More Danger of Presentism

 Quote from Washington Irving

There is a certain meddlesome spirit, which, in the garb of learned research, goes prying about the traces of history, casting down its monuments, and marring and mutilating its fairest trophies. Care should be taken to vindicate great names from such pernicious erudition. It defeats one of the most salutary purposes of history, that of furnishing examples of what human genius and laudable enterprise may accomplish.

Our Universe as an Improbability

 Thomas Dubay.

"This means that all the fundamental particles and their constraints had to be present, namely, “the velocity of light, the mass of the proton, Planck’s constant, the charge of the electron, universal gravity, etc. . . .  It is not a question of saying: if the charge on the electron had been 10% different, life would have taken on somewhat different forms, etc.  All life, as we know it, would have been impossible.” 

Jewish Thinking on Satan

 Twitter thread:

And that's the big difference in the Jewish concept. Satan is *our* adversary, not God's. He's not an evil pole locked in battle with the good pole that is God - everything comes from God. Good stuff, bad stuff, all of it is attributable to God. Even Satan is doing God's work Motley Elul @JustSayXtian · 20h

My favorite story about how Satan became a thing has to do with the part where God says "let us make man in our image" - i.e., with free will. The story goes that some of the angels thought this was a great idea, very cool, thumbs up to God for the out-of-the-box thinking. Motley Elul @JustSayXtian ·

Timing of the Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon

Patheos - Dan Peterson - 23 Aug 2020 

The initial visitation of Moroni to Joseph Smith, which launched the recovery of the Book of Mormon, occurred during the night of 21-22 September 1823.  Joseph first saw the actual plates on the morning of 22 September.  And, for the next four years, Moroni’s visits occurred very deliberately on 21-22 September.

Was the choice of these dates the result of simple random chance?  Not likely.

“The initial visit on September 21 in 1823 coincided with that year’s celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles. In 1824, September 22 was the eve of the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) and the beginning of the fall festivals. In 1825, September 22 was precisely Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). In 1827, when Moroni finally delivered the plates to Joseph (Joseph Smith—History 1:59), his timing on September 22 coincided exactly with Rosh Hashanah, also known as the Feast of Trumpets.”

Appropriately, these holidays are connected with notions of final harvest, remembering God’s covenants with Israel, the announcement of revelation or truth, and preparation for the Messianic Age, and they typically involve solemn admonitions and warnings, covenant making, remembrance of God’s might acts in history, sacrifice, prophecy, and new beginnings

Egyptian Names in the Book of Mormon

 Nibley drew particular attention to an Egyptian named Paanchi (Piankh), whose father (named Kherihor or Ḥerihor [Egyptian: ḥry-ḥr], cf. Korihor) was involved “in a priestly plot [that] set himself up as a rival of Pharaoh himself, while his son Paanchi actually claimed the throne.”22 Thus, the name Piankh shows up in Egyptian texts in close association with an attempt to usurp the throne, just as Paanchi in the Book of Mormon rejects the voice of the people and seeks to usurp the judgment-seat (Helaman 1:5–8).

More recently, Matthew L. Bowen, an expert in Semitic and Egyptian languages, has drawn additional attention to the fact that Paanchi’s rebellion initiates a series of events that culminates in his followers entering into secret covenants and oaths, “swearing by their everlasting Maker” (Helaman 1:11). Thus, this narrative involving Paanchi (pꜢ-ꜥnḫ-ỉ) seems to invoke or allude to the subtle meanings of ankh (not just life, live; but also oath, swear) and their association with oaths and swearing on the life of a deity.23

While the story of a rivalry for the judgment-seat between three brothers from a ruling-elite family with similar sounding names (Pahoran, Paanchi, and Pacumeni) may not be good fiction writing, Mormon apparently appreciated the value of these names at several levels, and that is why he purposefully included them in his record. These names and the narrative in Helaman 1 are arguably more true to life and consistent with the ancient Egyptian origins of the Book of Mormon than any fiction writer in 1829 could have hoped.

