#RULES should be made clear such that people NOT ALREADY INTIMATELY FAMILIAR WITH THE COMMUNITY can understand them too!!!!!

[hua-fei-hua]

actually my ideal role in a fan community would be that of philosopher, where i start asking mods/admins questions about the rules and what they Mean in order to obtain Maximum Clarity (for Neurodivergent Reasons(tm) ofc) and probably also promote greater understanding btwn community members and casuals looking in

#like. i think the greeks were onto something when plato(?) said that a government should have an official philosopher in it #it's that or it's just the 'child of church leaders' thing that led me to ask my parents abt community building n management at dinner today #bc i was curious as to whether any of what they'd learned in seminary school could apply to fandom or w/e #like. christianity kind of is just a fandom. a really massive fandom that has its creepy parts its unsavory parts it culty parts #its liberal sides/interpretations and its conservative sides/interpretations etc etc all bc of the existence of one source material #like scaling is ofc the major difference btwn christianity (a religion) and fandom (a hobby (i hope)) which results in very real power #but anyway they're both fragmented into littler denominations that have their spats as *communities* see that's the key here /community/ #anyway justification for using religious source/insp/whatever done what was i trying to get at here. #ah. well i guess an important role a philosopher would have in a community would be to prevent the formation of dogma #like. i hate it when people say things and expect common sense (or assumptions based on their personal worldview) to fill in the gaps #it's like my complaint abt how places have rules that literally JUST SAY 'don't be weird' #i've been in fandom long enough to know what you mean by 'weird'. BUT I'VE READ TOO MUCH ABT HISTORIANS GOING MAD BC NO ONE WRITES DOWN WHAT #THEIR BASIC ASSUMPTIONS ARE BC NO ONE THINKS TO THINK OF THEM LET ALONE QUESTION OR DEFINE THEM CLEARLY #RULES should be made clear such that people NOT ALREADY INTIMATELY FAMILIAR WITH THE COMMUNITY can understand them too!!!!! #imagine if in school the syllabus said 'basic classroom rules etc' instead of like. actually saying what was/wasn't allowed. #you probably could get away with that in middle/high school but they've been socialized to that sort of thing by then #idk vague rules n statements infuriate me to some degree and make me want to toe the line So Badly bc i was a horrible child lol #clarity of instruction and strict (but not cruel) enforcement that is based on understanding the rule's spirit and intent #are imperative to community maintenance and health imo #花話

[soulmate-game]

Part1 ... Part2 ... Part3...

Marinette blinked, tilting her head a bit. The streets around them were loud and bustling with bodies and vehicles despite the sun being right at the horizon. Gotham would slow down soon, people being wary of the darkness in the crime-ridden city,but for now it was busy as usual. Marinette and Jon stood outside the stadium that would be hosting the World Fencing Finals, but a familiar face had stopped them right before they entered.

“I didn’t know you liked fencing,” Marinette mused out loud, making Damian tsk and look away. The boy got along with Marinette alright, but that didn’t immediately cancel out his natural standoffish nature.

“Of course you didn’t, I never told you,” he retorted smoothly, the youngest Wayne moving forward to reluctantly open the door for his two friends.

“You hardly talk about yourself at all, actually,” Marinette continued, humming to herself. “Are you keeping secrets?”

Damian scoffed again, even as Jon snickered behind them. “Everyone has secrets. Even a naive child like you should know that.”

Jon couldn’t quite wipe the smile off his face. He had long since gotten used to the strange way the two communicated over the past month since they first met. Marinette always seemed to know when one of Damian’s jabs were or weren’t meant as serious insults, just as Damian was somehow able to always pick up the exact second that Marinette’s caring nature switched from being rooted in kindness to coming from a place of fear.

Yet Jon was the only one of the trio of friends who could hear their heartbeats change pace when they spotted one another, or when their hands accidentally brushed. Neither Damian nor Marinette seemed to realize their own feelings yet, but Jon would be there when they did.

He just hoped their relationship didn’t develop too quickly. Both his best friend and his new sister were dangerously fragile, just in different ways. He didn’t want them accidentally breaking each other.

“Come to think of it,” Jon heard Damian say, pulling the young kryptonian from his thoughts. “You do not talk about yourself quite as much as it seems like you do. You’ve certainly never mentioned liking swordplay.”

“Ah,” Marinette gave Damian a lopsided smile, rubbing the back of her neck. “I like watching it sometimes, but I’m mainly here to see my friend. She’s one of the competitors today, she and I managed to convince her mom to let her sleepover at our place for two nights.”

“But only if she wins,” Jon added sourly. He and his dad had both heard that condition of the deal that Kagami’s mother had made loud and clear. “I’m sorry Mari, but your friend’s mom sounds way too strict and demanding. If she wins this competition, she can spend two days hanging out with you, but if she even gets as low as second place they have to go back to Japan for remedial training immediately?” Jon shook his head. It wasn’t right.

Damian raised both eyebrows at that, but seemed more intrigued than surprised. “I’ve seen stricter,” he commented casually, only succeeding in making Jon glare at him for the veiled reference to his own dark childhood. “But you are right, Kent. That is concerning treatment. Who is this friend of yours, Marinette? Perhaps I have heard of them if they are good enough to qualify for the World Finals.”

By then, the trio had already handed in their tickets and reached the stands. Jon and Marinette glared at Damian when they realized all of their seats were in the front row, right next to each other even, knowing without a doubt that the rich boy was somehow behind it. The two Kents had had much worse seats when they had first purchased their tickets online.

Marinette waited until they all sat down before answering. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you know her. Her name’s Kagami Tsurugi—“

“World class fencer from a long family line of Japanese fencers,” Damian interrupted, nodding knowingly as one of his hands raised to gently grip his chin. “Before Fencing was introduced to Japan, they were famous for their practice of kendo and katana technique. Especially considering their typically untraditional way of insisting that the females in their family take up combat. That, of course, traces all the way back to the ancient female samurai, or Onna-Bugeisha, Tomoe Gozen, one of the ancestors of the Tsurugi family before they split from the Gozen family.”

Marinette and Jon just blinked at the young heir, before Jon’s mouth slowly started to curve up in a mischievous smile. Damian’s eyes narrowed in warning.

“Kent—“

“You’re a fan,” Jon ignored the warning, gleefully grinning ear to ear. “You did your research on her and her family, that’s some hardcore biggest-fan behavior right there. Do you want us to see if she can give you an autographkfgdjgdgj—“ Jon was cut off as Damian lunged over Marinette, the only person separating the two boys, and muffled Jon’s mouth with one hand as his other tried to slam Jon’s head on the chair’s arm. Of course super strength was no joke, and Jon’s head didn’t move even an inch as he laughed through Damian’s hands.

Marinette was somehow able to separate them, and Damian sat back in his chair with a huff and straightened his button-down shirt imperiously.

“I am not a ‘fan’,” he denied primly, but not even Marinette missed the slight pink to his cheeks even through his denial. “I simply acknowledge her skill. As a practitioner of swordplay myself, it is only me being proactive to research her family history. If she is so inclined, I intend to invite her to the manor sometime before she leaves for a casual spar.”

“Oh, she’ll love that,” Marinette agreed, nodding even as the first duel started. “Kagami is always looking for new sparring partners who can keep up with her, but so far only our other friend Adrien and her mom are capable enough. But…” her voice had dropped to a whisper out of respect for the current combatants, but both boys noticed her pause and the way she worried her lip.

“What?” Jon whispered back, worried. Marinette’s nose wrinkled.

“But I don’t know if it’s a good idea to introduce Kagami to Damian. They might end up taking over the world.”

Jon slapped a hand over his mouth to stifle a snort. Damian just smirked.

“Now you must introduce us. Perhaps I can finally meet someone who can conspire with me to get rid of my brothers.”

With that, the three quieted and actually watched the fights. Jon didn’t really understand the rules or what was happening, but he liked watching the footwork and the different styles that each competitor used when they dueled. Then, about the third or fourth match, a fencer in a bright red uniform walked out.

“That’s her!” Marinette squealed, leaning forward in her seat. She and Damian had occasionally whispered to one another about what they thought were good or bad calls on points, and critiquing different competitor’s techniques. It was a bit of an eye opener to Jon, who realized that he didn’t know much about what Marinette’s life was like back in Paris despite living with the girl for almost five months. In fact, he didn’t know much about her beyond what she actively showed at home.

Maybe Damian had a point earlier. Marinette had a weird way of making it feel like she spoke about herself a lot but in reality didn’t share much about herself at all. Most of what Jon knew about her came from experience. He knew her tells for whenever she started getting nervous, excited, worried, or was close to an attack. He knew how to tell when she was feeling overwhelmed or started retreating into herself because she didn’t want to intrude. But this?

Jon watched as Marinette stood up and cheered for Kagami when the red-clad fencer scored swift points.

He didn’t know the things that she liked to do besides designing. She mentioned listening to Jagged Stone, maybe that was her favorite kind of music.

Whatever. Jon wouldn’t let himself dwell on how Marinette didn’t open up as much as he would like—it was his job as the older brother for once to put some effort in too. Besides, with everything else Marinette had been through over the months it made sense for her to be a little closed off.

Jon moved his eyes back to the floor. Kagami lunged forward right then, ruthless as she slashed and didn’t allow her opponent a moment to do anything but scramble to deflect. But the red-uniformed woman was too fast, almost violent in her strikes, and she landed three hits on her opponent within one second.

Yeah. Now that he knew what was going on, he knew how to gently, slowly, learn more about his sister. Sorry Kon, but Jon had his eyes on the Best Brother prize.

Kagami won, without her opponent winning a single point against her.

“You know, Kagami’s fighting reminds me of someone,” Jon spoke up, ignoring the venomous glare Damian sent him. His sister looked over curiously as the fighters swapped out and Kagami was led to the back, where a locker room of sorts was set up for the competitors.

“Really? Who? I’ve only ever seen Kagami fight like that. Maybe her mom, but that’s different.”

Jon smiled, knowing he’d get some shit for this stunt later when he went on patrol with Damien but decidedly not caring.

“Robin. The newest one anyway, you can find videos online from different sightings of him around Gotham. He uses a sword.”

Marinette raised an eyebrow, obviously knowing that he partnered with Robin a lot as Superboy but not knowing that Damien was also intimately aware of that fact.

“Huh, that’s weird. Ryuuko, one of the Paris heroes, also uses a sword. But it’s a Miraculous weapon, so it’s a bit different than a normal sword.”

Jon winced. That backfired, he and his dad weren’t quite ready for the rest of the JL to know about the Paris situation. So much for the plan to bring it up later, when Marinette was better settled into life in America.

“Paris has heroes?” Damian asked, eyes sharp. All it took was one glance from the green-eyed boy for Jon to know that this would definitely be brought up to Batman. Great.

At least the next match started, distracting both of the fencing fans from continuing the conversation. For the moment.

—*—*—*—*—*

Marinette was the loudest voice in the stadium, standing on her chair without shame as she cheered for her friend, Kagami’s lips twitching in the slightest hint of a smile before she bowed her head to accept her medal.

Marinette was not surprised at all to see her friend win first place in the whole competition. Damian was pleased, and suitably impressed. Jon was just happy that this meant Kagami’s mother couldn’t keep Marinette from spending time with her friend.

Hopping down from the chair, Marinette turned to her friend and brother with a large smile. “Come on! Kagami and her mom are going to meet us in front of the building once everything is done, but I don’t want to fight the crowds.”

Jon cringed, nodding and standing up immediately. Marinette didn’t do well in crowds nowadays, though it could certainly be worse. Inside buildings like the school wasn’t so bad, it was mainly outdoors. Jon and his parents never missed how Marinette would constantly hold Lois’s hand or stick religiously to the woman’s side whenever they walked outside around tall buildings or through thick crowds. None of them mentioned it.

Damien picked up on it, having observed Marinette’s behavior firsthand during the only time he had went outside with her somewhere other than school. They had merely gone to buy Damian a new tie that Marinette approved of, but the girl had scarcely gone further than a foot away from him the whole time they were outside in the city. Only the stern glances from Jon had kept him from commenting on it.

Moments later, the two had found themselves waiting outside the stadium at almost ten at night, though none of them seemed particularly uncomfortable. Marinette seemed downright at home, besides her occasional glances up at the building next to them and her refusal to leave Damian’s side. They waited a good half hour in the slight chill of the night air before Kagami Tsurugi, completely changed out of her uniform, walked up beside her mother Tomoe Tsurugi.

The older woman was, to Jon’s slight shock (Damian’s research was VERY thorough), blind. She tilted her head when she and her daughter stopped in front of the trio.

