For much of 2010 I’ve had opportunity to work with a remarkably diverse group of Restoration bloggers at one of the most-frequented LDS blog sites, Mormon Matters. They invited me to join their panel of writers in order to provide additional Community of Christ perspective on issues affecting both churches. I also got to further the mission of The Fire Still Burning (i.e., this site) in exploring the implications of Restoration theology  and modern science for each other.  Occasionally, I got to share personal testimony or a devotional reflection that really is not the focus of this blog. Synergy for everyone.

Then in late September, during a literal 48-hour period, a series of events led to a parting of the ways between that panel of writers and John Dehlin, founder of that site. Those events have been aired — probably more than necessary — on a number of LDS sites, including Mormon Matters itself, so I will not bother to provide further commentary here. 

In short, John has chosen to take Mormon Matters in a new direction. Nearly all of the permanent bloggers there, on the other hand, have chosen to continue and expand our journey in a new vehicle which we will formally launch on Monday, October 4. That new vehicle is Wheat & Tares.

We have nine bloggers on the initial roster there:  Mormon Heretic, Bored in Vernal, Hawkgrrrl, Stephen Marsh, Jeff Spector, Adam F, Andrew S, JMB, and this strange guy FireTag. Except for the strange guy, most of these writers are well-known in LDS blogging circles and are responsible forthe success achieved by the Mormon Matters site. (The strange guy’s reputation in the much smaller world of CofChrist blogging remains to be seen.)

All of us launching Wheat & Tares plan to continue what we’ve done well — looking at Mormon ideas from multiple perspectives to clarify each other’s vision — while expanding the field of topics we cover. As soon as the launch is complete, you’ll see a reorganization of the blogroll at this site to provide direct links to Wheat & Tares as well as the individual blogs of these writers.

Of course, when opening new fields, it’s especially hard to tell whether what’s growing is a potential crop, or unwanted seeds of grass or wildflowers left behind in the soil. That’s what the wheat and tares parable is about: nourishing both the correct and the incorrect until they can be identified for what they are. It’s a patience-trying process, but it’s the only way to expand the cultivated area. 

So come join us at Wheat & Tares as we look for wheat beginning Monday, October 4.

The overall article is well worth reading to better understand current political debates, but that wasn’t what called my attention to it as a possible subject for this blog. Rather, the following paragraph toward the end of the Article startled me:

“Nothing has set the country class apart, defined it, made it conscious of itself, given it whatever coherence it has, so much as the ruling class’s insistence that people other than themselves are intellectually and hence otherwise humanly inferior. Persons who were brought up to believe themselves as worthy as anyone, who manage their own lives to their own satisfaction, naturally resent politicians of both parties who say that the issues of modern life are too complex for any but themselves. Most are insulted by the ruling class’s dismissal of opposition as mere “anger and frustration” — an imputation of stupidity — while others just scoff at the claim that the ruling class’s bureaucratic language demonstrates superior intelligence. A few ask the fundamental question: Since when and by what right does intelligence trump human equality? Moreover, if the politicians are so smart, why have they made life worse?” [Emphases added.]

When I read the bolded sentences above I almost sputtered to myself. “Of course, the intelligent should…” And then I remembered a series of conversations I had with my wife-to-be several decades ago when I was getting my baptism into the government policy environment in the DC area and she was free-lancing as a classical musician in New York City. When I visited her, it seemed her colleagues were always complaining about how little funding there was for the arts. When we were alone together, this conversation often continued as she noted that the government seemed to have plenty of money to pay me well for what I did. (I had enough spare cash at the time to fly back and forth between the two cities; she once, I found out later, had to walk home from seeing me off at the airport.) I had initially defended my privilege with exactly the same “Of course…” sputtering.

Well, true love triumphed, and we long ago moved on to debate other issues in our marriage, but my memory of those conversations stopped the sputtering, and I could start taking the article’s fundamental question seriously.

