Just_A_Guy

I’ve seen it done in times of emergency. But generally speaking . . . Contrary to what many folks will tell you, homelessness (at least in the US) is not merely an inevitable product of poverty. It is usually (not always, but usually) a product of poverty in conjunction with deeply antisocial behaviors (generally a result of untreated mental illness, drug use, or some combination of the two). I’ve worked with people who had stayed at The Road Home or other shelters in the Wasatch Front. The things they encountered at those shelters were horrifying. Drugs were rampant, physical violence and sexual assault were not uncommon, and filth was uncontrollable. On the whole, I’d rather take my kids to church at a maximum security prison than a homeless shelter—the security is better, prison inmates are held to a higher behavioral standard, and they face more rigorous displinary procedures.

Random tangent: Is it just me, or do D. Todd Christofferson and Merrick Garland look an awful lot alike?

I hope you won't mind my posting here, the same thoughts I posted in reply to your PM: Yeah, I have mixed feelings. One doesn't want to be unnecessarily doom-and-gloom--you've frequently (and rightly) pointed out that materially, humankind is better off now than at any point in history and that certain key indicators of (for lack of a human term) "human misery" are on the long-term decline. It's easy to poke fun at the doomsayers; particularly the mainline Christians who have literally been anticipating the Second Coming (and all the horrors that precede it) for the last two thousand years. And I don't have a lot of patience for people who try to associate Biblical prophecies/the antiChrist/etc with any particular modern individual, institution, or event--from a mainline Christian point of view, I see no compelling evidence as to why the "End Times" might not be another thousand years away. On the other hand--I'm not a mainline Christian, I'm a Latter-day Saint; and we have some unique scriptures and prophesies that do suggest that tough times are ahead and that they will probably find us sooner rather than later. And frankly, I feel like there are some cultural foundation stones that are necessary for a democratic republic to survive and thrive in the long term (e.g. civility, honesty, commitment, rule of law, work ethic/discipline, sexual probity, tolerance for and a modicum of trust towards people who think differently than ourselves, free exchange of ideas, rationalism/the scientific method, willingness to sacrifice, thinking and planning for the long term, trustworthy institutions and a populace willing to trust those institutions, et cetera). And I do think that most of those foundation stones are rapidly eroding away. I see the pre-Trump Republican Party as one of the last institutional bastions pushing back against that trend; and Trump pretty much eviscerated all of the GOP's credibility on those issues. I don't see the GOP getting that credibility back even if they wanted to--and many of Trump's supporters frankly don't seem to care if they get it back or not. What does it matter if the modern GOP happens to be "right" on the economy, if a) by the time they're back in power a full-blown economic catastrophe is under way and b) they're wrong about everything else?

Agreed.

Well, let's not get over-dramatic . . .

I (perhaps erroneously) understood Backroads as talking about a type of Facebook group where “needy” parents are soliciting others to buy gifts for their kids and get really persnickety about what kinds of gifts are or aren’t acceptable (“Oh nooo, darling; the base model AirPods aren’t enough for my little Tommy; he needs the AirPods Pros.”)

Being a “giving” person is not, in and of itself, a virtue. Being a helping person is a virtue. Giving in a way that does not help is not virtuous. It just makes one a schmuck, or a poser. IMHO you are 100% right to want to ensure that your giving is actually helpful.

As I understand it, the “blacks are the REAL Hebrews” bit is part and parcel of black supremacy. I don’t know anything about this particular player, and don’t have a huge amount of knowledge about the book he linked to. But I have no problem, in principle, with a private association/employer setting terms of behavior/participation on its members/employees, including terms that are intended solely to preserve the “good name” of the association/employer (however the organization chooses to define “good name”). And if the book is as odious as most other black supremacist stuff I’ve read, I have no problem with NBA players being sanctioned for using their influence to help give it legs.

Agreed. My overall synthesis of President Kimball’s teachings on marriage is: “Marriage is hard. Any two good, committed people with similar values can make a marriage work. But, some things tend to make marriage harder than it needs to be. You will probably find yourself in a more successful marriage if you select a mate in such a way as will minimize potential misunderstandings, conflicts, and trials down the road—particularly when you are vetting a potential mate with whom misunderstandings, conflicts, and trials are not only foreseeable but likely.”

