Dear Oregon Department of Transportation,

This weekend I took a group of scouts on a winter camping trip to Mt. Hood. We left on Friday morning at around 8am and arrived at Frog Lake at roughly 11am. The driving conditions were terrible as they always are in Oregon when it snows and freezes. The shoulders of the roads were littered with cars and semis that had slid or rolled off the road. When we arrived, we donned snow shoes and hiked in about a mile from the parking lot to the lake. It was a beautiful hike with some light snow and gospel conversation. The assistant scoutmaster and I discussed the implications of belonging to a Church run by imperfect prophets who make mistakes and often reflect the biases of their times and culture. (more…)

I am a pro-science guy and I believe in evolution. That said, it seems to me from watching the Discovery channel and reading popular science articles that it is easy to get carried away explaining things based on evolution to the point that we forget what evolution is in the first place.†  Evolution is natural selection working on random mutation. Here’s an example from the NYT (hat tip: ZD sidebar) demonstrating how easy it is to slip from sound scientific reasoning into poppycock: (more…)

This thread is cracking me up.

I just gave the “etymology is not meaning” speech to one of my varsity scouts a couple of weeks ago, but apparently it could use wider circulation. One of the scouts was pulling the familiar line that goes something like: “don’t use that word, do you know what the word “dork” really means?” (more…)

We can’t hold it against those copying texts thousands of years ago. It is entirely understandable that as they copied the original text of Daniel, when faced with what must have seemed to them a nonsense word “Obamanation,” they would try to smooth out this difficult reading by substituting the more reasonable look-alike word “abomination.” For us, living in the end times prophesied by Daniel, the meaning is obviously much more easily discerned. (more…)

When I was at BYU I used to spend some of my free time between classes hunting for treasures in the BYU library. I made lots of trips to Special Collections since my searches on controversial topics seemed to land me there more often than not. But those trips took time. Frequently, I would just go to the Mormon section (on the forth floor at the time before the HBLL was expanded and it moved downstairs) and look for interesting books to check out. At the time I didn’t have a very clear picture of the larger scholarly community and I assumed if I was going to find interesting things I’d have to dig them up for myself in old books. (more…)

Click over and read this short article by Eamonn McCann from the Belfast Telegraph.

Every now and then someone I would never expect jumps in to say the obvious in it can be very refreshing. I’m not worried that his description of baptism for the dead is light on the word “proxy.” I’m not too concerned about his describing our baptisms for the dead as happening in “batches.” Misconceptions like that are widespread and increasingly I think they are not a big deal. When it comes to the main points of his article McCann is right on the money and I was thrilled to read it. Personally, I like it even better coming from an atheist since I can imagine that he has less built in religious bias than your average Catholic or Mormon commenting on the situation.

Hat tip to my mother in law for forwarding me the link.

P.S. Blake made some related comments in this post back in Feb 2007.

Someone asked me recently why the LDS church still uses the King James Version exclusively. My answer was probably a parrot of something I read in the bloggernacle at some point in the past, but I don’t really remember where I got my current view.

My answer was to this effect:

Q1: Why do we use the KJV in the first place?

A1: Because the KJV was the Bible in widespread use at the time of the restoration. We just picked up the KJV by default because it was the Bible used by Joseph Smith and his contemporaries.

Q2: Why do we still stick to the KJV tenaciously after all these years, even to the point of disallowing other translations from use as the basis for Gospel Doctrine classes etc.?

A2: Because the Book of Mormon uses KJV language and we don’t want to do anything to the Book of Mormon language. It would be weird if we started using a plain English translation of the Bible but had a Book of Mormon that still used the KJV English. Since we are not about to “translate” the Book of Mormon into modern English, we can’t officially do it to the Bible either. I don’t think it has anything to do with the KJV being the best, or even a particularly good translation by modern standards. (more…)

Living in Oregon I don’t get to many of the various conferences, but as it turns out I will by in Utah this year during the FAIR conference on Aug 7th and 8th (since my brother in law is getting back from a mission that week) so I am going! I attended the FAIR conference one other time a few years back and it was a great time so I am looking forward to it this year. As usual, I see some bloggernaclers on the program and in particular I’m excited to see what Blake, Brian, and JimF do under the title Philosophy and Mormonism.

Who else has plans to be there?

Let’s assume for the sake of this post that God exists and that he’s good. In this context, the problem of evil starts to look rather like our complaining about how God does his job. This got me to thinking:

Just what do you think God should be doing? Specifically. (more…)

The response to my previous post could be characterized as a collective “that’s it?” but I know that what you really meant was “oh yeah baby, that’s it.” So, while I am on the topic of redactors working macro-level messages into the volumes of scripture the are redacting, I want to call you attention to a very interesting paper in the JBMS and get your take on it. In his paper Prophecy and History: Structuring the Abridgment of the Nephite Records, Steven L. Olsen makes some very intriguing claims about the editorial intent guiding Mormon’s abridgment of the Book of Mormon. (more…)

In a book called The Nine Commandments, David Noel Freedman argues that the Old Testament contains a hidden pattern, carefully crafted and put in place by an anonymous master editor† of the Primary History (Genesis – Kings). The hidden pattern is based on the Ten Commandments. According to Freedman, the history from Genesis to Kings is structured to show that the Ten Commandments were systematically violated by Israel (one commandment per-book) until God had no choice but to unleash the covenant curses on Israel, resulting in their capture and exile along with the destruction of the temple. (more…)

Every night I go to sleep and have the most terrible dreams imaginable. I am torn to shreds by wild animals, my children die, I am forced to kill home intruders to protect my family, I show up to finals three hours late or without having studied, I am maimed, and a thousand variations on that theme. Occasionally, I am Superman, but even then, I usually develop some sort of flying disability just when it becomes important and I sort of drag along the ground rather than flying properly. (more…)

There is a famous episode in Mormon history when Orson Pratt and Brigham Young were having a very public debate over various points of doctrine. One of the many things they disagreed about was whether or not God was increasing in knowledge and learning new truths. Brigham taught that God does learn new truths and eventually laid the smackdown on Orson by way of a first presidency message denouncing Orson’s opposing view. Ironically, Orson’s view is probably the prevalent one in the church today, mostly because of folks like JFSII and BRM. (more…)

Awhile back I posted on God’s decision making process and examined some reasons that foreknowledge does not render decision making trivial. On that thread, Mark made the following comment and I mentioned my intention to dedicate an entire post to the same point:

Knowledge of possible futures does not seem to be much of an advantage. As each one is conditioned on the free will of multiple parties, choosing an actual direction to take is still reduced to an exercise in risk management and statistics. (Mark D)

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Not that long ago I was shocked to find out that Geoff J does not believe animals have free will. A bit later, I found out my brother (usually an advocate of libertarian free will) is not so sure when it comes to animals. The birth of a post. (more…)