Just_A_Guy

1. Sure. It’s just a question of how seriously they take the idea of temple covenants. 2. I [would like to] think that most mature, reasonably-well-adjusted LDS folks can reconcile the ideas that a) a lot of what passes for “happiness” outside of LDS circles, actually isn’t; b) people outside the LDS Church can nevertheless be genuinely pretty happy folks; and c) LDS covenants and precepts, properly lived and applied, nevertheless do offer a superior opportunity for sustainable stability and health and happiness to what is generally available outside of the Church. And while statements that “there’s no place for x here” is dangerously and probably overused as a general principle—I nevertheless feel reasonably comfortable in saying that there is no place for a sense of entitlement to a sexual relationship, in the LDS Church.

The knee-jerkiness can (and in my experience, often does) go both ways. Take all these LDS military veterans who you seem to suggest were driven out of the Church because active LDS women wouldn’t marry them. I’ll bet those young men had no problems imposing a number of criteria on their would-be wives that had nothing to do with those women’s current righteousness temple-worthiness. Maybe they wanted wives who had a high school diploma; or who didn’t already have kids from a prior relationship; or had certain career plans; or who were virgins. And they probably considered women who didn’t meet those criteria as being “unfit for marriage”. Women, like men, have a right to set standards for their future spouses. It’s interesting to me that nearly twenty years ago LDS young men were warned that the bar for missionary service was being raised—and now, changing Church demographics are showing that due to a surplus of men and shortage of women, the bar for LDS would-be husbands is also being raised. LDS young men would be well-served to figure out early in life that LDS women do not owe them a dadgummed thing; and if an LDS man is going to precondition his continuing Church membership on the sexual availability of an LDS woman—my response to him would be “brother, I love you, but the door is right over there”. Church demographics are changing. We have a surplus of men now; and the days when LDS suitors can browbeat LDS women into lowering their standards through the threat of lifelong spinsterhood are over.

Random thoughts: 1. I loved the Vatican when I visited. I’d like to live there. I also recognize that if it became the sort of place where the likes of me could go and live, much of what I love about it would be lost. My love for it—and indeed, a big part of its allure and spiritual power—derives from the fact that it is not what it would inevitably become if it were under my control. And I wish that Francis had understood and conceded about my country, what I understand and concede about his. 2. LDS temples are beautiful, but (with a handful of exceptions) their artistry is not even in the same ZIP code as the artistry of the great medieval and renaissance basilicas and cathedrals. 3. Artistry can be a form of worship. Craftsmanship can be a form of worship. In our temples we do the latter very well; as I think we are theologically beholden to do. But we do the former only at a very elementary level. Temple artwork is first and foremost intended to recall and evoke the spirit of specific past events; not about embracing beauty as an aspect of divinity and then pioneering new ways of seeking beauty for its own sake. 4. There are good reasons for the LDS Church as an institution to *not* prioritize artistry, even (arguably, especially) in its temples. Structures can become enormous money pits if you aren’t willing to say goodbye to them when they become obselete or damaged beyond repair (see SL Temple, SL Tabernacle, Provo City Center Temple, Kirtland Temple; compare Ogden Temple, Anchorage Temple, Provo Rock Canyon Temple). And the architectural uniqueness of France’s great cathedrals is a big part of why the government there expropriated those buildings and has often refused to give them back in the intervening centuries.

Interesting. Mine started working when I was SS President, but it’s kept working now even though I’m just a lowly temple and family history leader. 🤷‍♂️

If you have LDS Tools, you should be able to see stats on average weekly sacrament meeting attendance in your unit (under “Reports —> Quarterly Reports —> Indicators of Conversion and Church Growth”) and how many members of your unit have received their endowment and how many of those have current temple recommends (under “Reports —> Unit statistics”).

