Link: “Preventing the Collapse of Civilization”

This rather optimistically titled video is one I came across a couple of years ago. It’s focus is on technology, and particularly how technologies can be lost. He speaks of the late bronze age collapse, as well as several Greek and Roman examples, before moving to the modern age and technologies where we have lost expertise, including software development (his own field).

He then have the following statement:

“This is why technology degrades. It takes a lot of effort to communicate from generation to generation, there are losses.”

This struck me as a profound truth, and not just for technology alone (although a vital truth there too, in view of people’s assumptions of progress). Any knowledge is easily lost from generation to generation, far more so than we are apt to assume, and this not only applies to technological truths but others as well: historical, political, philosphical and spiritual. I was minded of Jacob’s statement in Jacob 4 about the perishibility of documents and the efforts he makes to transmit vital information forward (indeed, I’m finally linking this video here as linking to my post on Jacob 4 for Come Follow Me reminded me of this in turn). And then in the end of the book of Mosiah there’s the fate of the rising generation who were too young to understand King Benjamin’s words when he spoke them (Mosiah 26:1). It appears there was a failure in communicating to this younger generation, and there were losses.

I highly recommend watching the whole video, for lots of insights into how easily knowledge is lost, the risks of complexity, and a number of interesting examples. Try not to get too frightened by the suggestion that the late bronze age collapse was started by a disruption of their complex supply chains… and the speaker was saying this in 2019, just a year or so befor our complex supply chains all got disrupted…

“O Wretched Man that I am!”

The end of Romans 7 might be a little puzzling to us. Paul’s essential dilemma seems a very human one:

For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin.

For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.

If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good.

Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.

For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.

For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.

Romans 7:14-19

This is certainly something I have experienced. However, to seemingly end it there with Paul’s declaration that “with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin” in verse 25 seems incomplete.

The Joseph Smith Translation of Romans 7:5–27 (found in the appendix of Church-published KJV bibles), reads very differently:

For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing; for to will is present with me, but to perform that which is good I find not, only in Christ.

For the good that I would have done when under the law, I find not to be good; therefore, I do it not.

But the evil which I would not do under the law, I find to be good; that, I do.

Now if I do that, through the assistance of Christ, I would not do under the law, I am not under the law; and it is no more that I seek to do wrong, but to subdue sin that dwelleth in me.

I find then that under the law, that when I would do good evil was present with me; for I delight in the law of God after the inward man.

And now I see another law, even the commandment of Christ, and it is imprinted in my mind.

But my members are warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.

And if I subdue not the sin which is in me, but with the flesh serve the law of sin; O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord, then, that so with the mind I myself serve the law of God.

JST, Romans 7:19-27

This may make more apparent sense to us, but these seems very likely to be one of those passages where the JST is serving as more of an inspired commentary, rather than any restoration of what Paul actually said. Earlier it speaks very much to what Paul would have felt encountering Christianity (and his zeal for the law leading him into sin), but the original seems to make a broader point. Here it seems to speak of Paul’s experience in a converted state, but not address so directly that essential human dilemma, of how the law itself could make sin known, but not solve the issue. So how can we make sense of what he said

Here it is worth remembering that any chapter divisions were inserted later on, and are not part of the original letter. Paul does not finish with 7:25, but goes on into chapter 8. Thus he goes on to say:

For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.

For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh:

That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.

Romans 8:2-4

Thus while the JST of Romans 7 talks of a post-conversion state, in the original Paul speaks of the dilemma we all face as fallen people, but then points to the solution from that dilemma in chapter 8, speaking of the power of the Gospel and the Holy Spirit to change and sanctify us.

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Matthew 27:46

Christ makes a number of statements on the Cross, all of which deserve attention, but this one (also recorded in Mark 15:34) always gets my attention, as I believe it is more significant than might be assumed, speaking to one particular aspect of his Atonement.

There are a number of different symbols and metaphors that have been employed to teach about or to try and understand the atonement, but one of the most significant – because God himself uses it on multiple occasions – is that of sacrifice. Hence we also speak of Christ’s atoning sacrifice. And in that sacrifice, Christ serves multiple roles, including as the priest making the offering (something the Epistle to the Hebrews gets into, when we get to that), and as the offering itself.

But what is the nature of that offering? I sometimes wonder if some think of it as principally suffering, as if the universe ran off corporal punishment (something which might lead to the idea of some that the Atonement was completed in the Garden of Gethsemane, but – as I go into here – while we have some additional insight in modern scripture, even the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants make reference to the Cross and Crucifixion many more times than they do the Garden). And yet the penalty of sin is not ultimately pain (although it often involves it), but death: “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:” (Romans 5:12).