“Miss Marinette?” She asked in flawless English. “How have you been?”

Marinette smiled, the expression oddly soft compared to her usual beaming grin. “As well as I can be, Madame Tsurugi. With me are my adoptive brother, Jon Kent, and one of my new friends, Damian Wayne. If it is alright with you, we would like to go to Damian’s house for the night. My guardians and his father already approved.”

Jon and Damian blinked, never having heard Marinette speak so properly before. It truly said a lot about the kind of woman Tomoe Tsurugi was. The woman gave an icy smile, pleased but distant. She raised one delicate eyebrow.

“I am getting old, but not dumb Miss Dupain-Cheng. I know very well who the Waynes are, and referring to his home as a mere house is a gross understatement that you couldn’t hope to fool me with in a hundred years,” the woman remarked with subtle humor. Marinette chuckled.

“It was worth a shot,” she defended herself with a shrug. Tomoe shook her head in amusement before settling both hands on her cane and straightening her posture.

“If you vouch for your… friend…” Tomoe said with deliberate slowness. Marinette was quick to nod.

“I do. Damian is trustworthy, and I won’t leave Kagami alone, Madame Tsurugi.”

Tomoe’s mouth flattened, and she was silent for a moment. “You know that you are one of the few people I trust with my daughter, Marinette. I will trust your judgement this time as well. However, Kagami must still call me in the morning and when she does reach your new home as well. And you remember her vacation training schedule?”

Both boys looked at each other, wondering why Kagami did not even try to speak up even though they had their own suspicions. The Japanese teen found that to be the moment she was done being silent however, and sighed.

“Mother,” Kagami spoke, back straight and tone level and proper. “I am perfectly capable of sticking to my training on my own. I do not need Mari-hime to remind me.”

Tomoe pursed her lips, but nodded nonetheless. “Alright. Mister Wayne? I trust your father is alright with Kagami bringing her fencing equipment?”

Damian nodded, despite knowing that Tomoe would not see it. For some reason he got the feeling that she was fully aware of the gesture regardless of her lack of sight.

“Of course. I am actually a fencer as well, though not competitively. I was hopeful that Kagami would humor me with a spar, our manor has a rather nice gym that would provide a more than sufficient space for such an activity.”

At that, Tomoe seemed rather pleased. “That is, of course, up to Kagami since she has not seen Marinette in quite some time and likely has plans for her time already. But I encourage any opportunity that my daughter finds to hone her skills.”

“The competitors today were skilled, but lack knowledge of real battle,” Kagami added, locking gazes with Damian. “My mother trains me as if I were actually fighting, so I seldom find fencers able to match my reactions. If you believe yourself capable, I would be honored to cross swords with you.”

“Oh no,” Marinette stage-whispered to Jon even as her eyes stayed on Damian and Kagami. “This is where the world domination starts.”

Even Tomoe couldn’t resist a small grin at that, and it wasn’t much longer before the trio were picked up by Damian’s butler, who introduced himself as Alfred Pennyworth. Inside the limousine, Kagami visibly relaxed. Her back was still straight, though not overly so, and her face was no longer stringently stoic. Once they pulled away from the stadium, she wasted no time pulling Marinette into a tight hug.

“I am sorry I could not be there for you, Mari-hime.”

Marinette laughed, returning the hug enthusiastically. “Don’t be silly! You were at the funeral, and you video chat with me at least twice a week. That’s plenty.”

Kagami shook her head, tightening her hold. “My mother would have been more than happy to take you in. Sometimes I believe she likes you more than me,” Kagami finally pulled away, turning to level a hard stare at Jon. “But that obviously did not happen, so you and your parents better take good care of Mari-hime, or nobody will find your bodies.”

“Kagami!” Marinette immediately reprimanded, aghast. “The Kents are wonderful! And what did I say about the death threats?”

Kagami rolled her eyes. “My cousin’s family still makes traditional katanas. I have plenty of available arms to carry out my promises.”

“Kagamiiiiiii.”

“If they treat you well, then they have nothing to worry about.”

Marinette groaned in despair, dramatically flopping over until she was draped over the side of Kagami like a limp towel. “I’m gonna get you a spray bottle, and every time you threaten somebody with violence I’m going to spritz you.”

Kagami’s eyes narrowed in playful challenge. “You will have to catch me first.”

Damian was smirking, enjoying this interaction a bit too much. “I believe the two of us will get along just fine, Tsurugi. Do you have a favorite katana craftsman, by any chance?”

—*—*—*—*—*

“They’re so tiny!” The man did not seem to realize the danger he was in with that statement. He was apparently one of Damian’s older brothers, Jason Todd. Both Kagami and Marinette, the “tiny” people in question, glared daggers at the man. “Okay, you,” he said to Kagami, “You’re at least intimidating. Don’t unsheathe that sword please. Bruce already told us that you won the World Finals, and I would rather not die today.” He held his hands up in surrender. Kagami just smirked smugly, and crossed her arms.

Marinette narrowed her eyes. “And me?”

Jason blinked. “What about you? You’re tiny and adorable, even when you’re glaring at me!” He boldly came forward to rustle her hair. “Like a little pixie.”

Kagami covered her smile with a hand, eyes dancing with amusement. Bruce, who had been the first to welcome them all in and introduce himself to Kagami, was pinching his nose next to Alfred in the background. Damian’s other brothers were also gathered. Apparently they all had wanted to meet his new friend and Jon’s new sister.

“Be careful, I’m not the one you should be worried about. At least without my sword I am not as dangerous,” Kagami warned. Everyone blinked at her, and her expression quickly turned confused. Her eyes darted to Marinette, who was too busy glaring at Jason with puffed-out cheeks to notice. “Mari-hime… you didn’t tell anyone?”

Marinette finally looked over, shrugging. “I mentioned it to Jon, Clark, and Lois.”

“What are you talking about, Miss Tsurugi?” Bruce asked, curious after the warning from the fencer. Kagami looked up, and slowly a devious smile spread over her face. It was small, but sent shivers over Jason’s spine.

“Jason and Marinette should spar. Mari-hime is quite the combatant when she desires to be.”

Jason crossed his arms, raising his brow and looking Marinette up and down. “I don’t mean to sound rude, but I’m about double her size—“

“Hey Jon, why don’t you call Lois?” Marinette interrupted, turning to look at her brother with a small smirk. “We’ve got her a huge story— burly biker is too scared to spar a girl half his size.”

Cackles arose, the other two of Damian’s brothers leaning on each other as they guffawed. Bruce and Alfred even stifled chuckles of their own, and Damian’s smirk was infuriatingly prominent. Jon was much like the other two Wayne boys, nearly bowled over in laughter. Jason, after a brief moment of shock and offense, straightened up and grinned. He shrugged off his leather jacket with a small huff of laughter of his own.

“Alright, that was pretty good. You want a spar that badly, you got one. But you’re gonna have to really impress me if you want me to take back what I said about you being adorable and nonthreatening.”

“I’m putting fifty dollars on Marinette,” Kagami bet loudly, raising her hand. “Who wants to bet against me?”

Jason and Marinette both shook their heads in amusement, the big man leading Marinette to the family fitness room (the public one anyway, outside of the Batcave) as everyone besides Bruce and Alfred energetically placed their bets on who would win the spar.

Dick and Tim were betting on Jason, for obvious reasons. Damian withheld from betting, but it was clear he was hoping Marinette would somehow win. Jon just stayed quiet, refusing to share any opinion on the matter. But once Jason and Marinette started heading to the sparring mat that was already laid out, he stopped her.

“You sure about this?” He asked, pulling her away so that nobody else could eavesdrop. “I know I laughed and everything, but you don’t have to spar. Jason won’t hold back if you tell him not to, but he’s not a pushover in any respect.”

Marinette frowned. She had gotten a little caught up in the moment, but at the same time… she wanted this. “You guys are great,” she replied to her brother, voice equally soft. “But you and Clark don’t focus on combat technique. I haven’t had a real fight, at least not one where I don’t have powers to fall back on, in a long time. I need this.”

Jon sighed, but nodded. He squeezed her shoulder for a moment, before smiling at the shorter girl. “Then show everyone what you can do. And I suggest telling Jason not to hold back, or you won’t be able to show off as much as you want.”

Marinette bounced on her heels happily, leaning up to kiss Jon on the cheek. “I’m winning Kagami some money today!” She yelled with a fist-bump before jogging over to join a very amused Jason.

“Was your bro giving you some tips?” He asked, stretching out his arms as Marinette giggled.

“Kind of! Jon suggested that I ask you to not hold back!”

Jason froze, gaze sliding over to the young kryptonian, who only smiled back enigmatically. He might not have spent much time around the youngest Super, but he hung out with Kon often enough and he knew that Jon was fully aware of what he was capable of as Red Hood. He wouldn’t suggest that Jason not hold back unless he was actually confident in Marinette’s skill.

The rest of his family seemed to pick up on that as well, also frozen in shock. Jason was one of the most ruthless fighters of all of them, fearless and brutal.

“Kent better know what he’s doing,” Damian hissed under his breath, to which his father and brothers could only nod to silently.

“So the pixie wants me to not hold back? Alright,” Jason agreed to after a moment of stunned silence. Immediately most of his jovial manner drained away, replaced with focus as he spread his legs and sunk into a stance that came naturally to him at that point. If Jon and Marinette both wanted him to treat her like a real threat (without forgetting that this was just a spar, anyway) then he would. Maybe the girl had super strength or invulnerability like the other Supers. That would explain why Clark was so quick to take her in.

“Oh I hope we don’t regret this later,” Bruce groaned before stepping into the center mat and raising one hand. “Alright. Winner is whoever can pin or otherwise subdue the other first. Please, don’t break any bones or skin. I do not need an angry Lois Lane on my doorstep tomorrow morning. You can use the whole room as long as you don’t risk hitting or involving any of us innocent bystanders. Ready?” Bruce backed up off the mat. “Start!” He wasted no time backing away to a wall.

There was no moment of stillness. There was no waiting with baited breath or looking for an opening. As soon as Bruce called Start, Jason attacked.

He jumped over the distance separating him and Marinette, bringing his knee up to try and end this in one strike like he would have in the field.

Only Marinette wasn’t there to take the hit. Just as quickly as Jason had lunged, she had jumped. Instead of Jason kicking her in the stomach, the small Asian girl had leapt up, and landed on the upraised knee balanced on only one nimble foot.

Suddenly, they were face to face. They grinned at each other, and then they were nothing but movement again.

—*—*—*—*—*

@fantasiame @thestressmademedoit @amayakans @resignedcatservant @too0bsessedformyowngood @chocolatecatstheron @mooshoon @jeminiikrystal @bigpicklebananatree @thezestywalru @bugaboosandbees @ironspiderstark @mikantsume @marinettepotterandplagg @more-or-less-human-i-guess @myazael @ladybug-182 @buticaaba @dast218 @maribat-is-lifeblood @elspethshadow @fandomsaremylifeline @moonlightstar64 @whats-she-gonna-post-next @toodaloo-kangaroo @maybemanymuffins @worlds-tiniest-spook-pastry @legendaryneckjudgestudent @goblinwhoships @yin-390

Part 5

This got long, so the majority of the spar will be in the next part so that I don’t get cut off. :D OMG, StOrY DeVelOPmeNT?! Who am I?!

More good stuff next chap.

#ml x dc #maribat #mlb x dc #marinette kent #platonic jonette #marinette joins the kent family #daminette #damian x marinette #pre daminette #eventual daminette #platonic jasonette

[gravelyhumerus]

Criminal Minds College AU - Chapter 3

Fandom: Criminal Minds

Title: “I may just take your breath away”

Relationship: Jemily

Summary:

It's midterm season and Emily runs into JJ at the library, they decide to study together.

Slow-burn Jemily college AU where they live across the hall and despite all odds, the universe pushes them together. AKA they’re silly gay babies who pine after each other for months.

Read it on AO3

Tumblr:  One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, (bonus scene), Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen, Twenty, Epilogue

There were no seats left in this entire goddamned library. Not a single one. Emily was on her second lap on the third floor, desperate for somewhere to sit down and have some peace and quiet to study for her test. She should have assumed this would happen. It was midterm season and the libraries were packed with students around this time each year.

She quietly made her way through the stacks and came upon a long, rectangular table near the back window. It overlooked a dark parking lot. The books were gigantic tombs of old academic journals that no one had probably even opened in decades.

There were eight seats and seven people, with one selfish asshole storing their backpack on the empty seat. Well, could be saving it for their friend, but with it being midterm season, those rules really shouldn’t apply anymore.

