Vort

Mary Ingalls in real life never married, though she did have a suitor who proposed to her. I think that we do not spend much time pondering how difficult life was for even our recent ancestors. We live with a level of privilege and comfort that I doubt any preceding generation could even have imagined, much less believed. Here is a photograph of Mary Ingalls, certainly a beautiful young woman. Here is the equally beautiful Laura, everyone's favorite 19th-century American frontier girl. Here is Carrie, the third daughter and baby in the TV series. Here is Grace, the youngest and least healthy of the sisters (and the first to die). Certainly a lovely family of beautiful daughters. I assume their brother Freddy was never photographed. And finally, here is a colorized photograph of Charles and Caroline (Pa and Ma) Ingalls. One can see why the family was especially proud of Pa's beard. Well, okay, not finally. Let's do one more, a family portrait with Pa, Ma, and all four daughters.

Maybe. It's something my wife told me. Maybe she remembered it from the books and I didn't. That's entirely possible. It may also be that she picked that tidbit up from another source somewhere along the way. The TV series started when I was eleven, a year or two after my fourth-grade teacher read the books to us. I didn't really watch the show very much. I did on occasion, and it was fine, but even as a child, I liked the books better.

Based on the original Provo/Ogden designs. I approve.

I just learned something from my wife a week or two ago that I had never known. Laura called her husband "Manly" because she had misheard his friends. His name was Almanzo, and his friends called him "Manzo", which Laura misheard as "Manly". She became aware of her error, but at that point she decided to just keep calling him Manly. I find it tragic that Laura and Almanzo had only one child to survive to adulthood, and that that daughter suffered a miscarriage and was subsequently unable to bear children. I think that, of Ma and Pa Ingalls' daughters, Laura's child was the only surviving grandchild. They lost their son Freddy when he was a baby. Mary, who of course was blind, never married or had children. None of the daughters produced an ongoing line, so Ma and Pa Ingalls' line ended with their granddaughter. Seems a terrible thing.

This is on everyone's list of favorite parables. Normally called "the prodigal son", the parable actually has little to do with the younger son's prodigality (that is, his spendthriftiness, or willingness to spend all his money). It's the third of three parables—more accurately, it is the third of three stories in the Savior's parable about the importance of retrieving that which is lost—and is the most moving. The strange part is that, while each story focuses on the value of the lost thing, whether sheep, coin, or son, the lost son story seems to put focus not on the son who was lost and then found, but on the faithful son. You could almost...allllllmost, but not quite...believe that the "lost" son was the one who stayed, and was lost in his own jealousy and bitterness. I don't know, maybe that's a subtext. What I find both curious and very comforting is the tenor of the father's words, the care and love with which he treated his elder son, and the mild way he responded to his embittered son's deprecations and accusations. The older son was out of line. We all recognize that. Yet he is portrayed almost sympathetically. Who has ever read the account and not felt the righteous indignation of the son? Who hasn't at least secretly agreed with the son to some degree? Who hasn't felt the father's love and concern for his otherwise faithful son? The whole situation is absolutely understandable to every human being. We sympathize with the older son, and even if we don't agree with him (which we shouldn't), we feel sympathy for him. Malachi's words come, almost unbidden, to mind: "Ye have said, It is vain to serve God: and what profit is it that we have kept his ordinance, and that we have walked mournfully before the LORD of hosts? And now we call the proud happy; yea, they that work wickedness are set up; yea, they that tempt God are even delivered. Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name." The Lord remembers, much better even than we ourselves remember. Known to God are all our works, and not just our wickedness, but our strivings for something better. We are not justified in envying God's mercy to our brethren, but we are understood. We must do better. We need to do better. But we are not condemned for our weaknesses. Not yet. God understands. When appropriate, God weeps for us. God does not now condemn us; rather, he calls to us and asks us to join him. Only if we resist his love and turn our backs on him are we truly lost. I suppose that Jesus had in mind to offer a parable of hope, not only to the foolish prodigals wasting their strength with harlots, but also to those who try to be faithful and don't understand why there is no fatted calf slain for them and their friends who stayed home to keep the animals fed and the fires burning.

