I live in a small town in Colorado with one relatively small chapel. Until this Sunday, the chapel housed two wards, one family ward and one young single adult ward. In the last 15 years, Sacrament meetings in the family ward have grown from about 100 people to about 300 people as new subdivisions have grown like mushrooms in the fields around town.

Our primary has more than 100 kids, and we have more than 30 young men. We knew it was only a matter of time until the ward would change because there are hundreds of other new homes being built in our ward boundaries.

So two Sundays ago a counselor to the bishop announced that the stake would make changes in ward boundaries. The counselor made a joke, “let the speculation begin,” and that is what happened. Every time one ward member talked to another, the question was asked, “what will happen to our ward? Will we ever see our friends again?” Many people literally wept at the idea that their friends would be shipped off to other buildings and they would lose the attachments built up over so many years.

Many readers who live in Utah and Idaho may go through boundary changes all the time, but for those of us who had lived with roughly the same ward boundaries for several decades, the alterations seemed potentially traumatizing.

So on Sunday afternoon the stake presidency presented the new boundaries, and basically our ward is being split in two with some additional people added from two other neighboring wards. Both of the wards will meet in our small chapel, along with the single adults ward. I am not sure how three bishoprics and ward clerks will share three small offices, but I guess they will make it work.

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For over a century leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have taught the Book of Mormon was translated by the Prophet Joseph Smith using the gift and power of God through the Urim and Thummim found with the gold plates. This is the same as taught, without deviation, by Joseph Smith throughout his life. His second scribe Oliver Cowdery who wrote for the Prophet, helping to produce almost all of the current text, taught this throughout his life as well. After the conclusion of the gold plates translation, three men (Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and the first scribe Martin Harris) were privileged to witness and testify of the gold plates, Urim and Thummim, and other holy objects. There names are attached to the Book of Mormon publication.

Recently this narrative has seen a challenge by none other than Mormon academics who think they know better. Instead of a divinely delivered Urim and Thummim found with the gold plates for their translation, it is now at least part of the time translated by a common rock found in a well put into a hat. Despite sophisticated words attached to research of primary sources, the new narrative is wrong. Taking Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery seriously, with a closer look at the primary sources, supports the traditional translation teachings. The ancient Interpreters placed with the gold plates was the only instrument that Joseph Smith used to translate the Book of Mormon.

Placing the stone in a hat as a major translation tool wasn’t seriously considered by members of the LDS Church until the turn of the 20^th Century. No less than B.H.Roberts included a discussion of the seer stone in his landmark A Comprehensive History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (pg. 137-133) with very little said about the Urim and Thummim. There was no more discussion of the seer stone until the “New Mormon History” movement began by Leonard Arrington sought to take seriously all sources, at the expense of the “traditional” history. Joseph Smith went from a Prophet called of God to translate the Book of Mormon and restore the ancient Church, to the local magician who just happened to become a Prophet. They basically accepted the position of anti-Mormon critics, with the seer stone in a hat the connecting issue. This isn’t even a “liberal” against an “orthodox” Mormon debate. In the book From Darkness Unto Light by MacKay and Dirkmaat, and sold by LDS distributor Deseret Book, the seer stone in a hat is said to be a major part of the translation. The newest approved history Saints has the seer stone in a hat and the Urim and Thummim almost on equal ground. An article in the October 2015 Ensign has an extensive discussion of both the Urim and Thummim and the seer stone, although not the first time in the magazine. It seems the stone in a hat is now found everywhere, when it used to be a speculated side note.

Including the stone in a hat as part of the translation is more than academically questionable, but comes with spiritual problems. Consider that Richard Bushman in his Joseph Smith biography Rough Stone Rolling denies that Joseph Smith told the truth about his using the seer stone, trying to hide his occultic past. He isn’t the only one who questions Joseph Smith’s words, as pseudo-official apologists FARMS, FAIR, and the Interpreter contributors also keep the Prophet out of the process. They hold strongly to and defend the stone in a hat translation method; even insisting that was the primary tool. Some may wonder why it is important to establish that Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery used the Urim and Thummin for the translation exactly as they always explained, and not a seer stone in a hat. Consider the scholar Royal Skousen in his preview book Volume III: The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon, pg. 22, where he writes Joseph Smith’s translation claims are “only partially true” and Oliver Cowdery “appear[s] to be intentionally misleading” even though they are the ones directly involved with the translation. Yet, that seems to be the only way a person can accept the stone in a hat narrative. Academics who hold to the stone in a hat seem to believe Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery were untruthful, the Urim and Thummim were not very important, the gold plates had no practical use, and some mysterious entity actually wrote the English words. Descriptions of the gift and power of God to translate has changed into accusations against the Prophet Joseph Smith and his scribe. If one is to “test the spirits” (1 John 4:1) then the stone in a hat comes up short, along with its history.

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The CDC Director Rochelle Wallensky famously said recently that the COVID 19 spread is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” This claim has been repeated by a number of health professionals, the media and politicians.