Emily braced herself and, with a smile, tapped the boy on the shoulder.

He had a large pair of headphones on. He lifted one side off his ear in a gesture of: ‘what do you want.’

“Is anyone sitting there?” She whispered, as quietly as she could, pointing to the seat next to him.

“Oh sorry,” he said, somewhat reluctantly, moving the coat and bag, inviting her to join him. She smiled in thanks and sat down.

Carefully unpacking her laptop and books, Emily tried to avoid disturbing the other folks at her table, the silence making each noise she made boom through the library. She settled down and pulled out her thermos, taking a sip of her coffee and bracing herself for a long night.

Her core classes for psychology were brutal, filled with endless memorization of terminology, stacks of mandatory books to read and countless essays.

At 8:30 the next morning it was her Introduction to Clinical Psychology midterm, worth a whopping thirty percent of her grade. She spent the entire day, between classes, at the Starbucks on campus, drinking her way through her student funds in coffee form and making endless flashcards.

She already had a stack of almost one hundred cards and she still had a couple hours of work left.

Just returning from dinner at the cafeteria, Emily had decided that she needed the relative quiet of the massive campus library to focus on the memorization period of her evening.

She flipped to the right page of her textbook: page 315, with a large header reading “SEXUAL DISORDERS” in large caps. Emily sighed, it was a strange thing to spend her time learning but at least it never failed to be interesting.

At least she wasn’t in Statistics this semester.

Emily took another sip of coffee, then rummaged through her bag for her wireless headphones, connecting them to her phone in order to play her studying playlist, which was mostly movie soundtracks, interspersed with Emily’s favourite classical music and of course, some lo-fi hip hop beats. She could not listen to music with words when studying, she would get too distracted and get nothing done.

Emily began gnawing at her thumbnail, focusing on writing down the definitions.

After around two hours of writing, Emily finally finished her flashcards. She stretched her back, closed her textbook, and went on her phone for a short break.

A Snapchat notification popped up on her screen.

Cheetobreath98 added you as a friend.

Emily frowned. Who on earth was that? Emily clicked on the profile, revealing the familiar face of Jennifer Jareau.

JJ had added her as a friend! On snapchat no less! That was at least three steps more intimate than Instagram.

Woah. Slow down there Em. She told herself. Don’t make it something it’s not.

They kept running into each other. JJ was probably just being friendly. She probably just wanted to say thank you for the cookies or send her funny snaps of the other students on their floor.

She has a boyfriend, a boyfriend she is having trouble with, but a boyfriend nonetheless. You can’t go around thinking about intimacy and Jennifer Jareau in the same sentence.

Emily accepted the friend request. Did that make them friends now? Emily hoped so. They could be friends.

As Emily stared at their chat, a new snap from JJ came in. Emily couldn’t help herself, she opened it immediately and she was met with a photo… of herself.

Emily’s head shot up looking around. She looked back down and it was clearly a photo of Emily, hunched over the desk with her head resting on her chin, staring down at her phone, taken from somewhere to her left.

JJ waved at her from between some books. Emily shot her a surprised smile in response.

She closed her laptop, stood, and walked over to her.

“Creeper,” Emily whispered with a giggle.

JJ had a large textbook and some notebooks in her arms, and a backpack hanging off one shoulder, and leaned in towards Emily to speak quietly, which let Emily catch the light, fruity smell of her perfume, blending nicely with the earthy smell of the old books around them.

“Guilty as charged,” JJ smiled.

“What are you working on?” Emily asked, gesturing at her heavy load, she leaned and took a peek at the title of the textbook.

“French,” JJ said, “It’s hard to bullshit that when you don’t know it. I’ve got a midterm tomorrow.”

“Bien sûr,” Emily replied confidently in French.

JJ blinked.

“Tu parles Français?” JJ’s French was shaky and uncertain, with less of an accent than Emily would expect.

Emily coughed quietly and tried to clear her throat.

“I do,” she replied in French, “I’ve been told that when I was a toddler, I was speaking it more fluently than English.”

JJ glanced down, seeming to be translating her words for a brief moment before replying, slowly, clearly excited to use Emily for practise.

“Are you French?”

“No,” Emily said, “My mom wasn’t around much when we were living in France and the nanny didn’t speak English.”

“Ton nurse?” JJ asked, not knowing the definition of ‘nanny’ in French.

“Oh uh,” Emily replied in English, “My nanny, the lady who watched me when my mom was working. She’s an ambassador.”

JJ nodded, then switched to English. She didn’t ask about Emily’s dad, which Emily was grateful for.

“My family is French, originally I guess,” JJ said, “Hence Jareau , the French name. I remember my grandparents speaking it when I was growing up. I only learned a few words from them so I thought I’d take a course here. I need language courses for my communications degree anyways.”

“Your French is good!” Emily assured her. “Honestly mine is getting rusty, I have no one to practise on.”

“Well,” JJ said between coughs, “you could tutor me?”

Emily smiled. An opportunity to spend more time with her? She would take it. She nodded.

“Mais oui!” Emily replied in her most dramatic accent that she could manage, sending both girls into a fit of giggles.

“Shhhhh!” Someone at Emily’s table hissed.

The two girls made eye contact, then burst into another fit of giggles.

“I have a study room booked for nine,” JJ said, “If you want to join me.”

“Absolutely,” Emily replied, “I have a midterm tomorrow as well, so I’ll be here for awhile.”

“Allons-y!” JJ whisper-yelled.

Emily collected her things and followed JJ into a room down the hall, tucked behind the stacks. Inside, was a desk, a couple of white boards and a small window facing into the quad. It was small, with only two chairs. It was shocking that JJ even managed to snag that, the booking system filled up days in advance during midterm season.

“I hate whispering,” Emily said at normal volume once the door was shut.

“Libraries are supposed to be quiet,” JJ said.

“I’ve never been good at quiet.”

JJ laughed.

Emily sat down next to her, stealing a glance at JJ while she was distracted: she had a pair of track pants, with a loose fitted t-shirt on top, a pastel blue which complemented her skin tone well. On top, she had her varsity hoodie unzipped, with their school’s crest on display. She looked good, as always, despite being in basically athletic sweats looking ready to go to the gym at any moment.

Emily placed her books down next to JJ at the table, stacking her flash cards neatly next to it. JJ’s eyes widened at the sight of the pile.

“You don’t have to help if you don’t have time,” JJ said, “Honestly I would just appreciate the company.”

“Nonsense,” Emily replied, “I’d be happy to help. I’ve been working on these flash cards all day, I need a break anyways. How ‘bout we work through your practise sheets, then you quiz me after? What’s your test on?”

“Conjugation,” JJ replied, flipping her notes open to a page full of irregular verbs and their conjugations.

“Oh sweet,” Emily scanned the notes, “Present tense, I can do this.”

Emily leaned back in her chair, pulling her feet up to sit crossed-legged.

“I was worried you were going to ask me the difference between plus-que-parfait and subjonctif or something.”

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“Lucky,” Emily said.

JJ then reached into her bag, pulling out a small case and revealing a pair of glasses—reading glasses—and put them onto her face. They were gold rimmed, round framed, and made her eyes slightly larger with the magnification.

“You-” Emily stuttered, her brain feeling like it was short circuiting at the sight of JJ, “Have glasses?”

“Yeah,” JJ muttered flipping through her notebook, “I don’t really need them but I’ve been staring at screens all day and my eyes are tired.”

“Nerd,” Emily fake-coughs. JJ’s draw drops and she hits Emily playfully with her notebook, whacking her on the arm lightly.

“You promised to help me, not mock me for my bad eyes,” JJ huffs.

“Ok fine let’s conjugate… hmmm… ‘voir’ to start,” Emily jokes, spinning her pen between her fingers.

“I know you’re kidding but I actually don’t know that one.”

Emily grins and begins explaining to her how to conjugate ‘to see’ in French.

“Now,” Emily says, “If you want to talk about how I can see, and you can’t—because you’re blind—you would write: Emily voit. Emily sees.”

“Elle voit? V-o-i-t?”

“Oui, et, Jennifer ne voit pas!” Emily giggles, “Jennifer does not see!”

“Ha-ha,” JJ says, not laughing.

“Sorry, I’ll stop now,” Emily says, picking up the worksheet and reading it over.

“Basically,” JJ says, “I need to just memorize this list of common irregular verbs by tomorrow. I already have the regular er, ir and re verbs down.”

“Cocky girl,” Emily said. “I like it.”

“Ok what verb should we start with?”

“Vouloir,” Emily said, “to want.”

The deeper meaning of this was not lost on her, even as she said it. Emily was far past the point of denying it to herself, or Morgan when he teased her, Emily wanted JJ.

“Start with je,” Emily continued, unfazed by her own internal monologue. “What do you want?”

“Je veux… un biscuit,” JJ said, sticking her pen in her mouth. She was so cute when she focused, chewing distractedly on the cap, with her glasses falling down her nose.

“Now what would I want?” Emily prompted, trying to focus back on the worksheet and not JJ in profile, gazing at the gentle slope of her nose, her pink lips that would probably taste like chapstick.

“Tu veux du thé?” JJ grinned, evoking their previous late-night hang out.  

“Oui,” Emily smiled, “I could definitely use some of your tea right now. Stuck with coffee for now though. I need the caffeine.”

They continued through that verb, moving down her list and covering aller, mettre, venir, before cycling back to the most important ones to make sure JJ had them memorized. Covering lots of ground, the two girls spent almost two hours straight working through her midterm prep booklet.

“Thanks so much for helping,” JJ said. “Maybe you could tutor me again sometime.”

Emily grinned. Maybe it was just tutoring but that meant hours alone with her and her pretty face and her laugh and the way she smelled like warm vanilla.

“Whenever you need me!”

“Je suis excité!” JJ said, in French, which was definitely not what she aimed to say.

Emily began to laugh. Hard. It started as a giggle but the sheer ridiculousness of her situation made it so much funnier. Her crush just looked her in the eyes and told her she was horny.  

“What?!” JJ demanded, nervously laughing at Emily’s reaction.

“Oh gosh I’m sorry,” Emily tried to calm down, to hold in her laughs. “In French we never say excité. It does not mean excited.”

“What does it mean?”

“JJ you just said that you were horny,” Emily made out between laughs. It must be the lack of sleep that made the simple mistake so much funnier.

“Emily!” JJ laughed, “don’t laugh at me I didn’t know!”

Emily’s laughter was infectious and before long the two girls were lost in a fit of giggles.

“You should say: ‘J’ai hâte!’” Emily said eventually, “it means I can’t wait. Like: J’ai hâte d'étudier avec toi. Or Je suis ravi. Or impatiente. Just don’t go around telling people how horny you are.”

“Fine,” JJ said, with a slight pout, “ J’ai hâte. ”

Emily nodded.

“I guess I can say I learned something today,” JJ murmured, “I guess it really is the language of love.”

Emily didn’t say anything, taking a sip of her cold coffee to muffle the squeak threatening to come out of her throat

“So,” JJ changed the subject, “gimme your flash cards. What are you learning?”

Before Emily could earn her, JJ flipped over the first card which read: ‘SEXUAL DISORDERS!’ in Emily’s messy script.

“On the same theme,” JJ murmured.

And so for the next hour, JJ and Emily made their way through her psychology flash cards, slowly making sure that Emily had the endless serious mental health disorders, personality disorders and other terms memorized before her midterm.

Luckily, In the process of writing them down, and due to her religious commitment to attending lectures, Emily had already retained most of them. Studying with JJ did help, because it forced her to explain some of the concepts in plain language, which, she found, furthered her understanding.

Moreover, JJ had brought snacks. Which made studying every more doable when she  could award herself with an m&m for each correct answer.

The thing was, half way through Emily’s stack of cards, and as the night crept on, JJ’s energy crashed as the girl’s body decided that it was way past her bedtime and that she should be asleep.

Unlike Emily, JJ was clearly not a night owl.

Eventually, Emily finished up her studying alone, discovering that the blonde was just about useless, as she read out gibberish and expected Emily to understand her. JJ finally fell asleep sitting up at about one-thirty in the morning. Emily decided to leave her be as she still needed to jot a few things down.

“JJ?” Emily murmured after a few minutes, poking the other girl with her pen. “JJ? Wake up.”

“Mm?” JJ murmured, her eyes still closed shut, her head heavy resting on her hand. She was adorable.

“I’m calling it,” Emily said, closing her textbook. “It’s almost two. We’ve studied enough.”

“Mmm… yeah I don’t know if I can fit any more French in my brain,” JJ rubbed her eyes.

