My thoughts on Christmas music (Merry Christmas! edition)

I leave for Texas early tomorrow morning and will probably not be online much until January. So if this is my last post until then, MERRY CHRISTMAS to you all.

And here is the greatest Christmas song of all time...

God, Probability, and Evil: A Response to Alvin Plantinga

I know... the title is lame. I got tired of working on it and decided to not bother coming up with something better.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Evil, Probability, and God:

A Response to Plantinga

     In his “Epistemic Probability and Evil,”¹ Alvin Plantinga responds to the argument that the overwhelming amount of evil in the world makes the probability of God's existence to be extremely low, and that because of this probability a belief in God exceeds reason and is irrational. In attempting to critique this problem, Plantinga appeals to the possibility of unknown free creatures, possible transactions God may have with those creatures, the possibility of Plantinga's own free-will defense, and the possibility of God's allowance of greater goods for this and the afterlife. Plantinga argues that the mere possibility of these things sufficiently responds to the criticism that God is improbable, and that it is thus not irrational to believe in God. The appeal to these purported possibilities however are problematic, especially when Plantinga is not just defending simple theism, but is also defending the theism of Christianity. While perhaps these things may be logically possible, they are problematic in themselves and do solve the problem that Plantiga is trying to avert. However, in light of Plantinga's response to this problem the probability of God's existence and the question of the rationality of a belief in God, especially in a Christian context, must be understood differently than in its simple form as initially and traditionally presented.

***READ THE REST HERE***

1Alvin Plantinga, “Epistemic Probability and Evil,” in The Evidential Problem from Evil, ed. Daniel Hawthorne-Snyder (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 69-96.

What a missed opportunity.

Pun intended.

My thoughts on Christmas music #7

 

The second greatest Christmas song ever. I don't know why. It just is.

I think it may have to do with some movie that I vaguely remember seeing as  kid. It had something to do with a statue of Mary and a trapeze artist dying in an accident, with Greensleeves playing in the background. I was really young and I might possibly be mixing three different movies all into one.

Eugene England's Theology of Peace

This is my paper on Eugene England that I wrote for my class with Richard Bushman - The Mormon Theological Tradition. Enjoy
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Eugene England's Theology of Peace

In the first week of August 1964, two U.S. Submarines off the North coast of Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin falsely reported receiving unprovoked gun and torpedo fire from nearby Communist ships. Within hours of the second attack, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered retaliation air strikes on Vietnam and three days later used this and other falsified information to ensure the passage of a resolution authorizing military action in Southeast Asia. Over 50,000 American and millions of Vietnamese lives were lost in what became one of the most controversial wars in US history.

Looking back on this event and its surroundings thirty years later, Eugene England pointed to this as being a foundational and life-changing moment in his life, a paradigmatic moment which changed his thinking and religious understanding. He says,

In 1964 quite suddenly I experienced a dramatic paradigm shift, a kind of sea change in my soul. . . . I had grown up believing, connected to my belief that the Constitution was divinely inspired, that U.S. Presidents did not lie. When I became convinced that President Johnson had lied, with complicity from his advisors and without significant opposition from Congress, but with such dire results for our country, I crossed some line in my soul. As I thought about it . . . I became convinced that I had crossed to a proper place, to a conviction that the Prince of Peace had to do with peace between nations more than with loyalty to one nation.¹

He was heartbroken and angry. While just a few years earlier he considered himself “a patriotic American” who had been a volunteer weather officer for an Air Force bomber squadron, he soon found himself joining up with anti-war movements and other social causes, where he remained a vocal critic of war and an advocate for peace up until his death in 2001.

Raised within a Mormon farming family in southern Idaho during the 1930's and 40's, George Eugene England Jr. recounts his upbringing as having come from a conservative and “rather cold, emotionally reserved, largely Anglo-Saxon famil[y] and Church culture.”² Shortly after serving an LDS mission to Samoa with his wife Charlotte Ann Hawkins, England went to Stanford University to do graduate studies in English which eventually led to a professorship in English at the LDS Church-owned Brigham Young University in 1974. He continued to teach there for nearly twenty-five years. In 1998, he took up a writer-in-residency position at Utah Valley State College³ where he helped establish a Mormon Studies program before passing away in the early fall of 2001 from complications resulting from a brain tumor. While having never served as a general leading authority for the LDS Church, England's prolific writings and intellectual pursuits (as well as the respect he earned from students) made him a prominent figure among LDS scholars, thinkers, and general membership. While at Stanford he helped establish Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and later at BYU he began the Association for Mormon Letters, both of which have been and are key venues for Mormon thought, scholarship, and literature.

