Last weekend was both Pascha (Easter) and General Conference, making it a weekend doubly full of spiritual blessings. One of the most powerful talks given was Elder Jeffrey R. Hollands discourse “Not as the World Giveth,” he addresses the problems of the world – its violence, hatred, and contention, all of which originate in Satan and wicked influences – and explains how we can find solutions to these problems can be found in the Covenant of Peace – the concepts, teachings, and ordinances that can only be fully found in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In the world we find wars and rumors of wars, rape, murder, greed, anger, social division, isolation, oppression, mockery, corruption, riots, mobs, and every excuse humans can think of to despise one another, kill one another, and hate our blood. Elder Holland then goes on to talk about the solutions to these problems and mentions three Christian principles that, if fully realized, would end all the problems of the world. These are Faith, Hope, and Charity. In this article I breakdown each of these principles and doctrines of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and show how they hold within themselves the power to truly transform the world into the place of peace, love, and liberty that we all wish it was already. Within these three principles is the key to world peace, to Zion.
Category: Society
On The Death of My Father
This is the story of two deaths. The death of my father and the death of my friend’s father.
They both died of similar illnesses – systemic cancer that ravaged their body beyond the ability of present-day science to repair. But it isn’t their cause of death that is meaningful.
What is meaningful is how people reacted to their deaths. What about the way they lived their lives elicited the reactions their deaths had and what this can teach us about the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Fathership of God – this is what I find to be so instructive. In their lives and in their deaths, we can see the quiet but profound impact that living the Gospel can have not only in the life of the disciple but on all those around him or her.
This may be the tale of two deaths, but it is also the tale of two lives – one of tragedy, one of victory, and the hope to be found in Christ for us all.
Great Profiles in Courage: William Lloyd Garrison in Baltimore Jail
History is full of examples of great men and women defying society and state to stand for what is right, good, and true against the injustices, corruption, greed, and violence of the world. This is the first in what will be an irregular series designed to help highlight some of these important, powerful, but sometimes unknown stands, the heroes and heroines who took them, and the lessons we can learn to apply in for our lives today.
This first article highlights the experience of one of our heroes, William Lloyd Garrison. He was one of the loudest, clearest, and most powerful voices for the immediate ending of slavery and his newspaper, The Liberator, was the beating heart of the abolitionist movement. But in 1830, when he was imprisoned for libel because he dared to tell the truth about a local merchant’s participation in the slave trade, he wasn’t influential or well-known. So when faced with a court case against a much wealthier corrupt opponent he did what many other poor people did – he went to jail. Rather than back down, recant the truth, and abandon the cause of justice. Garrison chose to go to prison. This is the story of Garrison’s defiance of the law and social custom, his persecution for it, and the lessons we can learn to apply in our own lives as we seek authenticity, justice, and holiness.
What Christians Need To Know About Romans 13
The traditional argument says that in Romans 13 Romans 13 the Apostle Paul tells Christians that they should be obedient to their governments which have been appointed by God to be His servants on Earth. But is that what the Paul really taught? In a word? No. Not even close. In this article I delve into what exactly Romans 13 does teach.
First, after looking at the teachings of multiple theologians and the text of the scripture itself, I demonstrate that even assuming Paul is talking about governments he isn’t teaching that we should be obedient to every government or that every government is from God. Rather Paul teaches that Christians should only obey governments as the laws and actions of those governments accord with the commandments of God – which means that Christians are not bound to obey most modern governments.
Next, I attempt a re-interpretation of Paul. After delving into the actual Greek text and the meanings of the words that Paul used, I conclude that Paul isn’t even talking about worldly governments at all. Instead Paul is actually talking about the kind of relationship that Christians should have to the church and its leaders, as well as the role those Church leaders should play in the lives of Christians.
No matter how you look at it, the Apostle Paul did not teach Christians that they should be obedient to governments or that worldly governments are God’s servants. And those that think otherwise have misunderstood the scriptures.
The Insidious Ways That Governments Use Propaganda To Control You
Over the last year I have written repeatedly on the different ways that governments utilize propaganda to manipulate the public into obeying those in power even when such obedience violates the individual’s basic humanity, his or her basic human rights. Yet, I am still left me lacking an explanation for how propaganda is used to manufacture the consent of the masses to taking part in a system that is built to profit the very few rich and powerful political and corporate leaders at the top at the cost of all the rest of us.
I couldn’t understand why people have fetishized democracy as if merely having a system of elections would protect people from those in power while ignoring the ideals and values that make democracy anything other than the choosing of a new dictator every four to six years. I could not understand how something like the Deep State/Double Government could develop in the most fervently democratic age in human history.
That changed once I was exposed to the book Propaganda by Edward Bernays. An experienced propagandist himself, having produced propaganda for the US government during World War I, Bernays literally wrote a book about how the government uses propaganda in times of peace to “engineer the consent” of the masses and to secure their obedience to those in power.
In this article I delve into his book and pull out some choice excerpts that can helps us to understand the ways that the masses are indoctrinated with government propaganda without realizing it, how the government uses propaganda to manipulate and control the masses, and what we can do about it. This one is an eye-opener for everyone, no matter what your political or religious beliefs.
