This is a guest post by Lattertarian

The metaphors of Lehi’s dream are explicitly explained thanks to Nephi’s desire for clarification and willingness to write down what he learned. The plain and precious truths of that vision are of course only seriously taught within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but have clear lessons for all Christians (and every truth-seeker to some extent). All of us search for a path to happiness. Taking hold of the rod of iron that is the word of God puts us on a straight path to that happiness. But we are under constant pressure to step away and grope toward other voices, and wandering around in the dark is a dangerous proposition.  

It’s also possible, and eminently reasonable, to read Lehi’s dream in an extremely broad quasi-secular way. We all have someplace we want to go, some destination we perceive as desirable. We also know there’s a way to get there, and that “path” has its own guidance “rod” of principles and actions we innately understand we need to adhere to in order to get us to our destination. But a variety of things can distract us from that, and it’s worth considering some of those things.

So what are we doing here? Largely unasked in Lehi’s dream are questions of why someone would let go of the rod once they held it. The mockery from the people in the great and spacious building is one thing, but there are some daily ground-level specifics we all encounter that are worth considering. To my mind, there are four obstacles we can run into as we walk the path and hold to the rod. In keeping with the structure of Lehi’s dream, they’re best explored through metaphor. 

Rough Spots on the Rod

The Iron Rod is not smooth, metaphorically speaking. Or at least not entirely smooth. It has rough spots, with dings and edges on it in various places. Much of the time we can just run our hand along it as we walk. But when we hit those sharp spots we need to resist the urge to let go of the rod to lick a wound. Rather, we need to put the other hand on the rod, past the rough spot, and purposefully and carefully hand-over-hand our way past that spot until we can find another smooth length. What does this represent? Sometimes living the truths of the gospel can seem hard. Sometimes we hit a rough spot–a teaching with which we struggle, an interpersonal conflict within the congregation or our families, a sense that God has “allowed” some bad thing to happen to us, or some other thing we perceive as a problem going forward. We can sometimes feel like we need to “take a break” from the rod for a moment to “reorient” ourselves. But that’s a trap. Letting go of the rod always is. Don’t let go. You can slow down, and giving yourself permission to do that can be a valuable factor in your spiritual health, but letting go is extraordinarily dangerous. 

This does mean, however, that progress along the rod does not happen at a constant pace. Each of us speeds up and slows down at seemingly random (to an observer, anyway) points along the path. Sadly and dangerously, many of the rough spots on the rod, the places on the path where many slow down, become places where we encounter two important kinds of people. The influence of either of these groups can halt your progress and maybe even detach you from the rod. This is made easier for them (and harder for you to resist) if you have let go of the rod to nurse a scrape. 

Vigilante Speed Enforcers

For this, we swerve into a highway metaphor. Highways involve lots of individual drivers making decisions, particularly regarding speed. Have you ever come up behind someone on the highway who insisted on driving slower than the flow of traffic? Sometimes precisely the speed limit, sometimes just under, or sometimes (and most frustrating) close to the speed of traffic but just slow enough to create an inconvenience for everybody else? Or to look at it the other way, have you ever had somebody come up fast behind you and rather than go around they chose to tailgate, honk and gesture, or be otherwise pointlessly aggressive? We can encounter similar people as we walk the path while holding to the rod. These are the people who insist there is one way to walk the path and one way to hold to the rod, and if you’re doing it differently from them you’re doing it wrong. A subset of these people are the stubbornly dogmatic, demanding that everyone yield to their hard-charging and “correct” (and often myopic and unnecessarily hardline) doctrine/policy position, and they’re quite prepared to bully people about it.   

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I grew up in a hippie community in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of my favorite artists were protest singers like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. I read Noam Chomsky when I was a teenager and loved his attacks on the Vietnam War and support for civil liberties.

Who would have ever thought that the primary proponents of censorship and government tyranny in 2022 would be Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Noam Chomsky?