What trumps “the worth of all persons”, to use a Community of Christ terminology? Is it intelligence, which we now measure in our culture by having accrediting bodies grant us degrees that say we are intelligent? It is a very seductive idea, until I start to examine it closely. Why does a master’s degree in physics make me more intelligent than my wife’s masters degree in classical music makes her? She can play a piano; she gets calls to do that more often than I get called upon to solve third order differential equations (and she can still do her thing from memory). Who’s more useful? How many people like me does society actually need?

Other cultures have believed (do believe?) that the basis of rule should be the ability to defeat enemy armies, to belong to a divinely-favored race or gender or ethnicity, or even to be sired by a previous member of the ruling class. Shouldn’t I be willing to question the basis of my belief in the rule of “intellect”?

I am proud of my degrees and my connections to what Codevilla’s article calls the “ruling class”. It shows, no matter how hard I try to become conscious of it and question my cultural assumption. Oh, oh!

Ancient people of many cultures built monuments to their gods. Often, it became a little confusing about whether the monuments were built to the gods, or whether the people who built them believed they were gods. In places like Egypt or Mesoamerica there eventually was no mistaking that the pyramids were about the rulers.

I look at the great monuments in Washington. Some are monuments to political demi-Gods of the past. But some seem clearly monuments to the rulers themselves. Oh, oh! In fact, the places you see Senators or House Representatives being interviewed on TV are not the most ornate Congressional office buildings. The newest structures have multi-floor glass walled interiors which work poorly with TV lights, so they go unseen by most people without day-to-day business there. (And why did I bother to tell you that? Oh, oh!)

Other monuments are ideological. If you can’t get your name on a monument (or at least an office building in your local district), get your name on a law. In the sciences, get an effect, or a theory, or an equation named after you. Win a prize. Leave your mark on history.

In the Book of Mormon, the falling of people into the “pride cycle” is frequently thematically associated with the wearing of “costly apparel”. Those on the fringes of the ruling class could not build monuments, but they could signal their membership in that class to everyone by what they wore. If we take Mesoamerica as a model, they could make themselves living pyramids of cloth, jade, or shell.

And the more widely those signs spread (physically or metaphorically), the more ideas like “the worth of all people” became illusionary self-deception. The more people were excluded from the ruling class, the more strongly those on the fringe found it necessary to justify doing ever-more-questionable things to hang on to the symbols of status.

I am very much on the “fringe” of my culture’s ruling class. I can signal my membership in that class through my university affiliations, the reports I’ve co-authored, the conferences and advisory hearings I’ve attended, and the offices of the government officials who’ve passed me written “attaboys”. I can make my pyramid out of paper, and my mark on history can last digitally until the digital formats themselves become obsolete. Oh, oh!

Intellectualism is not a vice. Neither is being a member of any elite. But could “intellectualism” be the particular form of the pride cycle to which our modern Western culture can most easily be tempted?

CONTINUE READING AT MORMON MATTERS 06/27/10. JOIN THE DISCUSSION THERE!

Distinctly Mormon doctrines relating the physical appearance of humanity to God’s own “preferred” form grew gradually in early Restoration history rather than springing forth full form. Although there are references in the Book of Mormon (the earliest recorded of Joseph Smith’s prophetic writings) to the Brother of Jared seeing the “finger” and then the full vision of Christ, even the earliest published accounts of the First Vision do not feature descriptions of two personages appearing as does the “official” version eventually recorded several years after formation of the church. This doesn’t mean that later descriptions were contradictory to the first version; it does suggest that certain features of the encounter took on greater significance in light of subsequent experience.

The emphasis on the “physicality of God” even in the spiritual realm grew in concert with notions of the Eternal Family and its role and function in achieving and living in Celestial Glory. The elaboration of this theology is natural as the early church leadership began to push, at first secretly, new forms of marriage and family life, but it was not an inevitable evolution of the theology of the 1830 Restoration. For example, no one in the Community of Christ expects that the afterlife is about progressing to populate new worlds with our own spiritual offspring, as Heavenly Father populated our own world. In one denomination, it is THE Heavenly Father; in the other it is Heavenly Father, with the seldom spoken inference that there may be Heavenly Mother lurking in the theology as well.