Thus Amulek teaches about Christ’s offering:

For it is expedient that there should be a great and last sacrifice; yea, not a sacrifice of man, neither of beast, neither of any manner of fowl; for it shall not be a human sacrifice; but it must be an infinite and eternal sacrifice.

Now there is not any man that can sacrifice his own blood which will atone for the sins of another. Now, if a man murdereth, behold will our law, which is just, take the life of his brother? I say unto you, Nay.

But the law requireth the life of him who hath murdered; therefore there can be nothing which is short of an infinite atonement which will suffice for the sins of the world.

Therefore, it is expedient that there should be a great and last sacrifice, and then shall there be, or it is expedient there should be, a stop to the shedding of blood; then shall the law of Moses be fulfilled; yea, it shall be all fulfilled, every jot and tittle, and none shall have passed away.

And behold, this is the whole meaning of the law, every whit pointing to that great and last sacrifice; and that great and last sacrifice will be the Son of God, yea, infinite and eternal.

Alma 34:10-14

Several things I think are worth noting:

1. One is that verses 11-12 teach that the Atonement is not simply a substitution, atoning for one person, and then another, and then another. That might be how some people think about it, but Amulek explicitly rejects that idea as not able to even work. Instead, the Atonement needs to be infinite. A series of finite substitutions, even if repeated some 25 billion times (as a rough guesstimate of all the people who live or have lived on Earth), may be big, but it’s not infinite.
2. To be infinite, the offering itself had to be an infinite and eternal sacrifice. A finite sacrifice – even of the life of a beast or a man – was not enough. Instead what was required was the offering of a divine life. Hence the importance of Christ, who was divine before the world was, and by whom God created the world, lowering himself into mortality (what is described to Nephi as the “condescension of God”, 1 Nephi 11:16). Hence the importance of his sinlessness, because then death had no rightful claim on him. We may see some added significance of his sweating blood as recorded in Luke 22:44, because while that is indeed linked to the extent of his suffering (Mosiah 3:7 and D&C 19:18), blood is depicted in the Old Testament as symbolic of life (Genesis 9:5; Leviticus 17:11,14; Deuteronomy 12:23). And hence the pivotal need for Christ to give up his life.

Death itself, however, has two components from which we all suffer: the separation of our spirits from our bodies, and our separation from God (2 Nephi 9:10-12). And as taught by Samuel the Lamanite:

For behold, he surely must die that salvation may come; yea, it behooveth him and becometh expedient that he dieth, to bring to pass the resurrection of the dead, that thereby men may be brought into the presence of the Lord.

Yea, behold, this death bringeth to pass the resurrection, and redeemeth all mankind from the first death—that spiritual death; for all mankind, by the fall of Adam being cut off from the presence of the Lord, are considered as dead, both as to things temporal and to things spiritual.

But behold, the resurrection of Christ redeemeth mankind, yea, even all mankind, and bringeth them back into the presence of the Lord.

Yea, and it bringeth to pass the condition of repentance, that whosoever repenteth the same is not hewn down and cast into the fire; but whosoever repenteth not is hewn down and cast into the fire; and there cometh upon them again a spiritual death, yea, a second death, for they are cut off again as to things pertaining to righteousness.

Helaman 14:15-18

Christ’s death and resurrection thus saves all from both forms of death, resurrecting us and bringing us back into the presence of God to be judged, and provides the conditions of repentance that allow one to escape the second death of being cast again out of God’s presence).

Why mention this? Well Christ himself obviously experienced the first, culminating when he “gave up the Ghost” on the Cross (John 19:30; Luke 23:46; Mark 15:39). But if he had to experience death so he could provide the way for us to escape it, it also seems logical that he had to experience spiritual death as well as physical. And while the process of his offering had surely begun by the Garden, there he had an angel to strengthen him (Luke 22:43). Thus the potential significance of this statement: it’s not just some lament, nor a quotation of scripture (Psalm 22:1), but the likely point at which the Father’s influence completely withdrew, turning aside his sight, and in that moment leaving the Saviour completely alone, as bereft as any of us can be. And yet Christ succeeded, having “trodden the wine-press alone” (Isaiah 63:3), overcoming and breaking death in all its forms. And because he did, he frees us from it too.

Link: ‘I found out my grandfather was a Nazi party chief. I knew what I had to do next’

Here’s a fascinating little article at the Telegraph by an author who discovered his grandfather had been tried for war crimes following World War 2, and his exploration of that complicated past: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/04/30/i-discovered-my-grandfather-was-a-nazi-party-chief/

Easter Saturday

It’s the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday again, and I was reminded of a couple of thoughts I had a few years ago.