“I think you’ll do just fine!”

They packed up their things, bundling up against the cold fall air. JJ went through the motions with her eyes half shut, allowing Emily to guide her out of their study room, down the spiral staircase and into the lobby.  

Unfortunately, as they stood just inside the library door, the clouds broke, sending rain pouring down onto campus. Sighing at their poor timing, they pulled their hoods over their hair in an attempt to stay relatively dry.

They walked home, laughing as it rained down onto them.

JJ seemed to wake up and her prior drowsiness seemed to fade into the night sky. She giggled as she splashed in a puddle, and her yellow jacket lit up under a street lamp.

Emily grinned, feeling elated in her exhaustion. How lucky she was! Splashing in the rain with JJ, which was a strange yet pleasant ending to what had promised to be a dredge of an evening. JJ waited for a moment, letting Emily catch out before grasping onto Emily’s hand and holding on, pulling her through the rain.

They tore through the torrential downpour, their hands clasped together, unbothered by the cold as the fiery feeling of JJ’s hand in her own had her full attention. A warm feeling filled her chest as she thought about how it was JJ who wanted to hold Emily’s hand.

Not caring whether it was just a friendly hand hold, or if it meant more, Emily’s heart soared.

JJ’s hand was smaller than hers, and their fingers fell together perfectly, comfortably linked like they were built to do so.

They only let go once they reached the door to their building, as Emily fumbled with the wet metal key ring in her pocket, unlocking the front door and offering the two relief from the rain.

They lingered in the hall, both damp, looking at each other as the tiredness returned and settled into their bones. Emily could see the bags under JJ’s eyes, the exhaustion clear on her face. Her cheeks were flushed from running through the rain and her blonde hair wet and tangled from the wind.

A voice in Emily’s head demanded that she reach out her hands, firmly grab the sides of JJ’s perfect face and kiss her then and there. It would be so perfect, their lips would meet and JJ would rest her hands on Emily’s hips. She would pull her in close and their bodies would crash into each other, fitting together perfectly. Emily’s tongue would graze against JJ’s lips, and their kiss would deepen until finally they would pull apart and-

“Goodnight, Emily,” JJ said, smiling at her sweetly, “Get some sleep before your midterm.”

Emily was brought crashing back into reality.

“Oh,” Emily said, “Yeah you too, you need it.”

“Thank you for helping me out,” JJ continued, “I was having a really bad day and you really made me feel a lot better.”

JJ looked down.  

“Yeah, uh, this morning I broke up with Will. Or maybe he broke up with me. I don’t know,” she admitted, “and with the midterm… then the home game tomorrow afternoon...“

She sighed.

“It was a long day and I’m grateful for your company.”

Kiss her, the voice in her head screamed, do it!

“I’m sorry about your break up, either way,” Emily said sincerely. “I feel the same way. I mean, I enjoyed your company. I think I’m going to do well on my midterm too.”

She smiled at JJ who returned it sleepily. Emily kicked herself for the awkward phrasing but blamed the fact that it was late at night and she was processing the fact that her crush was single. Single and had held her hand.

“Bonne chance demain,” Emily said with a wave, wishing JJ luck.

They looked at each other for another moment, before turning and unlocking their individual rooms. That night, Emily dreamt of Paris, cookies and the girl across the hall.

#criminal minds #cm #criminal minds tv #criminal minds fanfiction #fanfic #fanfiction #writing #jemily #jennifer jareau #emily prentiss #prentiss x jj #college au #college/university au #criminal minds au #my post #gravelyhumerus cm college au #this is so much self indulgent writing and i finally got to include my french headcanons into a fic #i hope there isnt too much french #its not my first language but i know it reasonably well but there could still b mistakes here #anyways theyre so gay and i love them sm

[wickedsrest-rp-archive]

Hey all, welcome to a balance/lore housekeeping post. This is a long one, so please bear with us! 

We’ve noticed a few things have gotten a little off kilter, which is impacting character and player interactions. We want to gently steer the ship back on course. We’re making a few clarifications to our lore and wanted to post some general reminders, as we’ve noticed a clash between the reality of characters on the dash, and the established background setting/lore that may be less visible, but that we all have to keep in mind. It’s the nature of RP that the balance of characters played and the established setting/lore don’t always align (for example, White Crest’s population is 90% regular humans), but when that setting isn’t taken into account, it has a negative impact on players and characters alike. This can (and has) ultimately created unnecessary difficulties in playing certain types of characters, reducing moral complexity and plot potential for everyone. 

Ultimately, we just want to keep the balance and keep things fun for everyone. No one’s in trouble and nothing needs to be retconned, these are things to keep in mind going forward to help keep things balanced and allow space for complex character development for all types of characters.

ADDITIONS TO THE BESTIARY:

To be VERY clear, these changes do NOT mean anyone has been playing their character/species wrong! You’re all wonderful. Really, really, really. We just want to add additional worldbuilding context to better establish how the setting can impact interactions and plots.

”Caution Tape” section for playable species. We have drafted a section for each playable species write up highlighting some dangerous or threatening aspects of those species, using already existing and implied lore. This should make the danger present more clear and provide some complex plot ideas/arcs, as well as help people with a frame of reference when they don’t write that species. Before these go live, we’d like to share the drafts with each group of players per species to discuss and see if anyone else has thoughts or additions they’d like to see.

Threat Level for non-playable species. It often takes a lot of training and study to be able to tackle some of the monsters in our bestiary. We are going to be making an addition to the write ups to point out which species are likely to require more effort and practice to take care of. While we’re by no means barring non-experts/hunters from handling these critters with difficulty, we’re hoping this makes the utility of certain characters (most specifically hunters and scribes) more clear and involves them in different plots! Keep an eye out for this addition over the long weekend.

OTHER INFO TO KEEP IN MIND:

Please be careful with character knowledge of the supernatural. It’s very easy to accidentally metagame this because we do have our detailed lore written up and ready for you to access. However, even characters who spend their whole lives studying the supernatural (hunters, scribes) or living in it (witches in covens, fae communities) have gaps in their knowledge; many only have deep knowledge in what they specialize in, or what they’ve experienced firsthand. Others might have very broad knowledge but lack anything beyond surface level details. In practice, this means a witch wouldn’t know about every species and subspecies of a vampire, and a hunter wouldn’t understand the complexities of spells and charms. For example, being well-versed in science doesn’t necessarily mean you would know all of the science (a biologist may know next to nothing about physics). Often people have specialties due to limitations of time and interests. 

We know it can be hard to tell what’s realistic for a character to know, but a good rule of thumb is to use the rarity index on the bestiary as a guide to whether or not you think your character might know or be intimately familiar with a species and all their quirks, weaknesses, etc. Almost every supernaturally inclined person in White Crest has probably heard of or seen an alghoul, but the Tender might be considered a legend even by the most experienced and centuries old hunter families. We want to make sure that every character’s knowledge feels earned and important and the specialties and resources of scribes and hunters don’t get nullified! 

The majority of White Crest is human and largely unaware (or in deep denial) of the supernatural. We know it can be hard to remember given that our followlist is largely made up of supernatural species and powered humans and a lot of characters who are deeply entrenched in the supernatural, but only 10% (approx 1,500 of 15,000 people) of the town is made up of the supernatural. Human deaths are common and many are at the hands of the supernatural, far more often than the other way around. The town is dangerous on the whole for everyone involved and it should not be downplayed that there are deadly supernatural creatures out there. Some of them are humanoids, too. 

We’d like to try and use the news blog more often to help communicate this point, and definitely encourage players to utilize it for their plots, however large or small. Murders, accidents, shots fired, gossip, supernatural nonsense -- all of it can be submitted to move things forward and give other characters a way to get involved and know what’s up with your character.

We’re aware that in-character perspectives often won’t line up perfectly with the reality of the situation and can easily fall into extremes. Characters can be misled, opinionated, or lied to or just have a prejudiced or naive take on the world at large. That’s all okay and we expect that and encourage it. We just want to be sure people are fully aware of the setting OOC and keep in mind when their characters are not in alignment, that it might be nice to give it a nod or a wink somewhere somehow (strikethroughs, tags, etc). Or use it as a jumping off point to explore plots that challenge your character’s worldview (though we know these are often slow burn). You are all amazing writers and we just want to keep the setting grounded and watch the wonderful character exploration that can come from it. 

Phew, that was a lot. Thank you all so much for being understanding. This group is fantastic and we’re thrilled with all the characters and plots that are going on -- we can honestly say that we’ve never seen so much creativity and amazing writing in one group before. We just want to make sure that everyone feels that they can engage in the RP to the best of their ability and that no one feels disheartened or excluded. We’re going to continue to try working on this on our end as well to make the lore more readily understood and make the RP better for everyone. We have a great season finale coming up and we’re looking forward to seeing everything that comes out of it!

[Give this a “like” once read!]

#mod note #wickedsmod

[rebelcourtesan]

Horde Prime is a Tactile Villain

It’s been a while since I did one of these so here I am back to form with this.

Another thing about Horde Prime that is discomforting about him is he’s very tactile - of or connected with the sense of touch.  

Long Post Below

In most animated shows (actually all because I cannot recall such like Horde Prime) the villain is not handsy unless its done in violence.  Occasionally, you might see a handshake or a comradely pat on the shoulder if they are trying to fool or lull the hero into a sense of safety.  Horde Prime is more open about his intentions, but is still prone to touching his victims that are non-violent, but no less discomforting.

First, we’re going to compare him to another Dreamworks villain who also considers himself Lord of the Known Universe.

Zarkon is a cold tyrant who rules the Galra Empire with an iron fist and obsessed with gaining power and strength.  The only time we see this man touch anyone is with violence.  Whether it’s fighting Shiro in another realm or his own son, Zarkon is never openly affectionate, not even to his own wife and son.   

He sits straight back in his throne giving orders to underlings from afar or via long distant communications.  The only one who can stand close to him is Haggar and even then there’s no physical contact.  Zarkon is an Emperor who doesn’t allow anyone close to him physically or emotionally.  

However, while Zarkon in intimidating and isn’t someone I would want to angry with me, it is Horde Prime who sends chills down my spine and unlike Prime, he actually smiles.

When we finally see Horde Prime in person for the first time, he’s sitting aloof similar to Zarkon with his valets standing on either side of him like blank dolls.  He’s looking down upon both Hordak and Glimmer from his perch until he does something that we have never seen Zarkon do.

He leaves his throne, approaches Hordak, and kneels down to be on his level.  No, he didn’t have his clones bring Hordak to him, HE went to HORDAK.  Not in the way that he’s the sort that isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, but he’s accustomed to invading other people’s personal space.  This is revealed even more so in the next bit.

He touches Hordak’s face.  Yes, it’s to strengthen the mind reading connection, but why the face?  Why not take his hand instead?  

No, Horde Prime takes the face because someone’s face is everyone to them.  It’s how we communicate, see, express ourselves, and attract others.  Our face is who we are as a person, but Horde Prime doesn’t see Hordak as a person, but an extension of himself.  He looks into Hordak’s face, he’s seeing a piece of himself rebelling against him, like a tumor or cancer.  

And how he handles Hordak also shows how much Horde Prime loves himself.  

The Greek myth of Narcissus is a hunter that so loved himself he fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water.  Horde Prime is narcissist  

Narcissism is the pursuit of gratification from vanity or egotistic admiration of one's idealised self image and attributes. This includes self-flattery, perfectionism, and arrogance.

People say that his touching Hordak like this is a hint of possible past sexual abuse and I do agree that this alludes to it, but I also see it as Horde Prime admiring himself.  Instead of a pool of water, he’s seeing himself in the face of a clone that adores him.

Unfortunately, for Hordak, he is a reflection that dared to think itself separated from Horde Prime.  And like a cancer or tumor, he is removed.

This is the first time and only time thus far we have seen Horde Prime being angry.  All because Hordak had the audacity to think for himself and build his own army.  As much as Horde Prime loves his reflection, he will not allow it to grow any stronger to usurp him as he is, in his mind, the most perfect being in the Universe and there shall be no contender.  

One thing to point out.

This bit right here leads credence to the sexual abuse history.  We have Horde Prime’s hand on Hordak’s throat, a very controlling and dominate hold, while a cord from Horde Prime’s hair tendril plugs (penetrates) a port at the base of Hordak’s neck.  

What’s noteworthy is that Horde Prime could have his clones take Hordak away right then or knock Hordak out with a punch to the solar plexus.  He’s clearly stronger than Hordak and could easily overpower him, but no, he does the deed himself and in a way that’s jarring.

