Man's Destiny, by Lorenzo Snow

I have this in hard-copy, but I can't find an easy reference online. So I'm copying it into the blog. Notice the emphasis on cleansing oneself from sin.

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Man's Destiny, by Lorenzo Snow, quoted in LeRoi C. Snow, "Devotion to Divine Inspiration", Improvement Era 22 (June 1919):660-661.

1 John 3:2-3

“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God.” - Philippians 2:5-6

Dear Brother:

Hast thou not been unwisely bold,
Man’s destiny to thus unfold?
To raise, promote such high desire,
Such vast ambition thus inspire?

Still, ’tis no phantom that we trace
Man’s ultimatum in life’s race;
This royal path has long been trod
By righteous men, each now a God:

As Abra’m, Isaac, Jacob too,
First babes, then men- to gods they grew.
As man now is, our God once was;
As now God is, so man may be,-
Which doth unfold man’s destiny.

For John declares: When Christ we see
Like unto him we'll truly be
And he who has this hope within
Will purify himself from sin.

Who keep this object grand in view,
To folly, sin, will bid adieu,
Nor wallow in the mire anew;

Nor ever seek to carve his name
High on the shaft of worldly fame;
BUt here his ultimatum trace:
The head of all his spirit-race.

Ah well, that taught by you, dear Paul,
Tough much amazed, we see it all;
Our Father God, has ope'd our eyes,
We cannot view it otherwise.

The boy, like to his father grown,
Has but attained unto his own;
To grow to sire from state of son,
Is not ‘gainst Nature’s course to run.

A son of God, like God to be,
Would not be robbing Deity;
And he who has this hope within,
Will purify himself from sin.

You’re right, St. John, supremely right:
Whoe’er essays to climb this height,
Will cleanse himself of sin entire-
Or else ’twere needless to aspire.

This poem was composed by President Snow in Brigham City, dated January 11, 1892.

The Constitution of No Authority, by Lysander Spooner

The Constitution of No Authority, by Lysander Spooner

Spooner argues that the Constitution of 1787 has no authority over us.

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The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago. And it can be supposed to have been a contract then only between persons who had already come to years of discretion, so as to be competent to make reasonable and obligatory contracts. Furthermore, we know, historically, that only a small portion even of the people then existing were consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted to express either their consent or dissent in any formal manner. Those persons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all dead now. Most of them have been dead forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy years. And the constitution, so far as it was their contract, died with them. They had no natural power or right to make it obligatory upon their children. It is not only plainly impossible, in the nature of things, that they could bind their posterity, but they did not even attempt to bind them.

5. At nearly all elections, votes are given for various candidates for the same office. Those who vote for the unsuccessful candidates cannot properly be said to have voted to sustain the Constitution. They may, with more reason, be supposed to have voted, not to support the Constitution, but specially to prevent the tyranny which they anticipate the successful candidate intends to practice upon them under color of the Constitution; and therefore may reasonably be supposed to have voted against the Constitution itself. This supposition is the more reasonable, inasmuch as such voting is the only mode allowed to them of expressing their dissent to the Constitution.

The ostensible supporters of the Constitution, like the ostensible supporters of most other governments, are made up of three classes, viz.: 1. Knaves, a numerous and active class, who see in the government an instrument which they can use for their own aggrandizement or wealth. 2. Dupes --- a large class, no doubt --- each of whom, because he is allowed one voice out of millions in deciding what he may do with his own person and his own property, and because he is permitted to have the same voice in robbing, enslaving, and murdering others, that others have in robbing, enslaving, and murdering himself, is stupid enough to imagine that he is a "free man," a "sovereign"; that this is "a free government"; "a government of equal rights," "the best government on earth," and such like absurdities. 3. A class who have some appreciation of the evils of government, but either do not see how to get rid of them, or do not choose to so far sacrifice their private interests as to give themselves seriously and earnestly to the work of making a change.

The payment of taxes, being compulsory, of course furnishes no evidence that any one voluntarily supports the Constitution.