As I understand it, the custom was that the virgins would have been waiting with the bride at her house for the groom to come and fetch her. If he’s late enough that people are falling asleep, then the natural response at some point is “gosh, is he coming at all? Girl, he’s a deadbeat. Clearly not reliable. Not a provider. Not husband material. You should send him on his way even if he *does* come.” But these virgins did not give up on the bridegroom. Nor did they abandon the bride. They knew the groom had already paid the bride-price. They continued their vigil as loving and loyal friends, showing faith that the wedding was indeed still “on”. They aren’t bad girls; and even the ones we call “foolish” are still far wiser than most of their generation. But, notwithstanding their good intentions—some of them just plain weren’t ready to fully cope with an event that wasn’t playing out on their timetable.

FWIW, my law school graduating class was about the same size (or a shade smaller) as my high school graduating class; and it was amusing to see how many of my classmates were fairly obviously trying to turn the whole thing into a redo of their high school experiences (while the rest of us were just like “whatever, dude; I’m going home to my wife and kids now”).

Brother, I am sorry you’re going through this. I think @The Folk Prophet is on to something. Based on what you’ve written your wife has clearly broken her covenants to and relationship with you. You’ve got some hard decisions to make about whether that break is irreparable and where that leaves you in terms of your future relationship, financial affairs, children, etc. I think in these situations that it’s tempting to seek validation from the Church—to know that the guilty party was subjected to Church discipline, banned from temple entry, or at least to have a Church leader publicly proclaim “Jane Doe has committed sin x and the world should all recognize and acknowledge her as a predator to be condemned and shunned and person y as the victim of Jane’s behavior who deserves our support.” I would encourage you, hard as it is, to resist that temptation. To a significant degree Church discipline can only be applied to the extent that the guilty party is willing to subject themselves to such—by confessing, by telling the truth thoroughly, by making evidence available, by showing up to meetings and hearings at all. You know what she did. You know what God thinks of it. You know what destruction she has wrought. You know that someday—if not now, inevitably at some point—she’s going to feel the full weight of what she has done. You know that unless or until that day comes, her worship experiences are hollow and her covenants are null and void regardless of where she goes what scrap of paper she might carry in her wallet. It doesn’t feel like it now, but it’s possible to get to a mental and emotional state where your healing is completely independent of whatever does and doesn’t happen to her in this life. Life is still fundamentally good and beautiful, and you’ve got great things ahead of you. A quest for vindication and justice will distract you from seeking the good things in life, eat you alive, and ultimately leave you empty inside. I won’t tell you to “move on”. But I will tell you that your life will be better if you focus your efforts into cultivating a “move on” mentality.

I grew upon Rodgers & Hammerstein plus Phantom and Les Mis, and in college I got into Scarlet Pimpernel and Jekyll and Hyde. Those—either due to the music or the story— all seemed to have an “epic” quality that the newer stuff (even Wicked*) seems to lack. *Full disclosure: I never liked “The Wizard of Oz” in the first place—it just seemed freakish—so in my book “Wicked” was already starting from a hole it was never able to climb out of. And rap may be a technical skill, but it is utterly without beauty and thus I reject it (and by extension “Hamilton”) as an art form. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

The thing about war is—if we’re smart, we go in with a vision of a specific set of objectives and a well-defined idea of what “victory” looks like. And fairly early on we have to convey that vision to the country and get them (mostly) on board with it. Does victory look like a specific nation or group of nations reducing its own tariffs or eliminating a particular uncompetitive practice? Or do we keep the “war” up until specific domestic industries have developed a particular capacity? Or do we keep going until the trade imbalance (either in the aggregate, or nation by nation) is “fixed”? And if, as some have hinted, the long-term goal is to transition federal government revenue from income-tax-based to tariff-based—there are some good arguments for that; but then they probably shouldn’t be selling tariffs to their base as a temporary, [economic] wartime-based expedient when they know darned well that these tariffs (or are version of them) are going to be permanent.

The overall layout *reminds* me a bit of the Financial Times website.

Something that gobsmacked me a couple weeks ago while perusing D&C 107, and of which I’m still pondering the significance (or lack thereof): Technically, scripturally, there’s no such thing as a quorum of deacons, or teachers, or priests, or elders. These groups sit in “council” in groups whose size is scripturally limited; but they are not called “quorums”. Scripturally a “quorum” is a body with authority to govern the church-at-large, and there are only five of them: —The First Presidency —The Q12 —A group consisting of all 70s in the Church —A group consisting of all stake high councilors in the Church —the high council in “Zion” (originally Missouri and later for a time, IIRC, a specific stake in SLC).

