Where are the Lost Ten Tribes? Some say they are scattered in Eurasia, some that they are among us. Through exhaustive research I have located them. I can hear your scoffs in my mind’s ear, but it is true.

I will start the story at the beginning with my proposal to the Department of Biology for my recent sabbatical leave and notes from my journal on my successful search for the Lost Ten Tribes. I feel rather guilty that I told everyone that I was going to Vienna to study tsetse flies. But the time for the truth as come. [Read more...]

I’ve been thinking about evolution of late. Not so much about evolution as such, but about people’s resistance to it. I’ve been thinking about the fear that some experience as they face the prospects that a new scientific age is bringing to an end their way of seeing the universe. The simple creationism of a Harry Potter-like God that was appropriate in the Seventeenth Century, and which we borrowed from the Greeks, is giving way to more complex conceptions and more Mormonism-informed perspectives. [Read more...]

I cut and pasted this from the Ensign. It’s perfect for the Fourth of July because it’s dripping sickly sweet sentimentality (How I love alliteration!). It involves two people in the military, which I do want to remember on the day. It also takes place in the cold of January so that heat of the summer (here in Northern Latitudes that is) can be forgotten. Plus it takes place in Germany, which is oh so European and so avoids the American bias we’ve been talking about! How could I resist? [Read more...]

In the Imporovement Era, June 1945 contains the following quote as part of a Ward Teachers’ message:

When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done. When they propose a plan–it is God’s plan. When they point the way, there is no other which is safe. When they give direction, it should mark the end of controversy. God works in no other way. To think otherwise, without immediate repentance, may cost one his faith, may destroy his testimony, and leave him a stranger to the kingdom of God. [Read more...]

When we administer blessings we are commanded to use olive oil. A quick bit of research through the scriptures, Church magazines and Conference proceedings yielded basically only the reasons (a) we’ve been commanded to do so; (b) the ancients did it that way; and (3) it is the purest kind of oil. It is advised that if you do not have pure olive oil (and its purity is important and emphasized) do the blessing without.

Yet in much of our richest symbolism, we understand the reasons for the symbol. In the sacrament the bread stands for the body of Christ, the water the blood. It is very specific and well understood what these symbols refer to. Yet even in that holy ritual the substance can be substituted, if we understand and honor the referent. We all know the story of potato peels being used at the end of WWII. The symbols point to the atonement. The form the symbols take is not the important thing and the material symbols can be substituted.

This does not seem to be true of priesthood blessings. It has to be olive oil or nothing. Why? What is the olive oil pointing to?

If you had a magic wand that could make tomatoes, you probably wouldn’t care about tomatoes very much. I mean, why would you? Why worry about preserving them in the refrigerator, when you can make more anytime you want? Need a tomato? Abracadabra, a wave of the wand and poof there it is. Do you think you would really pull out a Ziploc to save the unused half of a tomato that you had cut for a salad if you could conjure them at will? Quite likely you would pass them out to the neighbors with abandon. You could use them as compost. You could employ them as the lubricant on a slippery slide for your kids on sunny summer days. You certainly would not cultivate them, nourish them from carefully chosen starters, or set up cages to guide and cherish their growing form. Cheap, magically-made tomatoes would not induce you care about tomatoes. They would be eminently disposable. [Read more...]

Çatalhöyük was a large Neolithic ritual center in the Anatolia region of Turkey occupied from 7500-5700 BC. Found in the ruins of these structures, were platforms and panels decorated with etched bulls and bull-horned pedestals. Presumably rituals took place there. Animal or human blood was found on some of the alters. What’s interesting to me, however, was that the entrance into the sacred space required a formal transition from outside to the inside. [Read more...]

I’m not a philosopher, but once in awhile I like to safety-pin on a philosopher’s cape and don a paper-cutout of their mask, and whoosh around the room jumping off of the low furniture. Occasionally, real ones will pat me on the head, and say “Isn’t he cute!” and let me play around their feet. So it was, that last year I was invited to present at a meeting exploring boundaries in philosophy of science. There, I talked about perceptual boundaries in ecology. The chatter about sacred space buzzing around BYU with the Sacred Space Symposium has got me thinking about, well, sacred space. [Read more...]

