My CMS The View from a New City

Looking through old year books I find I can’t help laughing at the hair styles.

I have been reading a collection of modern essays. The only unifying spirit of these essays is the view that the writer gets to dissect the subject with “insight.” In other words, the writer gets to judge the subject. The subject is usually a human being or human conduct. What gives the writer confidence in his/her judgments? The writer views the subject from above, from outside, from the benefit of hindsight, or scholarship or the prevailing consensus. It is assumed that modern wisdom and methods are superior to ancient ones.

The James Web Space Telescope has just discovered that there are galaxies older than the big bang. Those books based on the big bang theory are useless now. The modern is an unstable foundation upon which to build.

At the store this morning, I saw a young father and his four children Christmas shopping. The children appeared to be from ten to one in age. They looked liked they were enjoying themselves. My heart went out to them.

This scene is so different from anything portrayed in modern media about what the good life is. I contend that this young father is more successful than any striving executive. I hope his wife is happy with the presents they bought her.

Today I read a description of Postmodernism: It is the belief that everything about human culture is a fiction created by humans. And it is true that much of culture is a game, created by human beings. Not only sports but business, politics, national identity, and even much that goes under the heading of religion.

My investigation of the facts of existence has convinced me that human life and the world we are allowed to live in were created by God for the experience and benefit of human beings and that God will reveal its significance and purpose to those who seek him with sincerity and faith.

The prophet Nephi truthfully described the world view that would prevail in the modern world more than two thousand years ago:

4 And they shall contend one with another; and their priests shall contend one with another, and they shall teach with their learning, and deny the Holy Ghost, which giveth utterance.

5 And they deny the power of God, the Holy One of Israel; and they say unto the people: Hearken unto us, and hear ye our precept; for behold there is no God today, for the Lord and the Redeemer hath done his work, and he hath given his power unto men;

6 Behold, hearken ye unto my precept; if they shall say there is a miracle wrought by the hand of the Lord, believe it not; for this day he is not a God of miracles; he hath done his work.

2 Nephi 28

On this Thanksgiving Day my wife and I are thankful to be alive.

take a look at this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgpfhIEXctQ

Here is an extended excerpt from the book, Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman:

What I can confirm, though, is that if you can adopt the outlook we’re exploring here even just a little–if you can hold your attention, however briefly or occasionally, on the sheer astonishingness of being and on what small amount of being you get–you may experience a palpable shift in how it feels to be here, right now, alive in the flow of time…From an everyday standpoint, the fact that life is finite feels like a terrible insult, “a sort of personal affront, a taking away of one’s time.” in the words of one scholar. There you were, planning to live on forever–as the old Woody Allen line has it, not in the hearts of your countrymen, but in your apartment–but now here comes mortality to steal away the life that was rightfully yours.

Yet on reflection, there’s something very entitled about this attitude. Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality an outrageous violation? …Surely only somebody who’d failed to notice how remarkable it is that anything is, in the first place, would take their own being as a given–as if it were something they had every right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time, maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.

The Lord’s Prayer is one of the most widely used scriptures in the Bible, and yet it continues to reveal truth. It occurred to me in the middle of the night, last night, that the prayer is in the plural. “deliver us from evil,” not deliver me from evil. Is salvation a family affair?

In his first address as the leader of the Church, President Dallin H. Oaks said the following: “We can truly say that the gospel plan was first taught to us in the council of an eternal family, it is implemented through our mortal families, and its intended destiny is to exalt the children of God in eternal families.”

The Bible says their is no giving in marriage in heaven. That is because marriage is a ordinance which must be performed on earth. Their is no baptism in heaven, but baptism is required to get to heaven. If it is not performed on earth, it must be performed by proxy in an earthly temple. it symbolizes death, burial and resurrection. Actions that require mortality. Where possible, the temples are constructed so that the surface of the water in the font is on a plane with the surface of the earth into which persons are buried and from which they are resurrected.

Similar issues apply with establishing and sealing families. See the phrase from President Oaks’ talk where he says exaltation in eternal families “is implemented through our mortal families.”

Yesterday I was discouraged, partly from the general effects of getting older, but partly from scrolling through the internet and seeing how “sinners ways prosper.” Then last night, my wife and I read the 121st Section of the Doctrine and Covenants, which among other amazing revelations, lists how the Lord will handle the unrepentant sinners. One element of faith is to realize that punishing sinners is not my job. I realized once again something I learned though my years practicing law; that educating jerks (teaching them that they are jerks) is a waste of time and resources.

In the middle of the night I asked AI whether the people of Missouri suffered in the civil war and got in response a very long narration of this answer: “Yes, the people of Missouri suffered intensely and in a variety of ways during the Civil War.”

Pete Hegseth said this about the motive for renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War: “We are going to go on offense, not just on defense; maximum lethality, not tepid legality; violent effect, not politically correct; we’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders.” (August 6, 2025)

I served in the Vietnam War as an infantry lieutenant, advising the Vietnamese Regional Force, Popular Force units in 1970-71. One day, my sergeant and I were called to a village in our district. As we approached the village in our Jeep, we saw a Huey helicopter idling on the road next to the village. Just as we arrived, we saw a captain, with his wide-brimmed hat (which you would recognize if you ever saw the movie Apocalypse Now), running out of the village with both hands outstretched carrying a limp, bloodied and battered baby, tears streaming down his face. He jumped into the Huey and they took off.

An operation had been under way to attack a suspected Viet Cong site along a stream running next to the village. A helicopter gunship had been called to shoot grenades into the suspected location. As the gunship passed over the village, a grenade round fell short, landing in one of the huts and exploding. I never learned whether the captain succeeded in getting the child to the hospital in time to save its life, but I am proud to say I served with him and other soldiers I knew who served with care and humanity.

War policy should not be set by those whose concept of war comes only from their experience in the media. American policy should not be set by people with no humanity.

During my lifetime the inadequacy of scientific explanations for the state of the world has become apparent. Starting with evolutionists having to admit that the fossil record shows “punctuated equilibrium” rather than evolution. Next came the admission that 95 percent of everything that is consists of dark energy and dark matter, about which science knows nothing. Finally the Web Space Telescope put an end to the whole big bang explanation.

But scientists tell us not to give up on science. “This is the way science works,” they say. “Be patient,” they say, “and you will see there will be a scientific explanation for it all.” The Grand Unified Theory of Everything.

But I suspect that if we are fortunate enough to be able to be even more patient than that, we will find that all those scientific explanations will also be found to be inadequate. So this is how science works! Try to build a life on that foundation.