Surprising exactly no one, Archuleta has now told People Magazine that he is “stepping away” from his religion. I’m disinclined to link; but Google and ye shall find.

Oh, good gravy, no. 🙂

I wonder if the distinction between the gift of the Holy Ghost and the power of the Holy Ghost is apposite here. I’ve had times in my life where I felt I had an inspired warning, even though I was quite sure I wasn’t living up to my covenants in one way or another (occasionally, a rather grievous way). And take non-members, who can have the power but not the gift of the Holy Ghost. General Eisenhower made some tactical decisions during WW2 that may well have been “inspired”; but he was also carrying on an extramarital affair at the time. So was he truly inspired (in spite of his sins) by a divine Being who was interested in the outcome of the war? Or was he just lucky? Isaiah seems to suggest that Nebuchadnezzar, for all his personal sins, was still acting at the Lord’s behest . . . Our doctrine is clear that unrepented sin nullifies the gift of the Holy Ghost. But I’m not so sure that it builds an impenetrable wall between the sinner and the power of the Holy Ghost (though, naturally, I fully agree that a sinful lifestyle makes it far more likely that we will be deceived into accepting spurious “revelations” as legitimate).

You make me wish I had added the proviso “spiritually destructive behavior or hazardous”, so let’s just pretend I did that from the beginning. As a general proposition: the ratio of the number of people who think they are exceptional, versus the number of people who actually are exceptional, tends to be enormous; particularly where matters of spiritual development and behavioral praxis are concerned. And people who truly are spiritually exceptional—and know it—tend not to remain spiritually exceptional for very long. With regard to dating age specifically: Do we know that as society evolves, youth of a particular age may find themselves more (or less) “mature” and ready for certain activities and challenges than youth of a particular age a generation or a century ago and that behavioral standards may in some degree morph in response to societal changes? Yes. Do we also know that humans in general, and teenagers in particular, have a remarkable ability to get “revelations” that harmonize perfectly with their own predilections and prejudices (and libidos)? Also, yes.

It was maybe even someone on this forum, who observed that Elder Uchtdorf’s underlying of the new FSY should be read together with Elder Renlund’s recent warning that some “revelations” are so clearly outside the Church’s teachings that they need not be given a second thought. Elder Uchtdorf himself framed the overhaul as a call to live a “higher and holier way”, and he used that specific verbiage at least twice. The behavioral standard isn’t changing, and (though I understand the philosophical basis behind it) I’m not even altogether comfortable with the “guidelines, not rules” paradigm; since that suggests that there may be excusable exceptions on a relatively routine basis—and there aren’t. Except for a ridiculously narrow and unlikely set of circumstances (“Dad, the Gestapo are here and want to know if we are hiding any Jews!”), the behaviors we’ve grown up hearing described as spiritually destructive behavior are universally spiritually destructive. The difference isn’t supposed to be what we do; it’s why we do it—and as we understand the why better, we’ll be expected to do more.

I had to file a petition to terminate parental rights, where the parents took to GoFundMe with a sob story about how DCFS stole their kids (we didn’t steal your kids, Karen; we got a warrant after you forgot to feed them for a week because you were high on heroin) and their public defender wouldn’t do anything for them (you quit returning her calls six months ago), and now you have to hire a “real lawyer” (who either a) will bungle things because he never practices in juvenile court, or b) lost his public defender contract because all the judges knew what a sleazebag he was) who will charge you $10K and lose anyways. So yeah, I tend to take GoFundMes with a grain of salt. Though we did recently donate to one for the funeral of one of our former cub scouts who committed suicide last month. 😞

And then, God changed.

(Tangent) The advantages of the live endowment were that you had a better sense of who was saying what—who was administering which covenants; which characters were physically present, which characters were not, and which characters you quit seeing after a certain point.

It’s interesting how online communication has changed in the last 20 years. We’ve evolved from sort of niche forums and individualized blogs (with aggregators to help us track our favorite sites), into consolidated formats like Twitter and Facebook where everyone can theoretically communicate with everyone. The movement over the last 5 years has been to exile certain ideological groups from those mass communication platforms; but rather than leading to a renaissance of the blogs and special interest fora, conservatives seem to be trying to either set up competitors in the mass-social media market (which progressives will never join and which can be shut down or appropriated with relative ease) or to “take back” mass platforms that have increasingly been banning them (which I frankly think is unlikely to yield sustainable success). I’m not sorry to see Twitter run into the ground, if that’s what Musk chooses to do with it. And if Musk manages to restore some modicum of free speech on the platform for a couple of years, so much the better. But conservatives need divorce themselves from the idea of centralized social media, of a single “public square” (or even a small handful of them) that of necessity is managed (and curated) by a single person or entity. Such institutions will inevitably fall under the control of the people or groups who most want to control them; and the motives underlying such a desire for control are rarely good.

