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***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n A few out there might find this article of interest:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAre the Lost Ten Tribes Being Found in Russia?\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n To his credit, Jacob Z. Hess is expending much more of an effort toward sympathetically understanding Latter-day Saint anti-vaxxers than I am:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cCOVID-19 Vaccination as an Abrahamic Test\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019m pleased to announce that I\u2019ve already enjoyed my traditional date milkshake at the Crystal Cove Shake Shack, not far from where I\u2019m writing at this very moment.\u00a0 Among my earliest memories are rather vague reminiscences of coming as a very little boy with my mother and one of her friends, the late Barbara Jenkins, to Balboa Island.\u00a0 I remember playing in the sand.\u00a0 I remember crossing on the ferry.\u00a0 But another very early set of memories involves stopping in with my mother and my father at the same little place overlooking the Pacific, just south of Balboa \u2014 I think that it\u2019s gone through several names since then \u2014 for a date milkshake while going to visit my widowed Aunt Nellie and my Uncle Clarence and his wife, Hazel, in the San Diego area or on the way back home along the Pacific Coast Highway.\u00a0 Nellie was kindness itself.\u00a0 My father\u2019s older sister.\u00a0 Sweet and innocent.\u00a0 Still, I found out in North Dakota earlier this summer, affectionately remembered as a school teacher by some of the older people there. Clarence was hilariously funny.\u00a0 With a rather ironic sense of humor but no real meanness of spirit.\u00a0 I miss them.\u00a0 But the date milkshake takes me back, at least a little bit.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I ran across a quotation just now from the English writer Aldous Huxley (probably most famous for his dystopian novel Brave New World)<\/em> \u2014 apparently from a book of his entitled Ends and Means<\/em> \u2014 that I think worthy of consideration:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Some of you will have been aware of Will Bagley, a Utah-based independent historian of the American West who was sometimes a very outspoken critic of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a>, Brigham Young, and so forth:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWill Bagley, Utah historian who chronicled Mountain Meadows Massacre, dies at 71: Brother of Tribune cartoonist earned praise and scorn for his volume \u201cBlood of the Prophets.\u201d He also wrote about the U.S. expansion and other aspects of Western history.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, and this is a very troubling case:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201c10th Circuit Court Rules Against Religious Liberty for Artists Like Me\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I happened, just now, to come across something that I posted here back in February of 2012, when this blog was in its infancy, only a few days old.\u00a0 I liked it \u2014 it\u2019s so old that there\u2019s no real pride of authorship here; it\u2019s from another era, another me \u2014 and I thought it possibly worth reposting.\u00a0 So here it is:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Whitney Houston\u2019s sudden and untimely death has drawn a great deal of understandable attention.\u00a0 She was only forty-eight, beautiful, and a very talented singer.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n A few days ago, a relative of a relative of mine also died, very suddenly and without any forewarning, at the age of forty-nine.\u00a0 She wasn\u2019t famous, but she was a mother and an accomplished person, and she leaves a massive void in her immediate and extended family.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n But these two departures are startling only because they came so unexpectedly early.\u00a0 As John Updike once wrote, death \u201cin the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day.\u201d\u00a0 We will all die, sooner or later.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cTherefore,\u201d wrote John Donne, \u201csend not to know for whom the bell tolls.\u00a0 It tolls for thee.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Yet, by and large, we don\u2019t think about it.\u00a0 We sometimes even try to pretend that it won\u2019t happen to us, and that it won\u2019t and doesn\u2019t happen to those we care about.\u00a0 And if it does chance to happen, we regard it almost as some sort of medical failure, possibly actionable in court.\u00a0 It very often occurs in a sterile hospital, safely distant from our daily lives.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n In a sense, we\u2019re like a herd of deer grazing in a meadow.\u00a0 The hunter\u2019s rifle cracks sharply, and one of our neighbors abruptly drops to the ground.\u00a0 We look up, startled for a few seconds.\u00a0 Perhaps we even bolt a yard or two.\u00a0 And then we return to grazing.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n But, in humans, this is pretense.\u00a0 It\u2019s self-deception.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cAll men know that they must die,\u201d taught the Prophet Joseph Smith. \u00a0\u201cAnd it is important that we should understand the reasons and causes of our exposure to the vicissitudes of life and of death, and the designs and purposes of God in our coming into the world, our sufferings here, and our departure hence. What is the object of our coming into existence, then dying and falling away, to be here no more? It is but reasonable to suppose that God would reveal something in reference to the matter, and it is a subject we ought to study more than any other. We ought to study it day and night, for the world is ignorant in reference to their true condition and relation. If we have any claim on our Heavenly Father for anything, it is for knowledge on this important subject\u201d<\/strong> (Joseph Smith, History of the Church, <\/em>6:50).<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n From the Christopher Hitchens Memorial \u201cHow Religion Poisons Everything\u201d File<\/em>\u00a9:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In BYU\u2019s student newspaper, The Daily Universe<\/em>:\u00a0 \u201cUtah preparing for Afghan refugees, students can help\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n