When you "break" a horse, the animal becomes docile and useful. A broken horse will carry loads, including you, pull what you need pulled, and in general obey your will. An unbroken horse will be pretty much useless to you. I believe this is the sense in which our hearts need to be broken.

It appears to me that you're utterly missing the point. It's not a matter of giving Christ sufficient praise, as if his glory depends somehow on my reverencing him enough. I will not be saved unless Christ saves me. I cannot be saved without knowing and accepting Christ's salvation. So yes, it matters that we "give credit specifically to someone named Jesus Christ."

I'd say it's worse than SLC but not as bad as LA. Don't know about SF. That's a pretty area, but one I would not want to live in.

All part of the great media conspiracy, labelling Republicans with commie red and Democrats with patriot blue. PS This is very much truth in jest.

Is oxygenation of our blood more important than breathing? The question itself is defective. "Faith in Jesus Christ" and "the condition of our hearts" are not separate or separable phenomena. Faith in Christ determines the condition of one's heart, and the condition of one's heart determines the ability to exercise faith in Christ. FTR, the answer is "faith in Christ". That is the important determiner. On this point, the scriptures are clear.

I've never noticed any good correspondence between the Anton characters and either hieratic or Demotic Egyptian. (Although the multicrossed horizontal line is reminiscent of the wave glyph that I believe held the phonetic value "n": /\/\/\/\/\/\ <-something like that.) My limited understanding is that Demotic was often used on engravings, while hieratic was specifically developed as a cursive to be used when writing on papyrus with reed pens. It seems to me that would have made hieratic unusable, or at least very inconvenient, for engraving things on metal plates. I also wasn't aware that hieratic was particularly any more space-efficient than Demotic.

I have an admittedly curmudgeonly attitude toward the "Mormons are/aren't Christians" debate. I think it's misguided, ignorant, and useless. If we're being candid, I agree with the Mormon-haters about the use of "Christian" to describe Latter-day Saints; that is, from their point of view, I think their argument holds water. From a "traditional" point of view, post-Fall of Rome (more like post-AD 150), Christians were those who believed and accepted certain ideas (e.g. the Holy Trinity) and who disbelieved and rejected as heretical certain other ideas (e.g. premortal life). It's been close to 1900 years that Europe and western societies in general have accepted this definition, and by this definition, Latter-day Saints certainly are not Christians. Which I'm perfectly okay with. I worship the true and living God, about whom I am vastly ignorant but I may know some things about him that most who call themselves Christian do not. Whether they think I'm wrong or right has exactly zero bearing on whether I'm actually wrong or right. To them, the term "Christian" means something that doesn't apply to me. Okay by me. Whatever. The issue is not that I disagree with them. I simply don't care about their point of view. I know perfectly well whom I worship and to whom I pray. If they want to say that I worship A Different Jesus®, let them prattle on. I don't care. The honest ones among them will recognize the true spirit of Christ, and will probably not say such nonsense. As for the rest, they can and will go to hell with the rest of humanity to meet the god they worship, and I'm willing to leave them to their chosen destiny.

We know the plates were written in an Egyptian script. Joseph Smith referred to it as "reformed Egyptian", and the Book of Mormon mentions that the Nephites had altered the Egyptian to suit their purposes. This sounds for all the world like a form of what we today would call Demotic Egyptian, a recharacterized (reformed) Egyptian script where the normal glyphs were replaced with simplified forms. Coincidentally—or not—Demotic became common at just about exactly the time that Lehi left Jerusalem, maybe a few decades before. A question that we cannot answer is whether the Nephites used their "reformed" Egyptian characters to phonetically write Hebrew, or rather simply wrote in Egyptian. I tend strongly toward the latter view; I don't believe the reformed Egyptian was merely a sort of parallel with Coptic. (Coptic was a late form of Egyptian and was often written using Greek letters, so has the idea of a language written in the script of another, completely different language. Sort of like Japanese written in Romaji.) I suspect Mormon's writing on the plates was in the Egyptian language, which partially accounts for why they could write so compactly; it was not a true phonetic writing system, but a shorthand abbreviation using widely understood (among those who knew Egyptian) glyphs with indicators for meaning and phonetics. In Mormon 9:33, Moroni asserts that if they could have written in Hebrew, they would have avoided many of the otherwise inevitable errors that crept in. If you're writing phonetic values, you can spell out the Hebrew in Hebrew letters, Egyptian hieroglyphs, or cuneiform, and it's going to be pretty much the same. So that's why I tend to believe the Nephites preserved the Egyptian language as well as its script. Admittedly, this introduces a lot of complexity in some ways, such as a relatively small group of Nephites needing to keep alive a non-native religious language, at least well enough for the kings to record the Nephite history. In the end, we don't know. It's speculation. Such ideas have no real bearing on the important topics covered by the Book of Mormon. But they are interesting questions to consider.