Today, because of this history, Mormons have a well-integrated belief system about how and why the Divine interacts with the physical universe that, nevertheless, is very different from its “prairie cousins”, let alone in comparison to more distantly related Christian denominations. As a prairie cousin with an abiding interest in the theological role of the physical, this fascinates me. LDS theology raises questions about the limits of acceptable definitions of “children of God”, and what God might do to see His children come out on top, that would never occur to me in CofChrist theology. These are the kinds of questions I’d like to ask openly in this post. 

Let’s look at extreme cases first, and then try to focus in on cases closer to home.

We know that the universe is a violent place. Creation is violent itself, and often involves destruction on scales we can barely comprehend. My favorite example is The “Death Star Galaxy”.  We have in that example a small galaxy – a mere few billion stars is small – that has wandered into a radiation jet being emitted by a larger galaxy. The jet is obliterating thousands of solar systems, and any life there, as we watch by telescope.

What does that tell us? Are planets with life so rare that God can let planets be destroyed wholesale without moral consequences? Or perhaps there are not moral consequences because the life there is not human and thus has no spirits? Either way, God would be able to “write off” a great deal of reality under LDS theology because His “children” weren’t involved. He just has to watch over those special few worlds ideal for humanity. The worlds with just the right size, at just the right distance from stars of the proper temperature and age, with the proper orbital stability and a big brother planet like Jupiter nearby to protect against too frequent impacts from comets. The list of requirements is lengthy, but with infinite space to play around in, they’re bound to pop up here and there even if God doesn’t directly favor them with a helping hand.

Or perhaps God has to actively “weed out” competition for his favored species. You could interpret the evidence that way, too. Consider the destruction of the dinosaurian ecosystems 65 million years ago, or the even more catastrophic Permian extinction scores of millions of years still earlier. Our existence and physical forms today depend in complex, but critical, ways on details of those events. For example, the orbits of all the inner planets of our solar system, including the earth, are known to be chaotic on only the order of 5 million years. Start out an orbital simulation with the earth relocated by as little as a millimeter, and in 5 million years, the earth could be on the other side of the sun. A “miracle” performed a hundred million years ago that protects humanity from destruction or clears the world of big reptilians so mammals (and man) can take over could be too small to notice. Far easier than Moses calling on God to make the sun stand still during battle or parting the Red Sea.

What LDS theology would define as human gets tougher to distinguish as we get closer to humanity. How close? Well, within the last few weeks, evidence has been published on the results of sequencing Neandertal DNA. The evidence, first reported in Science, but more accessible here at Science News, shows that modern humans whose lines remained in Africa do not share Neandertal DNA. However, all of the rest of us get one to four percent of our genes from interbreeding with Neandertals that occurred after leaving Africa 45,000 or so years ago. We don’t carry Neandertal body types, but we do seem to carry something important from that population in our internal chemistry and in our brains. Eternal family reunions might be more surprising than our expectations.

So, did the Neanderthals die out because our body type was a little more divine than theirs? Or were the ones who bred with Homo sapiens the more righteous ones? Or do we extend the moral capability and need for redemption to an extinct species at all? Do we instead decide that we are all descended from ancestors who practiced bestiality? Were there humans living contemporaneously with Adam that had no spirits?

Look closer now as we get to Biblical or Jaredite times. Now we picture God as acting in detail to favor one nation over another, one individual over another. We try to point to specific reasons for that favoritism in terms of justice, mercy, or obedience in this life or in preexistence, and we can often convince ourselves that such reasons exist. I could argue a very good case, for example, that slaughter of entire Canaanite cities down to the last child might actually produce fewer casualties in the long run.

But the more uncomfortable I become unless I make the case in such terms, the more I realize that tying God’s plan of salvation to things other than intelligence, or justice, or mercy, or obedience – properties that have little to do with the shape or functions of my body – raises doubts. Wouldn’t exalted beings give up such narrow notions of the boundaries of humanity as part of the progression toward exaltation itself?

