Stranger Things
@theartofmadeline
Jules of Nature
almost home
shark vs the universe
Sade Olutola
PR's Tumblrdome
Monterey Bay Aquarium
★
One Nice Bug Per Day
No title available
Game of Thrones Daily
#extradirty
Three Goblin Art
Sweet Seals For You, Always
izzy's playlists!
Kaledo Art
Andulka
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
titsay
seen from Malaysia
seen from Türkiye
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from Indonesia
seen from South Korea
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Finland
seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from Israel
seen from Türkiye
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany
seen from Türkiye
@blog-jeffc
The Things We Can't See
Trigger warning. Please don’t read on if discussion about depression, abuse, and suicide will trigger you. This post starts very, very personal and is a little unusual for my blog, so my apologies for that, but I think it’s relevant. Lifelong depression is really, really …. Well, I can’t even think of an appropriate word. Awful, terrible, horrible – these all understate it. The word horrific…
I Did Liken the Scriptures
If you follow this blog you will have noted my saying that the Book of Mormon was written not only to us and for us, but also about us. If you’re not already a bit sick of me saying that, you’ll probably become so. One reason I repeat it is because I suspect most people who read my posts aren’t regularly returning for more and it’s such an important message I don’t want it to get lost. It’s not…
They Were Not Ashamed
Guilt and shame. One is healthy, one isn’t. One is necessary for repentance, one isn’t. One hopefully encourages you to improve your life, while the other takes you further from God and happiness. In psychological terms, guilt is described as feeling bad about something you’ve done, while shame is feeling bad about who you are. Guilt is about actions, while shame is about the core or essence of…
To Be Or Not To Be (a Cult)
I’ve seen a lot of commentary online about the recent Netflix documentary, Trust Me: The False Prophet. It details the rise and fall of Samuel Bateman, a self-proclaimed successor to Warren Jeffs in the FLDS church1. It follows on the heels of Keep Sweet, Pray, and Obey of a few years ago that documented the downfall and arrest of Warren Jeffs himself. I’m not going to discuss the details of…
Are We the Opposite of Zion?
There are a lot of voices in today’s world. I would hazard a guess and say more than ever before in the history of the earth. We can stay on social media and news sites all day and night, continually bombarded with more and more information in a way that none of our ancestors could. The noise comes from all across the globe, sometimes peaceful and beautiful, all too often angry and divisive. Yes,…
The Glory of the Telestial
For members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, section 76 of the Doctrine and Covenants is central to our understanding of our lives into the eternities. Latter-day Saints believe in a resurrection of the body, a final judgment, and finally a life eternally in a kingdom of glory for all but the vilest of sinners and most rebellious against God the Eternal Father. These kingdoms…
Be Not Deceived
On a social media feed the other day, I came across this quote: ‘I was considering how powerful Truth is, that it is not something intangible like a simple concept or idea. It has a real and substantial impact on people, as impactful as a hurricane or an earthquake. When spoken with pure motive and without corruption, especially when the love and kindness of the Holy Spirit prompts it, truth…
The Natural Man
What does it mean that ‘…the natural man is an enemy to God’? (Mosiah 3:19) I’ve been pondering on this subject for a fair while and I somehow doubt I will be able to do it justice, but I’m going to try anyway. The passage from King Benjamin’s speech to his people is oft-quoted in LDS talks and lessons. We tend to focus on the latter half of the verse, where Benjamin tells us how to put off the…
A Servant For the End Times
There is a group of passages in Isaiah that causes a lot of speculation in LDS (and wider Christian) circles. In reality, there are many such passages, but here I’m referring to those relating to an end times servant, sometimes called the ‘Davidic servant’. Throughout Isaiah, the prophet uses a combination of King David, Moses, and the future Cyrus as types of the future end times servant. In…
The End is (Not) Nigh
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been getting ‘end of the world’ vibes for a few years now. Ever since the onset of Covid, the world seems to have been getting crazier and crazier. To be honest, there was a fair amount of turmoil before Covid, too, but since then the world has gone way beyond anything I expected to see. At times, world events appear almost surreal even. Within Christian circles,…
Truth and Reason
6 April 1830 is a date well-known to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On that date, in New York State, Joseph Smith Jr organised the Church of Christ. When Joseph later began collecting revelations he had received into what would become the Book of Commandments (the predecessor to the Doctrine and Covenants), the Lord then dictated to Joseph the preface for that book –…
The Things of My Soul
I am something of a broken mess. I’ve known this for many years, although some of the reasons for this have only begun to become apparent to me over the last few months. My life-long struggle with depression, repeatedly escalating into debilitating episodes, now has some explanation. I am grateful for that, although the path to find my way out of it is long and currently shows no potential end. I…
Mental Gymnastics
A phrase I see a lot in discussions about faith, politics, social cohesion and more these days is ‘mental gymnastics’. I’ve used it myself more than once. It seems that whatever ‘side’ of an issue you’re on, the ‘other side’ must engage in mental gymnastics in order to justify their conclusions. It suggests that there is an obvious, plain explanation of the issue – an Occam’s Razor if you like –…
Am I Severed?
I’m currently something of a fanboy of the Apple TV series Severance. It doesn’t neatly fit a genre, being mystery/thriller/sci-fi/horror/drama. It’s what you call a slow-burn. There’s not much in the way of action. There are long gaps between dialogue. Indeed, you could get to the end of an episode and wonder whether anything much had even happened. And yet it’s absolutely riveting. Every…
Being Right and Wrong
It seems I upset a few people with my post of yesterday. That wasn’t my intention. Given two of the three examples I used for living according to the scriptural injunction were based on my experience in the LDS church (tithing and polygamy), and that most of my readers are LDS, I knew there might be some discomfort for some people. But I expected it to be in relation to tithing and/or polygamy. I…
Discerning Truth From Counterfeit
‘Today Christians … stand at the head of [this country]… I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy Christianity … We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit … We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press – in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole…
Do We Need Another Samuel the Lamanite?
One of the YouTube channels I follow is Connor Boyack. For those who don’t know him, Connor is a fairly well-known commentator and activist in Utah, probably of a more Libertarian bent, and active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Sometimes I agree with him, and sometimes I disagree but I usually find his ‘Sunday musings’ well thought-out and researched. Yesterday,…