As soon as the cord plugs in, we’re given an organic wet sound like flesh is being cut or torn.  It’s disturbing and does damaging to Hordak.

Zarkon, as abusive as he was to his own son, Lotor, has never done anything that made fans cringe like this.  

And once Horde Prime is done with Hordak, he drops him like litter on the pavement.

I like how zen or meditative Horde Prime is here.  Like he’s shrugging off being angry and he’s trying to calm down.  Being angry means that something has gone wrong and nothing should ever go wrong in his Universe.  

Then we come to his interaction with Glimmer.

He notices (or sets his sights on) Glimmer.  His words are polite and friendly, but the look on his face says otherwise.  It’s not a threatening look, nor angry or disliking.  It’s intrigue, curiosity, and even with what one could call a leer.  He’s interested in Glimmer and even interacts with her by speaking and helping her to stand.

He’s playing the part of the gentleman and he very likely sees himself as one, but the eyes are windows to the soul.  The body language is there.  He bends down, helps her up with hand to hand contact, and speaks with his eyes on her face.  

Look familiar?  From the Secret of Nimh, when Jenner turns on charm to manipulate the court into aiding Mrs. Brisby to give him an opportunity to assassinate Nicodemus?  He’s really putting on a show for the rats to coerce them into agreeing to helping her, but there’s something in it for him.  

It’s possible I’m reading more into this than I should, but I can’t help feeling that this is an abuser who is staking out a potential victim.  However, for Horde Prime, it’s the opposite.  What need does he have to manipulate Glimmer?  He has all the power so why turn on the charm for her?  Why bother lulling her into a false sense of security?  What does she have that he would want?

That’s a deep question with multiple answers.  For one, Horde Prime seems himself as the perfect being and being a gentleman to royalty would paint him as he sees himself.

Secondly, narcissists love having their egos stroked by impressing others.  This could be a means to satisfy himself by impressing Glimmer or drawing her close, which leads to the third possibility.

Grooming her to be his next prey.  

From the moment he drops Hordak like used cigarette, and sets eyes on Glimmer, he turns on the charm.  He looks at her with predatory eyes and his maintains a close distance while locking eyes with her.  If he was dismissive of her, he would be looking away, standing away from her, or even turned away from her, but everything seems to scream being closer to her.  

Watch what happens next.

Glimmer is hopeful that they’ll resolve things peacefully.  

Notice how Horde Prime doesn’t seem happen for a moment here.  She rejected him.  It’s small and blink and you’ll miss it, but I love the subtlety that you have to think to catch it.  

Then you’ll leave us alone?  

He laughs at her and calls her a child in a means of ‘putting her in her place’. Building himself up by cutting her down, he reasserts himself as the main power mover in this exchange.  He’s unhappy because Glimmer isn’t playing the part of being thankful for the ‘order’ he brings. 

Glimmer backs away once Horde Prime becomes threatening, and he’s moves forward to maintain that close proximity to her.  See how his head is bigger than her body in this shot?  Every shot he’s in, he imposing compared to the other characters.  

Then this happens.

The infamous face touch.  As I mentioned before, most face touching in She-Ra is done between between intimates such as friends and family.  It’s used to control and manipulate others, but it’s always done between those who were already close. 

This is different.  This is a touch that Glimmer does not want and it’s from a stranger who is threatening to hurt her.  Look at her face and think back to Hordak’s face.   

Another thing I want to say is that I’m still not sure if he was going to do away with Glimmer right then and there.  I’m sure that Catra interrupted something bad that was going to happen, but I don’t think it was what we’re led to believe.

His words were threatening, but it’s never clear of how he was going to do away with her.  He doesn’t summon guards, doesn’t pull a gun or a knife, nor does he summon some power to blast her with.  He simply and intimately touches her face and it’s how Horde Prime touches her face that sounds off alarms.  It’s gentle, even tender.  Listening to the SFX is a soft little pat and not one second later, Catra speaks up and interrupts whatever was going to happen next.  

If this was an adult show that isn’t afraid of darker themes, then honestly, I believed he would have proposition her if not inconveniently interrupted by Catra.  

And even while Catra tells him about the weapon, he keeps a hand possessively on Glimmer’s face throughout.  Also, notice how he doesn’t seem happy to have been interrupted.  And doesn’t move his hand until he comes to a decision.

Glimmer has been upgraded from a plaything to a useful tool.  So he removes his hand and goes back to playing the charming gentleman again.  How long will this charade last?  And what happens when he doesn’t get what he wants?  Does Glimmer go back to being a potential plaything again?    

This analysis is based upon observation of the five minutes this character has been on a show.  It tells a lot, but also gives us more questions.  I am really looking forward to season 5 so we can see and learn more about Horde Prime.  

#horde prime #analysis #essay

[jikookuntold]

Can We Rely on Body Language to Confirm a Ship?

*Disclaimer: This post isn’t against any ship, it’s against a narrative for shipping.

Can We Rely on Body Language to Confirm a Ship?

Before answering this question, I have to bring up and answer another question: “Can we rely on body language at all?” 

The answer is yes, but we can do this only in specific circumstances. Not all acts or interactions are interpretable in the body language system. What do we mean when by “Body Language”?

Definition of Body Language

Body language refers to the nonverbal signals that we use to communicate. According to experts, these nonverbal signals make up a huge part of daily communication. From our facial expressions to our body movements, the things we don't say can still convey volumes of information. It has been suggested that body language may account for between 60 to 65% of all communication. Understanding body language is important, but it is also essential to pay attention to other cues such as context. In many cases, you should look at signals as a group rather than focusing on a single action.

Before starting to learn body language and going into detail, you have to know the first and most important thing which is “baselining”. A baseline is how someone acts when they are under normal, non-threatening conditions. You easily can establish baselines by sitting down with the person you want to read better—your child, your spouse, your friend–and talking casually to them about neutral topics that they would have no reason to lie about, such as the weather or what they want to have for dinner. Take note of how they act, how they hold their body, how they sound. Once you have established someone’s baseline, you can look for some of the typical gestures people make with their eyes, outlined below. If you see one of these clues and it is different from their baseline behavior, you know it is a red flag and you have to dig a little deeper. [1]

This might sound boring but if you read the upper paragraphs, you will know how important baseline is. You can’t analyze a person’s body language without having enough data about their personality and normal behavior unless you are an expert in this field. Now let’s find the answer to this post’s main question.

Can We Rely on Body Language for Sexual Attraction?

Can we use body language to tell if two persons have ever had an intimate relationship or they are sexually attracted to each other? The answer is positive. Experts can do this and Ms. Cora Boyd, is one of them. You can watch this video to see how amazing she does her job:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywpoj0SS0sk

Cora Boyd is a dating coach who works with big dating app companies and if you visit her official website and LinkedIn profile, you can see that her education is all in psychology-related fields and with the gift she has, she can tell if two persons have ever been in an intimate relationship just by monitoring their interactions and body language.

In conclusion, body language can be used for this purpose only by professionals (amateurs can have their  opinions too) BUT there is a big BUT here a professional will ever expose a closeted celebrity, this is rule no.1 of professionalism. So, we can tell body language analysis can be used to confirm a ship but it can never come to the eyes of the public for moral and professional reasons.

Umentory

If you are into ships of BTS, you have probably heard that a "body language expert has analyzed both KM and TK ships” and in his opinion, TK can be real but KM is just a friendly/brotherly relationship. But what was the story behind these analyses?

The YT channel which released these videos was named Umentory (now changed to Supercepción) is running by a guy named César Aurelio Ceballos Peña. He created a poll in his channel to do a ship analysis including KM, TK, Larry, and few other ships. Both Jikookers and Taekookers voted for their favorite ship and as we expected TK won the first place. When I watched his first video and heard him saying "touching ear is an undeniable sign of sexual desire" I found out that this guy has no idea about Korean culture and Kpop skinship and the case was closed for me. But when he made a video for KM (despite TK winning the second poll too) and claiming that KM can't be real, by familiar statements like "JK is not comfortable" I started to doubt his sincerity and honesty and did a deep research about him:

Mr. César Aurelio Ceballos Peña has a  Ph.D. in Fiscal Science and runs courses about body language (apparently from 2015 to 2017). You can check his resume and his LinkedIn profile. I searched a lot but didn't find any psychology-related subject in his education except an article named “Bases para la interpretación del Lenguaje Corporal (2013)”  which I couldn’t find it to be published anywhere. All his job experiences and educations are related to Fiscal Science and he has to be good at his jobs as an economy expert or teacher at communication in the economy. But as I said before, a body language expert has to have psychology-related educations to make legit statements, and they have to be aware that those statements can ruin lives of closeted celebrities in a homophobic country.

Dr. César Aurelio Ceballos Peña didn’t act like a professional but the 3 videos (2 for TK and one for KM) were a breakthrough for his channel. If you check his channel on this website you can see the significant growth in the number of his subscribers, viewers, and income after that specific date.

But what made me do this research?

To make it more clear, I have to refer to another YT channel, the infamous Taekook-lives. If you have watched her videos you already know that body language plays a big role is her analysis and she always claims to know about body language more than the rest of us.

TW/ conspiracy theory

If you try to connect the dots with some conspiracy theories you can tell that Umentory guy came at the exact time of need when TK was almost cancelled by Tae himself and Umentory’s unprofessional claims were perfectly matching with Taekook-lives theories and narratives. I have heard much worse Youtubers jobbery stories that this one will not surprise if it comes out to be true. 

Anyways, conspiracy or not, this was a win-win game for both of them.

Conclusion

When someone tries to do a body language analysis, they have to consider many things and the circumstance is the most important one of those things. You have to know everything that person is going through, the stress, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, presence of cameras, audiences and many other things can change the behavior of a normal person. And not to mention some people are not easy to read and they can easily get misunderstood (I am one of them!)

So when we talk about shipping, body language can’t be considered as a reliable source to prove that ship is real or not. What we saw from the idols’ lives, is just a surface, the thing they (idols themselves, the companies …) decide to show us. The acts that are affected by thousands of variables and those acts can never be analyzed properly and reliably unless you know all the variables. 

Sure we can read people’s body language signs and tell if they are happy, excited, sad, stressed, shy, feeling down, and … but we can never make conclusions about ships out of these emotions. These emotions, actions and reactions can be the result of many things we are not aware of. And as Ms. Cora Boyd said perfectly:

 [1] https://www.scienceofpeople.com/

#bodylanguage #jikook

[hadit93]

Grimoire Purism and Modern misconceptions.

One of the arguments within the magical community concerning grimoires is the methodology used to work the rites contained within them, especially when those rites are evocationary in nature. People tend to fall into two camps- those who believe the grimoire rites should be adapted and updated to conform to modern theories about magick and those who are grimoire purists and believe the operations should be followed to the letter. I fall into neither camp and believe both have valid argument, it is about using your own common sense.

1.Context matters.

When exploring the grimoire one should really take into account the period in which it was written, who the likely author was, what their beliefs were, and what possible sources their work could be based upon. For example it is clear the Solomonic texts were written by Christians who were literate and intimately familiar with scripture. They believed in God, in demons, in heaven, in hell- these were realities to the author. It is likely they were some how connected to the church and had a role within the church and thus likely to be devout. It has also been established that earlier sources for the Solomonic tradition can be found within the Greek magical papyrus and the Hygromanteia. The Picatrix also seems to be a possible precursor from my research, but I haven’t read it and so cannot confirm it.

It matters to know all this because it highlights the reasons why things were done and things were avoided. It shows the development of magic and how it has changed over time and thus gives insight into why certain rules within grimoires are important. It provides understanding.

What one shouldn’t do is approach the grimoires and immediately state that angels, demons, spirits etc are all portions of the human brain and rewrite everything the authors wrote in a Jungian fashion and then rewrite the procedure to conform to your theories, or simply state the procedure does not matter at all. If you cannot suspend your belief for an hour and work the grimoire as written you are a poor magician. If you do not believe in energy, spirits, or anything beyond the five senses drop magic altogether and pursue a masters degree in Jungian studies. It will save you time and money.

2. The Instructions Matter.

If it seems like a great effort to perform the rite and you believe it could be done much simpler, do you really believe these works would have survived as long as they did? The reason the procedures can be tough is because they are necessarily so. The lazy magician out there would love just to open up their 777 set up a temple and look at which goetic spirit fits into that framework. But miss out the purification, the prayers, and everything else and you are not getting the change in consciousness required to even enter the temple. Good results require hard work and there I no getting around that, there is no room for laziness.