Sooo . . . I consider myself a conservative. I'm also pretty ardently NeverTrump. I believe he's a bad guy. The evidence that he is a sexual predator is, to me, convincing. I believe he abjectly fails every one of the criterion set out in D&C 98:10. I think he frequently exhibits a flagrant disregard for truth and a contempt for political adversaries that is incompatible with the way civic discourse is supposed to work in a functional democratic republic. (That said, I think his style is a natural and expected--if not "logical"--reaction to the way the American left and center-left have chosen to do politics over the last fifty years). I'm intensely proud of the fact that I never voted for him. With that being said, I think a lot of the critiques against him are unfair, dishonest, and/or histrionic. He's not a Nazi. He's not a racist (at least, as we've been brought up to define that term. "Cultural chauvinist" may be more apt.) He's not really even all that isolationist, given the American history of isolationism. With regard to the specific points you raise: Tariffs: I grew up being taught about the economic virtues of free trade--that the result was cheaper goods and a better lifestyle for everyone; and that even if someone else is tariffing your stuff, it's better for you in the long run not to tariff theirs. I still have a lot of sympathy for that position, and a presumptive suspicion against those who make a "we must protect these vital/infant industries!" argument. At the same time: It's pretty hard to ignore the reality that by and large, American industrial/manufacturing capability seems to have been hollowed out compared to where it was fifty or even twenty years ago; and it's starting to have national security ramifications (vis a vis China especially). I don't think that's all due to the fact that other countries have been tariffing our stuff while we haven't been tariffing theirs--labor and materiel supply and costs, regulation, culture, and other factors certainly play a role. And I'm sure that evaluating a single nation's entire network of trade regulations and formulating a conclusion about whether that nation is "exploiting" us in a way that demands retaliation--and then repeating that analysis for each of the the 190-odd other countries in the world--is something I have neither the time nor the inclination to do. But at this particular moment in time, I'm glad the analysis is being done by people who recognize that there are costs to free trade and aren't merely applying a "cheap goods uber alles, and let the blue-collar workers learn to code" framework. Foreign Aid: From a national-interest standpoint: foreign aid "feels" nice. But I'm not sure it has earned us any truly lasting friends who could and would, in a pinch, inconvenience themselves to meaningfully help us out. Obviously, Humanitarian-oriented foreign aid is a good thing to do if we can actually afford it and if it's actually accomplishing a certain amount of good within certain parameters of efficiency. But the financial state of the US government is dire. I don't think we can afford it. We're going to need draconian cuts across the board; and when it turns out we're sending billions of dollars in the name of "foreign aid" to subsidize LGBTQ+ propaganda in third-world nations whose majorities and governments don't want it--well, anytime you're trying to trim a budget, you're going to start by cutting the low-hanging fruit. Panama Canal: I don't care if we own it or collect the profit from it, as long as we can use it on equal terms with other countries and get priority for our naval vessels. If it's true that China is positioning itself to be able to control and potentially lock out canal traffic--that's unacceptable, at least for the short-term. (Though I think Trump is telling a number of lies about how it was built and who bore the brunt of the construction deaths, which of course I'm not a fan of.) Longer-term, I think we need to reconcile ourselves to the idea that we can't control what goes on in Panama or any other country; and we need to develop whatever infrastructure/redundancies we can so that we aren't so reliant on the Panama Canal. That probably means ramping up shipbuilding/refitting infrastructure on both of our coasts, exploring canal alternatives through Nicaragua or wherever else, just planning that more commercial ships may have to take the trip around Cape Horn, etc.) Greenland: They are a socially progressive people, and no Republican in their right mind would want to give Greenland two Senate seats or any electoral votes. And acquiring new, permanently non-voting "territories" just feels un-American. We *should* keep Greenland strategically available to and engaged with the "free world" [whatever THAT means these days, though that's another rant entirely!], both in terms of access to arctic transportation routes and commercial access to natural resources; and we should box out the powers that want to monopolize and exploit Greenland for their own ends. If that means a little Trumpian Kabuki theater for the next few months . . . I'm content to let that play out. Gaza: I think the