Category Archives: Main

Let’s hear it for atheists!

Belief systems, Current events, Main, Politics, World Religions

No, really. Over in England, where the government has been drifting slowly towards a de facto Sharia law, a group of atheists has started a cheeky public ad campaign, stating that there probably is no God:

The sides of some of London’s red buses will soon carry ads asserting there is “probably no God,” as nonbelievers fight what they say is the preferential treatment given to religion in British society.

Organizers of a campaign to raise funds for the ads said Wednesday they received more than $113,000 in donations, almost seven times their target, in the hours since they launched the project on a charity Web site. Supporters include Oxford University biologist Richard Dawkins, who donated $9,000.

The money will be used to place posters on 30 buses carrying the slogan “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” The plan was to run the ads for four weeks starting in January, but so much money has been raised that the project may be expanded.

In a global climate where Mozart concerts are cancelled, novels are pulled from shelves, and video games are recalled over fear of offending Muslims, it’s nice to see a group exercising free speech — what of it remains in England.

The REPO Atlas: the Jaredites (part 1)

Belief systems, Book of Mormon, Main, Politics, REPO

[Here is an introduction to the REPO postings. Also I’ve made a few updates below.]

It’s hard to mine any detailed information about the Jaredites out of the book of Ether itself. What we have is Joseph Smith’s translation of Moroni’s highly selective and condensed abridgment of his (or Mosiah[2]’s) translation of Ether’s very condensed (“twenty-four gold plates“) and late summary of somewhere from 2000 to over 3000 years of Jaredite history. Outside of the brother of Jared’s theophany of the premortal Messiah, and the occasional speculation on just how those barges were built, most of our quotes from the book of Ether tend to come from Moroni’s commentary rather than anything the Jaredites did or said.

Ether becomes a bit more interesting, however, when we ask ourselves just how the Jaredite civilization(s) splintered, interacted (usually by fighting), and re-merged, and what kind of religious behavior and institutions existed. It’s particularly interesting to note how different the Jaredite narrative reads from the Lehite narrative in both political and religious aspects.

Continue reading The REPO Atlas: the Jaredites (part 1) →

One-page family preparedness checklist

Main, Preparedness

When I was in the bishopric of the Chevy Chase Ward (Washington, DC), I had responsbility for personal and family preparedness. Among other things, I prepared this one-sheet emergency preparedness checklist (PDF, 42KB) as part of a handout to members of our ward. The idea was to have something you could post on your fridge or bulletin board just to see how you’re doing. Also, given the urban setting of the ward and the variety of circumstances (including economics and living space) of the members, we also wanted a checklist that we felt all members of the ward could use.

You’ll notice that relatively little space is given to food storage per se, beyond having 72-hour kits, a two-week water supply, and a one-month food supply. That in part is because food issues tend to be symptomatic of other problems (typically economic and employment problems), but also because many of our ward members were living in typical DC apartments (small).

Beyond that, we (as a bishopric) wanted a focus on all aspects of personal and family preparedness, so that the members could deal with whatever eventuality they might face. As I’ve noted before, our ward boundaries included designated terrorist attack targets (e.g., the World Bank), though the biggest disruption we actually faced while I was in the ward was Hurricane Isabel (our own house was without power for five days).

Anyway, feel free to download the checklist and hand it out or pass it around. Feedback and comments are always welcome.  ..bruce..

GC blogging: the Rome (Italy) temple [updated w/location]

Main, Temples

OK…I wasn’t expecting that . The only thing that could have surprised me more would have been a Beijing temple.

UPDATED: OK, since I’m getting a lot of web hits, here are some more details from this Deseret News article :

The 12th European temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will be built in Rome. . . .

The Rome Italy Temple will be the first to be constructed near the worldwide headquarters for the Roman Catholic Church. It will serve church members from a variety of countries and greatly reduce travel time and expense to the Latter-day Saints living in the area, the release states. . . .

Reaction was emotional. Italy Rome Mission President Jeffrey Acerson, who has been in Rome sine July 2007, was moved by the news.

“The Saints in Italy have waited a long time,” Acerson said, his voice cracking. “We ‘re excited, we’re anxious and we’re very humbled by the decision of a prophet of the Lord to move forward with a temple in Rome.”

When he heard the news, Acerson said at first he wanted to react like Italian soccer fans, who take to the streets when their teams win.

“I felt like all the Saints here in Italy wanted to go into the streets to let everyone know a temple is coming,” he said.