David's random ramblings

A few years ago, during a particularly challenging and emotionally turbulent period of my life, I found myself at Easter thinking about the disciples, and how they must have felt on Friday night and then the Saturday following the crucifixion. I wrote:

I find myself thinking about how a small group must have felt on a friday evening almost two thousand years ago. The scriptures are almost silent about that Friday evening and the Saturday. We know the events of earlier, but that group didn’t understand them yet, and so wouldn’t have understood that the suffering they had witnessed would lead to good. And the victory of the Sunday Morning was both so far away and unimagined. What did they feel, I wonder, at this point when despair must have been at its greatest? How did Simon Peter feel, believing perhaps that he’d never have the chance to make right…

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Roald Dahl semi-liberated…

After an outcry that included Salman Rushdie and the Queen Consort, it seems Puffin & Penguin Random House (Puffin’s parent company) have backtracked a little from their plans to replace Roald Dahl’s works with their bowdlerised versions. While they will still publish, under the Puffin label, those editions that have been reworked to strip out anything deemed to offend ‘modern’ sensibilities (including, apparently, the very existence of Rudyard Kipling, though I suspect one can determine the provenance of this mindset by the fact they replaced him with Steinbeck, whose following was primarily American), they will also publish the originals as part of the “The Roald Dahl Classic Collection”, under the Penguin Logo. That’s certainly an improvement on before: at least we’ll still have the originals. Just remember:

Stupid Bird

Superior Aquatic Avian

Of course, for any new authors out there, you might hesitate before signing over any copyrights to Penguin at all should you realise they feel free to emend and reshape your works after your death into some form more favourable to the modern Ministry of Truth…

“The re-writing of Roald Dahl”

Well this is horrifying:

“Words matter,” begins the discreet notice, which sits at the bottom of the copyright page of Puffin’s latest editions of Roald Dahl’s books. “The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvellous characters. This book was written many years ago, and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.”

Put simply: these may not be the words Dahl wrote. The publishers have given themselves licence to edit the writer as they see fit, chopping, altering and adding where necessary to bring his books in line with contemporary sensibilities. By comparing the latest editions with earlier versions of the texts, The Telegraph has found hundreds of changes to Dahl’s stories.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/17/roald-dahl-books-rewritten-offensive-matilda-witches-twits/

The extent of the changes is quite staggering in some places. As is some of the defences of them, such as the one primary school teacher who’s worked as a ‘sensitivity reader’, and who claims such adaptions can “make them more accessible to children”. Yes, because it’s really the children who insisted on Steinbeck being substituted for Kipling in a passage on writers.

Does anyone happen to remember what Winston Smith’s job was in 1984? That book was a warning, not a flipping manual.

“Sin is the result of deep and unmet needs”

I’m just reading the Temptations in the Wlderness as part of Come Follow Me this year. and this old post of mine came to mind…

David's random ramblings

My “office”. A little drafty but it does the job.

Today, while sitting in my “office” (see above) and working on other things, I began thinking about temptation. This wasn’t for any especial reason, and this is not a confession post. But I’m as human as anyone else, and all of us face or have faced temptation, including the Saviour himself, even though he never succumbed. And I was thinking about what I have learned about those things that have helped me in repenting and those that have not.

As I was doing so, my mind began thinking about the temptations Christ suffered in the wilderness, but particularly the first:

Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.

And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred.

And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these…

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“Fourteen generations…”

So Come Follow Me is moving back round to the New Testament, and in the discussion group we have in our ward, I get asked about Matthew 1:17:

So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ are fourteen generations.

Their question being whether there is any significance here of three periods of fourteen generations, with the one asking realising that fourteen is twice seven, and wondering if that had anything to do with it.

I don’t know that there’s any definitive answers to this question (since, at least at the present moment, we don’t have Matthew around to ask, but I tried to answer the question, and since I felt others might be interested I decided to share my thoughts here too.

One point I mentioned is that I’m sure it touches upon the reasons why Matthew’s genealogy is different from the one given in Luke 3:23-38 (about which one could have a lengthy discussion in itself, although in brief the big differences are Luke’s runs back in time towards Adam, while Matthew starts with Abraham and runs forward; Matthew mentions several of the mothers – and the ones he mentions are significant – while Luke does not; and the list of names is quite different after David save for a brief intersection with Salathiel and Zerubbabel; there’s a variety of explanations for the differences in names, some I consider likelier than others).

It does seem like the numbering is deliberately structured to appear how it does, since Matthew plays with the sequencing to get it that way: hence he omits Zerubbabel’s real father (according to 1 Chronicles 3:17-19, Pedaiah, brother of Salathiel). In part that may be because he appears to be tracing legal descent, not actual (i.e the list of those who’d be heirs to the throne of Judah & Israel, not strictly father-son), but it also makes that nice 14-14-14 arrangement fit.