This, from all of you philistines who just let Mole Day go unrecognized . . .

It doesn’t take a lot of radicals to destabilize and overthrow a society; especially (and paradoxically) a mostly-free society whose mainstream pays lip service to the ideas of democracy and liberty. In that sort of environment, a radical population of 10-20% can do quite nicely.

Lest I be thought a complete apostate, let me preface this by saying that in general I think we are best served approaching scripture with the initial presumption that it means what it says it means. But . . . When I get to messy passages, I try to remember that while the scriptures are history, there are not (with the possible exception of the D&C, and even that is likely filtered to some degree through Joseph Smith’s experience with ancient scripture) a post-Enlightenment western style of history. Their authors did not necessarily share our assumptions about what history is, or how it should work, or what should or shouldn’t be included, or the quality of sources, or any literary quality that the end product should show. For example—I don’t remember if it was Herodotus or Thucydides; but one of them gave a “history” of a war complete with a general’s pre-battle speech to his men urging them to fight well, rehearsing their people’s founding legends and giving an exposition on the geopolitical significance of the importance of the battle they were about to fight. Modern historians are pretty confident that this speech was not given in this particular form, and that the general who ostensibly gave the speech may not have even been at that battle. But ancient readers may not have considered this to be much of an issue, because they considered “literary merit” (including the building of tension and other qualities of having a good story) to be at least as essential to “history” (as they understood it) as factual accuracy—sometimes, more so. The words attributed to the Lord by Moroni (or Ether, or the Brother of Jared) may not have been what the Lord actually said.* But it certainly reinforces the singular nature of what was happening, the extraordinary nature of the Brother of Jared’s faith, and the power of faith to work things that have never been wrought before. *Then again, maybe the Lord isn’t above a little hyperbole in the name of a good story, either—at least when dealing with ancients who had a broader definition of “history” than we do. D&C 19:7 suggests that maybe the Lord is more interested in what we do as a result of His words, than whether we interpret the words themselves with the objectively proper degree of accuracy.

Going back to Mark, and the denouement of the encounter: 26 And they [the disciples] were astonished out of measure, saying among themselves, Who then can be saved? 27 And Jesus looking upon them saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible.

I am currently serving as Sunday School president in my ward, and we have a couple that teaches a large (10+) class of teenagers that has basically failed to show up for class with no prior notice and no attempt to get a substitute, every Sunday for the past three months. I talked to my bishopric today about getting a replacement, and we reviewed the list of “members without callings”, and suffice it to say . . . there is no one on that list who regularly attends, has a strong testimony, and can be trusted with children. We will probably have to combine classes next year. We are a mid-to-large ward in Utah County; but between our enormous primary and our stake (the latter of which insists that even the folks filling the stake’s cushiest, most do-nothing callings must never, ever under any circumstances be asked to shoulder any modicum of responsibility in their home wards) (I have virtually no use for any of my stake leadership aside from the stake presidency and high council, in case you didn’t notice! )—all of the members who can be trusted to actually fulfill their callings are “taken”. I get the need to maintain boundaries; particularly for nursing mothers and the like. But consecration and exaltation is supposed to be at least a little bit hard; and the natural result of a critical mass of ward members setting up overly stringent personal boundaries is work that doesn’t get done and ministering that doesn’t happen and and wards that don’t function.

I am currently attached to the hypothesis that the point Jesus was trying to make with the rich young ruler was “You idiot! You can’t do anything to earn eternal life; and if you (in your brazen lack of self-awareness) think you’re perfectly keeping the basic commandments, then I’ll give you more and more commandments until your heart is broken and you’re left pleading for grace; and then maybe you’ll finally understand.” So, no; I don’t read this incident as evidence that perfect compliance with the Mosaic code can, or ever did, ultimately result in eternal life.

Yeah; I've been sloppy in that I've used "adultery" and "fornication" more or less interchangeably in this analogy.