Let this be a warning to all you mystery-delvers out there. Heh. ..bruce..
All posts by bfwebster
Rethinking the Flood (part IV)
I’ve previously expressed my opinion (here and here, plus here) that the classic (conservative Christian) view of the Noachian flood — a worldwide immersion of liquid water, likely between 3000 and 2000 AD — is implausible due to a complete lack of geological, archeological, and ecological evidence for such an event (cf. this Dialogue article by Clayton White and Mark Thomas). On the other hand, as I explain in my posts, I do believe a major climatic shift happened that gave rise to the Flood narrative in the Old Testament as well as in many other cultures and traditions. However, I believe it had to do with event surround the end of the last ice age, in which a very sharp warming period was followed by a brief ice age resurgence (the Younger Dryas period), which in turn was followed by another sharp warming period. This climactic whipsaw appears to correlate with some significant human and fauna declines, especially in North America (where LDS doctrine places the pre-flood patriarchs).
I bring all this up because I ran across a diagram today, based on the Greenland GISP2 ice core data, that shows just how dramatic that climactic whipsaw was compared to climate changes since then (the temperature scale to the left represents a reconstruction of the temperature on the Greenland icefield based on oxygen isotope ratios; click on the image to read the original paper explaining the use of this ratio as a ‘global’ proxy):
Many debates are still going as to what triggered the sudden up-down-up shifts, each of which occurred very quickly. But I suspect the antediluvian and Noachian events occurred in this time period. ..bruce..
A brief note on older posts with scriptural references
Many of my posts here have links to the online LDS scriptures made available by the LDS Church itself. However, I discovered a day or two ago that the Church has changed the location and layout of those scriptures, which means that some of those links (particularly those incorporating a search) won’t work. I will change them as I run across them, or you can drop me an e-mail if you find them yourselves. Thanks! ..bruce..
Five Nephite restorations
As Latter-day Saints, we tend to be locked into the narrative of our own history, namely: Christ’s mortal ministry in Palestine; the eventual apostasy of the Christian churches; and the restoration of the Church in the early 19th century, some 1500 years later. On top of that, our overall view of human history tends to be dispensationalist: Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and so forth. Finally, we tend to think of restorations as “all at once” (again, looking at the model of our own restoration). For those three reasons, I think it is easy for us to overlook shorter, more subtle cycles of apostasy and restoration.
While we commonly talk about the up-and-down cycle of the Nephites, we usually assume that there was nevertheless an unbroken line of prophetic leadership, priesthood authority and church organization from Nephi through Moroni. From a careful reading of the Book of Mormon, I am not sure that was the case at all. I think there are at least five (5) places where a restoration occurs in the Book of Mormon. Each restoration involves a divine intervention to restore doctrine, authority, ordinances and/or church organization. In each case, some remnant of the previous ‘church’ and its doctrine still existed, but that shouldn’t surprise us: our own Restoration took place in a world filled with Christian churches following the Bible, practicing ordinances and preaching doctrines that the Restored Church practices and preaches as well.
More after the jump.
A humorous warning
“I think a baby seal just died.” Heh. ..bruce..
A reflection on the BYU football independence announcement
BYU announced this afternoon that they are going independent in football as of mid-2011, while other sports will be played against the West Coast Conference. This is widely seen (and rightly so) as a risky move, since BYU will now have to line up football opponents for every single game in a season, instead of having most of those games against conference members. It also creates additional obstacles for BYU getting into a BCS bowl. There is, to say the least, great skepticism about this move on BYU’s part; most sports columnists, in and out of Utah, consider it risky at best and downright stupid at worst.
And yet….
While thinking about the announcement this afternoon, I remembered a well-known line from the 1983 movie, “WarGames”. Joshua, the self-aware computer, after playing through countless nuclear war scenarios, observes: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
That, I think, is it. BYU has deliberately chosen not to play the BCS game, at least not on BCS’s terms. In fact, I think that BYU is ready, at least for the near term, to deliberately step off the BCS treadmill, completely give up the idea of repeating its 1984 national championship and instead take a very different approach to football from the rest of the NCAA.
