Comparative love

So i heard a speaker in church recently say that if we commit sin, that means that we love that sin more than we love Jesus Christ.

Is that claim actually true? I have some serious doubts about it, but i’m not absolutely certain one way or the other. Others’ thoughts?

Looking at the calendar

Can we stop it already with the repeated claim (over the pulpit sometimes, even!) that we’re special because Doctrine & Covenants 20:1 tells us that Jesus was born on 6 April, 1 bc?

I mean, especially since it appears to be simply not true, what with the reference to the year most likely being just a hyper-flowery way of saying ad 1830? (Not to mention the issues of mapping a solar calendar to a lunar one, and the fact that each solar year isn’t always the same length anyway, and…) Also, it seems especially impolite to make such unsupported-by-scriptural-text statements right around Xmas itself.

Yeah, i know, we won’t (stop, that is). A boy can dream, though, can’t he?

Why we’re better than the rest

I just ran across this absolutely marvelous 1973 quote from Hugh Nibley:

The worst sinners, according to Jesus, are not the harlots and publicans, but the religious leaders with their insistence on proper dress and grooming, their careful observance of all the rules, their precious concern for status symbols, their strict legality, their pious patriotism…The haircut becomes the test of virtue in a world where Satan deceives and rules by appearances.

This, of course, is why nobody in any leadership position of our church cares whether boys and men wear white shirts or ties, or whether they wear beards, or whether they have long or short hair, or for that matter whether women wear skirts or dresses, or whether they have multiple earrings. Nope, nobody in our church is concerned with those sorts of things at all.

p.s. I’m considering moving this blog from Blogger to the WordPress platform, possibly hosted on my own server. I know there’s three or four people who read this blog semi-regularly, some of whom are bloggers themselves. Any input on that idea?

On the meaning of an adjectival affix

Serious question: Is becoming Christlike the same thing as becoming like Christ?

In honor of the date

So can we finally lose the idea that Jesus was born on 6 April? I mean, he certainly might have been, but the way that one verse in the book of Doctrine and Covenants has been spun into some sort of absolute “doctrine” by many members of the church disturbs me.

Things to remember:

1. Back when Jesus was born, there was no such thing as “April”. In fact, the calendar he was born under didn’t even always have twelve months, and any given day of any given month didn’t always occur at the same point during the earth’s orbit around the sun—it was a lunar calendar.
2. For that matter, 6 April doesn’t even always occur at the same point in the earth’s orbit every year—there’s slippage of a few seconds here and there.
3. And if the birth actually happened at night, when it occurred would make a difference, since the next day began at sundown back then, not at midnight.
4. And finally, the biggest reason this insistence on 6 April bugs me, you find collocations exactly parallel to “being one thousand eight hundred and thirty years since the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the flesh” in all sorts of writing back then, both secular and religious. It’s just a fancy way of saying, in English, anno Domini 1830 (that is, in the 1,830th year of our Lord).

After all, you’d think that a people who quite happily recognize that the seven “days” in Genesis don’t each literally refer to a 24-hour day would be able to recognize that not all scriptural references to time are literal.

Sometimes you get heretical notions here

So let’s start with the foundational axiom that Jesus Christ led a sinless life.

Fine. But what does sinless mean?

The general idea among us Mormons, shared by most Xian theology, i think, is that it means that Jesus Christ never committed a sin—he was tempted, but never submitted to temptation.

However, there are other possible readings.

First of all, for Mormons, it could be that he committed acts that would be considered sinful, but that he did so before the age of accountability.*

Another possibility is that he committed acts that would be considered sinful, but he never sinned against any particular law that he knew of—after all, there’s that textually ambiguous status of sins committed by someone who doesn’t know what the rules are. (That’s at least part of why Mormons don’t consider the Fall to be the result of sins on the part of Adam and Eve—no knowledge means no sin.)

He may have sinned but consistently repented perfectly (better than the rest of us do, i’m thinking), meaning that those sins would not have been attributed to him.

And finally, he may actually have never sinned. At all.

I’m not sure which of these i hold with. I’m throwing this out there ’cause i’m curious what others think.

* For any non-Mormons reading, one doesn’t become accountable for one’s sins until arriving at the age of eight. (There’s more to it, but that’s enough detail for the moment.)

Children and (pictures of) Jesus

I’ve started hearing, as proof of children’s spirituality, the fact that they’re so easily able to identify pictures of Jesus. Um, dude? First of all, we don’t know what Jesus looked like, and so there are a lot of different-looking representations of him around—find one that doesn’t match with what you’ve taught your children to identify, and you might be surprised at how unable children are to identify pictures of Jesus.* Also, take a child growing up in one of the completely non-Xian parts of the world, and i bet that child won’t be able to pass your spirituality test. You’re saying that those kids aren’t as spiritual as the ones who live near you?** How, um, lucky of your kids to live where they do.

* Yes, i realize the sort of person who makes such claims will cite that as proof that those aren’t what Jesus really looks like. I’m not even going to try to argue with that sort of twisted illogic, though.
** I do realize that there are some people who hold such positions. The technical term for such people, of course, is “idiots”.

On this Easter morn^H^H^H^Hafternoon

No snark today, just a nod to the reason we worship.

(And for those who aren’t nerds enough to get the subject line, ^H refers to an old widely-used keystroke for a backspace-delete.)

Non-doctrinal singing

“In Humility, Our Saviour” is an absolutely heartrendingly beautiful musical setting, but the last couple lines are pretty astonishingly counter-doctrinal. I mean, “…when we have proven worthy of Thy sacrifice divine”?!? Isn’t part of the point that we can’t do that?

In honor of Xmas

Family from overseas coming in semi-unexpectedly and spending a vacation in your house takes up time, you know? I guess it’s something you need to be better prepared for when you live this close to Disney World, but really, it’s time-consuming—and, of course, a few corners end up being cut. For me, one of the cuttable corners is this blog.

But, as penance for being out of contact for so long, a twofer mostly-serious Xmas special!

First: I make it a point to write Christmas as Xmas in most cases. I have two reasons for this. The first is that it annoys a certain sort of people i feel need to be annoyed. (Similar to the reason i don’t capitalize the word i, actually.) The second is that the sort of people who get annoyed by Xmas don’t get that the X stands for both Christ himself (the Greek letter Χ—a.k.a. chi—is the first letter of the Greek word from which we get the English word Christ, and it looks a lot like a Roman-alphabet X) as well as the cross that was a crucial part of his atonement for us.

Second: Some people think it’s way important what color Jesus’s skin was. (Some people have even formed whole churches based on what they think his skin color was!) The truth is, though, that we don’t know the vaguest bit about what he looked like, except maybe that he was probably bipedal—they didn’t have cameras back then, and we don’t have any surviving paintings of him from that time. However, most people from that part of the world have what’s generally called “olive” skin—kind of an in-between skin color. My uncle (a non-practicing Roman Catholic) once offered what I think is a deep insight about this—he said he thinks Jesus had in-between olive skin because that way if it’s important to you that Jesus had light-colored skin, well, that’s kind of light, and if you believe it’s important that Jesus had dark-colored skin, well, it’s kind of dark, too. The most important thing, really, though, is that Jesus lived. The skin color is just accidental.