Bidding Adieu to My Native State

Important:  The form on the Witnesses Initiative website was inadvertently created in such a way that it prevented people who live outside of the United States from accessing Witnesses and Undaunted.  (They are currently available there for free streaming.)  I’ve received inquiries from Australia and Switzerland seeking such access, and I think that we’ve now fixed the problem.  But I’m in the United States and can’t quite verify that on my own.  Can anybody from Canada report whether the links work there?  Can anybody from anywhere else report?  (Canada may be a special case.)  Sorry about the bug!

Newly up on the Interpreter Foundation’s website as part of our ongoing Thursday series of “reprints”:  Joseph Smith and Our Preparation for the Lord’s Final Judgment: Essays by George L. Mitton, “Preface: Inspiration, Writing, and Life,” written by George L. Mitton

“As an introduction to the four essays in this book, I would like to give some background so their origin will be known. I feel the Lord has blessed me with some wonderful experiences in life, and those experiences sometimes carried seeds that germinated and grew into essays that required considerable research. In some cases, I received specific impressions that I should put in writing the inspiration that came from them. I will discuss each essay separately, as they were published as journal articles and a book chapter by the Interpreter Foundation. This summary is based on an interview that was recorded, hence the conversational style.”

Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in Joseph Smith and Our Preparation for the Lord’s Final Judgment: Essays by George L. Mitton. For more information, go to https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/joseph-smith-and-our-preparation-for-the-lords-final-judgment/.

In May of this year, the Interpreter Foundation will be conducting a thirteen-day educational tour in “England’s green and pleasant land” focused on the topic of “Church History and Britain’s Victorian Century.”  The tour has been listed for quite some time as “sold out,” but I’ve just been told that as many as six spots on the tour may have just opened up.  (I hope that I haven’t been misled on this.)  If you are interested, you should call the folks at Bountiful Travel.

The tour will be a special one, among other reasons because it will be accompanied by, and enhanced by the expertise of, Kristine Wardle Frederickson and Peter Fagg.

I called attention the other day to a new book by the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat that is entitled Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.  Today, I read a column that he had written — it’s apparently an extract from his book — for Christianity Today under the title of “How I Lost My Faith in Atheism: A career arguing about faith has made religious disagreement easier to understand—but outright atheism more unfathomable.”  I don’t know whether you’ll be able to access it.  But I enjoyed it, and I append a few passages from it that I noted:

I’ve entirely lost what faith I once had in the plausibility and durability of atheism. . . .

I understand perfectly well how a reasonable person could have doubts about the exact nature of God, his specific intentions or his perfect goodness, or any of the particular claims that Christianity makes about the divine. But the idea that the universe and human existence have no plan or intentionality or purpose behind them, that mind, consciousness, reason, logos are purely epiphenomenal rather than fundamental, that our existence is finally reducible to the accidental, to the undesigned, to the bouncing billiard balls of hard material determinism—I don’t see how anyone can reasonably believe this.

I don’t see how anyone can believe it given everything that we know now, not just about the basic order of the cosmos, but about the exquisite fine-tuning required to give rise to stars, planets, life itself. (The attempt by atheistic intellectuals to find refuge in the theory of the multiverse, which casts our universe as a rare life-supporter among trillions of dead ones that we can never actually observe, seems similar to the epicycles attached to the Ptolemaic system when it became clear it couldn’t accurately describe reality.)

I could easily quote at least two further paragraphs from Douthat’s article here, but I think that I should not.

Official Notice:  While it will probably result in our being barred from the Oval Office of the White House, this blog and its proprietor will continue to refer to the oceanic basin that is bounded on the northeast, north, and northwest by the Gulf Coast of the United States; on the southwest and south by the Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Veracruz, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán, and Quintana Roo; and on the southeast by Cuba by its historical name of “the Gulf of Mexico.” That is the name that, in all of its linguistic variants (e.g., golfo de México, golfe du Mexique, Golf von Mexiko, Мексиканский залив, Κόλπος του Μεξικού, and خليج المكسيك), is  officially recognized by the International Hydrographic Organization. The name first appeared on a world map in 1550 and in a historical account in 1552, and it has been the most common name for the body of water in question since the mid-1600s.

Also for the record:  This blog and its proprietor will not be referring to Greenland as Red, White, and Blueland. And I won’t be spending any time reading and relaxing on the beach in a depopulated and American-owned Mar-a-Gaza.  Not in this lifetime, anyway.  I really am a conservative.

And it’s for that very reason — despite the fact that we’re talking here about “my own, my native land” — that I think that we should seriously consider a new proposal from the country where my paternal grandfather was born:  “Hygge to Hollywood: Petition calling for Denmark to buy California reaches 200,000 signatures: “Måke Califørnia Great Ægain,” reads the top of the petition website, replacing some English letters with Danish ones.”

It seems to me that a transfer of the title to California from the United States to Denmark could be a win-win for everybody concerned.

As if we needed any further evidence of the evils of religion, here are three appalling theistic crimes that have recently been committed against humanity, as documented in the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™:

“Technical School in Ghana Receives Church Donation of Tools and Equipment: Hundreds Attend Joyful Celebration of Handover”

“The Church Funds the Renovation of a School in Babaka, Papua New Guinea: Community celebrates the joy of education following a Church funded school renovation project.”

“How a stake in Oregon is finding opportunities to share God’s light: From socks to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, youth and adults are serving others in their Oregon community”