So I look at the criteria with which we define relationships with God through their physical manifestations – species, race, gender, diet, clothes – and I wonder. Is God really concerned about those things when He decides who are His children. Or are we just engaging in a very destructive and provincial form of sibling rivalry?

In my Father’s house are many mansions. Maybe some reefs and rookeries, too. Maybe some hives for natural clones or collective minds.

And if that’s true, then certainly there are places for Homo sapiens with same-sex attraction, or childless couples, or singles – every form of Eternal Family we might imagine from the occurrence of those forms here on earth.

The Community of Christ added a new Section 164 to its Doctrine and Covenants at its World Conference during April 10-17, 2010. I’ve been providing a series of commentaries on the canonization process for an LDS audience.

The latest is up at Mormon Matters.  I am told that there was a strong spirit of harmony at the conference. But what do you think about the substance of what happened and what it portends for the Restoration movement over the next several years?

In his book, An Ancient American Setting for The Book of Mormon, John L. Sorenson spends some time explaining that the directions we use are cultural artifacts that are not universally shared. For example, modern Western nations define east to be the direction of sunrise, and west as the direction of sunset. In fact, though our cultures did that long ago, we actually transitioned to defining north and south once we had compasses and then laid out a global system of four cardinal directions for the entire planet even though the direction of sunrise and sunset varies throughout the year and by how far we are from the earth’s equator.

At the time of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, Sorenson notes, it was common for people in Judea to define east and west by orienting to the shoreline of the Mediterranean Sea — the rise and fall of the sun was a convenient reference point because the Med’s coast runs nearly modern north-south, but secondary to the fundamental basis of definition. “West” was seaward; “east” was inland or “desertward”. 

So Sorenson suggests that the Nephites and Lamanites, landing on a modern westnorthwest-eastsoutheast trending Pacific coast kept their convention, and called Central Mexico “north” of both Yucatan and Guatemala.  And, Sorenson also points out, we have even less evidence to suggest how the Jaredites conceived of north and south.

What we know from the internal evidence of the Book of Mormon is that the early Nephites described directions such as east and west perfectly consistently with modern understandings until they pushed off into the Indian Ocean. Then there are no directional statements in the writing for centuries until the Nephites find refuge in the Land of Zarahemla after losing possession of the Land of Nephi – by which time the later writers are using the same orientations that some moderns find problematic.

Sorenson is wedded to the conventional dating of the Jaredite crossing as occurring after 3000 BCE to match the Biblical chronology of the Tower of Babel. In this context, Sorenson can offer no explanation for why the earlier Jaredites and later Nephites saw directions in the same non-modern framework (i.e.,  the Isthmus of Tihuantepac separates north from south) while their cultures clearly paid so much attention to directions of sunrise and sunset.

I previously posted an argument that many problems in interpreting the Book of Mormon come from carrying over the Biblical chronology to the Book of Mormon when we have reason to think the Biblical chronology is wrong.  Specifically, a great deal of evidence suggests that any “flood” in Genesis occurs thousands of years before any “Tower of Babel”. The former event gets carried down as oral tradition all over the planet because it is associated with a world-wide natural geophysical event: the end of the ice-age. And it then gets incorporated in both the oral tradition of Israel and the Nephites along with the much later “tower” tradition.  In short, the ancestors of all Americans can cross the North Pacific from Siberia by boat early enough to match the DNA evidence, and still carry the flood tradition from the drowning of the Persian Gulf.

This interpretation also naturally suggests a new answer for the direction problem. If your ancestral population spent thousands of years in the Arctic, the sun rises in the south, not the east. (In fact, Sorenson uses the example of Arctic peoples to make the point of the cultural dependence of connecting east to sunrise.) Move toward the equator, and the direction of the sunrise changes, but not your word for that direction. The word for the land where the sun rises is still descended from the word from “south”, even millenia later among the Olmecs (the last Jaredite dynasties) when its origin is forgotten.