1. It is true that the theory of our Constitution is, that all taxes are paid voluntarily; that our government is a mutual insurance company, voluntarily entered into by the people with each other; that that each man makes a free and purely voluntary contract with all others who are parties to the Constitution, to pay so much money for so much protection, the same as he does with any other insurance company; and that he is just as free not to be protected, and not to pay tax, as he is to pay a tax, and be protected.

But this theory of our government is wholly different from the practical fact. The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life." And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.

The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the roadside, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.

The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a "protector," and that he takes men's money against their will, merely to enable him to "protect" those infatuated travellers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful "sovereign," on account of the "protection" he affords you. He does not keep "protecting" you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy, if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villanies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.

A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. Neither are a people any the less slaves because permitted periodically to choose new masters. What makes them slaves is the fact that they now are, and are always hereafter to be, in the hands of men whose power over them is, and always is to be, absolute and irresponsible.

The secret ballot makes a secret government; and a secret government is a secret band of robbers and murderers. Open despotism is better than this. The single despot stands out in the face of all men, and says: I am the State: My will is law: I am your master: I take the responsibility of my acts: The only arbiter I acknowledge is the sword: If anyone denies my right, let him try conclusions with me.

But a secret government is little less than a government of assassins. Under it, a man knows not who his tyrants are, until they have struck, and perhaps not then. He may guess, beforehand, as to some of his immediate neighbors. But he really knows nothing. The man to whom he would most naturally fly for protection, may prove an enemy, when the time of trial comes.

This is the kind of government we have; and it is the only one we are likely to have, until men are ready to say: We will consent to no Constitution, except such an one as we are neither ashamed nor afraid to sign; and we will authorize no government to do anything in our name which we are not willing to be personally responsible for.

The Rapacious Hardscrapple Frontier by Robin Hanson

The Rapacious Hardscrapple Frontier by Robin Hanson.

Hanson uses evolutionary game theory to study the far future.

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The future is not the realization of our hopes and dreams, a warning to mend our ways, an adventure to inspire us, nor a romance to touch our hearts. The future is just another place in space time. Its residents, like us, find their world mundane and morally ambiguous relative to the heights of fiction and fantasy.

What sorts of lives will our descendants live, empowered by the most advanced technology possible and steadily domesticating the vast resources of the galaxy, as they develop oases and travel between them? Will they build immense mansions with armies of servants to reenact famous battles on the south lawn? Will they isolate planets of primitive life to study their evolution, build vast Jupiter brains or MBrains to calculate more digits of pi, or shape molecular clouds into exquisite sculptures visible a billion light-years away?

It is interesting to wonder whether the universe we see around us is consistent with such a scenario. That is, could a wave of alien interstellar colonization once have passed this way? Perhaps some combination of powerful weapons and oases in hiding from such weapons could be consistent with the virgin appearance of the universe we see.

The future is not the realization of our hopes and dreams, a warning to mend our ways, an adventure to inspire us, nor a romance to touch our hearts. I am not praising this possible future world to encourage you to help make it more likely, nor am I criticizing it to warn you to make it less likely. It is not intended as an allegory of problems or promises for us, our past, or our near future. It is just my best-guess description of another section of spacetime. I can imagine better worlds and worse worlds, so whether I am repelled by or attracted to this world must depend on the other realistic options on the table.

Dale Morgan on Early Mormonism: Correspondence and a New History, edited by John Phillip Walker

Dale Morgan on Early Mormonism: Correspondence and a New History, edited by John Phillip Walker

The book starts with a mini-biography of Morgan. It is very sad that his accomplishments are rather pointless due to the invention of the computer and the Internet. It is interesting to read about the note-card conversations between this deaf man and his friends.

After reading the unfinished history, it is very curious that such a frank non-believer would devout so much of his life to Mormon history.

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Of Palmyra:

A foot of snow had fallen in June; snow fell even in July and August, at the height of summer, and a killing frost on September 10 cut down such hardy crops as had survived. The year 1816 has ever since been remembered as "eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death," and on all the roads that fall, west across the Green Mountain to the valley of the Hudson and beyond, dust bellied up in sullen clouds about the wagons of those who, like the Smiths, had abandoned hope in New England.

