D&C 86 says that the “tares” aren’t rooted up because the faith of the “wheat” is weak.

For a long time I have lightly entertained the notion that the date of the Second Coming is variable. I speculated our righteousness can put it off, just like Sodom could have been saved if there were even 10 righteous people there.

But this section says the opposite. It says it is the feebleness of our righteousness that keeps putting off the Second Coming.

Model: the situation keeps getting worse until no one with weak faith is left one way or the other.

Wryly, one might say The beatings will continue until faith improves.

I dreamed that I decided to become a novelist. Surprising myself the dreamer (not myself the person in the dream) I cranked out quite a bit of good dreck that got popular. Then my ambitions increased and I decided to become a great novelist. (more…)

Here are a few more insights on righteous dominion. The quality here is high.

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We are all reading D&C 121 this week.

Here are some of the best JG posts on righteous and unrighteous dominion.

They are really good.

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it must needs be that there be an organization of my people, in regulating and establishing the affairs of the storehouse for the poor of my people, both in this place and in the land of Zion—

4 For a permanent and everlasting establishment and order unto my church, to advance the cause, which ye have espoused, to the salvation of man, and to the glory of your Father who is in heaven;

5 That you may be equal in the bonds of heavenly things, yea, and earthly things also, for the obtaining of heavenly things.

6 For if ye are not equal in earthly things ye cannot be equal in obtaining heavenly things;

-thus D&C 78:3-6

Like some of you, I have developed an allergy to the concept of equality, as who wouldn’t if the whipmasters shouted “equality” with each blow on you of the lash.  But that is the fault of the whipmasters, not the (sadly much abused) concept.

Paradoxically, I have become more alive to the idea of a group of people joining together as peers because of some great animating friendship and cause.  Like it says right there in those verses, “to advance the cause.”

But that isn’t the point of this post.

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How did I miss this gem from SPDI?

On Pills, Blue and Red

Here is an analogy I don’t think I’ve ever seen made (though it must have been): the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil <=> the Matrix’s “Red Pill.”

Something is lost when you start chowing down on red pills. You gain knowledge, but you lose innocence.

Adapting yourself to the world is (by definition) a utilitarian endeavor. We can become uglier even as we become more successful.

That’s the start.  He then treks off into Adam and Eve, sex roles, and on and on.

The stuff about sex roles strikes me both as deeply wrong, but also in some way I cannot put my finger on, a lot more right than my current notions.

What if you are the hero farm boy in a fantasy novel, but there is no Dark Lord of Darkness for you strike down, no One Ring to throw into the cracks, not even a Mt. Doom?  Just creeping malice and sludge and miasma and mediocrity?

In circles where manhood still has nominal rhetorical value, there is a tendency to say

Real men do X

Real men don’t do Y

Where X and Y are whatever the speaker happens to be for or against.

Real men brush their teeth

Real men don’t disrespect their wives

Don’t mistake us, my poppets.  We are four square for brushing your teeth and respecting your wife, preferably at the same time if possible.

But we are against mindlessly inserting “real men” in front of every piece of good advice (or, sometimes, bad advice).

It comes across as manipulative and meaningless and makes the concept of manhood pretty empty.

What there needs to be is some connection to an actual concept of manhood.

Elder Holland makes the connection here

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Imagine some stodgy old town that has stodgy old town meetings.

Except one day some incredibly brave youth stands up and says something incredibly brave that shocks literally everybody, maybe something like the truth is that there is no truth. He says everyone should just look out for themselves and never mind the rest, lie a little if they need to, there is no truth and morality so do whatever it takes to be comfortable and have a few of life’s little pleasures.  It’s so brave because he may well lose his job and his fiancee over what he is saying.

That is the fundamental myth of modernity.  Society LARPs it every day.

The myth is in the air we breathe, so much so that I’ve struggled to write it in a way that shows it’s absurdity.  The truth is that there is no truth …get out.

By him, and through him, and of him, the worlds are and were created, and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God

-thus Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon

Worlds, plural.  He is the savior of multiple worlds.

But I want to focus on the begotten part.  There is a lot of interesting mysticism in the scriptures about how we becomes sons and daughters of Christ, how the Son is the Father and so on.  But this revelation first emphasizes the Son’s status as the Begotten of the Father and then says that we are begotten sons and daughters of Father through the Son.  To me, the obvious answer is just that we take on Christ’s identity.  We are part of Christ, we are the body of Christ, and so in becoming Him, we become what He is–the Son of God, the Daughter of God.

This was the dream.

There was a conclave of the gods. Around the open marbled floor were ringed the towering pillars and the towering thrones and the towering gods, who were grave and almost unmoving.

Into the middle of that floor through an entrance came clattering a funny looking stone and behind it ran a little boy and his dog

.

The boy did not notice the gods. He ran straight to the stone and resumed playing with it.

The bright-faced goddess of joy laughed.  The boy looked up. He contemplated the gods gravely. They contemplated him gravely.  After a time he went back to his playing and then left.

For all that the gods made him greatly blessed.

How they greatly blessed him is jumbled.  It partly seemed that he grew up and became handsome and talented and rich but with the unselfconsciousness and the delight of a child.  Partly it seemed that his blessing was he died soon after

Christofferson, the Covenant Path

Obedience can be good.  Independence can be good.  But there is a tension between them.

They both have bad versions–unthinking conformity, prideful rebellion–and it should interest you that Satan appears to aim for both.  The conformist rebel is one of the defining archetypes of our age.

Covenants reconcile the tension between obedience and independence.

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Think about your relationship to your own history.  You could reject that history entirely.  You would embrace a principle of radical discontinuity.  Or you could embrace that history entirely.  You would reject any discontinuity at all.

If you refuse to change at all, you are rejecting being alive.  Life is an arrow in time, which means change and dynamism.

But if you refuse to embrace your past at all, you are rejecting any meaning in your being alive.  If you act like the past has never been, then you have no way of making sense of what you do now.  Because what you do now will soon be the past and by your own principles should be ignored as if it had never been.

You must have growth within continuity.  We call that repentance.

Repentance cannot be just a rejection of your past behavior.  It must be an improvement on it.  Like as The Great Divorce, you must discover what you were really looking for.  Like in Berger’s City of Earthly Desire, you must work through your past, understand it, make some meaning of it.

Then God remembers your sin no more, because it is no longer sin.  What He does recall with perfect clarity is your story of growth and grace and overcoming, of which what once was your sin is a part.

There was an ordinary countryside where ordinary people lived. They baked their bread and swatted their flies.  They had their little gossips and they told their little lies.

It was bordered on one side by a mountain range.  The mountains were grim but not magnificently and starkly grim.  Just dusty and rocky.

There was a gap through the range.  Through the gap you could glimpse higher, white peaked mountains, and a valley covered with a deep forest, all vanishing into far blue haze.

No one who went through the gap ever came back.

But the Gap called to you. You longed to walk under those trees. You longed to pass on to what could only be dimly seen in the far blue haze.

And so from time to time when the falsity and the small malices and accumulated desperations got too much a person would walk up to the gap and leave. They would never be seen again.

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Everyone here should grapple with Evils and Designs, by JC Bennett.  Its I, Pencil the horror story.   And also a commentary on the Word of Wisdom.

The key insight here is hyperstimulus plus impersonal leaderless systems. (more…)