Category: News and Politics

It’s going to be horrific.

BYU’s recent policy changes that appear to be geared towards reinforcing the institution’s Latter-day Saint character are causing consternation in some circles, so I thought now would be a good time to be the bad guy and make a case for why proactive faculty boundary maintenance is needed for an institution like BYU to fulfill…

“The entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’…The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” Galatians 5: 14, 22-23   Section 93 of the Doctrine and Covenants is, in my opinion (which is correct), one of the most radical, beautiful…

Free will is one of those issues where you have to think deep and hard about your definitions. Many philosophers will subscribe to one definition, but not another, so sometimes the whole debate on whether we have “free will” revolves around semantics that you can’t do justice to in a single post, so I won’t…

I remember when I was a little kid and began to learn that there were different languages. I loved that primary song where you learn how to say “thank you” in languages from all over the world. It felt so cool, like learning some kind of secret code. But even as I learned these words…

When I was a Wikipedia editor years ago the Joseph Smith page stated that “[Smith] began teaching that God was…embodied within time and space,” and they cited Busman’s statement to that effect. I removed the “embodied in time” and explained that this is arguable, citing Alma’s statement that “time only is measured unto men.” (As…

A pattern I’ve noticed in political and sometimes religious discourse lately is the concept of “good anger.” This isn’t the calm and measured, but firm response of Christ before the Romans or at the temple, but a deep antipathy with bite to it. The acidity of this anger is not considered a weakness, but is…

The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.-Freeman Dyson As noted in a previous post, fine tuning is a problem that has received mainstream acceptability within the scientific community. To summarize, for complex matter…

There are a variety of “end of the universe” scenarios that physicists currently see as most likely:  Heat Death Because of a mysterious energy in the universe (aptly named “dark energy”), the universe’s expansion is speeding up. As things expand they cool down, so the heat contained in the universe will gradually dissipate until there…

“Leadership roulette” (or “bishop roulette”) is a common term thrown around when there is some good or bad outcome that depends on the contingencies of who happens to be your local leader. This particular complaint is often aimed at some perceived authority figure in a bubble at Church Headquarters that is supposedly detached from the complexities…

Over at BCC, John S. has a post that is, overall, not very helpful.

The American philosopher Richard Rorty recollected that when he was a teenager he dreamed of being able to read all the great works in his local library and arrive at some grand synthesis of truth from all the wisdom contained therein (for all truth to be circumscribed into one great whole, as it were). and…

Population genetics is an exciting, cutting edge area of research. In the past we had a fairly simplistic picture of our deep history, with humans migrating out of Africa and then sequentially expanding from continent to continent. However, occasional findings of very early human remains, combined with the genetics revolution, paints a completely different picture…

I’ve noticed a not-insignificant number of members, both orthodox and heterodox, assume that the Church’s position on human sexuality is a “just because the prophet said so” issue, and aren’t aware of any well thought out defenses of the Church’s (or conservative religion’s in general) position written by non-church leaders, so I’ve gone ahead and…

Quantum mechanics makes absolutely no sense. Basically, small particles act differently depending on whether they are being watched, either by a conscious human being or a detector machine (even if the detector is turned on after it has acted). I’m not going to rehash how we know, but the more details you get the more…

A well done religious-themed movie can be a powerful spiritual experience. Unfortunately, the movie industry generally either shies away from religious themes (unless to deride them), or they fit in the Christian cinema niche that produces simple starches for the masses. It is hard to find a religious-themed movie that is authentically spiritually touching and…

Like most Latter-day Saints, my testimony of the Church is based more on the numinous than the intellectual. However, I still remember the moment when, ruminating on my AP biology class while taking a break during my summer lifeguarding job, I decided that there is no way life could have just spontaneously happened, and that…

When I was in graduate school with a young family my wife and I went on government assistance. We didn’t have a car so I had to fill our stroller up with groceries every third day. Of course, one particularly cold winter our stroller got a flat and we couldn’t fix it, so I had…

Many countries have continuity of government plans for what to do if the leadership suddenly dies in some sort of a catastrophe. The United States famously has a “designated survivor” that is in a secure location during the State of the Union so that somebody in the line of succession can be preserved if the…

Any reasonably intelligent person can understand the principles involved in the search for extraterrestrial life issue that I addressed in my last science post. However, the issue of consciousness is fundamentally mind-wracking and forces us to question some of our basic intuitions. It can get crazy; with some philosophers going so far as to claim…

“John saw curious looking beasts in heaven, he saw every creature that was in heaven, all the beasts, fowls, & fish in heaven, actually there, giving glory to God. I suppose John saw beings there, that had been saved from ten thousand times ten thousand earths like this, strange beasts of which we have no…

One of the stereotypes conservative US members have to deal with is the idea that they click their heels and salute every time the Church makes a political statement, when anybody who’s had deep political discussions with them understands that there are multiple layers of nuances and influences built into their decision making process. Consequently,…