How To Understand The Deep State
The term “Deep State” is much maligned and is often dismissed as a conspiracy theory with the idea that the heads of the various bureaucracies that run the different functions of government exercising some controlling influence over the elected leaders of the nation being treated as preposterous. But, is it so crazy to think that the unelected and largely unaccountable heads of the various departments of state within the Executive Branch have influence and power beyond the limits that the people suppose they have and have greater power over the functions of government and elected leaders than the public understands?
To figure this out I want to share with you an interview with Dr. Michael J Glennon about his book “National Security and Double Government,” one of the most important books on the function of government in the last 50 years. He is a respected intellectual, with decades of experience in academia, law, and the American political system. In this interview he warns that the dominance of the national security departments in the US government has established a verifiable “Double Government” that places the nation “on the path to autocracy” that will render its elected branches as mere functionaries and museum pieces if we don’t do something now to prevent it.
Here he lays out the thesis of his book and his basic argument for why we should be worried about the power of the burgeoning Nation Security State, which he calls Double Government and which most others call the Deep State, why it has the influence and power it does, the media’s role in furthering it, and what we should be doing to challenge it before it is too late. If you want to understand the reality and dangers of what people call the Deep State, not just in the USA but in a model that applies equally to all democratic and republican governments, here is the place to start.
Nonviolence In Christianity And The Apostasy From Peace: The Complete Series
In the series of articles gathered herein I accomplished three things.
First, I demonstrated the historic fact of Christian nonviolence by examining the writings of a variety of Christian leaders over a period of 300 years. In all that time not a single Christian leader whose works have survived ever taught anything other than the complete renunciation of violence and war as a central tenet of Christianity, a commandment given by Jesus Christ.
Secondly, for my Latter-day Saint readers I showed similar teachings as taught in our modern beliefs and church leaders. The teaching of early Christian leaders on this subject are not simply applicable to our lives today, they directly relate to what we believe in such a way that our modern teaching echo and are elucidated by these ancient writings.
Thirdly, and finally, I wrote a short explanation of the loss of the truths as Christianity, in a moment of Great Apostasy, abandoned centuries of Christian truth and teaching in order to construct a false and heretical doctrine that would justify the pursuit of power, prestige, and wealth by those who claimed to be Christian but who were in fact heretics and apostates corrupting Christianity into a tool of the state.
If we hope to use the full power of Christianity to help solve the problems of the world we must reject the foundation upon which all injustice is based, violence, and return to truths that made Christianity so powerful to start with, Christ-like love, service, forgiveness, and peace.
The Ten Basic Principles of War Propaganda
While most people are familiar with the concept of propaganda, they actually have a very limited understanding of just what propaganda is and how it works. If pushed to provide an example they might talk about World War I posters or something akin to them, maybe even the idea that governments might lie to people. But very few have the ability to recognize what propaganda is, what makes it effective, and how it is used to manipulate them into doing what those in power want the masses to do. This article aims to correct this limitation by providing a tool that people can use to analyze the claims and actions of the State and recognize when it is using propaganda to try and mislead or exploit the people. In this article I outline ten basic principles of propaganda, explain each element, and provide examples of them in action both historically and currently. Then, recognizing when they’re being manipulated by those in power the reader will be able to resist such exploitation, refute the lies of those in power, be able to defend their liberties from the warmongers, and able to cause positive change in the world to truly establish peace for everyone living in it.
The Apostasy From Peace
Having just spent the last month demonstrating the historical fact that Christians practiced a form of what we would today call nonviolence, rejected being in the military, and taught the importance of loyalty to the universal church of Christ over and beyond all worldly political authorities and powers all as part of fulfilling Christ’s commandments to love and serve our enemies and to do nothing but good, even to those who evil to us, we are still left with a singular, important question.
What happened?
How did we get from that to where we are today? How did we get from a faith focused on self-sacrifice, love, and service to one that justifies violence, war, and subservience to the powers of the world in all their evils? How did we go form Christians being literally kicked out of church for joining the military to Christians treating the military as some sort of sacred calling?
This article not only explains how this occurred, but also how this process robbed Christianity of one of its most radically Christ-like and powerful truths and how reclaiming that truth is essential to transforming the Earth and establishing the Zion of Christ.
How To Live The Word of Wisdom: The Complete Edition
This is the collection of articles which were written about the Word of Wisdom to address the many issues, misinterpretations, and misunderstandings we have about this revelation head on. By confronting them I hope to help correct the foundational errors in our understanding of the Word of Wisdom, which in turn helps us to explain why some of the apparent hypocrisies and contradictions of it (like why we can have Red Bull but not coffee) are neither contradictions nor hypocritical. I try my best to explore and explain the purpose of the Word of Wisdom by looking at the text itself and what it tells us it is, not what we have said it is, and how it actually tells us to live, not how we say we should live. I address the historical enforcement of the Word of Wisdom, how alcohol mas been treated by the Church, the many errors we make on the issues of drinking coffee and tea as well as eating meat. Finally, I hope to help set us on a better path of following the Word of Wisdom in a spiritually healthy way that will build and strengthen our faith in Christ and the Restoration through a better understanding and living of this great latter-day revelation.