last year and a half has borne out the notion that by and large, there are very few (if any) Gazan adults or adolescents who, given the chance, wouldn't enslave/starve/beat/rape/kill a Jew if they had the chance. It's a sick, sick, sick society--sicker by far than Nazi Germany or any of the other totalitarian regimes we typically associate with 20th century industrialized warfare. I pity the children born into this society, but . . . I don't know how you rehabilitate a people that is that far gone. I'm not convinced anything short of turning the whole area into a glass parking lot, really solves the problem. Trump is, of course, free to propose whatever pie-in-the-sky he wants; and if it changes the conversation and brings in some other stakeholders and ultimately gets the Gazans to give up the most degenerate of their hobbies--so be it. Just so long as it doesn't involve American lives or American dollars. We all saw how that goshawful "pier" turned out . . . Canada: See "Greenland". Ukraine: I feel bad for the Ukrainians. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was totally unjustified. Territorial guarantees were made back in the 1990s to induce Ukraine to give up their nukes, and those should have been respected in the 2000s and 2010s, regardless of how many ethnic-so-and-sos were living in which regions. At the same time: The $170 billion the US has given/committed to Ukraine, plus even larger amounts from the Europeans, seems to have accomplished a stalemate at best. The price of re-taking Donbas and Crimea seems likely to be American boots on the ground, or another $170 billion, or some combination of the two; and frankly--that's not a price I, as an American, am willing to pay. I'm sorry, I'm just not. If that makes me a crappy "citizen of the world", then I guess I'll just have to embrace that part of my identity and sit on my couch and feel bad about myself while my moral superiors show their compassion and virtue by signing themselves and their families up to join the Ukrainian International Legion. If Ukraine continues to stick with the line that they won't accept peace without getting Donbas and Crimea back, then I think it's right for the US to say "If you don't end this thing then we're going to scale back our aid on such-and-such a timeline, which we will make public; and after that you're going to be on your own." My gut is that Trump should have left it there (and maybe offered the Ukrainians a few dozen nuclear warheads), rather than trying to work out the nuts and bolts of a ceasefire and trying to get the US some mining privileges along the way. That said, I am inclined to think that the debacle at the White House was primarily Zelensky's fault--he was trying to goad Trump publicly into making a specific security guarantee that he must have known from the earlier private conversations, Trump wasn't ready to make. But a potential silver lining to the debacle is that the Europeans seem to have gotten the message loud and clear that they need to develop an independent credible deterrent force against Russia. (Then again: Will they actually use that new force against Russia? Or will they use it to force regime change in socially-conservative eastern countries like Romania or Hungary or Poland?) Europe/Russia/NATO, generally: I'm sort of in "a plague on all your houses" mode here. IMHO, NATO was supposed to push back against the global spread of a specific expansionist totalitarian ideology backed by military force, not the local (or even continental) territorial ambitions of a particular European power. NATO was supposed to champion liberty, free speech, free religion, free elections, free markets, and general Western enlightenment ideals and traditions. At this point I think the US needs to ask itself some hard questions about whether whatever it is that NATO now represents is worth spending American blood and treasure to defend; and questions about what the nature of the current threat actually is. I grew up on, and love, the vision of America, and the West generally, as defenders and propagators of liberty and justice. But VP Vance made some potent points in Munich about modern European commitment to some of those principles. Our misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq seem to have shown that as an outsider you can't prop up a free society by giving more for their liberty than they themselves are willing to give. And while Putin is clearly an evil SOB and Russia may indeed have continental ambitions--I can't help but notice that the great bugaboo of Russia has gotten bogged down in a quagmire against what was until recently a third-rate military fighting for what was considered to be more-or-less the redneck capital of Europe. Do the Eurocrats really think that the combined armies of western Europe couldn't do as well as Ukraine has done? Really? And for all the Eurocrat histrionics about the Russian threat to western Europe and global peace as a whole--their own actions, in terms of defense spending and military buildup, suggests that they aren't really all that worried about Russian expansionism (or weren't, until very recently). When