Or, at least, it was 917-756-8000 earlier today:   http://gawker.com/call-donald-trumps-cell-phone-and-ask-him-about-his-imp-1720472577   I expect that he’s changed it by now.   After his stunt of giving out Senator Lindsay Graham’s private cell number, this couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.   Posted from Victoria, British Columbia     Read more

      “But science has given us new eyes that allow us to see down to the deeper roots of the world’s structure, and there all we see is order and symmetry of pristine mathematical purity. . . .  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.”  Stephen M. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith  Posted from Victoria, British Columbia     Read more

    Here’s something to keep you awake at night!   http://news.sciencemag.org/europe/2015/08/tiny-black-holes-could-trigger-collapse-universe-except-they-dont   Posted from Victoria, British Columbia     Read more

    In New York City!   My thanks to Jabra Ghneim for bringing this to my attention:   http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/09/17/little-syria/   I recall, many years ago, just before my marriage, riding with my friend Kent Brown and another member of the Jerusalem Branch.  Kent and I were very Arab-friendly.  The driver, by contrast, though a foreigner like us and a very nice fellow, was extremely — and I mean extremely — pro-Zionist.   We were passing by some sort of... Read more

    Or, perhaps more accurately, an out-of-body experience.   I had long known about the time, in late March 1832, when a mob of nearly forty men dragged Joseph Smith from his home in the middle of the night, beat him, tarred and feathered him, and attempted to poison him with a vial of nitric acid.  He bore the scars for the rest of his life and, because of a tooth that broke when they were trying to force... Read more

    “The early Christians were known to have remarkably positive views of the human body. Celsus was a second-century Greek philosopher who wrote the first book against Christianity (it was published around A.D. 178). In it, he called Christians a philosomaton genos, which means a ‘flesh-loving people.’ Celsus was amazed that Christians took their physical existence so seriously that they wanted to take their bodies with them to the afterlife. If we take Celsus’s definition to heart, then Mormonism... Read more

    Luke 16:14-15   To the extent that we serve God in order to gain earthly rewards — e.g., money, public esteem, the approval of members of the opposite sex, glory, or whatever — we’re not really serving God at all.   I suspect that everybody has this problem, at least to some extent, at least at some times.  (We all want to be well thought of.  Most of us would like to have a bit of money, or... Read more

    “If we are seeking to serve the God of truth then we should really welcome truth from whatever source it comes. We shouldn’t fear the truth. Some of it will be from science, obviously, but by no means all of it. It will sometimes be perplexing, how this bit of truth relates to that bit of truth; we know that within science itself often enough, and we find it outside of science as well. The crucial thing is... Read more

    According to the Hebrew Bible, the Lord not only ordered Moses to construct the tabernacle in the wilderness but, as recorded in Exodus 25-27, gave him specific instructions on Mount Sinai as to its details.   “Look that thou make them after their pattern, which was shewed thee in the mount,” he said to Moses (Exodus 25:40).  The sanctuary should be constructed “according to all that I shew thee, after the pattern of the tabernacle” (Exodus 25:9).   The... Read more

    Luke 16:13 Compare Matthew 6:24   James 1:8 says that “a double minded man is unstable in all his ways,” and that seems to be the same message as given in the passages above.   Also Matthew 12:25:  “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.”   The great Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote a little book entitled Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing.  ... Read more