Some people have suggested it’s a matter of numerology, since the letters for the name David apparently add up to 14. While that makes its way into some study bibles, I find that less convincing. I think a bigger clue is in the opening phrase in verse 1:

The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Which immediately reminds some readers (including me) of Genesis 5:1:

This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him;

Which in turn is connected to Genesis 2:4:

These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens,

In short, that opening phrase seems connected with the creation accounts. There, of course, there were six creative periods, and then God rested on the seventh. Much of the associations around the number seven come from that. And here, Matthew has the genealogy of Christ from Abraham take three periods of 14 generations… or six periods of seven. If that’s a legitimate way of looking at it, it becomes significant that Matthew divided the time into Abraham until David (who is the type of Christ as king, Christ being that heir of David who’ll sit on the throne forever), and then from David to the exile, not Zedekiah or one of the other kings. The exile is part of what’s being undone by Christ, which I think one can see not only as the undoing of the Jews exile from the promised land and temple (and the gathering of Israel), but also symbolic of our own exile and scattering into mortality, in a condition where we are spiritually cut off from the real abode of God.

One can read the significance of seven (and thus 14 and 42) in quite a few ways, and it’s certainly a number that crops up a lot in scripture. People often refer to seven denoting completeness, and I don’t think that’s mistaken here: Christ appears in the notional seventh period, completing the work. But with the connection to the creation account, I think another thing this underlines is it’s all part of God’s plan and under his ultimate control. Just as he created the world as he meant to, so has he watched over Israel’s history and guided it to this point (namely the coming of the Messiah).

Hosea and Gomer

I’m currently reading through Hosea as part of my Come Follow Me readings. He seems a bit of a neglected prophet in the restored Church; well, all the smaller books are, but he seems particularly notable considering he’s the only prophet of the Northern kingdom whose writings we have in the Bible (though Zenos and Zenock were probably northern prophets too, but they’re quoted elsewhere). He was also writing right before the destruction of the Northern kingdom and the captivity of the ten tribes too, so I find it striking to think how his prophecies of Israel being taken away and then gathered were likely far more relevant than people at the time imagined.

One question I think many people have had when reading Hosea is about the whole arrangement with Hosea and his wife. The symbolism should be quite easy to grasp: Gomer’s adultery is equivalent to the way the kingdom of Israel has been disloyal and committed idolatry. The question some might have is why Hosea was commanded to “Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms” (Hosea 1:2) in the first place. Isn’t that a bit harsh on Hosea?

There are several possibilities:

1) The whole thing is symbolic, as in it didn’t actually happen (whether it be taken as a dream/vision, or simply as a metaphor). I consider this one really quite unlikely, in light of chapters 1 & 3 in particular, where the details are quite concrete.

2) There’s a degree of retroactive designation going on: that is, Hosea is writing in the light of subsequent adultery, rather than him literally knowing beforehand. I think this one is possible, but runs into issues with the very first instruction Hosea says he was given.

3) Gomer’s sin was – per the connection between the two – actually idolatry, not adultery. I also think this one is unlikely, partly again because of concrete details in chapter 3, but also since it’s really just shifting the sin to one that’s arguably as serious, but perhaps just less discomforting (and maybe *that’s* a point to ponder: do we regard *idolatry* as seriously as we should? President Spencer W. Kimball didn’t think so).

4) It all actually happened as described. I think this is the likeliest, if partly because the other explanations are all motivated to some degree by us finding the scenario uncomfortable, rather than impossible. And it would reflect the fact that the Lord too, when he made his covenant with Israel, also knew in advance that they would prove unfaithful and go after other Gods. Hosea took this commission on because of the power of such symbolism as a lesson, and because Hosea’s own feelings as a betrayed spouse reflect the Lord’s when Israel – or we – stray from their or our covenants. Or as President Eyring, talking of an experience he had in teaching Hosea for a Seminary class, said:

I knew that too, but even more than that, I felt something. I had a new feeling about what it means to make a covenant with the Lord. All my life I had heard explanations of covenants as being like a contract, an agreement where one person agrees to do something and the other agrees to do something else in return.

For more reasons than I can explain, during those days teaching Hosea, I felt something new, something more powerful. This was not a story about a business deal between partners, nor about business law. This was not a story of business. This was a love story. This was a story of a marriage covenant bound by love, by steadfast love. What I felt then, and it has increased over the years, was that the Lord, with whom I am blessed to have made covenants, loves me, and you, and those we teach, with a steadfastness about which I continually marvel and which I want with all my heart to emulate.

Henry B. Eyring, Covenants and Sacrifice, CES Symposium on the Old Testament, 15 August 1995, Brigham Young University

It’s also worth remembering, per the symbolic connection between the two, that in the same way Israel will (and is) being redeemed, Gomer quite possibly was too (chapter 3 may well be part of that process). Our present sins, much like Israel’s, need not be the end of the story. Though like Israel and Gomer, repentance may not come easily, it is possible, and mercy be offered.