Shutterstock Wedlock
I'm a substitute wedding photographer. You'll love their pictures
till death do you duckstack
H e l l o a n d w e l c o m e t o m y b l o g . I n c a s e y o u w e r e w o r r i e d , m y b l o g i s n a t i v e t o m a n y n o n - d u c k s u b j e c t s , s u c h a s : S t a c k s . U n f o r t u n a t e l y , o u r e m a i l a c c e l e r a t o r1 i s b r o k e n s o w e a r e h a v i n g w h a t t h e n e w s l e t t e r b u s i n e s s c a l l s “ A S l o w S t a r t ” . I f y o u k n o w a n y o n e w h o i s s e l l i n g e m a i l a c c e l e r a t o r s p l e a s e r e a c h o u t t o u s . I f n o t , t h e a l t e r n a t o r s h o u l d k i c k i n i n a m i n u t e h e r e . Oh, there it is.
Well that was embarrassing. You still with me? Good. We’ve got some engineers on fixing that old thing but the button to turn it off is located inside the track for some reason so basically we just keep launching ducks down the tube and hoping they bonk it by accident. Well, that’s quantum email for you. All new tech has its quirks! Gregory, feed it a few more scientists next time
Sponsored Message: The Dark Web
Hello. This is your Dark Web speaking
Many people surf the world wide web, but how many people surf the dark web? The shadowy underbelly of the internet, spun by Dark Spiders who want you to know they are lonely and not at all hungry.
Wirehead Heaven
Marriage Doctrine2 and playing with blocks
Latter-Day Saints have a special hymn with a special line:
In the heav’ns are parents single?
No, the thought makes reason stare!
Truth is reason; truth eternal
Tells me I’ve a mother there.
This is what Creedal Christians would call a “mystery3”, a term Christians use to refer to divine truths and sacred realities that are partially hidden from human understanding but revealed through faith, scripture, and sacraments. The idea of a Heavenly Mother is abhorrent to Thomistic Theists who root God’s sovereignty as dependent on him existing outside of reality, but it nevertheless fundamentally shapes how we as saints approach our understanding of the world.
Christians, in my observation, usually find themselves split in two worlds- the distasteful, fleshy one, and the promised spiritual heaven to come, a heaven without the icky necessities like eating, working, and all those other consequences of Adam partaking of the fruit. Christians claim marriage and such things are good things, but they also declare that God could never have any part in them, that marriage is basically a symbol, an icky accident of mortality that God instituted marriage to deal with but which is fundamentally inferior to being a Eunuch. Because Christ told the Sadducees that there is no “marrying” in the resurrection, the vast majority of Christians simply believe families are going to terminate in the afterlife, and that you will be okay with this because you’ll be so drugged out by heaven’s heaven-ness that mortal concerns won’t matter. This is basically where the caricature heaven of sitting on clouds playing harps comes from. Eastern Orthodox probably have the most radical view which is that the marriage doesn’t “dissolve” it just gets “upgraded” into dissolution, sort of the same way the Law of Moses demanded cow sacrifice but once Christ was offered as the ultimate sacrifice its unnecessary because everything just points back to him.
I hope Ronald Reagan4 doesn’t kill me for saying this, but marriage is good. I think everyone who thinks about it comes to this conclusion, but the theological question is whether God is preparing us for a next life which is wholly unlike this current life. I would say that Christ was not known for giving direct answers to trick questions, and Levirate marriage is of course not the same as what Latter-Day Saints call “sealing” or “eternal marriage”. A Levirate marriage is when according to the Old Testament commandment, a man marries his brother’s widow to have children in his brother’s name. Basically she’s still married to the first husband, which is kind of obvious from the scripture really. They aren’t “marrying” her in the same sense the first husband did. Latter-Day Saints affirm that the unmarried will be angels in the eternities, but we deny that this is God’s will.