So now look at Sorenson’s explanation for Nephite interpretations of directions in the light of this Jaredite origin. The Nephites have a word for the direction the sun rises that’s derived from “inland”. The people of Zarahemla have a word for the direction of sunrise derived from the concept of “south” that’s been common throughout all of Mesoamerica.  Sunrise is a common referent in either language, so the words are considered to mean the same in either language, even though the conceptual sources are radically different. For the Nephites, the “land southward” becomes the direction of sunrise as seen from Zarahemla. The “land northward” becomes the direction of sunset as seen from Zarahemla. The eastern lands and the East Sea become the territory to your left as you face the sunrise; the West is to your right. The result, using Sorenson’s proposed location for Zarahemla is illustrated by clicking on the thumbnail at the beginning of the post. 

And when JS translates by the power of God in the 19th Century, those would be the concepts he receives.

This line of thought immediately suggests another: might we also have a clue to the centuries-long gap in any directional information being contained in the Book of Mormon before Zarahemla? After all, Nephi and his successors are unlikely to have stopped writing directional words when they got to the promised land. If Sorenson was correct about the Nephite landing point and conceptual framework, there would have been no great difference in continuing to use the Jewish words for East and West to describe their movements during the subsequent centuries. But Mormon, who faithfully transcribed those directions from the Old World he’d never seen, never wrote anything about travel of his ancestors in the promised land, even though he clearly knew the geography of his homeland well enough to be able to infer those directions.

So try this on: what if the Nephites’ records of their “wanderings” made no sense to the post-Zarahemla prophets because Nephi didn’t land on the Pacific Coast of Central America, but on the Atlantic? If facing sunrise, unlike in the Med, meant facing seaward, not landward? If your whole framework for thinking of directions was suddenly flipped 180 degrees, with your “north” becoming “south”? Once you did move inland, your whole conceptual framework would become meaningless, and you’d stop using those meaningless directional words. And when you did meet up with the descendents of the people of Mesoamerica, you’d be hungry to adopt their directional framework and language.

This seems like a radical idea because the Sorenson model clearly tags the primitive ruins on which Gualemala City evolved as the City of Nephi, just as it places Zarahemla in the Grijalva River Valley in Chiapas. But ask yourself: if you ever get to play God, and you want to get people from Yemen to Guatemala City, do you intend to send your children across thousands of extra miles of Pacific Ocean and through already settled lands? Or do you intend to send them around Africa, across the much smaller Atlantic, and then lead them overland over a couple of hundred miles of relatively unpopulated river valley? 

I think I know which way I’d lean.

In a February 2, 2008, cover article in New Scientist, Jim Giles reported on some provocative research on the connections between genetics and political opinions:

“…Across the land, liberals and conservatives are slugging it out, trying to convince each other that their way of thinking is right. They may be wasting their breath.”

“According to an emerging idea, political positions are substantially determined by biology and can be stubbornly resistant to reason. ‘These views are deep-seated and built into our brains. Trying to persuade someone not to be liberal is like trying to persuade someone not to have brown eyes. We have to rethink persuasion,’ says John Alford, a political scientist at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

“Evidence to support this idea is growing. For example, twin studies suggest that opinions on a long list of issues, from religion in schools to nuclear power and gay rights, have a substantial genetic component. The decision to vote rather than stay at home on election day may also be linked to genes. Neuroscientists have also got in on the act, showing that liberals and conservatives have different patterns of brain activity.”

The article goes on to tie genetics to political views through the mechanisms by which genetics influence the formation of basic personality types, which are highly heritable. These, in turn, seem to be readily correlated with modern American political party preferences. (The genetic linkage is not limited to Americans, but other nations express the linkage to policy through different political institutions unique to their cultures.)

According to an existing and well-respected personality model, five basic personality axes can be defined: conscientiousness, openness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. The latter two seem to have little to do with political orientation, but the other three axes do show strong differences between Liberals and Conservatives.

