A Curious Instrument

Feminists fought hard to get wider choices. Now that they have such, will their younger sisters make responsible choices for society? They have a rather poor track record so far. After I read this back, I see that I was really vague about what I mean by feminist harpies. These are the current crop of Social Justice Warriors that wreak havoc on college campuses, manufacture offences, physically attack those with opposing viewpoints, and plead some higher virtue to justify their behavior. I honor the work over the past generations to give women the vote, allow them to act independently, and to work and live as they choose. The new crop have stolen the good work of previous "feminists" in providing new choices and given the term "feminist" a hideous aftertaste of intolerance to traditional values. When I say "modern feminist", I speak of SJWs that use violence and their ignorant rhetoric to fight for far less-worthy causes and encourage deviant behaviors t...

I give things away all the time.  I figure that I have resources sufficient for my family's needs, so I don't really need to force others to buy my writings in order to read them. I can make more "inconvenient" formats of my books available freely. If you want to support my writing, please visit my Amazon area and buy some of my e-books for the Kindle. I have made my latest e-book " Feeding the Soul of Steve Jobs " available on my home web server for anyone to read for free. There is a lot of other material there that is also free to read  Enjoy!

I don't want people to think I have dropped off the face of the earth.  I am still here, but since the last post, I have left my previous work, taken up a challenging new opportunity and much of my free time is taken up with preparation for additional work as an adjunct professor this coming fall.  Busy, busy! I will get back to posts at some point in the future, but it may be several months until I can get the free time needed to do a decent job. I hope you will not give up on me yet!

I feel the need to reveal something to those who comment on my posts here:  I don't read them.  To be more honest, I actually CAN'T read them.  That sounds weird, so let me explain. I wrote some time ago on the subject of internet comments and the fact that I had turned this feature off when I began using Blogger some six years ago.  As time passed, several features have been added to Blogger and I was put in the position to have to re-enable comments to make various features work as intended. I still feel the same way about comments - I don't really want them. I try to keep commenting features disabled to avoid the inherent rudeness of giving the impression that I encourage comments when I actually don't want them at all. A strange thing happened though - commenting here on my blog is still enabled, but it is broken! I couldn't see people's comments even if I wanted to do so (which I really don't).  However, I see statistical evidence that people leave...

I am going to reiterate, yet again, that although I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) and the basic outline of the afterlife that it espouses is the basis upon which I draw, I cannot say that what I present below is either factually true or an accurate depiction of the official LDS conception of life after death. I just love coming up with fresh ways of disclaiming everything I say! I got so excited about sharing my thoughts of the telestial (lower), terrestrial (middle), and celestial (higher) rewards that God makes available to us that I forgot that I am describing the after-life out of order!  These rewards come at the far end of a rather drawn-out after-death process. I think a lot of things I was taught in relation to the after-life were allegorical, especially if it is drawn from biblical descriptions. As an example, the whole concept of Hell was apparently based on a burning canyon of refuse a bit away from Jerusalem that was pret...

In the previous installments of this series of posts on the Plan of Happiness and the different "glories" to which one can aspire, each had a short descriptor: the telestial was a state of "no consequences" and the terrestrial had "no responsibilities" . Now, I will attempt to describe the highest or "celestial" reward which I have chosen the phrase "no limits". I can't find a cute description or picture for the celestial reward - there is very little recorded about it. It is compared with the light from the sun as compared to the light from the moon (representing the middle reward). Brighter! Warmer! Bring sunblock? As I have described each reward, one may have noticed that the lower and middle rewards constitute a freedom "from" something: a condition where something that was undesirable in mortality is no longer present. The telestial glory eliminates culpability for actions. The terrestrial eliminates the need f...

My maternal grandmother (Gran) was a good Christian woman. She believed that her afterlife would be filled with harp-playing and quietly praising Jesus while floating in a cloudy heaven, protected from the riff-raff by an ever-vigilant Saint Peter who ran a portal called the "Pearly Gates". It was her Christian duty to denounce The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints  (LDS) (to which her daughter and grandchildren had converted) and to fib to her friends and family that my mother and her children (including me) actually went to another congregation of Gran's chosen non-LDS denomination because of Sunday timing preferences. Again, Gran was a good woman and accustomed to hard work, likely a product of her upbringing in the highly religious and relatively hard-pan frontier of west Texas and eastern New Mexico. She never thought much of her progeny's religious choices, but she was kindly and loving regardless. I knew her primarily in her retirement, where she wa...