Grading press coverage

Main, Media, Politics, Press

Joel Campbell — an assistant professor of journalism at BYU, who blogs at the LDS Newsline site — has graded (A-F) some recent efforts at press coverage of the LDS Church and its beliefs. He’s pretty blunt and not afraid to name names:

“D” Work: In news reporting classes that I teach I talk a lot about “relevance” and a “news peg.” I couldn’t find much of either in this very long piece about Mitt Romney’s involvement in the building of the Boston Temple in Belmont, Mass. Based on the article’s sheer verbosity, you would think Romney played some leading role in building the temple and selecting the site. Although it is framed with the sinister headline, “Mormon Temple Casts a Shadow,” the article doesn’t make that case. It was written by WaPo Style writer Sridhar Pappu, who appears to be assigned to provide some meaningful narratives on the candidates. This one is a dull story and not too meaningful at that. Maybe Pappu felt like he had more to write after his novella on Romney ran in the September 2005 Atlantic, in which he asked Romney “How Mormon are you?” and then quizzed him about his undergarments. It was certainly one of the low points of the coverage of the presidential campaign.

Read the whole thing. ..bruce..

A Mormon lullaby

Main, Media, Music

My former wife, Marla, bought me two Marvin Payne CDs for Christmas this year: “Ships of Dust” (1971) and “Houses and Towns” (1973). Back when we were both undergrads at BYU, Marvin used to go door-to-door through the Provo student apartment complexes with his guitar and a backpack full of albums for sale — which is how Marla bought her original copy of “Ships of Dust”.

I used to sing the title song “Ships of Dust” as a lullaby to our daughters, Jacqui and Bethan, when they were about 8 and 5, respectively. I sang it again tonight as a lullaby for my 5-year-old granddaughter, Sydney. Here are the lyrics:

We wandered through the shipyards,
through the timber and the rope,
and the wise men saw the longing in our eyes.
So they made for each of us
a ship of dust, with sails of trust,
and the sun behind us vanished from the skies.

Now it’s a long time since the sunset,
and the time we raised the sails,
and the time the old shipbuilders waited for.
There are wonders in the night;
there are strange and dangerous shades of light,
but the dawn is gonna see me on that shore.

Sweet stars, mark the night.
Fair winds, arc the right waves over my prow—
I am homeward.

Wooden wheels and oaken rudders
bend like grass against the sea,
and the canvas fails and falls against our hope.
I am climbing on the mast
and I see a trace of dawn at last
and I feel a strange new feeling in the rope.

Now the sun splits the horizon
where I thought the beach to be,
and the graveyard for the ships done with the sea
But I’m on a sea of glass
and the light is more than sun can pass
and the deck is turning silver under me.

Sweet stars, mark my mind.
Fair winds, you can find me sailing your source—
I am homeward.

Words and music © 1971, Marvin Payne

Sydney fell sweetly asleep while I sang. ..bruce..

Current votes for the Anti-Christ

Main, Politics, Preparedness, World Religions

OK, so I’m finishing my preparations this morning for teaching my Sunday School lesson (on the book of Revelation), and the thought strikes me: how many folks out there (and by “folks”, I mean evangelical Christians) believe, fear, or suspect that Mitt Romney may be the ‘Anti-Christ’ alluded to in Revelation by John?

Well, a very simple Google search (Mitt Romney AntiChrist) turns up about 26,000 hits. But, as it turns out, Romney is dead last on the list of major presidential contenders. Here are some searches for the other candidates as well as the current and immediate past Presidents and Vice-Presidents:

  • Mike Huckabee: 156,000 hits
  • Fred Thompson: 108,000 hits
  • Bill Clinton: 84,900 hits
  • Rudi Giuliani: 84,800 hits
  • Ron Paul: 82,700 hits
  • George W. Bush: 64,800 hits
  • Hillary Clinton: 63,500 hits
  • Al Gore: 62,500 hits
  • John Edwards: 61,200 hits
  • Dick Cheney: 40,800
  • Barack Obama: 31,700 hits
  • John McCain: 28,500 hits
  • Mitt Romney: 26,000 hits

Admittedly, this is a crude and inaccurate measure — all I’m checking for is the presence of the word ‘AntiChrist’ along with the candidate’s first and last name. But the results certainly are counter-intuitive: not only is Mitt Romney the lowest on the list, but almost all the other major Republican candidates are ahead of all the major Democratic candidates, John McCain being the exception — but he’s still ahead of Romney.

I may do more refined searches later. ..bruce..

