This brilliant article by Rosalynde Welch needs to be read far and wide.

Unlike many of the people panning Rosalynde’s article in the comments, I actually have listened to many Mormon Stores podcasts. Some of them are really quite good — others clearly celebrate and openly encourage apostasy while subtly moving the listener to adopt an alternate religion around John Dehlin’s questioning of the Church. As others have noted, John Dehlin’s project could not exist without the Church (so he can continue to criticize it), but the Church will continue to exist without John Dehlin. Other followers of Dehlin — and he appears to have at least hundreds — may want to consider the cautionary tales in the Book of Mormon regarding priestcraft. Rosalynde concludes the following:

And indeed we see, in the website’s archive of “Member Stories,” that every narrative sounds the same notes, as surely and predictably as an LDS testimony meeting: beginning from a state of closed naïveté, a precipitating crisis, moving through confusion and rupture, finding Mormon Stories, and ultimately achieving openness and health. “Health” appears to be the dominant value in the community and the ultimate good, replacing the traditional Christian categories of truth and salvation: the archives, for example, are organized into narratives of Individual, Marital, Community, and Family Health. The website contains language assuring the reader that Mormon Stories is not and will not become a religion in itself. These assurances are at once grandiose and unnecessary, since the community evidently lacks the moral gravity necessary to anchor a religion. I have nothing against health, but it is far too comfortable and anodyne a concept to capture the soul.

I see nothing sinister about the predictability of these narratives and their relatively insipid moral grounding; my quarrel is only with the intelligence of their discourse. Mormon Stories seems like a textbook liberal mini-institution, a lot like a high school gay-straight alliance and about as important. And if it is founded on contradictory projects, well, the same can be said about much of Western civilization. Contradiction can add interest and energy to a project; incoherence can also eat itself from the inside out. I doubt anybody knows which will be the fate of Mormon Stories.

I take no credit for this parable, which was offered by “Pahoran” here.

I thought it was interesting enough to share.

Before you read it, check out the background for this issue here.

The problem is not that (Gerald) Bradford wants to do things differently; the problem is that he wants to do different things.

Here is a parable.

Once there was a city that had no fire department. A group of public-spirited citizens banded together, bought a good second-hand fire appliance, began training together, and pretty soon had a rather good working volunteer fire brigade.

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The Obamacare decision handed down by the Supreme Court has at least one side benefit: in upholding the mandate, the Supreme Court has re-energized the tea party movement. The majority of Americans strongly oppose the mandate (67 percent according to this poll), and the act of getting government even more involved with health care has caused millions of Americans to question how exactly it is constitutional. More people reading the Constitution is a very good thing. Tea party groups are already reporting a flood of energized people calling and e-mailing to fight Obamacare.

Make no mistake: the decision is a disaster for freedom-loving people. Congress has official permission to do anything to you as long as they call it a “tax.” So, we really are living in an Obamacare world, an Orwellian place where presidents promise they will not raise your taxes and then immediately do and where government bureaucrats are more firmly entrenched in your health care decisions (as if dealing with health insurance was not already painful enough). Big Brother is watching your prostate exam!

The most horrific thing about Obamacare is the lack of basic logic behind it. Follow along:

1)You must buy health insurance, but if you don’t want to you don’t have to, and you can pay a fine (this is the tax).
2)The tax is significantly lower than the cost of insurance, partly because insurance has to cover all kinds of things it didn’t have to cover before.
3)Companies have to provide coverage or they also will be taxed, but again the tax is much lower than the cost of insurance, so companies have an incentive to drop coverage.
4)If your company doesn’t cover you, or you are self-employed, what do you do? Well, you just pay the tax until you are sick, and then you buy coverage because of course insurance companies cannot reject you for any reason.

See how wonderful this is? Your taxes are raised to pay for insurance you don’t want. Companies are incentivized to drop coverage. Insurance companies are forced to cover all kinds of conditions that have nothing to do with insurance (remember, insurance is for catastrophic events — you don’t buy car insurance for oil changes but for when you get in a crash or when your car is stolen). And health insurance costs will continue to spiral up because most rational actors will not buy insurance until they are sick, and insurance companies must cover them and pay.

The end result, if Obamacare continues on its merry way to ruining our lives, will be:

1)Fewer companies offering health insurance as a benefit.
2)More people and companies paying taxes.
3)Fewer doctors willing to continue to deal with the health insurance bureaucracy rather than the reason they got into medicine in the first place, ie, healing sick people. The doctor shortage will worsen.
4)Health insurance moving farther and farther away from being actual insurance and premiums getting massively more expensive.

In short, you will be taxed more, will have fewer doctors to see, your health insurance costs will go up, and your company may very well drop coverage. Ain’t that great!

There is one silver lining in the Supreme Court decision. The Supremes said Obamacare could not be justified under the commerce clause, and this is a very good thing.

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I found this result of a poll released June 26 absolutely fascinating. To sum up, 67 percent of voters know Mitt Romney is Mormon, but only 43 percent know Obama is Christian.

Forty percent of voters said they are not sure about Pres. Obama’s religion, and 8 percent said he is a Muslim. In comparison, only 25 percent were not sure about Mitt Romney’s religion.

(Go to page 15 of the poll results).

Meanwhile, 50 percent feel comfortable about Mitt being a Mormon, and 18 percent say they are not comfortable. 32 percent don’t know or aren’t sure. Interestingly, the comfort level with Mormon Mitt is up 3 points from nine months ago.

I really don’t know what to make of this. Pres. Obama is a known quantity, probably the most famous person in the world right now. He has two autobiographies and has made it clear that he is a Christian. Yet only 43 percent know that? Meanwhile, Mitt Romney is not that well known, and yet many more people know he is a Mormon. Is it possible he is just known as “that Mormon guy running for president?”

(Personal anecdote: I work for an international company and have had people from around the world congratulate me because they know I am Mormon and they know Mitt Romney is Mormon. They are very confused when I say I favor Ron Paul).

Taxes are set to increase by more than $4,000 a year for the average family in 2013 — unless Congress acts. This is based on the average family income of about $70k. For poorer working families making about $22k per year, taxes will increase $1200.

This coming tax increase was dubbed by the Washington Post “Taxmageddon,” a combination of “tax” and the end-of-times Biblical term “Armegeddon.” (See, the Bible is useful for all kinds of things!). The tax increases will not be the end of the world, but they will be painful and will hurt the poor as well as the upper middle class, probably causing some serious pain for everybody reading this blog. The rich will find ways to move their money around to mostly avoid the tax increases, just as they do today.

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