Christ gave his apostles the authority to “bind on earth, and that same shall be bound in heaven.” There are not a lot of things this could be referring to. However, the historical record is fairly clear that this authority was not passed on. Without apostles, the church could no longer bind things in heaven, so it makes perfect sense to Latter-Day Saints that other churches perform marriages not for eternity, but “until death do you part.”
Latter-Day Saints believe Heavenly Father was once a mortal man, like Jesus Christ. And like Jesus Christ, perhaps the Father also appeared to a special woman whom he had to inform he had “not yet ascended”. I don’t know if Christ married in his mortal life, though I am personally partial to the idea that it would have been the groom’s responsibility to provide the wine at his own wedding feast, and that to be a Rabbi you had to be married, and that like baptism, Christ would have been married “to fulfill all righteousness”. For God had said: It is not good for man to be alone. Its whatever though, right? Unless you, for some reason, have a vested interest in God not partaking in marriage or sex- because you implicitly believe both to be unclean and impure practices.
Many would say that they do value marriage, but at least from the outside its hard to buy it. Not that they mean to devalue marriage, but it seems to be sort of inherent to the theology- What you think God is represents the ideal state, so the closer you get to that ideal state the more righteous you’re being. I’m not sure how much this intuitively affects people, but certainly some of these institutions force their most devout members to choose between marriage and the priesthood, and the ones that don’t, don’t seem to have a cohesive framework for fitting sex into their theology. In the Bible belt, I sat with hundreds of couples who described themselves as “living in sin”, meaning fornicating. Most Christians do not care about sex outside of marriage at all, and I suggest the reason for this is that they kind of think sex is a mortal foible like overeating, and isn’t going to be relevant in heaven, which is sometimes, despite everything Jesus did to prove the point, nevertheless visualized as basically unbodied.
Therefore, Christians were unable to mount a strong theological defense when gay marriage activism became ascendant. Common Christian arguments became an object of outright scorn for atheists and liberals- “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” and so on. “God says” is about as compelling as “Allah says” or “Krishna says”, even to most Christians, that’s just the practical reality. Without a theological framework explaining it, Christians were left with no real recourse except dogmatism, which leftists are frankly much better at. Tack on a little faux-christian doctrine about tolerance and love and the nation never stood a chance.
So Latter-Day Saints are set apart. Our doctrine mandates marriage (including the sex part) as not just an optional part of life, but a necessary requirement for exaltation, and without it a person’s spiritual advancement dead ends completely:
“Therefore, when they are out of the world they neither marry nor are given in marriage; but are appointed angels in heaven, which angels are ministering servants, to minister for those who are worthy of a far more, and an exceeding, and an eternal weight of glory.”
Its a vision of heaven that is the best of this life, perfected. As you might expect, this cascades into family stability, with Utah and Idaho leading the nation in things like share of teenagers living with married parents and fertility rates. All of this is alien doctrine to my Christian brothers so let me return to the Bible. What does it mean to be made in God’s image?
There’s many ways to decide what scripture means. I rank “God personally telling you what he meant” in the number one slot, but immediately after that I like to use a heuristic called “letting scripture interpret scripture”5.
And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth
-Genesis 5:3
The wording is identical.
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.
-Genesis 1:26
A common scripture Joseph Smith used on this point is John 5:19:
Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.
-John 5:1967
God can and does choose a lot of titles to be known by, but the one we’re commanded to use when talking to him is “Father”. Because, Christ said, he’s not just Christ’s Father, he’s our Father too. In this way, Latter-Day Saints don’t have to choose between navigating flesh and navigating the spiritual- as our scripture says, “All things unto me are spiritual”. We collapse the bridge. In everything you do, your spirituality is a part of it. Latter-Day Saints who internalize these doctrines can’t “compartmentalize” their religion. It has to be who you are, both in church and in coding at a computer. It doesn’t solve all our problems, of course, but it gives a big head start, because its obvious from the outset that all the commandments God has given us have a point. When you understand the point, then its easy to obey, but I think Latter-Day Saints often take this for granted. We’re really blessed in dozens of different ways, even down to our understanding of our place in the world. Its hard to quantify how many head starts we get by default, but we often don’t capitalize on it. When we don’t emphasize the things that make us special, then our people start to become subject to the same destructive trends taking place worldwide.