Ouch, indeed

Current events, Humor, Main, Politics

Here’s a child after my own heart:

“Who is your favorite author?” Aleya Deatsch, 7, of West Des Moines asked Mr. Huckabee in one of those posing-like-a-shopping-mall-Santa moments.

Mr. Huckabee paused, then said his favorite author was Dr. Seuss.

In an interview afterward with the news media, Aleya said she was somewhat surprised. She thought the candidate would be reading at a higher level.

“My favorite author is C. S. Lewis,” she said.

Boy, that’s gotta sting (this is in the New York Times). Hat tip to the omnipresent Glenn Reynolds and a chain of links from there.  ..bruce..

Joseph Smith’s Presidential platform

LDS History, Main, Politics

Most people (including many members of the LDS Church) are unaware that Joseph Smith ran for President in 1844, the year of his assassination. RonanJH over at By Common Consent has listed Smith’s Presidential platform, as set forth in a pamphlet distributed by LDS missionaries all over the young United States. Here are a few of them:

  • “Petition, also, ye goodly inhabitants of the slave states, your legislators to abolish slavery by the year 1850, or now, and save the abolitionist from reproach and ruin, infamy and shame. Pray Congress to pay every man a reasonable price for his slaves out of the surplus revenue arising from the sale of public lands, and from the deduction of pay from the members of Congress. Break off the shackles from the poor black man, and hire him to labor like other human beings; for ‘an hour of virtuous liberty on earth, is worth a whole eternity of bondage!’”
  • “Abolish the practice in the army and navy of trying men by court martial for desertion; if a soldier or marine runs away, send him his wages, with this instruction, that his country will never trust him again; he has forfeited his honor. Make HONOR the standard with all men: be sure that good is rendered for evil in all cases; and the whole nation, like a kingdom of kings and priests, will rise up with righteousness; and be respected as wise and worthy on earth; and as just and holy for heaven; by Jehovah, the author of perfection.”
  • “More economy in the national and state governments, would make less taxes among the people.”

You can read a scanned version of the original pamphlet here.  ..bruce..

Oh, great…

Current events, Main

…it turns out that Matthew Murray, the Colorado shooter — the one who murdered four people before killing himself and who left anti-Christian screeds on various web sites — had joined the LDS Church a year or so ago. This is a wretched tragedy as it is; I’d hate to see evangelicals seize upon it to somehow implicate or criticize the Church. That may have been part of his apparent rejection of his family’s evangelical Christianity, and there’s no indication of whether he stayed active and involved in the LDS Church for any period after his baptism. But that’s not going matter much once this hits the news cycle. ..bruce..

Evil, agency, and suffering

LDS Doctrine, Main

In my posting regarding the Huckabee flap, I noted that the LDS approach to ‘angels and demons’ avoids some of the issues regarding the problem of evil (theodicy), largely due to our rejection of creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing). While this helps neutralize the “God created evil” issue, we do still have the issue of ‘why does God permit evil?’ I think it’s because it’s a necessary consequence of our agency, which from an LDS perspective is an essential aspect of our eternal progress.

Beyond that, I suspect that in the next life, our perspectives regarding evil, suffering, and injustice will shift dramatically — in part because we will have ‘grown up’ and will have an eternal perspective on things. As a child, I hated getting shots; I would literally scream and thrash about. I’m still not a great fan of needles, but I can calmly watch myself getting a shot or giving blood — I think two years (during my missionary work in Central America) of getting a gamma globulin shot every three months probably did that for me. That’s a trivial example, but I think that our perspective will truly change in an eternal setting.

Beyond that, however, I suspect we may see examples of evil on an eternal level that make the worst sufferings here on earth look paltry and momentary. Consider this: if agency is an eternal aspect of eternal intelligences, what about those intelligences that chose evil early on — before ever receiving ‘spirit bodies’? If agency existed prior to spirit incarnation — and I would certainly read the scriptures and the prophets that way — then the spirit sibling we call Lucifer is clearly a ‘Johnny-come-lately’ to the dark side.

At the risk of sounding like a Latter-day Lovecraft — I wonder what evil might exist that has been following that course for much of eternity? What form might it take, and what threat might it pose to (a) other intelligences, (b) pre-mortal spirits, (c) post-mortal spirits, and (d) resurrected beings? (Think about it:  who tempted Lucifer?) We may find that our mortal life is just a warm-up for the real battle.

Thoughts? ..bruce..

Rethinking the Flood, part III

LDS Doctrine, Main, Science

I had an earlier posting that talked about rethinking the Noachian flood from an LDS perspective, changing the timeframe and location of the Noachian events to North America at the end of the last ice age. In that post, I mentioned growing evidence about a major impact event over the North American ice sheet about 13,000 years ago that may have triggered the Lesser Dryas glaciation, the last ice age event before the current warm period.

