Here are some thoughts on the readings from the Old Testament and the Pearl of Great Price that everybody else has already moved on from.

• Being made in the image of God means that creation, rest, and recognizing that our own creations are good are all part of what we were made for
• Subduing the earth was a command given before the fall.  What does that mean? What exactly needed subduing? Of course, so was the command to multiply and replenish which 2 Nephi 2:23 pretty clearly states was impossible until after the fall, so maybe the command to subdue is anticipatory.
• Having dominion is a command to Adam.  D&C 121’s command to avoid unrighteous dominion is not obeyed by avoiding dominion any more than Origen was being chaste by taking a knife to his tallywhacker.
• Dominion is power with responsibility.  In the long run, power without responsibility is just as much gibberish as responsibility without power.
• Moses was given the power to “endure” God’s presence.  Moses 1:2.  The common understanding of ‘enduring to the end’ is that we are waiting out the clock until salvation.  How does it change your view if you think you are being enjoined to learn to endure God’s presence and glory?  It makes me reel to try to see it that way.
• Contra C.S. Lewis, the heaviest weight of glory you have to bear is your own.

In Chad H. Webb’s talk from this last conference, he says that when we are teaching any principle of the gospel, we ought to ask “Can you think of a time when Jesus Christ exemplified this principle?”

Which is a very interesting exercise for the principle of peacemaking. When people describe this gentle, non-confrontational nice-guy Jesus, I honestly wonder how we can be reading the same book.

Jesus broke the Pharisee’s rules right in front of their faces, explicitly to provoke them. He didn’t treat them as if they were arguing in good faith when they weren’t: in fact, he explicitly mocked their hypocrisy, calling them whitewashed tombs, a brood of vipers, children of hell.

He drove out the moneychangers who desecrated his Father’s house.

He told the Samaritan woman at the well that she worshipped she knew not what, and that salvation was of the Jews.

He then goes on to say, using President Nelson’s analogy, that peacemaking is more like surgery than it is being nice.  Except

it’s not obvious where to cut, and you have to keep your hands steady while you’re taking all kinds of incisions yourself, and not necessarily in the right places, and it hurts, and it’s a mess.

The Savior’s way of peacemaking is the cross.

It’s not at all trivial. It’s not for the timid. It’s no wonder people don’t want to do it.

For ordinary people to do this is a miracle. Repentance — receiving a new heart, losing your disposition to do evil — is a miracle. There is no peace — within myself, my family, my country — without the atoning blood of Jesus Christ.

-thus EDJCB.  Much more at the link.

It’s a meme these days that men are the romantic sex and women are the practical one.

Like many claims about men and women, it  seems true and not true.

I see guys have romantic ideas and am romantic myself in a lot of more-or-less masculine ways whereas their women and my wife are practical about them.

“Well, yes dear, I do think a custom, wearable suit of armor embossed with the family arms  you just created would be nice.  But the dishwasher needs replaced and we don’t have anyone to polish the suit…”

And vice versa.

And in my own life, we are sometimes romantic-practical or practical-romantic in other areas that don’t line up exactly masculine or feminine.

Sorting it out becomes more difficult because there is often not a lot of daylight between “[Men/women] are romantic while [Women/men] are practical” and “I, a [man/woman] want to be romantic about a specific [woman/man,] but [she/he] is practical about me.”

I don’t claim it is specifically by divine design, but  a clever solution to the problem of having unity with someone different from yourself is having some areas where they are different from you in the ways that you are different from them in other areas.  That way you are both different from them–you have something to unite–but you understand how you are different and where they are coming from–uniting is possible.

Where is Poet Head when we need him?

Christians, Muslims, and Jews

Long-time readers know that I am sympathetic to creedal Christians.  I think they are sincere and even admirable about a great number of things and I try to avoid taking shots at them for no reason.  But here I am going to disagree with something they do taken even on their own terms.

Another thing I like to do is poke around in obscure corners of the internet.  I have an eccentric’s taste for eccentricity.  Most of what you find there is interesting as a spectacle but doesn’t add to your own stock of truth.  Sometimes you do find something worth taking back with you though.  For me, one such is the concept that one form of error people fall into is trying to be “holier than Jesus” or “more Christian than Jesus” if I have the phrase right.  The meat of it is that when people advocate for extreme and almost inhuman versions of some of Christ’s teaching such as talking about how you need to feel love for Satan or some other performative shibboleth of reified compassion or act like the presence of people “less compassionate” than they are is an intolerable insult to their purity, they are essentially trying to be “holier than Jesus,” who certainly pulled no punches but also recognized the messiness of life in many ways.

Whether you agree with that or not, it was the prompt for me to realize one issue I have with the creeds and their Jewish and Muslim equivalents.  Even if you believed, as they do, that its just not possible that God the Father has a body or is a person, that is how he presents himself in scripture.  By your own standards, he is ineffable and incomprehensible.  So what warrant do you have to think that you have a better way of understanding the Father than the one He himself gave you?  “Oh, that’s just for the common folk.”  Compared to God, you are all common folk.  Plato was a peasant.  So was Aquinas.  Much smarter than me, but that’s like saying the kid who has five bucks is richer than the kid who has a quarter.  True, but irrelevant in the presence of billionaires.  So maybe you feel sure that God cannot “really” be an embodied Man because he is clearly beyond anything we can comprehend.  OK.  So then the next question is what would be the best method to comprehend him as best as a human being can–the one you came up with, or the one God uses?