(Note: All place names have been translated from Adamic to Modern 21st Century English).

Noah stared at Japheth in horror. His voice shook a little, “What do you mean an Opossum escaped at our last stop?” Noah was angry. “YOU KNOW ALL THE MARSUPIALS ARE SUPPOSE TO GET DROPPED OFF IN AUSTRAILIA!.” It was another blunder in a long series of blunders. Sailing around the earth dropping off the animals in their appropriate habitat had been hard, and he only dimly understood why it had to be done, but a marsupial in North America was going to get him in trouble. [Read more...]

Dear [xxx],

You are about to make a terrible mistake.

I have warned you about the demons of home repair, those minor spirits encountered in plastering a hole in the wall or hanging a door, but in tampering with a sprinkler system you will be pit against demigods you must not face—fierce and angry gods of mythical power so prone to wrath that even those priests endowed with a great and fearless prowess do not trifle easily with these energies. [Read more...]

This morning the schools in Park City, UT were closed based on three suspected cases of Swine flu (or H1N1). The test results for the students will not be in for a few days so eight schools will be closed until at least Tuesday. President Obama (Wow, what a great 100 days given the mess he was handed!), recommended last night that schools close if there are confirmed cases. The World Health Organization yesterday raised its pandemic alert to phase 5. Phase 6 means an official pandemic, and that may come at anytime. Should we panic yet? No! [Read more...]

There is a lot of apocalyptic talk out there on the Net about the current swine flu crisis. Most of it is junk. If you are reading about swine flu from the usual doomsday email/internet sources, conspiracy theorists, or emails that contain capital letters that read ‘GET YOUR FOOD STORAGE IT IS THE END OF THE WORLD’, or from anyone who regularly sends you the latest on the current state of the ‘Endtimes,’ or points to prophecies predicting the this pandemic is “The one”. Toss it. [Read more...]

Today the Utah Valley Sierra Forum will host BYU climatologist Richard Gill at the Provo Library. The talk is called ‘Global Warming: Fact or Fiction?‘

I will be live blogging this event at 7:00 PM MST so be ready for a good discussion. (If for some reason I can’t get internet access, I’ll post my notes later that evening.)

Ok, we are live. (Note I’m not going to pay attention to spelling or grammar in the interest of keeping the experience going!)

[Read more...]

With the end of Battlestar Galactica fresh on our minds, it’s a good time to reassess the place of robots in Mormonism. [Read more...]

Last week a friend of mine’s daughter went through the temple for the first time. These are not ordinary friends. These are the kind of deep friends who you’ve been through a lot with. Friends who know your deepest secrets. The kind of friends that would stay back and help push your wagon out of the mud despite everyone else having gone on, leaving you to the arrows and elements. Friends who you know will always be there for you, and you for them. [Read more...]

If you want to endear yourself to me when you come over to my house for the first time, notice and peruse my living room bookcase. My real bookcases are downstairs in my basement, but the two you see as you enter my door are a convocation of carefully chosen books designed to reveal things about me. [Read more...]

I remember as an undergraduate walking to school with a friend. He was fairly newly married, and I was yet to have found ‘the one.’ Apparently, he was fresh from an argument with his wife. I pointed out that at least he had one. He dismissed my idealistic view of marriage and complained that that was not the way it was. He said that he could not wait to get to heaven where he would have several wives so that when one was being contrary [Read more...]

So seeing all the fuss about Nauvoo polygamy, I thought to myself, history schmistory, let’s talk biology. Biologists know plenty of titillating facts about reproductive strategies—including polygamy and polyandry! However, watch out, biologists tend to be ribald and earthy in these descriptions so if you tend towards reserved euphemisms in your discussions about what the ‘stork brings’ and the ‘nether parts’ of the body stop reading now. You are duly warned that I will splash some rather unsettling biology across the page. [Read more...]

In Terry Eagleton’s new addition to Oxford’s, A Very Short Introduction series, The Meaning of Life, he adds a footnote to the following sentence, “Many of the readers of this book, however, are likely to be as skeptical of the phrase ‘the meaning of life’ as they are of Santa Claus. It seems a quaint sort of notion, at once homespun and portentous, fit for satirical muling by the Monty Python team.” [Read more...]