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Indeed. I'm sure the first Mosiah was a tremendous man. My "thoughtlessly" wording wasn't meant to suggest literally no thought involved, but that they had strong (and very possibly justified) biases that seem to have made the outcome almost predetermined.

The Book of Mormon indicates that the people of Mulek had lost their language and much of their societal heritage. The text of the Book of Mormon seems rather broadly and (dare I say it) thoughtlessly attribute the obvious leadership to the Nephites, so that even though the Nephites were the numerical minority, the Nephite king was the obvious choice for leading the combined people. We may at least assume that this was the common Nephite viewpoint.

Indeed. Mulek is explicitly named in Mosiah 25:2 and Helaman 6:10. Alma 51-53 also mention a city called Mulek, which we may assume was named either for the original Mulek or for someone named for him. FTR, "Mulek" appears to be derived from "melek", meaning "king" (e.g. "Mechizedek" = "melek" (king) + "zadok" (righteousness) = "king of righteousness"). Mulek would thus be an appropriate title, or name, for the son of king Zedekiah. Here is a short but interesting BYU paper on the name Mulek.

"Mulekite" is a term coined by Latter-day Saints to describe what the Book of Mormon calls the people of Zarahemla. It's not found in the text of the Book of Mormon.

It has been at least a full generation, probably more like two, since the WSJ took over the place of "newspaper of record" from the loathsome NYT. I don't really read the WSJ any more, so I don't have a feel for its current journalistic practices. But I'll take it all day, every day, and twice on Sunday in preference to that NY rag.

My first thought was the pangram "Quartz glyph job vex'd cwm finks."

Don't pay me any mind. I'm just being cynical for the unsullied joy of rotting in my own private hell. In the end, Holmes will receive a small fraction of what should be legally due her. Those with political motivations will happily overlook her pure criminality so that they can tout their bottom line. Such is life in this fallen sphere. And I fear we are all guilty to some extent, though I believe honest people (present company included) try mightily to avoid doing such. It's been a bad few weeks, and I'm kind of grouchy. As I said, pay me no mind.

She's a victim, don'tcha know. A victim of oppression and prejudice against ambitious young women. Anyway, it wasn't her fault. It was the guy's fault, her loverboytoy. He got a stiffer sentence than her, so that pretty much proves it. Poor, poor Elizabeth, dragged against her will into shady dealings. She is not to blame. She's the victim, just as much as all those people who lost all their investments.

Very interesting, but this is certainly not proof or even strong evidence. Looks like someone's PhD dissertation idea. The land bridge idea is very compelling, but I'm certainly willing to entertain deep-sea routes. I agree with you that we severely underestimate the maritime skills of the ancients. It's like we assume that the Middle Egyptian model of sailing was the state of the art in the ancient world. Even at the time, that was not the case.

Really? I had not heard that. AFAIK, that's still our very best model, not only for human evolutionary origins but for the populating of the Americas.

I don't think either method will deliver the desired result. But given the choice, it seems to me that finding a geography that fits the descriptions well as given in the Book of Mormon would be a better guide to finding the authentic areas than trying to divine which blessings are being best fulfilled as per prophecy by which people in which area.