough. Instead of just looking at coffee and tea they should be looking at the entire thing. (more…)

The Dark was rising. It spread its influence over the land. It captured institutions, customs, lands — it put more and more peoples into its thrall.

When this had happened before, each time a Champion had arisen. Blessed with power and light from the Great God of Light and War and Justice, the Champion led the people with his blazing sword in driving back the lords of the Dark.

But this time no Champion came. One by one the peoples fell into the hands of the Dark powers.

Finally, of all the free peoples all that was left was a little band of a few hundred gathered around a hill to where they had been driven, awaiting the final assault of the Dark hordes in the morning.

They would fight and die.

(more…)

I keep discovering that all my most bouncin’ ideas turn out to be pale echoes of stuff already found in the scriptures.

For instance, the home as a fortress from which we sally out to wreak havoc on the devil.

Proclaim it abroad.  You are the knights of the spiritual feudalism.  The vikings have been looting the spiritual landscape unchecked.  Have been.  But now you are erecting extraordinary fortifications of the soul, such castles as the world has not seen, from which you sally.  Beat the drums, counsel together, your family is going to war.

Against the current

Comrades on the wall

I sat down to read D&C 88 because I like the verses about establishing a house of order, and God chuckled.
(more…)

In the middle of an article about social media of all things, somehow something significant was written:

The idea that motherhood is a woman’s highest calling may not be unique to Mormonism. But Ann Duncan—associate professor of American studies and religion at Goucher College and the author of an upcoming book on women who view pregnancy as a spiritual experience—says the Mormon conceptualization of motherhood is truly distinct, and it’s one of the reasons Mormon women are so conspicuous online. They have a strong sense that their voices matter. (more…)

Bringing children into this horrible world would spoil your carefree happiness. Here, have an antidepressant.
-Screwtape

A bull was gazing longingly over the fence into the next pasture.

“What’s the attraction of that pasture?” asked a pigeon on the fence.

“It’s greener,” said the bull.

“But look at all the hills,” said the pigeon, “they are greener too.”

The bull looked around. “Yes” he said, “now I want to roam all the hills, grazing there too.”

Moral: The vignette came to me first. I am undecided if the moral is something about ambition and desire being limitless. Or if the moral is that you need somebody to help you elevate your ambitions.

If you had invested one talent–let’s say around ten thousand dollars–back in the dawn of the Christian era, at a moderate rate of 1% real return compounding, you would now have $5.4 trillion dollars. Almost as much money as USG printed last year.
Haha, just a little joke, friends.

Of course you’d never get that sustained level of interest, not in mortality.

The light of truth. The light of Christ. He is the light of the sun and the power thereof. He is the light of the moon and the power thereof. He is the light of the stars and the power thereof. The earth also, and the power thereof. The light in all things, even the power of God which sitteth upon the throne.

-thus D&C 88:5-13.

Now, one might say truthfully that glory = power plus light. Righteous power = power plus light. But the scriptures say that you cannot even really separate the two concepts. Power without light is ultimately not actually power. Light without power is ultimately not actually light.

Always take your prescriptions. It’s all the fun of the lottery without the horrifying risk of unearned wealth.