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Showing posts from May, 2021

"Stoning" Among Us

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In  the Book of Mormon , the Lord catalogs the destruction of many cities and lands as a result of wickedness and abominations and the treatment of those who called out the wicked. 3 Nephi 9 :10-11 And behold, the city of Laman, and the city of Josh, and the city of Gad, and the city of Kishkumen, have I caused to be burned with fire, and the inhabitants thereof, because of their wickedness in casting out the prophets, and stoning those whom I did send to declare unto them concerning their wickedness and their abominations. And because they did cast them all out, that there were none righteous among them, I did send down fire and destroy them, that their wickedness and abominations might be hid from before my face, that the blood of the prophets and the saints whom I sent among them might not cry unto me from the ground against them. We are in the midst of such "stoning those whom [the Lord] did send to declare unto them concerning their wickedness and their abominations". W...

Straightjackets and Guardrails

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My podcast player went haywire, perhaps with the intervention of God, and I found myself listening to a very old discussion rather than my morning devotional. I would reference the source, but it is an old idea and I only heard a glancing reference to it. The story goes that a municipality notices that much money is spent on ambulances reporting to deaths and injuries at the bottom of a high cliff from which many people fall.  An "out-of-the-box" thinker suggests that a guardrail or fence be put at the top of the cliff to prevent such falls in the first place and that the reduced cost of ambulance service would more than pay for the preventative.  I always considered this a lesson in prevention and economics, but the discussion to which I accidently listened was not so narrow in moral scope. A broad concept, of which such things as socialism and neighborhoods were a part, was being discussed.  At its very heart, the people on the unintended podcast episode were talking ab...