The virtue set is a tool that was originally intended to help understand virtues and vices.*

*Briefly, every virtue had a vice that is its opposite but also a vice that is a distortion of it. There is a second virtue that the vice that distorts the first virtue of the opposite of. The vice that is the opposite of the first virtue will be a distortion of the second.

Surprising me, it turns out the Virtue Set has some uses for goods and evils in general.

Let’s take the town mouse and the country mouse childhood experience for instance.  (more…)

This blog will never be a popular Come Follow Me site. What people understandably want is a site that gives them cool insights when they are reading the material. But I get most of my insights in Sunday School when we are discussing the lessons from the last two weeks, or even in the days after when I am thinking about the Sunday School conversation. I believe that there is an intensification of the available spiritual insight as more and more of the Saints simultaneously turn their attention to a subject.

So here goes, thoughts and comments on the part of the Book of Mormon you are no longer reading.

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Certain “outward observances” are private by design.  It’s very hard to virtue signal or be conspicuous about them.

Hypocrisy is the vice of claiming a high degree of righteousness in public while excusing your black sins in private. Hypocrisy is a satanic parody of the virtue of upholding standards that you yourself fall short of. We call this the nameless virtue.

The virtue that is the opposite of hypocrisy is obvious. It’s where you do good in private so you don’t get social credit for it. Virtue non-signalling, we could call it. Christ was big on this virtue in the gospels. ‘that which do in secret your father will reward openly’ ‘let not your right hand know…”

Probably any type of virtue can be hypocrited, but the two classes of virtue are the most vulnerable. One is whatever type of virtues are involved with publicly signalling your allegiance to good stuff.  We don’t normally think of these as virtues because virtue signalling is so common in our world.  But there are virtues like that, they are just buried under the vice of virtue signalling.  The other one is when doing good requires outward observances, where virtue consists of identifiable acts that people can see.  This was the type of hypocrisy that the Pharisees embraced.  Super-large phylacteries, tithing their herb garden, etc.

It’s interesting that most of our restoration outward observances are things that naturally occur privately.  Wearing the garment, fasting, paying tithing, are all things that no one really knows whether you are doing it or not.  To an extent the same is true with sabbath observance and even with the Word of Wisdom.  Of all these I think garment wearing is particularly interesting.  It is *by design* private.  People can tell if you are not following the standards, but it is hard to tell if you are.  Wearing the garment is in a sense the opposite virtue to the nameless virtue.

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one does not drive sin out of his life; he crowds it out with love of God and neighbor. Our lives do not then depend on the principle of avoiding sin, which is a tiresome job, but on living constantly in the climate of Divine Love.

— Fulton Sheen

Amen.  For me the principle discovery of our work with virtue sets was the difference between sin avoidance and holiness seeking.  Not away from, but towards.

Working together as a family and having fun while you work is one of the peaks of human existence.

Watering each other and the plants.

Singing while washing the dishes.

Making charcoal for your garden and deciding among you to see if you could make a charcoal cardboard crown for no good reason.

Its a synthesis of virtues.

Getting there is not just a matter of will.  It takes a fair amount of slogging and sloth and labor without much fun and fun without labor.  The Plan of Salvation in microcosm.

By the way —

Slog + Sloth = Boredom

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.

At the deep level, having a body is the same as being individual. Mortal embodiment is acquiring a unique location in space and making each moment unique through time. This place, and not that place. This time, and not that time. This choice, and not that choice.

In that light, think about gospel truths such as “a physical body is necessary for salvation.”

There are deep resonances between

individuality and unity — body and spirit — time and eternity

This diagram is a first attempt.  It can be improved on.

In D&C 92, the Lord tells Williams to be a lively member of the United Order.

Scriptures about being active, having energy, being quickened–we think those are about accomplishing more.  It’s good to accomplish more.  But we may be looking beyond the mark.  Being lively is itself beautiful.  It reveals what is glorious about being alive.  It and stillness and contemplation seems to be the two states that God loves best.  Those are also the two states where the glory of being human are most manifest.  A child playing energetically, a child at rest.

Sexual temptation can be pretty strong sometimes, especially when the desire is new and in the full flood of youth.

This is a post about desire. Any desire. But we will do that literary thingo, synecdoche or metonymy or whatsit, where we focus on a part to stand in for the whole. So we will be looking at sexual desire and sexual temptation.

Let’s look at the teenage years or early adulthood, when the desire is strong but chastity still means celibacy. I am writing from a guy’s perspective but I think, mutatis mutandi, you could translate it into a girl’s perspective too. (more…)

This is a musing inspired by the recent three-part series on virtue sets and progression.

Part 1 was Virtue Upon Virtue.  There we discussed that your standard virtue set could be disassembled and we could see the four different parts as stages or levels.