There is a scene in the movie Star Trek Generations in which Picard the captain of the Enterprise finds himself in the most wonderful Christmas celebration ever depicted in film. It blows It’s a Wonderful Life‘s final scene out of the water. Light snow is falling outside, and a cozy fire is seen on the hearth. [Read more...]

Once there lived a powerful witch. Everyone knew that by a wave of her birch wand she could do just about anything. Everyone also knew she was a very good witch. She would never lie and was always honest with her dealings with her sister witches. She was as ethical as could be and lived by president Kimball’s teaching that a lie was any communication sent to deceive. She never lied. [Read more...]

A couple of disclaimers about this post. First, the following estimations are just extra-fancy back-of-the-envelope calculations. They have not been subject to peer review and should not be taken as a rigorous analysis. I can tell you now the analysis is as full of mistakes as my text is spelling errors and I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to find them both. The post is meant more along the lines of “Wow: Here is something to think about.” Also, I published this for 8 hours in August and several people pointed out that this had all been done before by the Committee on Celestial Demographics in Dialogue. My numbers, methods, and sources are a little different than theirs. Why am I publishing this now? Peer pressure.

I was reading on BCC about a questionnaire given at the FAIR conference that said that the number one worry of church members is celestial polygamy. Now there are lots of things to worry about (like Global Warming) [Read more...]

I was wandering around some of the less frequented halls of UN building here in Vienna and discovered a moon rock. It was sitting in an obscure wing that I’d never before visited, on a pedestal encased in a hefty clear resin pyramid. The rock was about as big as my eleven year old daughter’s fist—Sparkly black with a barnacle-like gray ball of stony colored rock protruding from one side of the darker crystalline matrix. [Read more...]

At the UN, where I’m doing my sabbatical right now, it’s much the same everyday. First, we plot how to get blue-helmeted peacekeeping troops in La Verkin (which as you know declared itself a UN-Free Zone) and then toast the election of Obama and the coming new world order.

Seriously, it’s the office training that I enjoy. I suppose anywhere you work you have to go through some orientation on how to handle the day-to-day problems that might crop up during an average workday. [Read more...]

Picture a small boy. A pleasant lad, standing in sixth grade against a classroom wall. His classmates are lined shoulder to shoulder, faces forward, anticipation and determination gracing their eager faces. A list of words is proffered down the line, one to each child who, in turn, must spell back the word in clearly enunciated English. The words are easy at first. In the first pass none are expected to be asked to sit down. The first group of words are part of the ‘confidence building’ round. But as the first-round word reaches our young man, he stammers a bit, trying hard, but it is to no avail. He can’t spell it. He is asked to sit. He sits alone for four more passes through every child in the line before [Read more...]

Now that the election is over it’s time to turn to other things like EVOOOOOOLUTION MAINIA. So it’s time to go head to head in a blog spectacular heavyweight smack-down! In this corner, the post on evolution at mormonsandscience—Hardcore rabid anti-evolutionists. In the other corner, Dave Bailey’s post at the Mormon Organon, where the enlightened pro-evolution theists boldly proclaim the truth. In this first round I take on: [Read more...]

It’s not like I’ve not been to Czechoslovakia before. Back when I was serving in the US Cavalry (and despite what my kids think I did not ride a horse and rescue settlers) we would sometimes get out of our small fast cavalry tanks and patrol the Czech boarder on foot, following old snow-covered footpaths through cold, fog enshrouded forests. We would occasionally pass white stone boarder markers, in size about six inches square and standing a little less than knee high, which marked the boundary between West Germany and Czechoslovakia. At one of these markers while my sergeant wasn’t looking I stuck my foot inside the border. [Read more...]

The ‘Galileo affair’ is often replayed as a morality tale about irrational religion vs. enlightenment science. The truth is that it was a little more complex than that. Galileo was a firm believer in God. He was a good Catholic in fact. He believed the church was true. However, he ran afoul of the Pope in some, well, not to put too fine a point on it, ways that he should have seen coming. [Read more...]