Now here’s my “kinds of presents” list:

1. Stuff the recipient doesn’t want (like Christmas ornaments — who ever thinks, “I’d love a Christmas ornament”?)
2. Stuff the recipient likes and would probably get for themselves anyway (like clothes)
3. Stuff the recipient likes and could afford but probably wouldn’t get for themselves (like a spa gift certificate)
4. Stuff the recipient doesn’t know she or he wants yet, but will think is awesome when they get it (???)
5. Stuff the recipient wants but can’t afford (???)

Christmas is awesome for kids because parents are usually able to fulfill the #5 option, which is the most impactful kind of present. My favorite present each year was the video game or big Lego set, which were far out of my allowance-funded price range.

But as we get older, the power imbalances decrease. When you’re 8 years old, your parents might make 1,000 times as much money as you do. When you’re 12 years old, they make maybe 100 times as much. When you’re 16 years old it’s perhaps down to 10 times as much. That income disparity is what makes #5 gifts possible. But then you become an adult. Your wants become much more expensive, and your parents aren’t so capable of funding them for you.

If I were trying to connect Christmas gift giving to the Savior’s atonement (and I admit it’s a bit of a stretch), those #5 gifts are the ones that best capture the spirit of it. Salvation is the ultimate #5 gift — the one thing we most want and can least afford.

The atonement works because the power imbalance between us and the Savior is so great. And it’s an amazing gift for the same reason.

A couple Christmases back, I asked a friend in the ward if I could get him anything for Christmas. He said, “Not unless you can pay my mortgage.” The power imbalance had disappeared. The two of us, on relatively equal financial footing, couldn’t provide those #5 gifts for each other.

So now, when I get gifts for other adults, I try to focus on the #4 ones. It’s harder; I’d guess that about 1 in 3 of them actually turn out to be something the person ends up loving. But when it works, there’s something wonderful about introducing a person to a new world that they didn’t know existed before. As adults, I think that’s the power imbalance that we can work with — the imbalance of awareness. You know about wonderful things that I don’t know about. I know about wonderful things that you don’t know about. So, this year, instead of buying you a Christmas ornament, maybe I’ll see if I can find you a good book on astronomy or the history of the Balkans. And maybe you’ll discover that the world is fascinating in new and wonderful ways you’d never considered.

The Mormon-Libertarian connection is nothing new, but it fits in with something that’s been on my mind lately — competing “goods”. Or, in Elder Oaks’ words, “good, better, and best”.

As I see it, there are three cardinal points of political virtue that we wrangle over in the church:

(I think the role of authoritative church statements in this triangle is fascinating. Boyack reaches out to Pres. Benson for support, and others have done the same in support of Libertarianism with words from church leaders extending back to Brigham Young. But not Joseph Smith, I don’t think. Joseph’s statements are, perhaps, generally too pro-government to be used as ammunition there.)

Now there might be better names for these than the ones I’ve chosen, but I think “freedom”, “purity”, and “charity” convey the point effectively. By purity, I mean those values that come down to an intrinsic sense of “rightness” — things that are not arguable, but that are right (or wrong) because God declares them to be that way. Gay marriage is as good a political issue as any to exemplify what I mean by purity. Arguments of gay marriage pit the “purity” camp against the “freedom” and “charity” camps.

When there is moral strife over the appropriate policies of government, I believe it essentially comes down to a question of ordering these three principles into “good”, “better”, and “best”. By and large, we recognize that all three of these are valid principles. The question is, when they conflict, which do we privilege?

A few more examples:

• Government-mandated health care, with the “charity” camp in favor and the “freedom” camp opposed.
• Drug laws, with the “freedom” camp in favor of legalization and the “purity” camp opposed.
• The death penalty, with “purity” (we need to punish wrongdoing) against “charity” (it is a cruel punishment). I’m not sure that “freedom” has a clear position on this one.

