Whitewash High Posh
When everything is boring nobody knows that you're refined
Look before you duckstack
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Every so often it comes the time to doomscroll the spam in your email inbox, hoping in vain to spearfish something interesting from the currents of bills and spam, and this time it seems you have found a Duckstack. Congratulations! Now, if you’re a “catch and release” doomscroller, you can just read it and toss it back into the ether, letting it swim away on the currents to be discovered and read by some other soul1 looking for relaxation and philosophy and whatever else we offer. But some of you want to eat the Duckstack. And on this matter you will need a cooking guide.
First, smack it until it stops moving. Hit your monitor, phone, paper, or whatever else you’re reading this on until it “looks dead.” Then run it under cold water to get all the letters off. If you’re on a device, the ideal state is a screen that’s 15 shades of pink and orange with a lot of lines. That’s how you know its well done. You don’t have to cook it and in fact most connoisseurs tell me2 Duckstack is better eaten raw, like sushi. You already rinsed off the mind germs so there’s no danger of contamination, just shove your phone right into your mouth.
Poetic License
expires every month and requires two factor authentication to renew
The poets are dangerous and out of control. The Duckstack has introduced a new licensing requirement to avoid any further casualties. If you are a rogue poet, understand that poetry is not just musical— its a crime. Be sure to get properly licensed with the link below so that you aren’t caught operating illicitly.
God Will Not Save You
Humility is a virtue except when your religion says you have to be right about everything
There’s some dude named Bryan Johnson who has devoted billions of dollars- his life savings- to researching biological immortality. His whole thing is, through research and science, he wants to overcome death. A lot of Christians like to dunk on him by saying “Christ already did that!”, despite the evidence in front of their eyes that people still die all the time. I agree with them of course, but as someone who has had a child pass away and who I have been missing very much this week, this type of comment feels… Shortsighted.
I’ve written a fair bit recently about how Christians have a long and terrible3 history of philosophical maximalization: “God isn’t just good, he’s the very concept of goodness, all goodness proceeds from him and there is no good without him.” would be a standard example. Because of this philosophical lineage, what I see a lot of times is people viewing God a primarily a sort of trump card, a wild card that can be played in response to essentially anything. Low on money? Go to church. Trouble with women? Go to church. A huge motivation behind this thinking is tribalism, but this is two separate moral errors.
The first error is that offering people solutions with no regard for their person is worse than useless. The second is that you’re speaking about something you don’t actually have authority to speak on- If God didn’t authorize you to speak for him and show you what would happen, you’re more making a prediction. But whether church truly helps, or not, for various issues, almost no one is thinking the steps through. “How does going to church solve dating or money or morality or (etc)?” If you actually examine it, beneath this simplicity you usually discover the prosperity gospel: “Because God always gives his believers whatever they need/want.” This worldview extends to a view of the afterlife which is indistinguishable from wireheading.
Latter-Day Saints can fall into this error too, but we have a lot more safe guards in place. First, we have an emphasis on teaching by testimony4. When we talk to others, we’re told to basically always tie it back to a personal experience. If I encourage someone to pay tithing, I should “bear testimony” of an experience where tithing has blessed my life, for example. So you’re supposed to be a mini-prophet with your own religious corpus, which gives you an understanding of the operating principles, from trial and error and practice. This creates an ad-hoc evidential basis for predictions which otherwise might not be logical or intuitive, which is what religious claims generally are.
The second safe guard we have is that the Book of Mormon is “messy”. While the Book of Mormon is full of stories of God performing miracles and dramatically saving people, its also full of stories where God doesn’t, and people die literally praying for help. In one instance, a prophet is watching the wicked burn women and children and says “why don’t we stop this, don’t we have the power of God?” and his partner answers “God says not to.” This is harsh doctrine.
It also happens to be true, meaning that it specifically reflects reality and the experiences you will have as you walk with God. Sometimes God literally saves you. He sends an angel, heals something unhealable, and literally acts as a get out of jail free card. Its powerful and makes life better in ways impossible without religion. And sometimes God answers true, and righteous prayers, with “No.” In a way, the Book of Mormon prepares people for life in this way. Instead of presenting history as a “gradual but guaranteed triumph of good5” it sells no such noble lies or rosy expectations, and the book culminates in the main group of righteous people apostatizing and devolving into cannibalism gangs and death cults before being pitifully wiped out. The world really is fallen. Even within the true church. It forces you to consider deeper principles for why God might say yes at one time and no in another, or make seemingly false prophesies, or allow something obviously wrong to happen in one circumstance or another. In the wake of a recent shooting at a catholic school, you had democrat governors outright mocking people for praying, saying prayer didn’t save the victims. Latter-Day Saints are shocked by the insensitivity and callousness of these leaders, but have been prepared more or less since primary to answer it.