Is this true? Well, it is actually quite easy to find out. All you have to do is compare the vaccination rate in various countries to each other and then the countries with the lowest vaccination rates per capita should have the highest number of deaths per capita. It is most helpful to compare like countries to like countries, and we will get to that in this post.

Well, let’s dig into the numbers from this helpful web site.

I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but let me put up a graph that has been circulated a lot lately to show you that the claims that this is a pandemic of the vaccinated are complete nonsense.

Here are the vaccination rates in four countries:

And now we can look at recent deaths.

So, how is it possible that India, with a very low vaccination rate, has fewer deaths per capita than Israel, with a very high vaccination rate?

You see what I am saying about nonsense?

But to be fair, comparing countries as dissimilar as India and Israel is problematic, so let’s look at the numbers for countries that are more like each other.

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MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN

Geoff B suggested this needed to be posted here at Millennial Star. I’m happy to oblige. These are my thoughts, your mileage may vary, of course.

For many years, I’ve followed a rather eclectic group of men and women who spend a lot of time thinking deeply about various issues, and then writing their thoughts about those topics. I don’t always agree with everything they say, but I deeply appreciate knowing what they have to tell us, and I recognize that many of them really do know what they are talking about because they have spent years or decades thinking about the issues and studying them in great detail. I have been enriched by their thoughts and writings, and over the last decade, my viewpoints on a lot of things have changed drastically, primarily due to their influence in opening my eyes to some festering issues that have laid just under the rock of our social structures.

One writer that I have followed consistently is Rod Dreher. Mr. Dreher is formerly a journalist, currently an author, blogger and pundit. He has written several books, the most prominent of which are Live Not By Lies and The Benedict Option. Both are must-reads if you care at all about living a religiously informed life in the West or in the United States. He has a world wide following, particularly in Europe and the United States. But he has readers in Africa, Asia, all over the place. He is religious, and his faith informs his study and his viewpoint. However, he doesn’t push his religion on his readers, but he is very transparent about his beliefs. For many years he was a faithful Catholic; he broke from the Catholic Church nearly twenty years because of the international pedophile priest scandal. He fled to the Orthodox faith, and that is his spiritual home.

I don’t agree with every jot and tittle of what Mr. Dreher writes about. We don’t view politics, for example, through the same lens. He was, and is, extremely hard on Donald Trump whereas I am far less critical. But whatever. His value to me is his profoundly deep insights into religion, into our cultural insanity in our contemporary society and politics, and his quite trenchant commentary on a host of issues that we grapple with in the now third decade of the 21st Century.

Without stepping the reader into all the details, Dreher has been keeping his finger on the pulse of our rotting corpse culture for many years now. He was clear-eyed from the very beginning about what Obergefell was going to do to religious freedom in the United States. He saw the growing intolerance in our social and secular institutions towards Christians before most anyone knew that it was becoming a problem. He saw the handwriting on the wall long before many other people saw these issues. His is a voice that needs greater dissemination.

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Many readers have heard of eugenics, a set of beliefs that involves improving human beings through scientific experimentation and the exclusion of certain “undesirable” groups. Eugenics were used by the Nazi regime in the 1930s and 1940s to justify forced sterilization, medical experimentation and ultimately the extermination of millions of human beings in an attempt to improve the German race.

What many people don’t know is that 100 years ago Progressives were almost all eugenicists. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson — Progressive heroes — both promoted eugenics. The scientific “consensus” of the early 20th century was that eugenics were needed to create better human beings and a better society.

Princeton University scholar Thomas C. Leonard documents this in his 2016 book Illiberal Reformers; Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era. “In 1928, 376 college courses were dedicated to the subject of eugenics,” he wrote.

The result in the United States? More than 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized. Eugenics were used to justify segregation and Jim Crow laws because the thought process was that African-Americans were genetically inferior. But eugenics was not just aimed at African-Americans, of course. The “inferior” people included “degenerate Anglo-Saxon hill clans, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and Asia, backward peoples in the territories of the new American empire, African Americans, the feebleminded, [and] the epileptic” among many others, Leonard writes. More than 30 US states passed laws in favor of forced sterilization.

It is important to understand that the eugenics movement was considered “settled science.” Darwin and subsequent biologists had conclusively proven that natural selection would help create the best human beings, and the role of the government was to promote policies to help natural selection along. The science of the day proved that it would be harmful to the general society for inferior people to be part of the gene pool. For the good of all, the less desirable must be forced out, and it was government’s role to protect the common good.

And here we arrive at a crucial lesson we should have learned from the horrors of the eugenics movement: individual rights are always more important than societal rights. The U.S. Constitution concentrates on individual rights and limits governmental authority to infringe on these rights. And it is also true that traditional Judeo-Christian values have promoted the idea that individuals, as sons and daughters of God, have natural rights that supersede societal rights.

Eugenics was evil in every way. It was racist, it was classist, it was illiberal, it was murderous and it was used to justify societal tyranny instead of individual rights.

And that is exactly what COVID-19 hysterics are promoting today.

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