Conscientious people are defined as being organized, self-disciplined, and responsible, and likely to follow rules. Conscientious people tend to favor conservative political positions and oppose liberal positions.

Open people are defined as anticipating new experiences, seeing change as presenting opportunities rather than problems, and as envisioning the possibilities of the world that might be.  Open people tend to favor liberal positions and oppose conservative positions.

Extroverted people are quick to self-disclose, process information out loud and like to be seen as being busy. Extroverted people also tend to favor liberal positions and oppose conservative ones.

Now, no psychological model can reproduce the complexity of a human being, and the article itself is filled with qualifications and limitations of the various research studies involved. But it ends with a quote that I find very interesting:

“So the guy at the bar [blog] may never agree with you, but perhaps realizing that can be liberating. ‘We spend a lot of energy getting upset with the other side,’ says Alford. ‘We often think our opponents are misinformed or stubborn. Accepting that people are born with some of their views changes that’, Alford points out. ‘Come to terms with these differences, and you can spend the energy now wasted on persuasion on figuring out ways of accommodating both points of view.’

In fact, perhaps God (and/or evolution, if you prefer) designed humanity that way quite intentionally – with separate preferences imparting resistance for society to various “spiritual diseases”. After all, different strains of wheat protect the field from the emergence of a new fungus.

Perhaps, rather than either liberals or conservatives being right or meeting in a middle ground, we actually need to preserve each other to hear truth.

Do we, as spoken of in Genesis and Ether, metaphorically speak to each other with “confounded languages” that prevent communication before it even begins?  And do we also need to pray that our languages “be not confounded”?

An article from the Salt Lake Tribune listed in the Mormon Matters sidebar sometime ago noted the official elevation of “care of the poor and needy” to the status of a “purpose” of the Mormon (LDS) church. Church news sources are noting how LDS resources are being mobilized from both the United States and the Dominican Republic, in coordination with partners such as Islamic Relief, CARE, Food for the Poor, and Healing Hands for Haiti.

All of its missionaries are reported to be safe, and the church is using nine meeting houses to provide shelter for members and an even larger number of non-members. There have been casualties among the membership, however.

The immediate need in Haiti is, of course, for emergency supplies and medicines, which the church is attempting to help provide. The news releases also indicate that the church will gradually move to assistance for reconstruction, expecting to stay involved with the effort for up to a year or more.

The second largest denomination of the Restoration, the Community of Christ, had embedded their ministry more deeply in the Haitian education system as a long term strategy for Christian ministry in that part of the world. CofChrist has increasingly tended over the last half-century to emphasize Zion-building, as seen through focusing on peace and justice issues in the present, over discussions of personal salvation. As a result, the work of the CofChrist in Haiti has been hard hit by the earthquake.

This approach has not been limited to the Community of Christ, and so a number of humanitarian ministries are looking beyond the immediate crisis and wondering about long term prospects for the country. As a front page Washington Post story by William Booth and Scott Wilson put it on January 23:

Schools’ Collapse Leaves Haiti’s Future in Rubble

The earthquake has crushed what many deem the only path to a better life in the impoverished country.

Of the many things taken from this city [Port-au-Prince] by the earthquake, few are as threatening to Haiti’s future as the near destruction of a school system viewed across society here as the only path to a better life.

Education is as precious as water in Haiti. The ruined capital was filled with parochial and secular schools built on the strict French model, many affordable even to the poorest parents, who struggled to pay a few dollars a week in tuition…

Now there are no schools. Education officials here estimate that the quake erased thousands of campuses, and at least 75% of those in the capital lie in ruins… Nearly every block has one, with many meeting in multiple sessions into the evening. …the debris-filled sites where they once stood are the places that smell the strongest of death. They were filled with children.

Information from the CofChrist is probably typical for other religious ministries in Haiti. The denomination primarily worked through a charity, Outreach International created by church members several decades ago that had been able to build and maintain — even through years of political instability in the country — a network of ninety schools enrolling 9000 students. (That number is not impressive until you realize that the Community of Christ has only about 140,000 known, baptized members in the entire US and Canada.) 

