I’ve discovered this week just how much His Majesty can be a pain in the

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What do people collectively want? It’s hard to say. Voting gives you one kind of answer, but voting isn’t nuanced. Voters can only say yes or no to ballot questions as phrased and as they understand them. It’s possible that with more explanation they might feel differently, or with even slightly different phrasing they choose the other option.   Or else they can only select between candidates. Different voting systems give different answers. Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem says that no voting system can ever perfectly capture voter intent. Polls are even more fallible.

That’s where the concept of the General Will comes in. What if someone knew the people well enough to have an intuitive, almost literary, sense of what they wanted? That’s why dictatorships claim to be democracies. They say they’re giving the nation what it really, collectively, wants.

The reason it’s hard to know what voters want is because it’s hard to know what a voter wants. Individuals are something like a collection of people over time. No man can step in the same river twice, the Greek said, because it’s never the same man. The mind is always engaged in editing memory to fit the needs of the present, which it wouldn’t need to do if we were really fully the same throughout, if we always had the same end in view. (more…)

Mormon Christianity has a lot of odd little teachings that don’t seem to add up to anything at first glance.  Resurrected beings have bodies of flesh and blood.  Heaven has three main degrees.  Satan rules over the water.  And Christ atoned twice, first in the Garden, second on the cross. (more…)

The presence of God is eternity. (more…)

Bruce Charlton is thinking deeply about the Atonement. He is working out alternatives to the customary belief that Christ took on the punitive consequences of sin for us and to the customary liberal notion that the atonement was fundamentally an act of symbolic engineering to excise our retrograde belief in sin and guilt. Charlton thinks he’s found one. (more…)

Love is not best considered as a feeling, it is not necessarily something at the forefront of consciousness. For many people, their deepest love is something which structures their life, rather than being at the front of our conscious deliberations for most of the time. Some (I am one of them) are very expressive of love – but this is not a necessity; and some very loving cultures and families and marriages do not go in for statements, hugs or tears.

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My understanding of the absolute necessity of loving God above all else is metaphysical rather than psychological – that without this, all other loves (including the love of Jesus) lose their meaning and function.

The supremacy of our love for God is that it makes all other loves possible – it makes other loves a matter of eternal significance.

-thus Bruce Charlton.

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My little baby just got out of the hospital. She’s fine now, no need for sympathy, I mention it because I learned something from the experience. (more…)

His Majesty has found a new way to eat his porridge: Flavored with shredded ham and Swiss cheese, with a fried egg on top.

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“Our society is systematically enabling deviant and self-destructive behavior. And you Mormons are as bad about it as anyone else.”

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I just realized the connection between two independent ideas, neither completely original, that have been bouncing around in my head for a while.

The first time I really thought about possible racial differences in intelligence was when I picked up my parents’ Newsweek and read the feature on “The Bell Curve,” which had just been released. My thoughts were 1) I wouldn’t really be too surprised if there were IQ differences between races, and 2) why rub it in? What could possibly be the benefit of pointing out such differences? (more…)

As I mentioned to Bruce Charlton in the comments section of a previous post, once you get His Majesty monologuing, you can’t get him to shut up.

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As a youth there were two things that turned my mind toward attending Brigham Young University. The first was a personal story my 9th-grade seminary teacher recounted that involved him as a BYU student teaching missionaries at the Missionary Training Center. The part that stuck with me, the incidental setting for his story, was that BYU is a place that serves the missionaries. That is a holy thing that wouldn’t be found at other colleges.

The second thing was learning that there were weekly devotionals where General Authorities spoke to the entire student body. If there was one school that included teaching from the mouths of prophets and apostles, in addition to the physics and literature classes that all schools have, then I wanted in. (more…)

I guess this is what they call a “bleg.”

I recently was called as YM President, which of course means I’m also the Priests Quorum Advisor. We have two boys who are high school seniors and planning on missions after the school year. They seem fairly well prepared to go with regard to enthusiasm, testimony, and maturity. What they lack is much substantive knowledge about the Gospel. I’m referring specifically to knowledge of the Scriptures and Church History. From my last few weeks of priesthood lessons, just to give two examples, I know that they had no idea who wrote most of the Epistles, and had never heard of the School of the Prophets. I don’t want to unduly elevate rote memorization of facts, but as a spot check for their familiarity with the source material of our religion, it was not encouraging. What this says about our Sunday School and Seminary classes I will leave for another blog post.

So I’ve decided to get them for Christmas a single volume that gives them a basic and broad-based grounding in Gospel knowledge. (more…)

Enjoy these goodies. (more…)

Our Cub Scouts went caroling to an old folks home. The elderly people there were moved. It is remarkable, the power we have to affect each other. (more…)