But “God is spirit”!  Yeah, God says he’s vitality and life.  The very essence of personhood.

But “God is love”!  Yep.  The deepest of human emotions.

The closest you can come to comprehending God is to think of him as a glorified eternal man.

The Great and Spacious Building has no foundations because he stove them in.

We all know that a perfect love casts out all fear.

That fear is the opposite of love is one of those deep insights that has become a truism. So much so that I found it in a Steven Pressfield historical novel on Thermopylae. He attributed it to Greek rationality, at least in the book. Spartan men discussing the nature of things in a mini agora every night as they marched north. I’m sure he knows its actual source.

The Scripture does not say love though. It says a perfect love. (more…)

The father is the adult biological stage of the human male. You could say the same of the mother too, but there it’s more obvious. What we all know happens with women happens with men also. There are literally physiological changes and mental neurological developments that occur when you become a father to your first child.

(more…)

My daughter helped me solve a puzzle about peace.

Quotes below are excerpts from her journal she sent me.

In my Classical Civilization class we spent a lot of time talking about what violence does to us psychologically/when it invests us so heavily in a story.  One guy said something I thought was really cool – he said that that’s something we’re drawn too because God is perfectly violent – (sometimes death is merciful) and that same ability to conquer/defend/protect is sooo appealing to us, but easy to get wrong.

Then a ton of girls raised their hands and just tore into this guy.  “God isn’t violent.  He’s the opposite.  He is loving and kind and anything violent ever comes from the devil” etc.  [No wonder guys today are emasculated.  God is being emasculated.]

(more…)

I stumbled across a lesser known form of service recently.

Through an odd set of circumstances I ended up doing a thing for several days where the circumstances were configured for me to be both an authority and to have charisma.  For a wonder, I didn’t flub it.

But my only real model for that kind of role is church, so I put on my church personality, which includes asking how people are doing by name and all that sort of thing.  A little pastoral counsel mixed in with the other presentations I was doing, that kind of stuff.

To my surprise, it really touched people.  It was moving to them.  Having an authority figure interested in them felt good.

Now that I’m back on my normal bland track, situation-derived authority and charisma gone like the snow, I have reflected on that experience.  And on other experiences I have had when I was on the receiving end.  When some person of character and authority and charm took an interest in me and pushed through my usual seesawing between wariness and fangirlishness to really make a connection.  It felt so good.  And at key junctures, changed the direction of my life.

I had a boss like that one time.  Everyone who worked there was unnaturally productive and agreed that the office felt like heaven.

These experiences have also been common for me inside the home, both now and when I was young.

(more…)

(Because it can be obtained on no other principle).

Not only does absolute power not corrupt absolutely, the purpose of this life is to learn to exercise power without being corrupted.

-thus EdJCB

(more…)

1. There once was a good man in a good land with a good people. They made him king.

When his kingdom was sore pressed by enemies and not all his valor nor the urgent spells of his magicians could turn them away, it so happened that a loyal man-at-arms sought an audience, saying he had somewhat to offer. The king received him, of course. The man spoke with fervor and sincerity. “Sire!” he said. “I will will my life force, the mana of my soul, to you! With that extra might, you will save the kingdom!” The king was horrified. ”  You would die.  I forbid it,” he barked. “You cannot stop me,” the man said. Zeal gleamed in his eyes, and then his eyes were blank. He fell to the floor. Potency rushed into the king, who vomited.

Others did likewise, to the increasing horror and rage of the king. Filled and overflowing with literal power, the king won the battle and the war. and freed all.  A universal golden era set in. (more…)

The path of ascent and desire is spiritually dangerous.  Nonetheless, if there is anything virtuous, lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.

Your means should be proportioned to your ends and no matter how reasonable or practical or achievable your means are if they will not accomplish your ends they are inadequate and if means that are difficult or nigh impossible or even impossible are the only way to achieve your right end then that is the means.  The beauty of Christianity is that we do not lie to ourselves about our ends.  Restoration Christianity allows you to rip off the mask and say, yes, I was meant to be a GOD, instead I’m a gross humdrum niggler, Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.  Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy.

Everyone almost automatically adjust their ends to fit their means.  We do not have the right end of beingMan until we let ourselves know from the inside the full nobility that a human spirit should be able to achieve, until we let ourselves admit that we have tasted something true and pure, and we say that is the end even if our means are wholly unable to achieve it.

Though he slay me, yet will I praise God.

I have a new take on the nameless virtue. (First nameless virtue post here).

Let’s look at something President Nelson said.

Discover the joy of daily repentance. Cut short your misery. He loves us especially when we repent.
(more…)

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, then, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the ‘married’ couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.

-thus Wendell Berry