Here’s another article that pulls together some of the growing evidence of this impact:

Evidence unearthed at more than two dozen sites across North America suggests that an extraterrestrial object exploded in Earth’s atmosphere above Canada about 12,900 years ago, just as the climate was warming at the end of the last ice age. The explosion sparked immense wildfires, devastated North America’s ecosystems and prehistoric cultures, and triggered a millennium-long cold spell, scientists say.

At sites stretching from California to the Carolinas and as far north as Alberta and Saskatchewan—many of which were home to prehistoric people of the Clovis culture—researchers have long noted an enigmatic layer of carbon-rich sediment that was laid down nearly 13 millennia ago. “Clovis artifacts are never found above this black mat,” says Allen West, a geophysicist with Geoscience Consulting in Dewey, Ariz. The layer, typically a few millimeters thick, lies between older, underlying strata that are chock-full of mammoth bones and younger, fossilfree sediments immediately above, he notes…

Heat from the event would have set off wildfires across the continent, the scientists suggest. The heat and shock from the explosion probably broke up portions of the ice sheet smothering eastern Canada at the time, they add. The flood of fresh water into the North Atlantic that resulted would have interrupted ocean currents that bring warmth to the region, and thick clouds of smoke and soot in the air would have intensified cooling across the Northern Hemisphere.

The inferred date of the event matches the beginning of a 1,200-year-long cold spell that geologists call the Younger Dryas, which in its first few decades saw temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere drop as much as 10°C.

The interesting note (as per the excerpt above) is that the Clovis culture of North America, along with much of the megafauna, appears to have disappeared post-impact. Read the whole article (which includes photographs of the charred layer). ..bruce..

Angels and demons

Belief systems, LDS Doctrine, Main, World Religions, , , , , ,

Some weeks back, I happened to see the last few minutes of the movie “End of Days“, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger ends up taking on Satan himself. It highlighted for me how differently the LDS Church and most other Christians religion view angels and devils (or demons). I think it explains in part why Evangelicals are so obsessed with the LDS doctrine that both Christ and Lucifer are — just like the rest of us — eternal, uncreated intelligences with agency who each received spirit bodies from God and thus — just like the rest of us — are ‘spirit children’ of Heavenly Father. Their usual way of framing this is that “Do Mormons really believe that Christ and Satan are brothers?”, an issue that presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has now apparently raised.

The short answer is, yes, an answer that (in my opinion) makes as much or more sense than traditional Christian theology while defusing the whole sticky issue of why (and how) did God create evil (theodicy). Let me explain.

Continue reading Angels and demons →

The JFK Mormon speech

LDS History, Main, Politics

No, not John F. Kennedy’s original “Catholic” speech, nor Mitt Romney’s “Mormon” speech. This is a speech that Kennedy gave in the LDS Tabernacle in Salt Lake City in September 1963, just two months before his assassination. The full text has been posted over at Straight and Narrow Blog, but here are a few excerpts:

…Of all the stories of American pioneers and settlers, none is more inspiring than the Mormon trail. The qualities of the founders of this community are the qualities that we seek in America, the qualities which we like to feel this country has, courage, patience, faith, self-reliance, perseverance, and, above all, an unflagging determination to see the right prevail…

…I know that many of you in this State and other States sometimes wonder where we are going and why the United States should be so involved in so many affairs, in so many countries all around the globe. If our task on occasion seems hopeless, if we despair of ever working our will on the other 94 percent of the world population, then let us remember that the Mormons of a century ago were a persecuted and prosecuted minority, harried from place to place, the victims of violence and occasionally murder, while today, in the short space of 100 years, their faith and works are known and respected the world around, and their voices heard in the highest councils of this country.

As the Mormons succeeded, so America can succeed, if we will not give up or turn back. I realize that the burdens are heavy and I realize that there is a great temptation to urge that we relinquish them, that we have enough to do here in the United States, and we should not be so busy around the globe. The fact of the matter is that we, this generation of Americans, are the first generation of our country ever to be involved in affairs around the globe. From the beginning of this country, from the days of Washington, until the Second World War, this country lived an isolated existence. Through most of our history we were an unaligned country, an uncommitted nation, a neutralist nation. We were by statute as well as by desire. We had believed that we could live behind our two oceans in safety and prosperity in a comfortable distance from the rest of the world…

Hat tip to Dave’s Mormon Inquiry.  ..bruce..