As has been pointed out by others, BYU now has one of the best high-definition broadcast facilities in the United States, including a complete sports studio and mobile HD truck. BYU has its own satellite channel, which I suspect will soon have an HD parallel channel. BYU is in negotiations with ESPN for scheduling and broadcasting football games, reportedly at a much, much higher return than BYU was getting through the Mountain West Conference. Outside of those games, BYU can — like Texas — now run its own independent sports channel (in high def, no less) and gain revenue, or can sell broadcast rights of specific games to other networks.
All this will increase the income to BYU from football, as well as its exposure. BYU should not have any trouble lining up bowl game invitations each year — BYU fans are well-known for showing up. And in the meantime — and, again, others have already noted this as a consideration — a greater portion of the US and the world at large becomes familiar with BYU and, through it, the LDS Church.
The end game? If the approach remains lucrative and meets exposure goals, and if they truly are giving up (for now) on a national championship, BYU has no real reason to join a conference for football. In fact, with the PAC-10 (soon to be PAC-12) and the WAC both clearly out of contention (though for different reasons), the only other conference that really makes sense for BYU geographically would be the Big 12. They may yet come after BYU with the pending departure of Colorado and Nebraska, but neither side is going to be in a hurry at this point.
Should be interesting to see how this all unfolds. ..bruce..
Mormons and flowers
Ran across this on Facebook. I’ve watched this clip half a dozen times and crack up every time. ..bruce..
I love me that Rapture humor
In the meantime, I’ve got to do better than one post per month. ..bruce..
Interesting commentary on the US District Court ruling on DOMA
The Defense of Marriage Act, passed by the US Congress in 1996, defines marriage as being solely between “a man and a woman”. Judge Joseph Tauro of the US District Court of Massachusetts just issued a ruling striking down the DOMA as unconstitutional. In so doing, he apparently stated that
DOMA marks the first time that the federal government has ever attempted to legislatively mandate a uniform federal definition of marriage – or any other core concept of domestic relations, for that matter.
Charles Lane, over at the Post Partisan blog of the Washington Post, responds by saying, in effect, “Uh, no.”
During the 1856 presidential campaign, the Republican Party platform had accused the Democrats of countenancing “those twin relics of barbarism–polygamy and slavery” and declared it the “duty of Congress to prohibit” both evils in the territories. Buchanan’s expedition was intended to prove the Republicans wrong. It succeeded only in provoking a few inconsequential clashes between armed Mormons and U.S. soldiers.
Congress subsequently adopted three increasingly harsh criminal bans on bigamy and polygamy in the territories: in 1862, 1882 and 1887. The Supreme Court upheld these laws repeatedly against Mormon challenges alleging, among other things, that they violated religious liberty. The 1887 law, the Edmunds-Tucker Act, abrogated the Mormon Church’s corporate charter and confiscated its property, on the grounds that its leaders encouraged polygamy.
The Supreme Court said that was okay, too. Echoing the majority opinion of the day, the court recoiled in frank horror at a practice the Mormons believed was ordained by God — but which the justices considered a “crime against the laws and abhorrent to the sentiments and feelings of the civilized world.” They compared it to human sacrifice. . . .
So it is a bit misleading to say, as Tauro does, “every [historical] effort to establish a national definition of marriage met failure.” Washington’s triumph over Mormon polygamy, made permanent in a national statute, would seem to qualify as a federal definition of marriage, at least in the sense of what marriage is not.
To be sure, Tauro emphasizes that the states have always had exclusive authority over marriage. Utah was a territory at the time of Washington’s effort to stamp out polygamy, and the constitution gave the federal government paramount authority over territories, including their domestic legislation. (That is why, technically, the anti-polygamy laws aimed at Utah also applied to Arizona, Oklahoma, Alaska and the District of Columbia.) Congress functioned, in effect, as the super-legislature for each territory.