I don’t mean that these three are the only considerations in developing governmental policy; only that they are the three moral considerations. A non-moral consideration (and perhaps the single most weighty opposing force to the triangle) is economics. For example, immigration isn’t an issue between the corners of the morality triangle (at least not most of the time — there are some racist arguments that make an appeal to “purity”, but I’ll ignore those here). It’s an issue between the “charity” corner and the economic question of what services we can afford.

In fact, economic concerns are so weighty that I’d place them as a forth point, the pinacle of a pyramid, competing with the three moral values in the triangle:

My own weightings of these three values have shifted over the years. One of the biggest changes for me was due to the time I spent serving as Elders Quorum President in a rural Oregon ward. Up to that point, I’d spent essentially all my life in relatively affluent areas. I grew up in suburban California, went to school at BYU, and served a mission in Japan. This ward in Oregon was my first experience really seeing the effects of unemployment, poverty, and lack of opportunity.

When these families and individuals, some active in church and some not-so-active, came into hard times, the ward members reached out and made up the difference. I’d never seen charitable service to such an extent. Perhaps that same level of service occurred in my other wards and I just never saw it because I hadn’t been in a position of authority, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think that the particular economic situation of this ward created an atmosphere of service — one of both independence and interdependence. Regardless, those experiences shifted purity down and charity up in my moral weighting scale. I saw that the most serviceable weren’t necessarily the most “righteous”, and realized that the service counted for a lot more than the righteousness, at least to my heart.

Ultimately, though, what I find interesting in this is the idea that virtues compete with virtues. (That would be a fun Young Women’s lesson — “Let’s have the YW values battle it out and see which one truly stands for moral dominance!”) There’s not a solution that satisfies all three corners of the triangle in every situation. How does that reality fit into our concept of heaven? If heaven heaven because God has figured out the trick of how to satisfy all three corners simultaneously? Or is heaven the place where the limitations of morality are navigated as best as can be, recognizing that even God can’t satisfy all three?

Life is good. In fact, life is great now. I’ve worked through my demons. No, that makes it sound like I knew what I was doing. Even now I can’t say why things have turned out as well as they have. Just lucky, I guess.

I remember the day I decided to be lucky. I was walking to school with a friend on one of those frigid mornings when you can see your breath. Things hadn’t been going well for me, and I felt like Murphy’s Law incarnate. But that morning I decided I was done with it. I decided to be lucky, and I’ve been lucky ever since.

(How does that work? Kind of like this: For the orientation session of my MBA program, all of us students took a personality test. I like personality tests. I find it comforting to have myself quantified, conveniently understandable. But, for whatever reason, I was feeling contrary the day I took this test, and I decided to answer all the questions at random.

The results came back and classified me as a “reformer”. That’s not the result I would have gotten if I had answered the questions accurately, but I liked it. I decided to own that assessment, and I’ve been a reformer ever since :) )

Being lucky is great. It makes a person optimistic and grateful. It’s especially useful when you’re depressed. That odd combination of optimism and depression has probably done as much to define me — to make me “Dane” — as anything else has.

The thing I remember most about when the depression was severe was how physical it felt. It wasn’t some abstract emotion. It occupied a space in me. It was an iron ball, and I could point at the particular spot in my chest where it sat. At its worst, it became an external presence rather than an internal one, and I could point at the space in the room from which it pressed down on me.

That depression ceased to be a controlling force for me, though, in a series of sacred events that occurred in my life over the space of two years. That doesn’t mean that everything is gone, cleanly washed away. I mean, some of it is. The guilt and self-incrimination are gone, as is the hopelessness and despair. But the pain isn’t all gone. I can still point at the place in my chest where that iron ball sat.

Even though the ball isn’t there anymore, its presence left a mark. But I don’t mind that so much. It’s a reminder to me of how good things are now. It’s a reminder to me that the people I meet each carry their own burdens, and that I would do well to treat them with care, love, and patience, since I don’t know what sufferings they currently endure. It directly influences my faith and theology. I suppose that my personal articles of faith were largely borne of those experiences.

