Upward Thought

What feels like an eternity ago, I was sitting in a church in South Africa when a fellow said something about building up Zion in Cape Town. I turned to him and said, "God has never said Zion would be found anywhere but the United States. You can build his kingdom here, but Zion will never be found anywhere but in the United States of America." Everyone who heard me felt extraordinarily uncomfortable, as they should have. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am no jingoist. The only special thing about our government these days is that we have probably sinned more against greater light than any other government in the history of the world, as measured by the value of what was given compared to the degree to which we've rebelled from that value.  What makes this place special is the place and what God has pronounced about the place, not the government--which won't be here when Zion is built. There are only lands in the world that God has appointed for the gathering

 Some will find this too verbose and intellectual, but for those who can extract the value, there are many important ideas expressed in this video: https://youtu.be/YdAZ5z2kcr8?t=216 I recommend watching the whole thing, as various different ideas are explored. I've intentionally skipped the introduction, which is unnecessary. Some rumination: There are so many valuable ideas regarding how humans think, the role of reason in the gospel, the present inescapable political situation, science, religion, and how all things connect to all things. This video touches on only the smallest portion of what could be said, and doesn't touch a great deal of what ought to be folded in. I have not seen anything that even gets close to taking these ideas and breaking them down into their simplest. I hope people come forward with more and better attempts at explaining these things to the residue of people. I will do my best in my future books. I also wish there were a ready way to help the ~40%

Some time ago I started saying that there would be a second civil war. Then, I started saying it had already begun. As with other predictions I've made, such as the arrival of a Chinese superflu two years before it happened, or that an eventual war with China and Russia would occur, many resisted or rejected my words claiming it could never happen. Eventually, more and more people woke up to these and other prophecies, and pretty soon they are discussed openly as mainstream ideas. Everyone seems to forget that there was time when it was considered crazy and impossible. Few react to such incidents by increasing in their willingness to believe other things from the same source that seem equally crazy or impossible. So it has always been (see, for example, Helaman 7-9). The second US civil war has been one such idea. I've been speaking about this for years and years. Now it is a mainstream idea. Some recent events include current and former federal legislators openly calling for a

We tend to get hung up on how hard God's personal requests to us are. That's sort of funny, considering the difficulty of his request is equivalent to its value, because that is the measure of the distance from us to him that it covers. Anyway, it is important to think about how pleasing it is to the Lord that we come back for more. In fact, whether we come back for more is much more important than our reaction to the previous interaction. God's voice is the voice of improvement. To the extent that a person is like God, contact with them will yield invitations of improvement--even when that person says nothing. As with God (but obviously on a lesser scale) their very presence will increase the intensity of the light of Christ within us, and cause an increase in the volume and content of God's voice inside of and to us through our conscience. This is why wicked people react so intensely to the righteous. They get really good turning the volume of God's voice inside o

Joseph Smith taught a surprising amount on the principles of government. Unfortunately, very little of his ideas are evident in the governments of areas where the majority of people profess to believe he was a prophet of God. Over a year ago, a man named Marc Martinez did an excellent job writing a ~200 page summary of these ideas, as well as those of later Latter-day Saint leaders. The ideas in the book are worth thinking about for all people, and the book is well-written and easy to read. Marc is not a scholar by trade, but a carpenter. I mention this because I know from experience that it is not easy to write books when you have a full-time job to attend to that has little to do with your writing. To me, if someone in such a situation is willing to spend the time involved, and manages to produce something worth reading, it catches my attention more than someone doing it to earn a paycheck. Also, I have a bias towards carpenters who set out to live and teach the gospel. Marc recently

Jesus said: "He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me; and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him." (John 14:21) All people, everywhere, have an idea of right and wrong. If you always do the best thing you could imagine a person doing in your situation, you will learn more about what is right and wrong from your reasoning and experiences. To love God means to fully submit yourself to your understanding of the best a person could do in your situation. When this is done by a person who does not yet believe in God, they will find many reasons to believe in him. When this is done by a person who does believe in God, they will find reasons to trust him more than they already do, and they will learn more and more about his character. They will know him more and more intimately until they know him better than they know themselves. The person who consistently does the best thing they can imagi