Stephen M. Barr - Modern Physics and Ancient Faith

“The universe looks far more orderly to us now than it did to the ancients who appealed to that order as proof of God’s existence.”

Sin and Community

The breakthrough to community [Gemeinschaft] begins in confession. Sin wants to be alone with humans. It causes them to withdraw from community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive power sin will have over him, and, again, the deeper the entanglement the more hopeless the solitude. Sin wishes to remain unrecognized. It shies away from the light. In the darkness of the unspoken, it complete poisons a person’s being.

Dietrich Bonhoffer

Faith and Fear Interplay/Paradox

I have often said that diagramming Ether 3:19 last phrase, "...and he had faith no longer, for he knew, nothing doubting" would put faith and doubt on the same side of the equation.

This from - In the Time of the Virus: The Parting of my Personal Red Sea By Lynne Perry Christofferson · April 15, 2020

I’ve been told that you can’t actually show courage unless you’re afraid. Faith is like that too. We can’t actually demonstrate faith unless we’re facing uncertainty. As Elder John A. McCune described, “There will be times when we will not be able to see any way that a current situation will end well…” (1) Like when you’re standing on the shores of the Red Sea while Pharaoh’s army races toward you in their chariots. When you have absolutely no place to go. That is where faith lives.

Sacred Timing of the First Vision

Spring Equinox Events

The book binding was finished, ready for sale on March 26, 1830. This spring equinox season monumental event was ten years after Joseph’s First Vision—not a coincidence, but by divine design.

Ultimate Questions

Ultimate Questions

It seems are those that are answered by a Testimony.

Natural Morality

Try to imagine a totally different morality

The very fact that the two people in Lewis’s example are quarreling suggests that they do more or less agree on the common standard.  Otherwise, they would just fight about the matter, as animals often do.  When they quarrel, each is trying to show the other that he or she is wrong.  But if there is a Wrong, and if there is a Right, there must be some standard behind those identifications.  There would be no point in calling a foul on a basketball player if there were actually no rules defining what a foul is.

The Spirit is Experienced Through Spiritual Means

Michael Augros:

Should the trait of immortality be encoded somewhere in your genome?  Of course not.  Yet such are the tools and terms of biology.  And they are quite excellent for their purposes, too.  Only, they don’t function very well as detectors of immortality, or finders of souls, whether such things exist or not.  To the degree that biology restricts itself to terminology that is fully reducible to that of chemistry and physics, of course its methods will be inept for determining whether you have a soul and what its nature might be.

With Christianity, nature's 'fine-tuning' makes sense

This:

"In crossing a heath," wrote William Paley at the beginning of his famous 1802 book "Natural Theology," "suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be enquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there."

"Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch, as well as for the stone? why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, viz., that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose … This mechanism being observed … the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use."

Who is Adam? Pre-Adamites

Interpreter Foundation

SCIENCE AND MORMONISM 1:COSMOS, EARTH, AND MAN

It is clear that the Atonement and resurrection did not just affect those born after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Indeed, at the time of Christ’s resurrection, we know that “the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose.”19 Therefore, the resurrection was infinite, not only in affecting all humans who would live afterward, but all those born before Christ’s resurrection. The resurrection was both anticipatory and retroactive.

 What about the Fall of Adam and Eve? Is it possible that the Fall was also both anticipatory and retroactive? In other words, could it be the case that not only those who lived after Adam and Eve but also that there were many who lived before Adam and Eve who partook of the Fall as well as the Atonement?

Ordered Universe - A Very Skillful Wathcmaker

Dan Peterson 8 Jun 1999

Using Einstein’s relativity theory and its predictions of the compression and dilation of time, Schroeder says that everything depends on whether our perspective is from the earth or that of the cosmos as a whole.  “When one asks if six days or fifteen billion years passed before the appearance of humankind,” he declares, “the correct answer is ‘yes.’”