It is important to understand that the protest movements of the 1960s and early 1970s were not just about free sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and Vietnam.

At its heart the protest movement of that era was about personal liberty. The foundational event was the early 1960s free speech movement, which began at UC Berkeley. Yes, this movement was influenced by various leftist groups, but it gained public support because most people recognized that UC Berkeley was preventing free political expression. And most Americans support free political expression.

The burgeoning free speech movement then grew into peaceful demonstrations in favor of civil rights for African-Americans and opposition to the Vietnam War. Notice that most of the causes here are on the side of personal liberty: liberty for oppressed African-Americans during the civil rights era, and liberty for the people of Vietnam to make their own choices (good or bad) about their own government, and liberty for young Americans not to be forced to into the military draft.

Neil Young is famous for, among other things, protest songs on the side of these movements. So is Joni Mitchell. Noam Chomsky was one of the primary intellectuals of that time in favor of civil rights and against the war. Back before COVID Chomsky famously wrote things like this:

“Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.“

What does Chomsky think of the unvaccinated in 2022? They should “remove themselves from the community” and getting food should be “their problem.”

Notably, Chomsky has never spoken out against the widespread censorship taking place in social media today, censorship that is abetted by the government and the most powerful groups in society. Meanwhile, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell have called for their music to be removed from Spotify because they say Joe Rogan should not have the freedom to interview other people who dare to say things with which Neil Young and Joni Mitchell disagree.

I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and Noam Chomsky of 1970 would be absolutely ashamed of what they have become in their old age. Neil Young for example once recorded an entire album called “Freedom” and wrote a litany of anti-war songs attacking the establishment from the 1960s all the way up to the W. Bush era. Back then, he was suspicious of everything coming out of Washington DC — now he seems to embrace and parrot everything the establishment has to say. He has never spoken out against the cruel forced masking of children, the school closures, the forced lockdowns and mandates and the government’s attempts to force everybody to inject an unknown cocktail of medicine.

Before COVID, Joni Mitchell would say things like:

“Freedom to me is the luxury of being able to follow the path of the heart. I think that’s the only way that you maintain the magic in your life, that you keep your child alive. Freedom is necessary for me in order to create and if I cannot create I don’t feel alive.”

Meanwhile, she, like Young, has never spoken out during the pandemic for the freedom of other people to keep their businesses open, or the freedom of children to go to school, or the freedom of people to choose, if they wish, not to be vaccinated. She now wants to limit Joe Rogan’s freedom to speak out as he would wish, to follow his own heart, to maintain the magic in his life. Ironic, isn’t it?

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Every once in a while, the news is quite good, and in this case I want to praise the Utah state legislature for finally standing up to the mask tyrants in Utah.

Yes, you can still wear a mask if you want to, but no government should force you. (And, you male and female Karens, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not in favor of government force — it is in favor of people voluntarily putting on masks out of kindness, which is very different, and if you can’t see the difference, you are part of the problem).

And by the way, as I have been writing since April 2020, the masks that most people wear are indeed completely useless against a virus. The CDC even admitted it. But it is true that wearing a mask provides comfort for many people who feel they need to do something to protect themselves during a pandemic. I personally and voluntarily wear a mask when visiting a family to whom I minister because the father is immunocompromised. But the point is that no government should force me to do this.

So, thank you Utah legislature for standing up for actual science and personal freedom. Now we only need about 2000 other legislatures around the world to do the same thing. (Did you see that the UK government has also ended mask mandates? Sometimes there really is good news in the world).

One of the most alarming trends of the pandemic has been executives and unelected bureaucrats taking upon themselves “emergency” powers to control the lives of the people. The fact that so few elected representatives stood up to these despots was an unfortunate signal to budding future dictators that all you have to do to become all-powerful is declare a fake emergency. And a very large percentage of the sheeple will fall in line and not question the official narrative. What we needed from the beginning were more legislatures standing up to the tyrants.