On Martin Harris visiting Joseph in Harmony, before the translation began:

For all his brave words, Martin Harris could not but have been shaken to find in Joseph such little constancy to the great cause, while he himself was prepared to mortgage his farm to finance publication of the book. Swift to retrieve his mistake, Joseph proposed that Harris carry to New York a sheet of characters transcribed from the golden plates, and secure opinions on them from the foremost scholars of the day. This was a means of dealing with his followers Joseph would find useful to the end of his life. In a perilous situation, set people to doing something: It kept them occupied, enlisted their loyalties, and served to identify their interests with his own.

Of the document given to Charles Anthon:

Anthon said later that the transcript brought him by this "plain, and apparently simple-hearted farmer" consisted of "all kinds of crooked characters disposed in columns, and had evidently been prepared by some person who had before him at the time a book containing various alphabets. Greek and Hebrew letters, crosses and flourishes, Roman letters inverted or placed sideways, were arranged in perpendicular columns, and the whole ended in a rude delineation of a circle divided into various compartments, decked with various strange marks, and evidently copied after the Mexican Calender by Humboldt." 16 What has been preserved among the Saints as the "Anthon transcript" does not conform to this description, nor is the evidence satisfactory that the extant transcript is that which was taken to Anthon. But there is no reason to suppose that the sheet of "Caractors" usually referred to as the "Anthon transcript" was not prepared by Joseph Smith as a representation of the characters found on the plates, and it may be critically discussed in this light.

I was very intrigued by this, because I've seen the "Caractors" transcript many times.

Details of the missing pages:

It has been assumed that the 116 pages Martin Harris lost comprised all of the manuscript which had been written to that time. That this assumption is mistaken, that some few pages, at least, had been written beyond that point, is shown by a revelation of May 1829, which gave instructions for replacing the lost portion of the manuscript: "You shall translate the engravings which are on the plates of Nephi, down even till you come to the reign of king Benjamin, or until you come to that which you have translated, which you have retained." The language of this revelation is employed again in Joseph's special foreward to the first edition of the Book of Mormon: "The Lord said unto me...thou shalt translate from the plates of Nephi, until ye come to that which ye have translated, which ye have retained." 1 (The italics in each case are mine.)

The author's opinion of the Book of Mormon:

That no part of the book's conception was conspicuously original only strengthened its appeal and was strikingly characteristic of Joseph's subsequent practice in the role of prophet, seer, and revelator, for the distinguishing feature of Joseph's church was not to be the novelty of its doctrines but the authority with which it seized upon the floating ideas of its generation. What gave Joseph's book vitality, however, was not intellectual content but the emotional impact which followed from its identification with the Bible. Joseph had neither the wit nor the learning to write a book parallel to the Bible which men would be able to receive as being of equal standing, but he did possess a boundless ingenuity, a certain plasticity of mind, and a verbal facility which are worthy of all admiration, whatever the defects of the work they combined to produce. The Bible gave him both his frame of reference and the warp into which he wove the blood-and-thunder adventures, platitudinous moralizing, family memories, revivalist sermons, political alarms, speculative ethnology, backwoods folklore, and all the other curious threads which make up the woof of his narrative.

Provo City Board of Education Meeting

As a new resident of Provo, I was slightly happy to see "A Public Budge Meeting Will Be Held August 12th at 7 PM" on my property tax notification: here was an opportunity to limit the amount of injustice in my annual mugging. I was particularly inspired to go because the school district portion of the taxes went up by 23%.

Libby and I got there as the meeting was getting together and were greeted by Carolyn Wright, one of the members of the board. The president, Darryl Alder, talked about "Americans doing the impossible" (using the movie Pearl Harbor, particularly the end, as his notes), then gave an opening prayer and let Mary Ann Christiansen (board member) lead the group in the pledge of allegiance. (Aside: I consider the pledge a bit idolatrous and an assault on liberty.)