I was practicing as a lawyer in the private sector, I used to tell my clients "I'm not going to take your case more seriously than you do". But that's precisely what my European friends seem to want my country to do. In the past, I've argued that America-as-world's-policemen made sense from a mathematical standpoint—better to lose 2,500 men/year for a hundred years, then half a million men in a once-in-a-century world war. But why are we the only ones who have to do that math? And why do we have to put up with the rest of Europe posing and preening and spitting in our eyes while we do it? "Autarky", as you call it, has definite drawbacks; but on the whole it's starting to look preferable to having a crew of European wannabe dictators perennially scheming to use my kids as cannon fodder in their grudge-matches against other European wannabe dictators. China: I'm not sure what "handing China the win" actually means here. Letting China surpass us in military capabilities (almost, if not already, there), surpass us in shipbuilding capacity (exceeded long ago, by several orders of magnitude), surpass us in manufacturing generally, steal our technology and then surpass much of it, lock up repositories of natural resources around the globe, spread propaganda around the globe, and bully its neighbors who had previously expected us to be able to effectively protect them? That has already happened. China is *already* winning. The post-cold-war order, championed by presidents of both parties (but most notoriously Clinton and Obama), let them win. It's not defeatism to say "holy crap, we're behind, we'd better work harder to catch up". It's the opposite of defeatism. And to his credit, Trump was one of the earliest and loudest voices sounding the alarm on this issue (hence the "stop Asian hate" business a couple of years ago, which was calculated to paint him and others who stood up to the CCP as "racists" and which, IIRC, actually had support from Confucius Institutes around the country). If part of the process of "waking the sleeping giant" against Chinese aggression entails a tariff war that may succeed at getting certain concessions out of the Chinese that will foster long-term stability and prosperity--well, finding American alternatives to Chinese imports is an American tradition that goes back to the Revolution itself. Taiwan: As noted above, our hand in supporting Taiwan at the moment is extremely weak--and more so due to simple geography. We cannot effectively defend them against a Chinese invasion without tremendous loss (and the likelihood of effectively defending them at all diminishes every day. The Chinese know this; and there's no sense in our strutting around like impotent roosters pretending we can do what everyone knows we can't do. We should build redundancies for Taiwanese microchip manufacturers on American soil. We should offer asylum to freedom-loving Taiwanese who want it. Maybe we could even give them land- and sub-based nuclear ICBMs.* (Actually, the UK could do all those things as easily as we could.) But beyond that--what would the UK, which infamously handed Hong Kong back to the CCP, have us do to safeguard the liberty and security of the Taiwanese people? So I guess, in total, my thought would be: We're at a precarious moment in history. The old status quo is not sustainable. I wish the US were led by someone with a universally acknowledged and acclaimed vision for what the next century of international relations are going to look like (and if that person were a decent human being and worthy of inspiration by the Spirit of God in the same way that--say--Pahoran and Moroni and Helaman were, so much the better!) But other than Russell M. Nelson (who I voted for, but who I'm sure doesn't want the job), we have no such person in the world today. And I think Trump's instincts aren't actually terrible on this. So my inclination is to, as the kids say, "let him cook". * Long-term, I think the notion of an international peace secured by the implicit of American-guaranteed MAD, needs to be replaced by an international peace secured by a series of regional "Mini-MADS" that need not go global or result in counterstrikes on the US--the UK, France, Poland, and maybe Ukraine countering bad actors in Europe; India and Israel securing southwest Asia; Japan and Taiwan and maybe South Korea in east Asia; and Australia in the western Pacific.

And here I thought y’all were going to be talking about fishing . . .

Well, at least now we know where the “blessing the hands that prepared it” line comes from. The OP, and a couple of responses, got me thinking about what “bless” really means. Google seems to associate it with “consecrate”. I suppose that for Latter-day Saints who consider ourselves to be consecrated beings living consecrated lives, a formal consecration of food that is about to become part of our consecrated bodies provides a lot of opportunity for reflection and renewal. It’s not about “purifying” the food, per se; it’s about taking a moment to consider the Source of the food and ponder the food’s role in our ongoing quest to—with the Lord’s help—purify ourselves.