Yet what is noteworthy about the Utah case is that Congress leveraged its power over Utah the territory into power over Utah the state. As a condition of admission to the Union, Utah’s people gave Congress a permanent veto over their marriage laws – a veto that remains on the books to this day. The fact that today’s Mormons are proponents of heterosexual monogamy and opponents of same-sex monogamy, is deeply ironic, but legally irrelevant.
What’s more, Utah is not the only state in which this situation obtains. The language of the Utah Enabling Act was repeated, word-for-word, in the laws that admitted New Mexico, Arizona and Oklahoma as states in the early 20th Century. In short, the federal government has shared authority over the marriage laws of four U.S. states.
Now, I have long been amused by those who state that efforts to allow gay marriage would have no impact on efforts to allow plural marriage. It has always struck me that any successful legal argument allowing gay marriage would have to, of necessity, allow plural marriage — I have yet to see a convincing argument to the contrary, particularly since plural marriage has a much deeper and broader history worldwide (including current active practice, particularly in Islamic and African cultures) than gay marriage does.
If Judge Tauro’s ruling is upheld, it would be interesting to see whether legal challenges to the Federally-mandated Arizona laws might arise from one of the polygamous religious groups therein (Arizona being, in my opinion, the most likely candidate for such an effort). Since Judge Tauro’s ruling does indicate that states can define marriage on their own, such an effort could be quickly ended by a de novo state law banning plural marriage (and for all I know, such a law already exists). But we continue to live in interesting times. ..bruce..
Interesting view of LDS professionals
The Financial Times (which I read faithfully for a while back in DC, while I still read physical newspapers) notes the increased visibility of Mormons in Western business, government, and culture (free registration may be required):
Mormons are moving from the periphery of modern American life to the very centre. From Romney’s failed tilt at the presidency to the tales of everyday polygamous families in HBO’s popular drama Big Love, Mormonism has become increasingly visible over the last generation. Where its most famous acolytes were once the Osmonds, leading lights now include politicians such as US Senate majority leader Harry Reid (a Democrat) and Romney (a Republican); Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight vampire saga; Glenn Beck, the popular conservative talk-show host; and self-help guru Stephen R. Covey, the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Those are the household names. As important are the Mormons who play central roles at the companies and institutions that make America tick: Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University (one of the biggest in the US); David Neeleman, founder of JetBlue Airlines; J.W. (“Bill”) Marriott, head of Marriott International; and Jon Huntsman Jr, ambassador to China – to name a few. And while firm data are hard to come by, off-the-record interviews conducted for this article suggest that a generation of Mormons in their thirties and forties is accelerating the trend. For every Hill Cumorah Pageant – an annual set of performances starting this weekend in which a cast of 650 enact scenes from the Bible and Book of Mormon before massive audiences near Joseph Smith’s birthplace – there are much more mundane scenes being played out across the US: an investment banker in New York said, “I was at my final day of interviews at JPMorgan during my senior year in college. They took students from Princeton, Yale, Harvard, U-Penn and Brigham Young University [a Mormon university in Utah]. I was like, ‘what the hell? BYU?’ Then I slowly realised how many Mormons there are on Wall Street.”
The CIA has its eye out for Mormons, who, people say jokingly, ace the mandatory drugs and lie-detector tests. Blue-chip corporations are recruiting, too. And at Harvard Business School, female students note ruefully that attractive male classmates are invariably associated with one of the “three Ms”: the military, the management consultancy McKinsey or Mormonism.
In that complaint lies the conundrum: much of the US still sees Mormons as weirdly strait-laced at best, cultish at worst. Yet elite institutions are embracing them. What does that fact say about the world’s youngest major religion – and about success in modern America?
Much of this is not new — Stephen Covey has been writing for decades, and the CIA was recruiting at BYU when I was an undergrad in the 70s — but I do agree with the articles main points: Mormons and the LDS Church as visible as never before, and — as noted — “elite institutions are embracing them.” Some of their observations and answers are quite interesting.
Must drive the anti-LDS crowd nuts. 🙂 Read the whole thing. ..bruce..