Replacing the RS and YW semi-annual meetings will be a new General Women’s meeting for those 8 years of age and up.  It will be conducted by the General Presidencies of the Relief Society, Young Women, and Primary organizations.

http://www.lds.org/church/news/first-presidency-announces-new-general-womens-meeting?lang=eng

I’m very happy to see this change.  We have many spiritual and talented women in our Church, and we have not used them as best we can.  With allowing more young women to serve missions at 19, and encouragement to use the Ward Councils and the sisters for guidance and church work, we are beginning to hasten the work.  Now, mothers will be able to take their daughters to their Conference session, just as we have with Priesthood.

If you like podcasts, I highly recommend the FAIR podcast. FAIR was voted the best religious podcast in 2011, but last year the Ardent Atheist won. If this is not a sign of our times, I don’t know what is.

In any case, let’s see if we can help FAIR win again this year.

For more information, please visit this link.

In the old days, right-wingers would often decry “socialized medicine,” which was a code word for state control of the health care industry. When you think of “socialized medicine,” you can consider the case of the UK, where doctors and nurses are literally employees of the government, but it may be more accurate to consider the cases of Cuba and the former Soviet Union, where everything is controlled by the state.

Obamacare is not socialized medicine. It is fascist medicine.

You are excused if you do not know what fascism truly is. Most people don’t. They are fooled by the false left-right paradigm. Fascists are not and never were “right-wing.” Fascism as an economic system was seen as the “third way” between free-market capitalism and socialism:

As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. The word derives from fasces, the Roman symbol of collectivism and power: a tied bundle of rods with a protruding ax. In its day (the 1920s and 1930s), fascism was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition, and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism, with its violent and socially divisive persecution of the bourgeoisie. Fascism substituted the particularity of nationalism and racialism—“blood and soil”—for the internationalism of both classical liberalism and Marxism.

So, if you want to use the left-right paradigm, leftists believe in Communism or Socialism and “right-wingers” believe in free-market capitalism. Fascism is right in the middle. So, you could call fascism a “moderate” economic policy, just as Obamacare retains a veneer of capitalism with government control.

Continue reading →

Just this week, my friend Jana Riess wrote an article regarding an attack made on Elder Oaks because of his statements on same-sex marriage.  Jana notes that many liberals were disappointed in his strong stance against it in General Conference, but that the vicious letter from a returned missionary was not called for.  Elder Oaks response was also published, wherein he asks the man to see his local leader for guidance on repenting (ostensibly for his belligerence towards an apostle).

Wading through the hundreds of comments, I noted that many defended this angry man, expecting Elder Oaks to apologize, “turn the other cheek”, etc. 

Lost in the shouting there is one key concept taught by Jesus.  Continue reading →

I might as well add my voice to the chorus of self-congratulatory and/or other-condemning posts out there on the topic (I won’t link to them, though.  Well, I’ll link to this one, which is the only good one I’ve seen so far).

Orson Scott Card in his wonderful “Saintspeak” (which predates snarker sites by decades, and did it better than any of them – if any of them are still active) pretty much already came up with the definitive definitions: Continue reading →