So my questions for you today are — Do you feel that your pain has helped to define you? If so, do you see this as a positive, valuable force in your life, and how? If you’re currently struggling, what keeps you going? And if you’ve overcome it, what advice do you have for those who still fight it?

• the Catholics, due to our shared focus on a formally ordained lineage-based priesthood, strong church hierarchical organization, conservative moral politics, family focus with traditional gender roles, the need for works in addition to faith, and the role of priesthood ordinances in obtaining salvation.
• the Evangelicals, with our conservative moral politics, family focus with traditional gender roles, claim to spiritual gifts, 19th-century scriptural interpretations, and renewed focus on salvation only being available through faith in Jesus Christ.
• Islam, since we both have post-biblical prophetic foundings, accept additional scripture that adds to the Bible, prohibit alcohol consumption, and share conservative moral politics, family focus with traditional gender roles,and marginalized American social status.
• Biblical Judaism, due to our establishment of ritual temple worship, engaging in covenants with God, formally ordained lineage-based priesthood, and our self-identification with the tribes of Israel.
• Modern Paganism, from our various hagiographa supporting a feminine divine, a plurality of gods, and the earth as an ensouled being.
• Buddhism, specifically with regards to ancestor veneration (sealing the human family from generation to generation, baptism for the dead, that sort of thing).
• the Protestants, due to…hmm…I’ll have to come back to that one. Other than both being Christian religions, maybe we really don’t have too much in common.

I’ve also heard comparisons made with Taoism, Hinduism, and Native American religions. So what I’m curious about is, is this a distinctly Mormon thing? Do we have a particularly wide-ranging, eclectic set of doctrines? Or, could I find just as many parallels between any other two religions?

Each church member responds to problematic issues in church history, doctrine, and culture in their own way. [Why, yes, that was "their" in the singular neuter, thanks for noticing.] Some people ignore them, some engage in apologetics, and some leave the church entirely.

As for me, I’m a categorizer. I categorize them away.

I separate human knowledge and experience into two overarching spheres — science and religion. For this to make sense, let me start with my definitions of those two spheres.

Science answers questions about what is, what was, and what will be. Science is descriptive and predictive. It describes things, how they work, and it predicts outcomes based on inputs. If you release two spheres from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, science can tell you what will happen.

Religion answers questions about what we, as human beings, should do with the knowledge we gain from science. Religion is about distinguishing the good from the bad and choosing the good. Religion is about being able to envision an ideal and then act toward achieving that ideal.

Using these definitions, hope and charity sit squarely in religion. Faith — being our belief in how the world works —is part of science.

Science is about “is-ness”; religion is about “ought-ness”.

Science is about determining what is true. Religion is about determining what is good.

Science asks, “How did we get here?” Religion asks, “Given that we are here, what should we do?”

***

I believe that most of our problematic issues in the church are the result of getting these two spheres confused. When religion attempts to answer scientific questions with religious tools, the outcome isn’t pretty.

“How was the universe created?” and “Where did people come from?” are questions for science to answer. They deal with objective truth. It’s possible that the big bang and evolution will eventually lose their status as the favored scientific theories to answer those questions, but should that happen it will be in the wake of a superior scientific explanation, not a religious one.

***

What are the tools of each, then?

Both science and religion are founded on the concept of experimentation.

In science, someone suggests a possible truth — a hypothesis. Then an experiment is devised to test whether the hypothesis is false. After the experiment is run, the hypothesis is either rejected or strengthened depending on the results. That’s the scientific method for discovering truth.

As I said earlier, religion’s role isn’t to determine what is true, but rather what is good. We are directed to “experiment upon the word”. So how does religion go about that? What is religion’s “scientific method”?

I believe that it is what we call “the admonition of Paul”: “[W]hatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things” (Philippians 4:8).

While this begins with truth (“whatsoever things are true”), it then moves on. Science is a tool of religion, but religion expands beyond science, from just “truth” on to honest, just, pure, and lovely.