It isn’t, to my observation, hitting us nearly as hard as its hitting the gentiles. Among church-going members, our TFR hovers around 3.0, and while I haven’t found data for temple divorce rates (the last data I saw was very good, like 90%, but that was from decades ago) I can definitely see that among my friends a good portion of the marriages that fail were outside the church. We aren’t Amish, Latter-Day Saints live “in the world” in the same feminist divorce apocalypse culture as everyone else, so it does affect us- but we also have some natural shielding. Like the Book of Mormon tells us, we can be grateful for Zion, but we can’t say all is well in it. God has commanded us to work.
Liquoroscopes
Today’s horoscopes are based on your favorite alcohol.
Disclaimer: I am a Latter-Day Saint and have never had alcohol.
Beer: idk
Vodka: idk
Whisky: idk
Wine: idk
Tequilla: idk
Rum: idk
Sake: idk
History
With great independence comes great responsibility. For the parent. To clean up the little independent’s messes.
The Church’s “General Conference” was this weekend. 8 hours of talks spread out across Saturday and Sunday and I’m going to have to relisten to all of it because kids are HIGH MAINTAINANCE. There was a talk about how divorce is bad, a talk about crying repentance without vitriol, a talk about removing rocks from backpacks, and a talk about the Japanese concept of Kaisen, which roughly translates to “being Japanese” and how that results in a functional airport. Cool stuff but I’ll need to reingest it to really meditate on anything
The kids are old enough we can let them outside a little bit. We’ve got a sort of netted tire swing and the kids were taking turns pushing each other on it. Our son would push the girl and say “blast off!”, and then he’d hop on and she would push him. She would yell “ba off!” and throw her arms out all excited after pushing him like 2 centimeters (her body’s current limit)
I was exhausted and trying to sleep, and my son comes in and says “can you read this?” and puts a book up my right nostril. I told him “no… I will die.” And he looked at me like I was stupid and said “No. Only womens die. When they are going uphill!” So its good to know he’s been paying attention on his walks with mama
blanket apocalypse
Duckstack Technology: Invisible Ink
Our scientists are pleased to announce this new reality bending tech
Most people are surrounded by paper8, filled with entities called letters, watching you. But you can’t fight something you can’t see. We’ve invented something called a pen, with which you can draw the invisible letters out, by inking them. Get those invisibles. Decode their secrets. Protect your family. All of this and more, with: Pen
Ducksnax
Poker
We’ve discovered so many types of email by smashing newsletters together at mach 7
declared heretical by 5000000 councils and authorities
One they heavily disagree with lol
Ronald Reagan signed the very first state level no-fault divorce bill into law. He also signed the Federal Infinite Migrant Underclass Importation Bill, and the All Snacks Must Be 50% High Fructose Corn Syrup” bill. The most conservative republican who had ever lived
revelation
scripture interpreting scripture
peer interpretation <50 years removed from the source
Passed down tradition
“whatever I want to be true, personally”
Philosophy
non exhaustive list
in case you missed the citation right before I pasted the quote I guess. IDK read the scripture twice
scripture twice, cut once
Yay, so good, thanks! A lot of angles I didn’t expect. I currently believe God loves diversity in the Chesterton sense, so the idea that marriage is mystically favored to such an extreme is not one I share. I think we each contribute something new to creation that’s interesting and let’s say “fun” for God when it’s in harmony with let’s say the Good. But as a constructor of mathematical models it’s also obvious that marriage/procreation vastly amplifies that creativity in most cases. Still, one can easily name celibate geniuses in earth’s history (even if you don’t count Christ as one) who contributed more creatively than many married couples and all their descendants, and that’s within the confines of mortal life. If they didn’t decay and die, presumably they would go on creating new things forever. But then maybe that’s in some sense being a servant to the celestial marriages, idk. Anyway, thanks so so much!