Whenever you work with a new grimoire you should work it as close to the letter as humanly possible for a good handful of times before you can consider yourself knowledgeable enough to make individual changes and substitutions. Your requirements and needs will not be the same as a medieval practitioner of magic and adjustments may be have to be made but you won’t know where to sensibly make these adjustments without working the grimoire as written first.

3.Spirits know the names of their superiors.

A common error modern practitioners make is perceiving the entire universe through the lens of their own dogma. Thelemites are the worst for this- you will find Thelemites summoning goetic spirits whilst standing in a circle protected by the names Babalon, Therion, Chaos, Nuit, Hadit etc. I understand why, I understand that in your eyes Nuit is just as powerful if not more so than YHVH, but the spirits might not know that! It might work, the power might be enough, but why take that risk simply because you have a negative experience of Christianity? This is the equivalent of taking someone below you at work into the office and saying that a manager at another office in another continent is going to punish them and ensure they are doing their job properly. They are not going to care because the other manager has nothing to do with them! Use the names from the system they come from just to be safe.

I am not saying the Thelemic Gods are any less powerful or offer less protection, but use the tried and tested means first and experiment later. You may get good results, you may get bad ones. It’s okay saying that you believe that Hadit is the same as AHIH, but they are from different mythos’, different names, and serve different purposes in their original context. Trying to organise everything onto the tree of life is useful, but if you are working with an Abrahamic spirit, use an abrahamic system- or a system which calls upon Abrahamic forces. You can’t pick and choose as you please it doesn’t work like that, the ritual has to be cohesive. If anyone has done it well enough for me to believe I could give it a go it is Jake Stratton-Kent and his Goetic Liturgy. But again, I personally would stick with the Abrahamic version for spirits you have not summoned before and already have a relationship with when it comes to goetic and angelic workings.

4. The Tools Matter, but....

The grimoires list tools because they are deemed necessary, they are called tools because they are used. They are not jut fancy ornaments to sit on the altar collecting dust. If you can afford to make, buy, or otherwise acquire the tools as written then you should do so. Now some of them are harder to come by and require a small fortune. This is where common sense comes in- if you can’t get the actual tool, get the closest possible thing you can. If it is truly irreplaceable and you are just being lazy- stop being lazy! For example, if the grimoire calls for a hazel wand cut at 3AM on a Wednesday you will have to step outside and look for a hazel tree in an area which is accessible to you at 3AM on a Wednesday. If the time is truly impossible, venture further out until you find one! Honestly, it is laziness to assume it impossible and just log on to eBay and buy one.

Now if you are truly having an issue acquiring an item due to funding or lack of materials anywhere you will have to make substitutions, but these substitutions should be logical. For example, anything large made out of gold may be out of your price range. You can always apply gold leaf to the item thus giving it a piece of gold and allowing the same value and powers inherent within gold to be added to it, or you could paint the item gold- however it depends on what the item is for, this is the common sense part. If you are charging an item it would be better to have the properties of Gold on the item as it has a resonance with certain types of energy. If it is not being charged and is simply decoration or for show or is symbolic then it is probably less necessary, emphasis on probably and less.

Why does this all matter? Because this type of magic is NOT ALL ABOUT INTENT! The tools matter because they have a use, a physical and symbolic use within the ritual. People used to rituals such as the Lesser Pentagram Ritual will argue that that ritual calls for a dagger or wand but can be done effectively without the tool. Yes, you are correct, but that ritual is working upon the lower astral plane and is not really seeking to create physical results-thus the working on the physical plane with physical tools matters less. And I don’t care what you say, if you actually had something to banish other than your own bad juju the dagger would be more effective. In evocation rites you are trying to manifest the spirit on the physical and often gain physical results from doing so. The physical plane matters, the tools matter, the robes matter, the temple matters. The circle definitely matters! You are not working on the astral plane in these rituals, you are working on all planes and all planes matter.

Again once you have been around the block you will be able to see what tools are absolutely necessary and which ones are only necessary in certain situations. You can omit as you want once you have the experience, but don’t assume you can right at the beginning.

5. Sometimes alternative is better.

I can think of one time when it is probably acceptable to evoke a spirit from a grimoire utilising a procedure which is simpler and different to the grimoire in question. This one instance is when you have previously used the grimoire procedure and are well versed in it and have evoked the same spirit before and formed a good- emphasis on good- relationship with the spirit. You may call upon it again and ask if there is an easier way o communicate with them and get them to work with you in alternative ways, if there is, I will tell you. Here is the catch, you must be able to trust this spirit and ensure the methods it give still assure your protection. You must be able to get rid of the spirit if it turns out is is lying to you and becomes unruly.

Once some experience is gained I am all for experimenting, but you should do so cautiously at first and know that mixing pantheons, tradition, and customs can get messy. The more cohesive and logical a ritual is, the better. If you have evoked say Agares 8 times and he is always nice to you and you believe there is a simpler way which is more cohesive your working every day system and have asked him if it is alright, then go ahead and try it. If you are confident with banishing go ahead and try another spirit- but at the very least know the names it answers to within it’s traditions and make sure you have implements which serve the same use as tools mentioned within the grimoire text.

But- don’t be scared to work with a Christian framework because you are not a Christian. If someone assaults you and you say you are phoning the police they are going to be a little scared and more willing to calm down etc. It doesn’t mean you have actually called them or even have any love for the police you simply understand the authority they have over the criminal.

[yourgodmoments]

Giving Our Children a Better Start

The best start that we can give our kids in life is a relationship with Jesus:

…if anyone is in Christ [that is, grafted in, joined to Him by faith as Savior], he is a new creature [reborn and renewed by the Holy Spirit]; the old things [the previous moral and spiritual condition] have passed away. Behold, new things have come [because spiritual awakening brings new life]. 2 Cor. 5:17 AMP

However, this is happening with much less frequency these days. In order to demonstrate, I’m going to use examples of Baby Boomer parents (of which I am intimately familiar with), and their Millennial children in the USA…

Satanic attack is nothing new. It began in the Garden of Eden, and it has never let up. The devil works these aggressions out through willing human followers:

“For you are the children of the devil, and you love to do the evil things he does. He was a murderer from the beginning. He has always hated the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, it is consistent with his character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” Jn. 8:44 NLT

The big lie Satan would have you believe is that there is no God, or at the very least, that He is a liar. Jesus Himself prophesied about the future manifestations of the fruit of the devil’s actions:

“Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many. And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold.” Mt 24:11, 12. NKJV

The future has arrived.

Many times, the devil works within governments (Mt. 4:8), and through their many tentacles. It is no more apparent than in the present day. Look no further than in the decades-long indoctrination by the nanny state of our children through public schooling. Our kids have been assaulted on multiple fronts, to lay waste to the foundations of morality, civility and reality.

Many of us Baby Boomers haven’t been much help either – taking a lackadaisical approach to parenting, trusting the schools to do it for us. After all, we were too busy ‘doing our own thing,’ (same as ‘You do you’ in Millennial-speak).

First, our children were taught that their history (i.e. their ancestors) were brutal, racist killers, to plant the seed of guilt regarding their lineage. Instead of teaching that the evolvement of all humankind is messy at best, ancestry has been weaponized. The guilt is used to shame them into apologizing for their bloodlines and ‘make reparations’ to the descendants of the ‘victims’ – even though both parties had no part in that long-dead history.

God looks at this differently:

The person who sins is the one who will die. A son won’t suffer for the father’s iniquity… Eze. 18:20 CSB

To make matters worse, our children are not allowed to learn to accept others on the basis of their humanity. Instead, they are taught to group those of color as a band of victims and villainous those who pale by comparison – again for the sins of the ancestors. Thus, all become victims. Victims have no power, making them ripe for manipulation and control.

What is God’s view?

And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on the face of the earth… Acts 17:26 NKJV

For the LORD your God is the God of gods and the LORD of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God who does not show partiality… Dt. 10:17 NASB

One people, all equal…

Next, these would-be teachers deny our children the truth of the sciences of anatomy and genetics. God created us, and is crystal clear on what He created and how they are to relate:

God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Gn. 1:27 NASB

…a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. Gn. 2:24 NASB

Marriage is to be held in honor among all [that is, regarded as something of great value], and the marriage bed undefiled [by immorality or by any sexual sin]; for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous. Heb. 13:4 AMP

Man, Woman, joined in matrimony and monogamous. Anything else is sown from seeds of confusion – either from something misconstrued, or forced upon them by a parent, who, without regard for the child, is trying to glorify themselves in the face of the politically correct crowd.

In fact, God condemns any deviation from His word in this regard: (Lv. 18:22, 23; Rm. 1:26, 27; 1 Cor. 6:9, 10.)

So far then, we see that our kids may suffer from not knowing who they are, where they stand, and what they are: confused, powerless, and insecure. This again, is 100% contrary to what God wants for His children:

For God is not the author of confusion but of peace… 1 Cor. 14:33 NKJV

Next, they are taught what to think, and are severely castigated if they differ from the groupthink that is darkening their ability to reason; and God forbid that they should have an opinion of their own. As a result, our children have been kept from cultivating the ability for lively discourse, to examine and exchange differing points of views.

Instead, they are morbidly fearful of their fragile belief’s disintegration in the face of new ideas, regardless of their virtues. Insecure in their convictions, they have been taught that anything that conflicts with their indoctrinations, is tantamount to assault. And so, they strike out in verbal and physical response, (many times before the new ideas can be presented), playing out the very violence they condemn others of propagating.

In doing so, they are impotently trying to destroy free speech, (one of the very things that make this country so great).

There are dark forces at work:

Be sober [well balanced and self-disciplined], be alert and cautious at all times. That enemy of yours, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion [fiercely hungry], seeking someone to devour. 1 Pt. 5:8 AMP

There is an agenda being played out that is reaching for the minds of everyone – parents included, and its global. It’s all about controlling the masses, by creating a dependency in the people upon those who rule over them. It’s about power and the continual proliferation of it.

Once again, this is in stark contrast to what God intended for all of us. He gave us free will so that we could make choices in this life – so much so, that He even opens the door for our complaints if we don’t think life is working out the way we think it should:

“I loathe my life; I will give free utterance to my complaint; I will speak to the bitterness of my soul. I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know why you contend against me.” Job 10:1, 2. ESV

This agenda plays right into the ‘climate change’ scare, which is being used to frighten our children into thinking that they have no future. Are there human-induced dangers to our planet that need to be addressed? Most certainly. Will the earth be uninhabitable in ten years? Absolutely not. God’s got a plan for this earth, and He’s not going to let humankind mess it up.

It’s all about mind control.

Finally, if our children are rigid in their thinking, their ability to communicate and relate to others will be fragmented at best. Add to that the invasion of the internet and smartphones, with their rewards of instant gratification: and what we are seeing is increasing social isolation. And so, the final product is a child who is totally focused upon self, which too, is proscribed by God:

Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Phil. 2:3, 4. NASB

So, what as parents are we to do? The first thing is to not make them wrong. That is already their greatest fear. All they will do is throw up walls of defense and take a stand for their misguided convictions. Human nature.

Here is the big message that we want to relate:

IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT YOU’VE DONE, WHO YOU THINK YOU ARE, HOW CONTRARY TO GOD YOUR WAYS MIGHT BE, GOD LOVES YOU JUST THE WAY YOU ARE. HE WANTS YOU TO BE IN HIS HOUSE (church). HE WANTS TO BRING YOU TO JESUS, SO THAT YOU CAN SPEND AN ETERNITY OF PEACE AND LOVE AND PROTECTION WITH HIM!!!

That’s it. Make the case for Jesus:

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.” Jn. 3:16, 17. NKJV

“I am the Door; anyone who enters through Me will be saved [and will live forever], and will go in and out [freely], and find pasture (spiritual security). The thief only comes in order to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance [to the full, till it overflows]. I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down His [own] life for the sheep.” Jn. 10:9 – 11. AMP

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 1 Pt. 1:3 – 5. ESV

“Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” Mt. 11:28-30. NASB

“Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” Jn. 1:29 NASB

We can do nothing without Jesus (Jn. 15:5). Do whatever you need to do, to get them introduced to Him. The conversation that they have with Jesus, will be between them. I’m guessing it will be a good one…

Goodnight and God bless.

#better start for children #identity judgment #inability to reason #Millennials #mind control #relationship with Jesus #satanic attack #self-centered #shaming our ancestry #two sexes

[teretebusinesssolutions-blog]

Top web designing trends that made an impact this year

In the beginning, web design trends were incorporated with web-safe colors and unique palette schemes. Later, the websites have been loaded with text, usual monitor resolution and then HTML. But by now, we have come a long way as the society has been completely enabled into digital. So, we need to take a step ahead to hold the promising trends of 2018.