On January 19, Outreach International reported, almost defiantly:

Outreach International’s Haiti school children, staff and facilities are so severely impacted with loss of life and destroyed buildings that the organization cannot come close to accounting for extent of loss.

Matthew Naylor, Outreach International President, received an email today from Michel Rosier, Outreach International schools network director stating, “It is difficult and even painful to give you a detailed report on the Haitian situation. I thank you so much for your extreme concern for the Haitian people.”

With a teacher staff of 300+, Rosier and another staff member, Augustin Derat, executive director for the schools programs, are the only two staff accounted for. Both of them, along with their families, are living on the streets.

Early reports indicate that 7 of 12 schools which have been inspected are destroyed and the rest seriously damaged. There are at least 20 schools in the affected area. Rescue efforts at one school have saved 7 students from the rubble. Rosier states, nothing can be done for the others trapped.

With the Outreach International schools network so badly damaged, initial support for relief efforts has been made through Doctors Without Borders (MSF) located in Port-au-Prince, who will supply the type of immediate relief requested by our staff members on the ground.

Naylor promises, Outreach International will continue to invest in the long-term development in Haiti. We pledge to remain with the surviving children, families, and staff in order to put their lives back together. We will stay for as long as it takes. This is where the bulk of our resources will go.

I am sure that reader’s here have already made initial decisions about how much and in what ways they wish to help Haiti. However, I’d like to pose some more strategic questions that will still be relevant as the emergency evolves further:

How should  our churches (and our peoples) give relative priority to our notions of the evangelistic and Zion-building enterprises?

Does the elevation of “care of the poor and needy” within the LDS “purposes” change their personal response in how they give time and money? Does the setback to the school programs in Haiti change how Community of Christ members allocate their giving?

 How should the churches allocate the proportion of their support among their own people and ministries and among the general population affected by the crisis?

Is the best strategy for each church to focus massive resources on emergencies as they happen, wherever they happen (knowing that they will need to move on to some other emergency after a year or so, unfortunately)? Or is it better to build long term programs that, also unfortunately, may have to be built again and again?

How do the churches best coordinate with other religious and humanitarian agencies in ways that are faithful to the two denominations’ separate understandings of the meaning of the Restoration?

How do we integrate our sense of the Spirit calling us personally with the task of our churches and other ministries?

When I went to work for The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in the 1970′s, the State of Maryland had just passed environmental laws that expanded the state’s role in siting all proposed power plants. JHU/APL had been awarded a contract to provide the state with environmental expertise that the state employees lacked. Although there was already one nuclear plant (Calvert Cliffs) operating in Maryland, I arrived on the scene fresh out of grad school just in time to be assigned to monitor the nuclear safety aspects of the siting of the first proposed nuclear plant to be licensed under the new laws. This basically meant looking over the Feds’ shoulders to catch any errors, since the state could not preempt Federal safety law for nukes. 

Because the state had no real power on these issues, but did have real power on other environmental concerns with the plant, I think it was a case of stick-the-new-guy-with-it, but I loved it. This was at the time when plate tectonics was just being accepted as a scientific revolution in our understanding of the earth sciences. When some geologic faults were discovered near the proposed plant site, it suddenly became my duty — yes, my duty — to spend a great deal of time getting smart enough on the geology of North America to be able to go into the field with real geologists and translate their findings for the regulators. Pure heaven.

I got to do some things I had never imagined I would do. Walk with a geologist as he traced a volcanic dike across driveways and through pastures over a couple of miles. Stand inside a back-hoe trench exposing one of the faults breaking through different-colored layers of clay — which would have been even more fun if I hadn’t just seen the original “Earthquake” disaster movie, the one where geologists get buried alive in such a trench just before Los Angeles is leveled.

So right then and there I fell in love with geophysics, a specialty my college training had never included in more than a cursory fashion, but which has since become an interest for the rest of my life.

