On May 9, something random from my childhood popped into my mind for no apparent reason: a story revolving around a misunderstanding of the phrase "beans swell" -- which was intended to mean that some beans had swollen to gigantic proportions but was understood to mean that beans are really "swell," in the dated slang ...

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost

I first encountered Robert Frost's beautiful and so-memorable miniature some forty-plus years ...

The totalitarian ideology of "this world" works by establishing a cycle of soft-sell assumptions, that are "confirmed" by the hard-sell propaganda of facts and theories, that provide evidence to "prove" the assumptions.

Assumptions and evidence support each other pre-emptively; in a confirmatory-cycle that ...

Christians say Jesus Christ is necessary.

The necessity of Jesus only makes sense if God, the creator of this world, is not-wholly responsible for the situation.

If God is doing His best... But a further factor is needed.

On May 9, I posted "Joseph Smith and Michelangelo's Creation of Adam," in which I described the montage with which every UltraMormonChan video ends. I specifically mentioned this image:

This ends with a closeup of the Angel Moroni's hornless hand (it was dislodged in an earthquake in 2020, a sign the church ...

This morning I woke up with a line from "Joan of Arc" by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark in my mind:

Now she's on her way to another land

During my lunch break today, I started reading Child of Fortune by Norman Spinrad, a novel I picked up at a used bookstore some months ago for no other reason than that it had ...

Yesterday I read this in The Story of Alice:

An obituary of Carroll in the Saturday Review pointed out that she [Alice] 'moves through her wonder-world with much of the modern spirit, which has now and then to be wholesomely repressed'. The notion that repression of any kind could be wholesome might sound surprising, ...

Jesus Christ is our saviour.

What is he saving us from? And don't say "our sins" because that doesn't make sense to me.

Jesus is saving us from death.

But everybody dies, including Christians; and when we die we cease to exist...

It is about what happens after we die. Even without Jesus, everybody remains in ...

(the following came half as a result of Bruce’s post, and half from what i was already scribbling before. the synchronicities have been exceptionally active lately).

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there are many types of intelligence, and having ease with words is just one of them. of course, there are arguments to be made that it is the ...

I am continuing to add to the new compilation blog "Bruce Charlton on Music" - most recently a post that might be useful to those who are setting out to explore the Classical music repertoire.

I focus on my three favourite composers, and probably the greatest by reputation - Bach, Mozart, Beethoven; and discuss how ...

This past Saturday, May 9, one of the reading comprehension exercises in the English textbook I'm using for one of my classes was a paragraph about the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. The first comprehension question after the article had four pictures of Egyptian deities (easily recognizable as Sekhmet, Bastet, Isis, and ...

Apologies for the hiatus. It wasn't planned -- but needed.

I shall resume regular blogging around May 20. Until then . . .

The first account of Nephites practicing baptism is at the Waters of Mormon, where Alma baptized himself and his followers. Alma had fled from the Lehi-Nephi group founded by Zeniff and later led by Noah and then Limhi. This group had broken off from the main Nephite-Mulekite group in Zarahemla c. 200 BC, and the two ...

I just wanted to note the recurrence of Under, as a capitalized name for a particular place or condition.

First, the Men at Work song "Down Under" came up in "Tim knows" (February 17) and "To the Faithful Departed" (March 6). The original song of course refers to Australia, but these posts refer to how it has ...

A problem that I experienced upon becoming a Christian, is that the standard model over the centuries is first to discover the true institutional manifestation of Christianity: then believe it, obey it.

The flip side of this standard model; is that a good Christian does not make up his own mind; because the major ...

Tonight I read some more in The Story of Alice. Carroll has already died at this point, and the book is exploring how the idea of "Wonderland" continued to develop after its creator was gone. Here are a few of the things I read, taken from three successive pages:

Wonderland – a place that gave the impression of ...

I have been reading magical fiction and fantasy since discovering Tolkien in 1972, and continued with a (partly academic) study of animism and shamanism in the early 2000s; but I began reading about 20th century magic at the start of 2020.

In this I was, belatedly, following-up a recommendation by William Wildblood ...

Late last night, an image of the Justice card of the Tarot impressed itself on my mind, and I started thinking about it. It occurred to me that the word justice can be divided into the two words just ice. Fire and ice? No, just ice. Though I would ultimately dismiss that thought as meaningless, I did entertain it long ...

Since reading Owen Barfield, in context of my preceding academic studies of human evolution; I have accepted that there has been (and is, ongoing) a development of human consciousness that is evident through recorded history, and consistent with what we infer about prehistory - and evident also in the lifespan of ...

I've been thinking about the difference between love and compassion. Spiritually speaking, compassion is a Buddhist virtue while love is Christian. Some people would say these are the same thing, just differently viewed. I don't believe they are the same at all. Compassion is supposed to be rooted in a recognition of ...

Following from yesterday's discussion; I shall put forward here an explanation for those beings who are traditionally regarded as demons in orthodox Christian theology:

The definition of which is that they are spirit-beings, that have never incarnated, and which are eternally committed to evil such that they cannot ...

Two days ago, I discovered the YouTube channel UltraMormonChan (actually I discovered it on Rumble, but it's on YouTube, too) and have since watched several of their videos. Almost every video ends the same way: There's a rapid-fire montage of images, accompanied by a drumbeat, beginning with Michelangelo's Creation ...

What seems to me a very powerful argument against the mainstream orthodox Christian notion that God-the-creator is both Good and an Omni-God; is the theologically-assumed reality of demons - that is, of never-incarnated spirits who are irredeemably committed to evil, and who operate in this world.

In an ultimate ...

I dreamt that a Taiwanese girl told me she had decided to go by the English name Isabel. I said, "Good choice. That's a good Book of Mormon name." (This was perhaps influenced by my post "The harlot Isabel," though that was more than two months ago.)

Later in the dream, I was reading the Book of Mormon and found that ...

I have added (and compiled) some more entries for the Bruce Charlton on Music blog - including an extended piece on Music in my Early Life.

This is how it begins:

My first musical instrument, at age ten, was a ukelele - the one that looks like a little guitar - and it cost one pound and one shilling; bought for me ...

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Saint Mungo (aka Kentigern) meets, debates and baptises Merlin (aka Lailoken) as depicted in Stobo Kirk, Scotland

Saint Kentigern (aka Mungo) was one of the great missionaries to the Ancient Britons (including Picts), founder of the Cathedral and Patron Saint of the city of Glasgow; and has many ...

How's the deluge going Noah. Swimmingly.

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in the lusitanian dialect we call a short nap 'passing through the embers'.

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what a great place

it could be if everyone

knew their place

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given the etymology, a reasonable abstracted and expanded definition of humility could mean ‘being grounded’ (in ...

Christians (of various denominations) often make a good deal of the assertion that Jesus Christ is King of the world, and the Universe - everything.

The intent is, obviously, to emphasize that Jesus is divine, is a god - and (for Trinitarians) that Jesus is The One creator God.

The intent is to make sure that ...

Although an irritating affectation among adolescents; there is more to the "So what?" attitude than is first apparent.

To respond to information thus is a form of reductionism; and reductionism (aka. scientism, materialism, positivism) has been and is the ruling reality of our civilization - hence the world.

"So ...