In the past years, web designers have managed to cope up with enhanced technical challenges and however managed to create websites that are user-friendly, innovative, and adaptable with corporate style. However, 2017 had many advancements including mobile friendliness. In that way, 2018 must have several benefits that were never seen before. Almost the year 2018 is going to end and so let’s discuss the web design trends that scored the hearts of every web designer.

In fact, there are much to learn in web design, but here is the list of top 10 web design trends to watch in 2018 which will give utmost attention to your websites.

JavaScript – Progressive Enhancement

Nothing makes a website better without JavaScript and so the web developers have jumped towards this powerful tool to create more engaging and interactive documents

This year developers have used functional programming heavily. In fact, no one knows how the JavaScript will end but actually, it takes up a great journey.

Yes, “JavaScript is still ruling the world.”

Bottom Sticky Elements

Have you ever recognized your users are clicking at the bottom of the page to navigate? Mobile app designs have become the most important in this era and so website developers must have proper web designing training in these sticky menu items. In 2018, web designers utilized this less obstructive area as a prime viewing area.

Voice Search

It’s certain, voice search will remain a part of the future web design. Incorporating search terms in standard language is imperative for all web design projects nowadays. Compared to other trends, it is expected to be in higher usage and popularity this year. So, start incorporating it into your business to travels along the trends.

Split Screen Feature

Split screen design patterns are trending nowadays. Moreover, people need to have quality service and ready to pay for it, so get ready for enabling split screen feature to enhance the sales and revenue. In addition, it provides more enjoyable work in all environments.

Many designers are opting for the split screen with another topmost layer which contains text to provide a more deeper effect.

Subtle and Scrolling Animations

Subtle animations are intimate and direct but mean everything necessary. It acts like just a delight to visitors with its visual attraction. You can apparently greet your visitors to a visual world of wonders. There are still infinite possibilities available to engage customers through scrolling animation. In fact, designers can try including a balanced touch of parallax with scrolling.

Designers have started using different tools that ease the creation of animations. But however, animations should be placed in a genuine place as it can distract the users and may result in performance issues.

Asymmetrical grids, Fluid shapes, and Brighter colors

As already said, split screen designs are trending now and so never worry about influencing exact symmetry anymore.

Almost sharp and geometrical shapes endured the ride in 2017. But things promptly have completely changed and have more fluid shapes than ever. Especially, visually gracious curves are enticing the visitors remarkably. Visually appealing bright color, who doesn’t demand this? This appealing feature is holding it’s placed on its own in this ever-growing field.

Scalable Vector Graphic Images

It is not a modern feature but is highly familiar these days. It involves lightweight images of a vector that consists of icons, logos, and graphics under an ideal combination. Almost all types of high-resolution displays take up this format’s gradual rise. It is expected to endure the thing of the future as more advantages are provided when compared to normal pixels. It includes a 360-degree view of the image and will never affect the loading speed.

Virtual reality videos

We all know that visual communication has gained importance over the years. But now it’s different, web designers have set a current trend of integrating videos into websites. Definitely, today’s designing processes naturally include 360-degree videos and virtual reality videos, this has produced significant enhancement.

Artificial Intelligence and Chatbots

The enhancement in technology has caused an impact on web designing elements. Almost millions of devices right now are having Google Assistant, Cortana and other digital assistants. In addition, websites at present are using chatbots for easier communication with customers. So, is clear it will be the present and future of web designing.

Mobile responsive design

It is not a current trend but is a must-have feature in all websites. However, the web designing world is turning towards mobile first approach and as well Google itself has insisted to enable Accelerated mobile pages. In fact, it is good practice to design the smaller pages first in a way easy to develop large pages.

Terete Business solutions is a leading website design & development company  developing high-quality and responsive website tailored to help your organization lead. Our team has delivered interactive, eye-catching, user-friendly and most importantly fully functionally as well as technically strong websites. Right from prototype to the launch of your website, our project managers focus on strategic development that helps your business to reinvent.

In addition to these trends, there are several other features in which web designers need to be strong

Flat design

Broken grid layouts

Expressive typography

Bold fonts and eye catchy colors

Floating navigational menu

Sustainable design

Stacking Mobile

Brand Experience

There are numerous web designing trends in which web designers must concentrate a lot, however, to adapt to these ever-changing trends one must have learned best web designing courses. A good training help in following and employing accurate techniques at the right time. With these trends into an effect, websites will encompass effectively and will definitely deliver a tangible impact on this digital world. more visit-http://terete.org/blog/top-web-designing-trends-that-made-an-impact-this-year/ View Source: https://www.techgenyz.com/2018/10/27/top-web-designing-trends/

#terete business solutions #TERETE #Business #Solutions

[asafeatherwould]

Debt and Bankruptcy

When I decided to ask my Wife to marry me I felt pressure to purchase a ring that – at the time – was way too expensive for me. I wasn’t a bankruptcy lawyer at the time. I loved her – so why wouldn’t I do everything I could to show my love? Right? I had access to credit. The bank reassured me that it would be easy to repay. Well, I was wrong. I made a stupid decision. I went into debt. I went into debt at the wrong time for the wrong reason with little to no income to pay it back. And that ring? Well, it was a really nice ring but my Wife later lost it – twice! (….a great story for another day).

The debt for that ring was hard to pay off. I remember struggling to pay back the debt and feeling like a failure. The harder I worked the more difficult it seemed. My entire paycheck was gone before I even received it! I had no control over my finances because the creditor controlled me.

Feeling ashamed for our debt is a real thing.

Don’t believe me? Check this out:

“Money is also intimately linked with our inner lives. Its presence, or lack thereof, has profound physical, mental and emotional repercussions. Perhaps in more ways than we would like to admit, money has tremendous power over us. … Any of the aforementioned negative emotional responses to debt may be serious enough to require medical or psychological intervention.” from debt.org

National Foundation for Credit Counseling – “[C]onducted a poll asking participants to finish this sentence: “I’d be most embarrassed to admit my…” And respondents made it clear that debt shame in the United States is worse than even diet shame. A whopping 37% of people answered that their credit card debt was the most embarrassing, followed by 30% of respondents admitting they wouldn’t want to fess up to their credit score. Weight made only 12% of people sweat, and came in a distant third place.”

I don’t think anyone is immune to money problems. So I assume that you’ve all had some type of similar situation. Being in debt at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. You may or may not be to blame for the money issues (e.g. medical debt), but you know what it feels like to stay up late at night wondering how you’re going to get out of the situation you’re in.

You know what it feels like to feel there is no way out. You know what it is like to think about your debt hour after hour. You lose sleep over it. You think that people close to you judge. You may ever start to think that you are less of a person because of it.

Now, imagine being in that type of situation and then having a debt collector call you and appear to confirm to you all of the irrational fears mentioned above. You may be told that you are a terrible person. That you did this to yourself. That your family is embarrassed because of you. And for some reason, there are thousands of us who believe these debt collectors! A client recently told me that a debt collector threatened to call the police and have her arrested for not paying a debt! Can you believe that? It happens more than you would think.

It’s been my life’s work and passion to help people realize that no matter what life has thrown their way they shouldn’t feel embarrassed or broken when it comes to debt. I stress over and over to my Clients that they should not despair – there is almost always a way out that doesn’t turn out to be nearly as bad as they might think.

Sometimes the way out is bankruptcy and sometimes it is not. It all depends on the situation. Regardless of whether my clients end up filing for bankruptcy – all of us have the following rights when it comes to harassing debt collectors. To provide some sense of relief, here are some quick basics on the rights you do have:

The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) is a federal law that can prohibit debt collectors from using practices that may be abusive, unfair or deceptive. In addition to the Federal law, your state should have a consumer protection statute that can also prohibit deceptive practices as well as unfair or unconscionable practices. You should become familiar with both the FDCPA and your state’s consumer protection law(s). A good way of doing so it to schedule a consultation with a local attorney

Make them prove it: If you receive a phone call from a debt collector demanding payment, demand to receive proof of the debt. Simply paying out of fear can be costly. You may be waiving your statute of limitations defense or paying a debt that doesn’t belong to you! A jury recently awarded a Kansas City woman $83 million against a debt collector suing for wrongfully suing her for a $1,000 credit card bill that wasn’t hers.

Phone Call Limit: I don’t believe any Court has ruled on a specific number of calls per day that would be prohibited. A court would likely look into the situation on a case-by-case basis to determine if the debt collector’s calls were harassing. In general, the FDCPA prohibits debt collectors from calling you with excessive frequency. This would include repeated calls or continuous calls so as to be annoying, harassing or abusive. Obviously, if a debt collector calls with a series of calls one after another this would be prohibited

Contacting you at work: The FDCPA allows a debt collector to call you at work unless the debt collector knows – or has reason to know – that you or your employer prohibit such contact. Simply telling the debt collector to stop calling you at work should do the trick. However, if you can get the request in writing you would be better off

Calling your cell phone: The FDCPA can prohibit debt collectors from calling your cell phone in certain situations. For example, a debt collector cannot call you at an inappropriate time. If you inform the debt collector that the call was made to your cell phone while you are at work this is an inappropriate time. Another federal law, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act can also prohibit certain debt collector contact to your cell phone

There are recent attempts to fix the wrongs committed by debt collectors. Debt collection practices are so horrible that the “U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has proposed new rules for the debt collection industry that include limiting collectors’ communication with debtors.”

Law changes can take time. So, until the laws tighten up on debt collectors use these tools and stop shaming yourself. There is a way out. And the way out will be easier than you think. Don’t let your debt define and control you.

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Face to Face with a Lying Disgrace

As has already been pointed out by several people in different forums (I recommend Radio Free Mormon’s “Elder Ballard Blows Up The Church” if you prefer to listen rather than read), parts of the 19 November 2017 ‘Face to Face’ event for Young Single Adults with Apostles Dallin H Oaks and M Russell Ballard turned out to be just as much of a car crash as it looked like it was going to be after the disheartening trailer they made advertising it, in which they proclaimed that they were going to filter out and ignore the difficult questions.

Elder Ballard admitted “And they are in-depth questions. They are questions that matter a lot in the lives of our Young Single Adults around the world…” Yes, thousands of earnest and intelligent young adult Church members opening their souls to post difficult questions about the struggles and conundrums in their lives and testimonies on the Church website as they had been invited to. They included questions about being LDS and homosexual, or finding themselves uncomfortably judged by their peers because of the Church’s anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, policies and political action. Questions about Church history which have rocked thousands of members’ testimonies and, supercharged by the truth-revealing internet, triggered an avalanche of reform and revision of the official histories approved of, or published by, the Church.

For many these admissions, and finding out how much they were resisted by Apostles for decades, has fundamentally damaged their trust in the integrity and honesty of the General Authorities past and present, and been the catalyst for their gradual or rapid exit from the chapel doors. We have always had devoted and fully active members leave the Church through exhaustion and burning out on very rare occasions, but the scale of such highly involved people of all ages leaving specifically because of doctrinal, historical and trust issues – ideas rather than emotions – over the last few years has been unprecedented since the schisms at Kirtland if the stakes I am familiar with are anything to go by. We are losing too many of our brightest and best leaders, teachers and young people.

After acknowledging how important these kinds of difficult questions are to these members, they were metaphorically slapped in the face:

Ballard: “I think we’d also have to be honest there may be some of these questions that there is no answer to. They’ll be the ones we avoid.”

Well, great. What is the point of a Q and A with a super-important rising generation of “future leaders” of the Church if you aren’t prepared to even try offering A’s for the difficult Q’s?! And more fundamentally for everyone in the Church, what is the point of claiming to be a Prophet, Seer and Revelator who can go to the Lord and receive revelations and answers to questions on behalf of the general Church membership, while forbidding the general membership from seeking revelations and answers to questions on behalf of the general membership because only Apostles are allowed to do that, and then saying as an Apostle you’re not going to bother even trying because we all have to make do with the limited information we already have? Are they actually any more inspired or connected to channels of communication with the Divine than the rest of us? Is revelation ‘ongoing’ or not in our Church? They did not seem to think that asking for new guidance or insights to the difficult questions was even an option.

Continuing revelation that ends confusion and mysteries rather than adding to them and pours down “plain and precious truths” from heaven into our religious lives is meant to be the whole Unique Selling Point, the raison d’etre, of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. We don’t have to wander around in darkness and doctrinal confusion struggling with limited information to try and arrive at answers to important questions because we have living Prophets, Seers and Revelators who can receive definitive revelations and interpretations about our questions and concerns in our day, now.