So, here is the good news story on the Utah legislature:

SALT LAKE CITY — The Utah House of Representatives voted Friday to overturn mask mandates in Salt Lake and Summit counties.

The joint resolution to terminate the mask orders, including the student mask mandate in Salt Lake City, passed by a 45-29 vote.

SJR3 passed the Senate with a 22-5 vote on Tuesday, the first day of the Utah Legislature’s 2022 general session.

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If you want to see yet another example of crazy COVID hysteria in action, you only have to look as far as Utah’s largest newspaper, the increasingly out of control Salt Lake Tribune. There, we find an editorial with this paragraph:

Were Utah a truly civilized place, the governor’s next move would be to find a way to mandate the kind of mass vaccination campaign we should have launched a year ago, going as far as to deploy the National Guard to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.

Civilized? Only if you consider Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Cambodia under Pol Pot civilized.

To be clear: the newspaper is saying that unvaccinated people should literally starve to death. If they can’t go “anywhere,” they can’t go to the grocery store or the corner 7-11 or a restaurant. You can’t go to your doctor’s office for a checkup or to work. In the Tribune’s view, you should be confined at home until you submit yourself to the health decisions that the newspaper believes are worthwhile.

Never mind that even the WHO says people under 18 should not be vaccinated. Never mind that recent studies have clearly shown the vaccines should not be taken by pregnant women. Never mind that literally a year ago almost every public figure was saying that COVID vaccines would never be mandatory.

How, exactly, would such a measure be enforced? We have seen the institution of vaccine passports in some limited locales like New York City and central Los Angeles. But the Tribune is calling for the National Guard to enforce this. In effect, they are calling for road blocks where you must show your “vaccine passport” at every corner. All this for a virus with a 99.8 percent survival rate, a virus that is becoming endemic and is now less deadly than the flu or the common cold. Are they really that unhinged?

But there is some good news, if you want to see it that way. For 22 months now many of us have been warning that the COVID hysteria could only go in one direction: toward complete and total government control over every aspect of citizens’ lives, using public health as an excuse. We were called every name in the book, with “conspiracy theorist” being one of the nicest. Can you rubes now see why we were worried?

Many readers may have already had the revelation I am going to describe in this post, and for some of you this may be an obvious point, but this experience was new to me. We were discussing the scriptures as part of “Come Follow Me” this week and I finally began to understand the story of Adam and Eve.

This revelation came after more than 200 endowment sessions and dozens of times reading Genesis and the Book of Moses. My wife, in comments during “Come Follow Me” and in talks she has since sent me, was the one who created the spark that helped me comprehend a bit more.

Here is the issue. As most readers know, Adam and Eve are in the Garden of Eden and are given two commandments: 1)be fruitful and multiply and 2)don’t eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Note that the tree is in the “midst” (or exact center) of the Garden of Eden, so the tree is central to the story. Satan “beguiles” Eve, and she figures out that Adam and Eve cannot do 1) without doing 2). So, she eats of the tree, explains it to Adam and Adam agrees and they both eat of the tree. Eve is the heroine of the story because she figures it out and tells Adam: “Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient.” (Moses 5:11).

Bottom line: without eating of the tree, Adam and Eve would still be in the Garden of Eden and would never have been able to keep the first commandment, which was to be fruitful and multiply.

I had always seen this story as showing that the Lord gave Adam and Eve a puzzle of sorts. What I did not understand until literally this week is *why* the Lord did things this way. I was always confused by the question: why?

It always seemed to me a very strange way of doing things. Wasn’t the Lord tricking Adam and Eve? Why give them one commandment that they cannot fulfill without breaking the second commandment? Why not give them the second commandment first and then once they broke that commandment introduce the first commandment? Why did the Lord not say: “Adam and Eve, now that you have transgressed my law, I give you another law, which is to be fruitful and multiply.”

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