The difference is that the scientific method provides results that are independently verifiable, while the admonition of Paul is subjective and personal. There’s no way to demonstrate that a principle is “good”. The best we can do is present it to people, and trust that their hearts and minds will judge the principle on its merits.

***

If life is a process of building a house, then religion is the blueprint and science is the tool set. Good religion assists us in getting where we want to go, but it can’t ignore the principles of science in the process. When science tries to answer religious questions, or when religion tries to answer scientific questions, problems arise.

Neither scientific nor religious truth can be asserted through authority. Indiana’s infamous attempt to declare the value of pi to be 3.2 is as laughable as the long-lived belief that left-handedness is a sin. The scientific method tells us that the first is false, and the admonition Paul tells me (I say “me” because I can’t use “us” for religious knowledge — it is personal and subjective) that the second is wrong.

Back in January, I asked what brings you to the bloggernacle. Today, I want to narrow the question down to Times & Seasons in particular. Several of you are new here in the past six months, and there are a few old friends that I haven’t seen in a while (Bill of Wasilla, where’d you go?)

I want to know what keeps you guys coming back here, week after week, month after month. Feel free to take the discussion in any direction you’d like, but I’m particularly interested in:

1. When did you start reading Times & Seasons?
2. How often do you check Times & Seasons?
3. What do you enjoy about the site that keeps you coming here?
4. What would you like to see more (or less) of on the site?

So, with those general guidelines, take it away.

1. I believe that the religion that does nothing for people in this life isn’t likely to do much for them in the next. The church is true to the extent that it is useful. (Yes, that makes me a philosophical utilitarian.)
2. I believe that exposure to a variety of information and experiences (including those that are disagreeable, challenging, or foreign) is the foundation of discovering truth. It is our responsibility to seek out and understand positions that conflict with our own so that we can obtain perspective.
3. However, I believe that even a perfect knowledge of truth wouldn’t give us the power to convey that knowledge perfectly to others. Language is limited, and the interpretation of language depends heavily on the context of the listener. Two individuals can hear the same principle taught and understand it in two very different ways — even to the extent that truth taught to one person can become falsehood by that person’s understanding of it.
4. I believe that worship is the act of instantiating God and heaven. To the extent that we live as gods and build heavens, we are engaged in worship, whether that is through traditional methods like prayer, church attendance, and service, or more mundane activities like housework, secular study, creative projects, walking in nature, or spending time with friends and family.
5. I believe that guilt is not an appropriate form of motivation.
6. “There’s no accounting for tastes.” I believe that just because something makes you happy doesn’t mean it will make your neighbor happy.
7. “Saying doesn’t make it so.” I believe that truth is determined not by authority, but by reality.
8. I believe that one central purpose of life is to learn to choose and then achieve joy over pain, and to help others do the same. The chief virtue is sustainable happiness.
9. I believe that to worship a god who would cast his own children into suffering without end is to worship Satan.
10. Celebrate excellence.

Time to look at distribution of labor, education and job skills, and self-determination.

…

Like I said previously, I’m targeting a $1,000-per-month lifestyle that covers food and housing for a family. In practice, the way I imagine implementing it is with a three-tier system:

• Tier 1: $2,000/month
• Tier 2: $1,000/month + part-time community maintenance
• Tier 3: $0/month + full-time community employment

Each tier is designed to meet a different individual need. Tier 1 is for people who have money and/or good employment, and who just want to escape from the mundane responsibilities of life. They’d have their meals, laundry, grounds maintenance, etc. taken care of. Kind of a sustainably affordable vacation resort, albeit in a shed-cabin.

Tier 2 is for people who want to make enough money to support a family while doing work that they love. In Alison’s words, they are the one’s who want to spend their time “painting sunsets”…or running a dance studio, or writing novels, or throwing pottery, or researching and publishing on obscure academic topics. The idea is that you might not be able to make enough money doing that to support a family in a conventional modern American lifestyle, but you could probably pull it off here.