There’s danger here in taking the wrong lesson, which is that you shouldn’t have faith. You can, and in fact should, ask God for things, believing that you will receive them. You should not view God as a cosmic supercomputer who is going to follow some optimum trajectory no matter what you say so why pray at all. It is the heritage of Adam to know good from evil, and God would be trampling on Adam’s sacrifice if he didn’t require faith, and he would also be trampling on Adam’s sacrifice if he didn’t respond to faith. To not respond to faith would be to reduce man’s capacity to understand the good. “Why is this man born blind?” “So that the grace of God can in him be made manifest.” This is also a harsh doctrine. It means sometimes God pulls back and makes you struggle for no reason other than to make you figure it out yourself. “God, why did you let this happen to me?” “I just wanted to see what you would do.”6
Its the difference between always having to be told what to do and having initiative, or as a famous video game character7 says, “we can’t expect God to do all the work.”
A friend recently asked me how I cope with believing that God can change his commandments, and I think its basically the same thing. Its certainly convenient to believe life is in essence an Ikea™8 project where all you have to do is follow the manual, but I just don’t feel like that matches to how it feels to actually live life. Not a single person on earth is playing with the same pieces. I believe it is plenty noble to believe God would be adaptive to the circumstances and cultures his children find themselves in. You don’t prescribe Tylenol™9 for autism10. Different problems require different solutions, and this is intuitive to me. Of course that means God is a constantly moving target and you have to keep your eye on the ball and recheck your position all the time, but that’s what it means to work out your salvation with fear and trembling11. Its the difference between believing God is proactive and believing he is inert- and by extension, how you believe man should live.
There’s a complex mesh of doctrines that can easily lead to inertness. When your doctrine posits Christ as not just the savior but also a sort of “final revelation”, and that the Bible is perfect, then you’re kind of obligated to believe you “have everything you need”. You have to treat everything as a “solved problem”, as though the only issue in life is a matter of compliance. You don’t need to understand things, because you’re not doing it yourself. Islam is especially prone to this but we see it in Christianity too.
To the ears12 of a Latter-Day Saint, this is kind of like saying “there will never be any more calamities, there will never again be any need for anyone to build an ark.” While you can often extract true principles from the Bible and reframe them towards modern issues (like chastity is good → pornography is bad for example), this often takes multiple extra steps relying on human intellect and a prerequisite desire to even be righteous. A lot of people fall by the wayside, practically speaking.
But if you think you’ve got the final perfect revelation, you can’t acknowledge and solve that issue. This leads to almost a form of self-righteousness-as-a-cope. After a mass shooting at a Latter-Day Saint church in Michigan this week, hundreds of thousands of Christians flocked to the internet to clarify that “it wasn’t Christians that were killed, it was demon worshippers”. To an uneducated reader, this might strike as “somewhat poor manners”, but when you understand the sort of tunnel vision operating behind the scenes, it isn’t really surprising at all. These Christians sincerely believe that their worldview is the only thing that matters, and in fact they can do no wrong by espousing it, since eternal hellfire (as they believe) is on the line. If you have absolute truth, how can you sin by espousing it, absolutely? This is inertness not of action, but of spirit.
On this, Latter-Day Saints again have a great deal of room. With a more expanded view of God’s mercy in the afterlife, we aren’t obligated to think philosophical error is literally murdering people. Instead, people are choosing how close they want to be to God, and qualifying themselves for greater blessings by living greater laws. Since our doctrine says the higher laws are service, compassion, charity, self discipline and so on, trying to be holier (usually, but with some exceptions as here again, the Book of Mormon espouses both peace and war as righteous states) leads to being more prosocial. As Joseph Smith said: “I find no fault with this people and therefore let me be resurrected with the saints, whether it be we ascend to heaven or descend to hell. And if we descend to hell we will turn the devil out the doors and make a heaven of it. Where this people are, is good society.” Such is aspirational, but often in life, sincere aspirations become true.