One of the “hot” topics in the literature then – pardon the pun — was the observation that there had been a cooling trend underway for several decades, and we were beginning to get some glimmers (not since borne out) that the current interglacial period of 10,000 years or so since the last ice age made us overdue for the next ice age to start. Since ice has a lot to do with how volcanoes in the US build up and erode, I followed this issue as well.

By 1982, the nuclear disarmament issue had also become a major concern, especially as scientists realized that nuclear weapons (or more particularly, the soot from burning cities and forests their use would cause) could produce a phenomenon called “nuclear winter”.

In a nuclear winter, the amount of sunlight reaching the earth plummets enough to drop the earth’s temperature several degrees (depending on the war scenario invoked) and keep it there for a year or two. Definitely not good for the food and energy supplies at any time, but especially at a time when civilization itself would be teetering anyway. Indeed, there was debate by luminaries such as Carl Sagan and Henry Kissinger that nuclear weapons had become self-deterring, because no rational nation could be confident it would not be destroyed by the explosion of large numbers of its own weapons on enemy soil. And if the world was on the verge of an ice age, nuclear winter could indeed be the kind of trigger that would push us over the edge.

About this time I remembered seeing something about ice as a teenager while reading the Doctrine and Covenants cover to cover. Sure enough, I found it in what is LDS D&C Section 133 (The Community of Christ version is numbered Section 108):

“He shall command the great deep, and it shall be driven back into the north countries, and the islands shall become one land. And the land of Jerusalem and the land of Zion shall be turned back into their own place, and the earth shall be like as it was in the days before it was divided… 

And they who are in the north countries shall come in remembrance before the Lord; and their prophets shall hear his voice, and shall no longer stay themselves; and they shall smite the rocks, and the ice shall flow down at their presence. And an highway shall be cast up in the midst of the great deep… And in the barren deserts there shall come forth pools of living water; and the parched ground shall no longer be a thirsty land.”

Now the above can (and quite possibly should) be interpreted metaphorically. But the thing I’ve always found interesting is that the above describes consistently a number of effects of an ice age on the world several years before Louis Agassiz  is generally credited with putting the concept together from observations in Europe in 1837 and forcing the scientific community to take notice.

The “great deep” is quite literally sucked up out of the ocean basins over a thousand years or so and dumped on the “north countries” as snow, deeper and deeper until its own weight makes it flow steadily southward, “smiting” the rocks in its way to such an extent that it creates things like Long Island out of the rubble pile. Continental climates and rainfall patterns change radically, with many “barren deserts”, especially in Africa and the Mid-East becoming refuge areas for populations from the North (at least that’s what happened previous times when the ice returned within human pre-history).

As sea level falls, a land bridge (Beringia) emerges to link Eurasia to Alaska, joining the contionents of the New World to the Old as they were before the megaflooding at the end of the last Ice Age as sea levels then rose. Australia and New Zealand don’t quite link up with Indo-China as the coastal plain southeast of the latter is exposed, but they come awfully close.

And, of course, it was all phrased as prophetic judgment against humanity (which destruction of the environment, the economy, or of nuclear war certainly would be.

And even if it isn’t intended to be a metaphor, it would still be a “hit” rather than a “miss” any time in the next thousand years. However…

If any of you reading this from the “north countries” should observe that the snow doesn’t entirely melt next summer as it usually does, please feel free to draw the appropriate prophetic conclusions. (And don’t buy property too near the shoreline of Salt Lake — Lake Bonneville was much larger.)

The first post, entitled “Canonizing Modern Revelation: A Tourist Guide”, describes the background of the issues motivating President Stephen Veazey to give guidance to the church on January 17, 2010.

The second post, “CofChrist to Tackle Major Issues at April Conference — Gay Marriage, Baptism” headlines topics of the revelation that should be most notable to the bloggernacle.  Please feel free to comment either in this thread or on Mormon Matters.

Thanks to Mormon Heretic, and we now return you to our regularly scheduled science and theology discussions.