The next thirty minutes were spent hearing presentations from the Provo High School Spanish class and Provo High School band about trips they had made. The groups were thanking the school board for approving their trips and presenting results. Lib and I were a bit surprised at this part, because the gist of each story was that the group raised their own money to go on the trip. Why did they need to be organized or approved by the school? Can't a group of people decide to go to Mexico, etc. On the less cynical side, the trips looked like great experiences for the youth who went.

After that, Kerry Smith (business administrator for the Provo government education system) gave a presentation about the budget and why the taxes were being increased. The moral was: three years "the public" voted on two plans that require raising taxes today. The first, a bond initiative to raise money repair buildings after years of dilapidation, required paying off the principal and interest on the loans for the long term. The second, a "leeway" program to increase teacher compensation and make the government schools "more competitive" with other government schools, was split over three years (and this was the last year.) Later, when these parts of the budgets were discussed, the board members kept talking about how they "could have ask [i.e., taken forcefully] more in past years, but did not", so we should be happy about their restraint. This reminds me of a robber stealing the most valuable thing in my house and telling me, "Hey, I could have taken everything. But I didn't, so cut some slack." Nevertheless, I appreciate the restraint. My goal was to ensure that there was a lot of friction when trying to increase the taxes. This way it is harder to spend frivolously in the long run, even if this particular increase is "reasonable."

The main negotiable (i.e., not the result of past voter initiatives) part of the budget was to start a fund for building maintenance. The bond program was to jump start some major repairs, because no money had been set away. This board decided to take money every year, starting this year, to (a) monitor and improve government buildings and (b) save to build new government buildings. The intent of this fund is to ensure that bonds (which are expense) will not be "needed" in the future. Apparently, the ceiling of a kindergarden room caved in one night. (When have you ever worried about the ceiling of McDonalds or a movie theater caving in?) This, by the way, led to quite a few "But think of the children!"

During the public input phase of the meeting, some people had inappropriate comments that should have been directed to the county assessors---the group that valued their home more and thereby increased the taxes. But some people zeroed in on the actual expenses at hand. I recall some people talking about how it seems inconsistent to talk about restraint and a gradual process when the repair program is starting up at the "dream" level, rather than graduating those taxes increases. For example, there is 2.5 million budget increase this year that will continue in perpetuity, rather than (for example) a 1 million increase, followed by a 1.5 or 2, followed by a 2.5, thereby spreading the budget increase over a few years. A few other people talked about the need to cut the budget and make due in times of "recession", etc. Two people complained about high fees for their kids.

In my comments, I underscored this last critique by pointing out the admonition of "Good, Better, and Best" as principal of cutting budgets. I mentioned that those who are opposed to taxes should be in favour of fees, because they put the cost of activities on the people who do them and I expressed my support. (Interestingly, the board members nodded thoughtfully at this, but earlier had commiserated with the fee-complainers.) Finally, I had a number of questions about how they were evaluating the effectiveness of their compensation program.

During the break, a board staff member came over to criticize me about my requests for merit pay and other teacher evaluations. He asked how I would like that at BYU, or rather, how they do it there. When I explained the tenure process, he said that it was fictitious and just a rubber-stamp. Perhaps, but he is misguided. First, BYU is not robbing thousands to pay its teachers. (Despite what you may think about tithing.) Second, I don't have voice at BYU, like I should at this meeting for government schools, so attacking me is attacking the wrong person.

The meeting went on for about two hours before they held their vote. (Only the board voted, not the citizens.) Everyone on the board---Shannon Poulsen, Carolyn Wright, Mary Ann Christiansen, Darryl Alder, Sue Curtis, and Sandy Packard---voted in favour of the tax increase. Sue prefaced her vote with a comment that she recognized "everyone present" disagrees. Sandy Packard prefaced her vote by saying that she thinks the board can cut the budget more and should close a school, but couldn't vote "No" without hurting the children. (I was particularly surprised at this, because she was the last to vote and therefore could have voted No, but had the motion passed, and thereby had a bit of political armour.)

So, there you are. We did our best to slow down the tax increase and were unsuccessful. But was there enough pain and annoyance at the meeting to reconsider future increases? Who knows.