The Mueller Report Distilled

I thought this might be of interest to many in blog land. I spent many hours going through the entire Mueller report and then took the parts of volume 2 (since volume 1 is less important given the “no collusion” judgment) and condensed it down to a 30 minute read.

It’s not a summary, it’s the actual text from the original report, just cut down to a more digestible size. But it still captures the overall narrative of the original report. If you’re someone that doesn’t have time to read the whole report, reading this will give you all the important stuff (in my opinion) for a much smaller cost of your time.

I think — no matter your view point on this — we should all go to the source rather than rely on media summaries, which these days are so incredibly biased that they actually make you less knowledgeable at times.

The Mueller Report Distilled

Note: this link is the non-paywall version.

P.S. if you find typos, post them here please and I’ll fix them. Trying to transcribe so much was hard and I have no skill with it. I wish I could have just cut and pasted the text, but there was no available text version I could find.

A Question About What the LDS Church Officially Teaches About Priesthood

I had a long conversation with a Mormon friend on the internet in which he said something that got me curious how members of the LDS church would answer or react to certain question or questions. I am going to ask the questions using language as clear as I can, which requires the language to be a bit more blunt than you might normally want. But I do not feel it’s an unfair or unclear question as worded:

Does the LDS Church’s magisterium (i.e. what LDS members call “The Brethren”) teach that the collection of all religious or priesthood authorities (or equivalent) of all religions in the world can be split into two broad categories?:

  1. A single priesthood authority that is Divine, namely that of the LDS Church.
  2. All other religious authorities of all other religions, which are man-made.

Continue reading

Origins of the Earth and Genesis

HubbleThis guest post is written by a friend of mine, Ken Cluff, who expressed some interest in writing for M* to share some of his thoughts on science and religion. Ken recently made another guest post here about his Mormon website app: LDS Advocate.

Lately, I’ve been going to the temple weekly to get the ordinance work done for a large number of names my mother has gathered in her ongoing genealogical research. This frequency of attending has given me many opportunities to ponder the creation story. At the same time, I’m a science geek and writer of hard sci-fi. The evidence scientists have observed about the origins of the universe is something I’m particularly interested in, especially as it relates to the Earth’s origins.

It’s axiomatic to say the aims of science and religion are the same, the pursuit of truth. Though science tends to be driven by doubt and religion by faith, they both move forward by asking questions. My expectation is that as we come to know the truth of things, we’ll see they both say the same thing… just from different paradigms. From where I sit, science answers and fills in the “what” while religion answers the “why.” Continue reading

LDS Advocate Brings the Internet to Our Side

value-divine-natureOkay, the title is intentionally over the top. But I do have a friend that made this cool little iOS app that brings together a lot of LDS internet resources. So I thought I’d give him a little ‘free advertising’ by letting our readers know about it. Here is what he has to say about the app:

If you’re interested in having immediate access to online information on LDS topics, you’ll want to get a new iTunes app named “LDS Advocate.” It recently launched in the iTunes App store. It gives easy access to a curated list of sites, blog postings and YouTube videos containing faith affirming information on a range of LDS topics.

Such as: Continue reading