Part 2 was In My Father’s House are Many Virtues.  There we tried to match the parts of a virtue set with the four afterlives and roughly succeeded.

Part 3, The Plan of Virtue, mapped the Plan of Salvation to the virtue types.

The Risks of Progression

he who sins against the greater light shall receive the greater condemnation

–D&C 82:3 (more…)

This is Part 3 of a series.

Part 1 was Virtue Upon Virtue.  There we discussed that your standard virtue set could be disassembled and we could see the four different parts as stages or levels.  Seen this way, they wouldn’t even necessarily be vices, if they were necessary parts of progression.

Part 2 was In My Father’s House are Many Virtues.  There we tried to match the parts of a virtue set with the four afterlives and roughly succeeded–in particular, its eerie how well the astronomical symbols for each of the afterlives works.  Outer Darkness = cool vice; the Celestial Kingdom = hot vice; the Terrestrial Kingdom = cool virtue; and the Celestial Kingdom = hot virtue.

In this part we are going to look at the plan of salvation and see if we can match its stages to the parts of a virtue set.

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Let’s think about how we progress through the virtues.

A virtue set is static.  Here are virtues and vices that relate to each other.

Its true that real men and women tend to experience a mix of most virtues and vices to greater and lesser degrees all at the same time.   That mix changes over time.  We can become more or less virtuous.  Our existing virtues become stronger.  Our branches grow.  The real experience of virtue is growth, repentance, and change.  A virtue set is a terrain.  We move around on it.

There is a lot of precedent in the scriptures.

For behold, thus saith the Lord God: I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little; and blessed are those who hearken unto my precepts, and lend an ear unto my counsel, for they shall learn wisdom; for unto him that receiveth I will give more; and from them that shall say, We have enough, from them shall be taken away even that which they have.

-thus 2 Nephi 28:30.

That which is of God is light; and he that receiveth light, and continueth in God, receiveth more light; and that light groweth brighter and brighter until the perfect day

-thus D&C 50:24.

We have the Plan of Salvation which moves us from stage to stage.  In mortality we have dispensations and the Law of Moses giving way or being fulfilled in the higher law of Christ.  We have the concept often preached in the Church and elsewhere that we need to move on from negative virtues (thou shalt nots, direct commands) to positive virtues (thou shalts, open-ended principles).  It is a wicked and slothful servant who must be commanded in all things.

What if for fun we rearrange the virtue set as a virtue chain?

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If there are two types of virtues, maybe the two types are male and female. WJT says maybe, though he’s just trying the idea on, he’s still working it through.

Only later did I realize the correspondence between Ahuric/Devic and male/female. By simply exploring these models of good and evil, without thinking of sexual identity at all, I had inadvertently arrived at a possible explanation for the eternal nature of sexual identity — the necessity that good be expressed in two complementary forms rather than in a single asexual Supergod.

-thus WJT

Looking at lists of Ahuric and Devic virtues, I found that the first list made me think of Jesus Christ and the second of Our Lady. This led me to the tentative conclusion that these two types of good corresponded to masculine and feminine, and that the Ganymede model helped to explain why the two sexes were necessary and eternal.

–thus WJT.  He also discusses some problems with the idea.  This post is one you will definitely want to read.

Also this one on the two types and eternal sexual identity.

Let’s mull it over.

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The Lord praises sheep, wheat, tame olive trees, etc bc they take no thought for their own nourishment – everything they get they give away If there is no Cultivator obviously this is a very stupid way to live.

The parable of the olive trees in Jacob 5 introduces gradations of tameness & wildness The lord of the vineyard doesn’t just kill the wild & save the tame – he gradually prunes away the hard, woody, wild portions of each tree.

But we also learn that tame branches are prone to decadence & decay – & the solution is to graft strong, wild root systems with hungry, tame boughs that will draw out their strength It’s not just “tame good, wild bad”, both are necessary which is why both are allowed to persist

-from ExDeJCB

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If you are interested in virtue sets, you owe it to yourself to read WJT’s essay on Satan Divided Against Himself.

It’s full of insights.  (In the following passage, “Ahriman”=Satan, the evils of fear and excessive prudence and risk avoidance)

Those who serve Ahriman may seek to be in control themselves, but more often their goal may simply be that everything be under control. Hierarchy is of Ahriman, because even those who are far from the top have no objection to it. Even an Ahrimanist who has the ability to control things personally will generally defer these personal decisions to a system or algorithm, personal responsibility being unpleasantly risky.

Even the casual asides are good.  Here he is describing how the two fundamental good impulses (seek goods, avoid evils) can be turned to evil

• Sacrifice the avoidance of evil in order to pursue good (e.g. to seek pleasure)

• Sacrifice the pursuit of good in order to avoid evil (e.g. to be “safe”)