The trade-off is spending some number of hours each week (probably in the 10 to 20 range) doing the work that makes the community function, i.e. the meals, laundry, grounds maintenance, etc. that the Tier 1 group is paying not to do.

Tier 3 is for people who want to build job skills or get work experience for a resume. In addition to the part-time community maintenance that the Tier 2 people are working on, there are full-time jobs that need to be taken care of — things like running community finances or marketing or administration and management.

…

The key idea here is that this structure flips the traditional job hierarchy in Tiers 2 & 3, which provides an alternative path to employment for the unemployed and under-employed.

Our job market is currently structured in a Catch-22 loop: to get a career job you need work experience, and to get work experience you need a career job. The way many people break into this loop is through personal connections. My first internship as a computer programmer happened with the help of a family member. My first non-internship position as a computer programmer came through an acquaintance at church.

Since then I’ve obtained several jobs on the merit of my work history alone, but I probably wouldn’t have gotten into the loop without that initial help from personal connections. The problem is, how do people who don’t have those kinds of connections get into the loop?

Conventionally, they don’t. The USA provides relatively poor career opportunities for the poor and uneducated. So we have a stratified system where the people at the bottom only have access to dead-end jobs — work that won’t lead to the sort of stable, well-paying middle-class career employment.

My second and third tiers flip that equation. The third tier gets specialized work opportunities while the second tier performs the community labor that we traditionally associate with the poor and uneducated. What the second tier people get out of it is free time and the opportunity to pursue their interests rather than be stuck in well-paying careers they don’t have any passion for, while the third tier gets an entryway into the middle-class economy.

…

Affordability

Across the street from my workplace is a Lowe’s (Lowe’s is a hardware/supplies store, for those of you that aren’t familiar with it). The Lowe’s parking lot has a bunch of sheds. Being the odd kind of guy I am, I took a tour of the sheds during lunch one day, and discovered that sheds are a lot cooler than I thought. One looks like this:

It’s about 100 sq ft (9.2 sq m) with a workbench at one end. It’s got enough space to lay out a couple of futons, and the workbench could make a decent dining bar. But my favorite is this one:

It’s a little bigger, at 120 sq ft (11.1 sq m), but best of all it’s really tall and has a loft storage area.

The first one is about $1,000 and the second is about $2,000. Best of all, they’re stick built, which means they could theoretically be insulated and drywalled. I figure that a tricked out shed would come to about $5,000.

…

Now, before you try and burst my bubble and tell me that no one wants to live in a shed, let me say — I know. But that’s not entirely true. There are a few people who might enjoy it. The kind of people who read Thoreau, or Calvin and Hobbes. Or who enjoy watching movies like “No Impact Man”. So I understand that living in a shed isn’t your kind of thing. That’s cool, I’m not going to make you live there.

That said, there are some concerns that really do need to be addressed.

…

Space

First is the word “shed”. Because, despite what I said above, really no one wants to live in a shed. But people are cool with living in cabins. And these sheds are pretty similar to the cabins we stayed in at one of my Boy Scout camps. So I’ll call them “cabins” (even though you know that I’m really just talking about sheds).

The problem with these cabins is that they don’t have bathrooms or kitchens. So, I envision a few of them built around a shared restroom facility, kind of like this:

Add in a main central dining/recreation hall and some walking trails, and it starts to look like a community:

Set aside some of the open areas as gardens, fields, and playgrounds and you’ve got something that meets a lot of the “Space” criteria that I outlined in my previous post.

But back to affordability, how are we doing? Well, if I were to target, say, 3 – 5 acres for this, the land would cost (in my area) somewhere between $50,000 and $500,000 (or more), depending on how close to town it’s located. As a talking point, I’ll say $250,000.

I don’t know much about construction costs, so I’ll just pull the other numbers out of the air — $200,000 for each of the restroom facilities, and $400,000 for the dining hall. That puts me at a little under $1.5 million. Split that between 10 families and you’re at $150,000 per family. The internet tells me that a home loan for $150,000 at 5% comes to about $800 a month.