The LDS Church has more than 22,000 members in Italy, where preaching first began in 1850 by then-Elder Lorenzo Snow, who later became president of the church. The first congregation of Latter-day Saints in Italy was organized in Brescia on March 20, 1966. The first Italian mission was opened in August that year, but the church didn’t have formal legal status until 1993.

Though a temple site hasn’t been announced, many Italian church members think a location on church-owned land on the northeastern side of Rome would be a perfect fit, Acerson said.

Tullio Deruvo, church spokesman in Italy, said the site many members speculate about is typical Roman countryside adorned with Mediterranean pine trees. The land is located with easy access to a freeway on the outskirts of Rome, Delruvo said.

And Rome is likely to be closer for Saints in Greece, Cyprus, Albania, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia, members who currently travel to Bern, Switzerland, for temple work. Though the Rome temple is likely to draw Church members, who coordinate temple service with vacation time, from all over Europe.

Go read the whole article.

The LDS Church newsroom has given information on the history of the LDS Church in Italy , but no real details on the temple itself.

[UPDATE] And here are some interesting thoughts on Temple Square vs. the Vatican, as well as some suggestions for the architecture and interior artwork for the Rome temple.

[UPDATE]: Here’s a Google Maps link showing the location of the temple in Rome (hat tip to Temple Study). ..bruce..

“An American Carol”: my review

Current events, Humor, Main, Media

I have posted my review of David Zucker’s new film, “An American Carol” over at one of my other blogs. Here’s a brief excerpt:

David Zucker is brave. Not just because he gleefully mocks the Left (including Hollywood), but because he gleefully mocks radical Islamic terrorists as well. And he is very politically incorrect in how both the Left and radical Islamists are portrayed. When in the first few minutes of the movie you have suicide bomber jokes — not wry or ironic asides, but Airplane!-style, pushing-the-boundaries-of-taste jokes and pratfalls — you know you’re not in West LA anymore.

YMMV.  ..bruce..

Another perspective on the continuing crisis

Current events, Environment, Main, Politics, Preparedness, The Last Days

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

— Sara Teasdale

[cross posted from And Still I Persist]

[full size (3008×2000) original photograph]

Some words of wisdom for Sarah Palin

LDS History, Main, Media, Politics

Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose:

“I am often made aware of the utter uselessness and folly of seeking to vindicate my character…from the simple fact that although foul aspersions can be bruited far and wide, held to the fluttering breeze by every press and rolled as sweet under every tongue, yet while the vile slander is fairly refuted and truth appears in the most incontestable manner it is permitted to lie quietly upon the shelf in slumber the sleep of death or if by chance it should get published in some obscure nook or corner of this great republic be most religiously suppressed as tho in fear that the truth should be known and believed.”

— Brigham Young writing to (then) U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, 1855 (quoted in 40 Ways to Look at Brigham Young, Orton & Slaughter, Deseret Book, 2008, pp. xiv-xv)

Doesn’t look as though the interwebs have changed things all that much.  ..bruce w..

[cross posted from And Still I Persist]

BYU Honors Program reading list (mid-1970s)

Belief systems, BYU, LDS Society, Main

It is, of course, fashionable to mock BYU as somehow being parochial or backwards, even (especially!) among the Bloggernacle. Having attended BYU in the 1970s and taught there in the 1980s, I don’t really buy that. BYU students as a body have more real-world exposure to international culture, language and politics — not to mention genuine third-world poverty — than any other major US university. Also, as I have written here before, my freshman Honors English class was actually “composition and reasoning”, and we had to learn to construct and defend a logical argument, a skill sadly lacking in current public discourse, especially in academia and politics (and, frankly, religion).

Scrounging through my files after an e-mail exchange on reading lists with a good friend (hi, Linsey!), I ran across an “HONORS PROGRAM RECOMMENDED READING LIST” from my undergraduate years (1971-72, 74-78). I don’t know exactly when this was compiled; some analysis of the articles cited might establish a “no earlier than” date. But I had this before I graduated in 1978, since I didn’t have a lot of interaction with the Honors Program during my two years of teaching at BYU (1985-87; I was an instructor in the Computer Science department).

So, here’s what the Honors Program recommended back in the 1970s that we as undergraduates read. I’ve reformatted it a bit (and corrected a few typos, though probably introduced a few of my own; this was most likely typed upon on a typewriter on a mimeograph stencil), but the overall structure is still the same. Note that the original takes up seven pages, two columns per page. I’ve put in a few notes in italics and brackets. The list itself contains occasional duplications (e.g., Captial/Das Kapital by Karl Marx shows up in two different places); I’ve left those intact.