***READ THE REST HERE***

~~

1Eugene England, “The Prince of Peace” in Making Peace: Personal Essays (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1995), 226-7. England also recounts this “paradigm changing” account in Eugene England, “Jacaranda,” in Making Peace: Personal Essays (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1995), 114; “What Covenant will God receive in the Desert?” Sunstone 96 (September 1994):27-8; and “'No Cause, No Cause': An Essay Toward Reconciliation,” Sunstone 121 (Janurary 2002): 32.

2England, “No Cause, No Cause,” 32.

3Now Utah Valley Univeristy.

My thoughts on Christmas music #6 (Where are they now? edition)

Then:

I'm gettin' nuttin' for Christmas
Mommy and Daddy are mad.
I'm gettin' nuttin' for Christmas
'Cause I ain't been nuttin' but bad.

I broke my bat on Johnny's head;
Somebody snitched on me.
I hid a frog in sister's bed;
Somebody snitched on me.

I spilled some ink on Mommy's rug;
I made Tommy eat a bug;
Bought some gum with a penny slug;
Somebody snitched on me.

CHORUS
Oh, I'm gettin' nuttin' for Christmas
Mommy and Daddy are mad.
I'm gettin' nuttin' for Christmas
'Cause I ain't been nuttin' but bad.

I put a tack on teacher's chair;
Somebody snitched on me.
I tied a knot in Suzy's hair;
Somebody snitched on me.
I did a dance on Mommy's plant.
Climbed a tree and tore my pants.
Filled that sugar bowl with ants;
Somebody snitched on me.

CHORUS
Oh, I'm gettin' nuttin' for Christmas
Mommy and Daddy are mad.
I'm gettin' nuttin' for Christmas
'Cause I ain't been nuttin' but bad.

So you better be good whatever you do
'Cause if you're bad, I'm warning you,
You'll get nuttin' for Christmas.

Now:




Personally, I blame the parents. Think about it, the kid BROKE A BAT ON JOHNNY'S HEAD and the worst he is thinking about is getting 'nuttin' for Christmas? If he were my son, he'd certainly be getting 'sumtin' for Christmas... like a swift kick in the ass.

That's a real mugshot bytheway.

Validation

It's long but it is worth every minute. Please watch.

My thoughts on Christmas music #5

On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

Hamster eating popcorn on a piano

My thoughts on Christmas music #4

No thoughts this time. Just Christmas music. Enjoy.

My thoughts on Christmas music #3

The cattle are lowing
The poor Baby wakes
But little Lord Jesus
No crying He makes

He also came pre-potty-trained.

Quite possibily the funniest photo ever.

My brother and sister-in-law took my nephews to Legoland a couple weeks ago. Levi in the back loved the roller coaster. Koji in the front wasn't as thrilled.

My thoughts on Christmas music #2

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room,

Joy to the world, the Savior reigns!
Let men their songs employ;
While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow

He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness,

This is not a Christmas song - it's about Christ's millennial reign. It's about his second coming, not his first.

Tonight's Christmas Devotional

I just finished watching tonight's First Presidency Christmas Devotional online. I really enjoyed it... a lot. If you missed out on it you can watch it online here. I really liked the heavy emphasis all of the talks had on serving which has always been a theme of Pres. Monson's messages. And, of course, the MoTab's singing was beautiful as ever.

My thoughts on Christmas music #1

If I was daddy and I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus, a laugh it would not have been.

Two quotes for comparison

A prophet and a pastor:

"I love that man better who swears a stream as long as my arm yet deals justice to his neighbors and mercifully deals his substance to the poor, than the long, smooth-faced hypocrite." - Joseph Smith

"I have three things I'd like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don't give a shit. What's worse is that you're more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night." - Tony Campolo

What think ye?

Prop 8 Musical

Yeah. I know what I promised. This was really funny though.

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Scenes from an awesome week

I just dropped off Angela at the airport after spending an amazing week with her.