What about legality — zoning and building codes? I mean, legally you can’t really live in a shed…ahem…cabin. And what about financing? You can’t get financing for a weird project like this just as easily as you do for a conventional home purchase.

Okay, you’ve got me there. I don’t really know anything about the legal or finance aspects of construction. And I know there’s plenty that I’m glossing over — property insurance, maintenance, etc. I’ll have to get back to you on that.

…

As for the other principles — distribution of labor, technology, education and job skills, and self-determination — I’ll come back and write more on those later too.

Why? In part it’s because communities are difficult and complicated. Mostly, however, it’s because the ideal community that I envision is so dear to me that it pains me to put it into words. I feel like the words do violence to the vision, and a part of me fears that, in transit from vision to writing, the vision might get lost.

That said, I’ve reached a point where I realize that there’s no moving forward until I’m willing to get started. So here’s my vision of the place I hope to inhabit.

…

First is affordability.

Life is too wonderful to spend it worrying about finances, and too short to spend unnecessary hours in the workplace. I hope to spend the time I have in the society of my loved ones, in appreciation of art and nature, in creative works, and in learning through study and observation.

I think the first trick to making all of that happen is to live affordably. My target number would be to have expenditures somewhere around $1,000 per month in food and housing for my whole family.

…

Next is space.

The $1,000 per month target isn’t really all that unrealistic on its own. When my wife and I were first married, we lived on less money than that by renting room in a house in Springville, Utah. The recent “microhousing” movement also provides options for extremely affordable housing.

Living in a tiny residence is fine as long as you have accessible space around you. Places where you can meet with people. Places to walk or hike or swim or nap. Places where your kids can play (that’s the crucial one — being cooped up with highly energetic kids and nowhere to take them is rough).

Modern homes are multi-purpose structure. They are recreation areas, study areas, sleep areas, dining areas, entertainment areas, childcare areas, work areas, and socializing areas, all combined in one. I think I could be happy with a tiny home that functioned as just a sleep area if I knew that there were other facilities nearby to meet the other needs.

…

Next comes distribution of labor.

It usually takes me about 30 or 40 minutes to make dinner in the evening. I figure every other family on my court is spending 30 or 40 minutes making their dinners as well. For six households, that’s four hours of time spent each night making dinner. Making dinner for all six houses might take me longer than 30 or 40 minutes, but it certainly wouldn’t take me four hours.

I think this sort of duplicated labor takes place all the time. In childcare, home cleaning, yard work, laundry, etc. I’d like to live in a community where households don’t have to waste time doing things on their own that could be accomplished much more efficiently together.

…

Next comes technology.

The internet and computers are hugely awesome. I wouldn’t want to live in a community that is so focused on simple living that it would forgo the advantages of technology.

…

Next comes education and job skills.

I’ve been blessed to have been trained in marketable job skills. I’m a computer programmer. It’s not my #1 passion, but it’s not a bad gig by any means. And it’s been very reassuring to know that I’m very likely to be able to find work if ever the need should arise.

I want to live in a community that provides an education in marketable job skills, both to children and adults. I imagine a community where those who have job skills serve as teachers and those who desire job skills come as students. Of course the economics of that exchange would need to be worked out, but I think it could be handled within the economy of the community (see: distribution of labor).

…

Next comes self-determination.

One potential problem I see with intentional communities is that they need rules, obligations, and expectations. That’s not to say that rules, obligations, and expectations are inherently bad. In fact, they’re necessary in order for of my previous points to function. However, as much as possible, I would hope to see the community build around autonomous households. This is the point I have the least to say about right now, not because it’s not important, but because I just don’t know much about community governance.

…

So that’s my start: affordability, space, distribution of labor, technology, education and job skills, and self-determination. I hope to come back to this again in the not-too-distant future to fill in some details and perhaps add some additional principles. But for now, it’s a start.