Given that this list was complied 30 years ago, what would you add or drop? What entries surprise you the most? [UPDATE: Here is the current BYU Honors “Great Works” list.]

Continue reading BYU Honors Program reading list (mid-1970s) →

Child of the Year moments

Family, Humor, Main, Personal, Personal History

Heather O. over at Mommy Mormon Wars has a posting about “Another Mother of the Year moment” (which involves her toddler daughter stuffing her mouth with holly berries). The comments (be sure to read them all) have similar “I can’t believe I did that” parental moments.

In fairness to Heather O. and the rest, however, many of these moments are less the parents’ fault than simply the consequences of having children. I think that many of my mom’s gray hairs come from my own actions — and I started young. Here are some examples:

1958 (age 5, living in Imperial Beach, California):

— The street we live on has (as I recall) no sidewalks — just yards that go right up to the street. After a heavy rain, there are wonderful large puddles in the worn depressions along the shoulder of the road. As I go out to play, my mom tells me, “Don’t play in those mud puddles with your clothes on.” A while later, she gets a call from a neighbor who says that I’m playing stark naked in one of the large puddles — with my clothes carefully laid out on the neighbor’s lawn.

— There was an abandoned workshop or garage across the street; I thought of it as a “barn”, but it was far too low for that. I used to climb up to the roof and jump off. In fact, I very much loved jumping off of high places until I was about 9 or 10. Then I suddenly developed a fear of heights. I don’t know if that was just a realization of what I was doing, or the result of an unpleasant jump whose details I’ve blotted out completely.

1958-1960 (ages 5-7, living in Naval housing outside of Subic Bay, Philippine Islands):

— I used to leave the Naval housing area (West Kalayaan) and wander in the surrounding jungle. On at least one occasion, I took the first aid kit from my house, and a friend (same age) and I wandered into the jungle, found a nearby Negrito village, and tried to ask them if they had any cuts that needed band-aids. (They spoke no English.) It’s been nearly 50 years, but I remember the warm (and, in retrospect, probably amused) smile on the face of the native — an older man not dressed in much more than a loincloth — who tried to talk with us and who offered us coffee in a tin cup.

— I was crawling around an abandoned pillbox (probably Japanese) in the jungle and cut myself (on a rusty piece of rebar) on the inside of my thigh. Rather than tell my mom when I got home, I just put a large band-aid on it. Luckily, I was wearing shorts; she spotted the band-aid, asked me about it, took the band-aid off, and then transported me to the Naval hospital, where I got two stitches and a tetanus booster.

— On a regular basis, a truck pulling a trailer would wend its way through the Naval housing area. The trailer had a DDT sprayer that would emit dense clouds of wonderful-smelling DDT fog. We (the neighborhood kids) would play tag in the DDT fog.

— My older brother Chip and I would go down to a construction area on the outskirts of the housing area near sundown to throw dirt clods at the fruit bats.  Chip and I also used to capture large beetles and make them fight each other.

— I remember on a few occasions walking from the Subic Bay base itself to the naval housing area and noting with keen interest the signs along the side of the road saying, “Danger! Quicksand!”

1960-61 (ages 7-8, Astoria, OR):

— We lived in Naval housing again, with the (moderate) rain forests starting at our back yard. I used to wander through these woods at will — alone or with a friend — and capture snakes. My friend Paul and I once captured 26 snakes in one day. I kept large numbers of snakes in two unused trash cans behind our duplex. Somehow, in all this, I never once caught or encountered a poisonous snake.

And so on.  Your own stories?  If you need some different inspiration, here’s a post over at thisisby.us made two years ago in response to some school banning tag; the comment thread is still going.  ..bruce..

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Belief systems, Current events, Main, The Last Days

[crossposted from And Still I Persist]

Jerry Pournelle over at his blog has linked to the Rudyard Kipling classic. Written nearly 90 years ago, it is remarkably apt right now, as our financial system threatens to melt down over human greed and stupidity:

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.“

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four—
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:—
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will bum,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Amen and amen. (Here’s a though: correlate this poem with the Book of Mormon.)  ..bruce w..

P.S. “Copybook headings”: classic proverbs and wise quotes printed at the top of each page of blank school booklets (copybooks) used for essays and handwriting practice.