WET ORIGAMI
Arts and rafts
Okay, its totally soaked, but we’re going to try anyway. Maybe if I lay it flat on the table it will be okay. So far so good, as long as I never have to unfold any of this of course. Its practically gluing to itself with each fold. Oh shoot, it wants me to do a mountain fold here which means I’ll need to lift the paper up— well. It tore. Its just a little tear, I can probably salvage it. No no no okay, we’re stable again, it only tore a bit more. Next fold, all good so far. Okay another, great, that patched up some of the tear. Now we need to flip it over. easy does it, great. Another fold, and another, now we need to flip it again and open this flap. Not an easy task when the sides are all stuck together, I feel like its going to rip any second. Okay, now fold down, and flip it and repeat. Now open the flaps up, and we have a soggy dreamcatcher. Pick a color. It ripped in half.
History
There is an age where tantrums become gymnastics as they roll around and sit up and do back somersaults and flop back and forth
Here’s somethings the toddler said this week: “I'm cute and adorable and handsome and not a tree. or a truck.”
“You have three boys. You’re five people”
The toddler holding it up triumphantly: “Cheese. I call it: Cheese”
We said “aww look at my cute baby girl” and the toddler echoed: “aww, look at my cute baby sister!”
We have a painting in our house of Jesus as a shepherd and a bunch of sheep. The toddler was telling us about it. “That’s Jesus, and when everybody turned into goats.” One of my favorite bible stories
The kids found a container of sprinkles and coated the kitchen in a fine layer of them. It was very painful. I’ll need to make a note that we don’t need caltrops, we don’t expect enemy cavalry to come through there
After grandpa talked with the toddler about his brother dying and the afterlife, the toddler tells it to everybody we meet. We were putting groceries on the conveyor belt and the toddler says to the cashier “my brother died.” We were hiking and encountered an older couple on the trail, and I caught up just as he was telling them that his brother died. Thankfully people love hearing about dead children
The baby is almost, sort of, starting to talk. She’s known what words mean forever, of course. Tried getting her to say mama and she was happy to. Tried getting her to say papa and she looks away and then peeks at me from the corner of her eyes while grinning. Apparently she did this in reverse to my wife too.
The toddler’s underwear was wet so we asked him, rhetorically you know, “did you pee in your underwear?” and he responded “No, that’s my sister’s pee.” don’t you hate it when your sister pees on the underwear you’re wearing
Exclusive Interview: The Letter E
Not just any reporter can get an interview like this.
The Duckstack: Hey E thanks for being here.
E: eh
The Duckstack: What’s it like being the most used letter?
E: eeeeh
The Duckstack: If you could pick a favorite letter, what would it be?
E: eeee
The Duckstack: have you ever had any problems with drugs?
E: e
The Duckstack: Alright. Anything you want to promote before we go?
E: eeee
Ducknsax
Well Done
i hope
Or they would, if I had connoisseurs, I imagine
(seconds before inventing philosophy) “time to start the dark ages”
It has been said that every single one of our doctrines originates from personal experience rather than scriptural extraction- we believe God has a body because that’s what Joseph Smith and others saw, for example. But you’re also encouraged to get your own experience/testimony of everything
This is called or at least a cousin to “whig history”, a form of revisionism where you’re always more righteous than your ancestors, the correct institution always wins, etc. A lot of leftism is like this, believing our current society to be much more moral than the slaveholders or polygamists or nuclear family centered past. I think the Bible for the most part is the opposite narrative where Israel is constantly falling away from God and stepping on rakes and barely holding it together. Both Latter-Day Saints and Catholics believe the church can never fail and they’re right in one sense but they’re mostly wrong in the others.
One time after a minor car accident that ended up costing me a few hundred dollars I asked God why he didn’t protect me and he told me “it rains on everyone dude get over it.” So that’s also an answer God sometimes gives.
Mario: “we can’t expect God to do all the work.”
I don’t know if Ikea™ is actually trademarked but better safe than sorry. It certainly isn’t trademarked by us.
I don’t know if Tylenol™ is actually trademarked but better safe than sorry. It certainly isn’t trademarked by us.
Or…. Maybe you do!
Phillipians 2:12 Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
I don’t know if ears™ is actually trademarked but better safe than sorry. It certainly isn’t trademarked by us.