That’s what we keep teaching and saying in our wards and missions, but it seems that the reality is they have stopped even trying to do that anymore, and we are so used to that it now seems unreasonable to expect or ask for them to actually provide that service in response to our questions, even though most of our Latter-Day revelations and scriptures came in response to asking questions…in a not so very latter day at all anymore. More like yesteryear. Mostly in the 19th Century. The many excuses that have been made for the failure of recent generations of prophets and apostles to have clear and doctrinally significant revelations (not just administrative tweaking) like the good old days are starting to become the mainstream message and expectation when it used to be ‘Come to Zion to live with the prophet – he talks to God and answers your questions!’ These trends in General Conference talks and the Face to Face broadcasts and devotionals are adding up to a paradigm shift towards avoiding revelation and keeping people distracted with vague generic lifeskills advice with some religious jargon and little more.

Coup D’etat

Indeed, it is becoming increasingly apparent that there is effectively a coup attempt going on at the top to replace actual revelators who have vibrant spiritual lives and a focus on theology with bossy bureaucrats focused on managing the Church as a corporation with a really specific dress code rather than a religion. They are now insisting on their own infallibility and our total loyalty while at the same time playing down the need for them to experience the direct and intimate communication with God that would justify that level of trust and loyalty. They are trying to disconnect the revelatory, healing and spiritual gifts the scriptures tell us to look for in true Apostles from their position and power as our leaders. This may be deliberate, or the unintended outcome of a tragic convergence of particular personalities and events out of their control as so often happens in secular and religious history, but it is happening nonetheless.

Wise voices throughout the history of the Church, including some of the LDS prophet presidents, Hugh Nibley, disillusioned dissidents, and most powerfully Jesus Christ Himself, have warned against the ever-present danger posed to the flock by “wolves in sheep’s clothing” who include managers and Pharisees seeking to control and replace the true religion of inspired leaders and Christians. These predators value procedure, rules and control over the Holy Spirit and the freedom of individuals to really engage with and save the world. In doing so they sabotage the Church from within, devouring members of the flock and chasing away the lambs before they can grow. They keep it small, parochial and unappealing instead of growing it exponentially to fill the world with a message and community that is relevant and inspiring to everyone of every culture and class, which is the mission Jesus gave His Church.

The principles of revelation, and the individual’s autonomy to prayerfully decide for yourself what to sustain as revelation, is enshrined in what should be the foundations of Mormonism. We have a premortal narrative about Lucifer’s coup attempt with a doctrine of control and removing the individual’s freedom to think and learn for themselves. The principles of spiritual autonomy sing out like poetry in the second half of Doctrine and Covenants 121 which deconstructs command and control male authority and replaces that with truth and “love unfeigned” leading to personal transformation into something glorious. They sound a clarion call to action in D & C 58’s instruction to not wait to be told what to do by leaders but be anxiously engaged in good causes as we personally feel inspired by the Spirit.

In what follows I am going to criticise what some of our Apostles have publicly taught pretty intensively. Not because of a personal animosity but because of their power to determine the destiny of our Church. I am going to take what they say seriously and hold them accountable for it. I am going to present reasoning and evidence to support my concerns and alarm, but I hope it is clear throughout that I am not doing so from a position of trying to damage or compromise Mormonism or its core principles and scriptures, or what I believe is a legacy of real inspiration and revelation. The source of my worry and anger is a desire to protect Mormonism, the religion of most of my extended family and most of my dearest friends, and all that is wonderful about it, from wolves, including the most dangerous ones at the top. All priesthood holders are called to be shepherds and watchmen of the flock, so I claim this as my right and duty.

You are welcome dear reader to conclude that I am a fool trying to fix something that is too broken to save, or a heretic trying to ‘steady the ark’, but I invite you to hear me out first before making that judgment. There is a growing wave of loyal Latter-Day Saints who share these concerns and have left with heavy hearts, or are trying to stay and make it work. Several things happened this year, particularly in the General Conferences and this Face to Face broadcast, which ramp up our concerns about the ideological conflict between Christians and Pharisees, Truth and Lies, to Defcon One. Even if you are a totally active Latter-Day Saint generally satisfied with how things are going, consider this: If a senior Apostle, third in line to be Prophet after Thomas S Monson, tells a huge and obvious lie about the biggest challenge to our collective testimonies in a broadcast to the world, and tells all the young people watching to tell the same lie to everyone who asks them about it, this is a big problem for us all and cannot be ignored.

Kremlinology

I can understand that there is something of a revelatory and leadership hiatus occurring right now as President Monson is out of action with old age dementia, but it turns out that this hasn’t stopped the other apostles going ahead with some radical innovations in policy and doctrine that they have claimed are top-notch revelations, such as the November 2015 Policy to deny even the most basic saving ordinances and priesthood to children and teenagers with a parent who currently, or HAS EVER, cohabited homosexually (still the wording in Handbook 1), Elder Oaks proclaiming the 1995 Proclamation on the Family to be canonised essential doctrine, and recent changes to allow teenage Aaronic priests to administer the temple ordinance of baptism for the dead…and allow teenage girls to do the lady job of handing out the towels and wiping the wet floors, which isn’t exactly a 21st century feminist revolution. Watching how that gets spun as a sacred privilege is already proving to be a festive feast of schadenfreude.

These innovations seem though to have been rooted in the Apostles’ personal homophobic American culture war priorities and their other obsession with inducting our children into serious roles and responsibilities at increasingly younger ages to consolidate their loyalty, not responding to the many frequently expressed questions and needs of the ordinary members about far more important and urgent matters. They had an opportunity in this Face to Face to really show an empathetic servant’s attitude to the deep and often complicated needs of the membership in how they responded to these adults, not children, who are on the cusp of taking over the local leadership of the Church, but it mostly became an exercise in asserting their own authority, dumbing down their rhetoric to Primary level unsophistication, and revealing priorities and tactics that bode very badly for the future of the Church.

Since they did not feel able to prophesy, see and reveal anything new or helpful I will risk stepping in and prophesy that this strategy and worldview of theirs will sooner rather than later lead to some serious unrest among the mainstream membership in rebellion against the complacent and comparatively wealthy oligarchy that the apostles and their monocultural circle of close family and acquaintances have become. They are taking bigger and bigger risks with our patience, and have revved their counter-reformation engines this year rather than continuing the climbdown towards less arrogance and more honesty that has been the larger and encouraging trend over the last few years.

So we were forewarned by Elders Oaks and Ballard themselves that the Young Single Adult Face to Face was going to be a shallow propaganda event with carefully censored questions rather than an actual face to face dialogue addressing the needs of the YSA’s, much like the last one where Elders Holland and Eyring told the entire youth of the Church that God hasn’t got a whole lot of time for them, so their best chance of getting an answer to their prayers is to put on a Sunday suit and get on their knees in a darkened room with the curtains drawn…and not be surprised if they get nothing. I kid you not. What a shameful message to deliver to the teenagers of the Church at the Palmyra Temple which is dedicated in the place where a teenage boy prayed with faith in the open air and sunlight and was answered with a visitation of deity. You just couldn’t make it up.

The whole ‘Face to Face’ enterprise has been an unsettling disappointment and a missed opportunity in my opinion, but none the less historically important and revealing for that. Like the Kremlinology of my Cold War teenage years, our only insight into what the secretive upper echelons of our self-appointed leadership class, which doesn’t do interviews with real journalists any more, is thinking comes from their formal public pronouncements in conferences and broadcasts like this. We the proletariat have to try and piece together some kind of understanding of what their general direction of travel is ideologically, who the members of competing factions are, what the thinking behind their edicts might be, and whether they represent a temporary or permanent shift in policy, or just a power play in some hidden game of internal politics.

The Cold War taught us to do this automatically with any secretive regime which carefully manages its public pronouncements, and growing up very far from Utah my generation of British Mormons and our leaders had to play this game all the time with the Apostles. We did not have the personal contact and insider knowledge or family connections with General Authorities of the members there. We assumed they were constantly receiving revelations and were in complete harmony with each other. Our stake president would go to a couple of meetings in Salt Lake every other year or so and relay to us all the subtle nuances of emphasis he had noticed in what they said. We were seeing their world through a pinhole. Most of us had no idea about Utah politics or the intellectual dialogues and controversies that had been going on in community and academic circles there for 150 years, so we got good at tracking trends from revealing clues just in their official broadcasts. If you are prepared to replace your rose-tinted glasses with your Game of Thrones / Kremlinology goggles and pay attention to the details, a clearer picture of what is actually going on comes into sharp focus.

Always there is the question ‘Are these Machiavellian geniuses wielding influence and power in sophisticated strategies, or just ordinary old men who have somewhat accidentally got to the top in an imperfect system and may one day be revealed to not have much of a clue what they were doing after all?’ Russia’s President Yeltsin seemed to be a people’s champion of democracy who skilfully survived a counter-revolution by communists, then he kept turning up at important state events completely sozzled, unable to stand and slurring his speech until he was replaced by the real deal Machiavellian Putin. Whatever one’s views on Donald Trump politically, his ascension to the leadership of the free world demonstrates beyond all doubt that even the most virtuous systems can result in less than ideally capable individuals becoming the boss.

It is therefore very important to pay close attention to what our Church leaders actually say on these occasions and look out for any metaphorically heading for the bottle and slurring their speech. Indeed, they command us to pay close attention with the oft-repeated and scripturally sanctioned reminder that they are the literal mouthpieces of God and what they say should be scripture to us. So let’s do that and scrutinise, because I think there are several very revealing layers to peel back and learn from.

The Plan and the Proclamation

In the trailer Elder Oaks made a very significant admission about his game-changing October 2017 General Conference talk ‘The Plan and the Proclamation’ in which he had unilaterally declared the Proclamation on the Family to be a revelation and doctrine of such importance that if you are a “converted Latter Day Saint” (he used that phrase twice) intending to be exalted you HAVE to accept it as such and make it fundamental to your religion. This was followed by absolutely no sustaining vote by the other General Authority quorums or any Common Consent sustaining vote by the general membership, which are required by the Doctrine and Covenants before a doctrine can be canonised in the Restored Church.

In government and politics an individual or cabal of individuals who declare things to be laws that everyone must follow without following the legislative procedures of their nation’s constitution are staging a coup and declaring their dictatorship. In Mormonism declaring something to be a doctrine that everyone must believe to be recognised as “fellow citizens with the saints” (Ephesians 2:19) while not seeking the sustaining vote of the leading quorums or the membership is risking apostasy and false-propheteering, and it has been happening more and more frequently in the 40 years since the last revelation that was presented to the quorums and membership in 1978.

He said “The gospel plan each family should follow to prepare for eternal life and exaltation is outlined in the Church’s 1995 proclamation, “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.” “I testify that the proclamation on the family is a statement of eternal truth, the will of the Lord for His children who seek eternal life.” “I testify of the truth and eternal importance of the family proclamation, revealed by the Lord Jesus Christ to His Apostles for the exaltation of the children of God.” But we were not asked if we agreed that the Proclamation is “a statement of eternal truth” essential to our exaltation, even though things that are that essential are a pretty big deal rhetorically and existentially.

Revelation by Committee

While Elder Oaks described a year-long process of separate committees working on parts of the Proclamation’s text and constantly reviewing and revising it, I was wondering to what extent either Jesus or the Apostles and Prophet actually got a look-in, never mind whether that really sounds like how revelations are communicated by God. Surely any of us could come up with some pretty amazing proclamations given a year and a bunch of subcommittees with lawyers in to review and revise the text. In fact, if that’s how revelation about the most essential paths to exaltation for the whole Church is done these days, why are we paying them to do it? Why not involve the whole membership in this very democratic-sounding methodology? Then maybe some brown people could get a look-in as prophets, seers and revelators before the 22nd century dawns. Imagine the power of the collective wisdom that would be made manifest.

But no, they are 15 uniquely authorised Prophets who get revelations essential to our exaltation…through year-long committee meetings with lots of people who aren’t “His Apostles.” That doesn’t really make sense, but rather than minimise it he shouted this embarrassing secret about the Proclamation from the rooftops and demanded complete submission to his demand that we all hail it as the work of Almighty God as if it had been delivered to President Hinkley by an angel.

Is this the first time an Apostle has proclaimed that God makes doctrinal revelations to His Church through the deliberations of committees rather than communication directly to an Apostle or Prophet or a quorum of Apostles and Prophets? They have been promoting collaborative committees for decision-making on a local level, but this is a whole other ballgame. It is also a pretty big deal after 2 centuries of criticising the same methodology in other churches as a sign of apostasy and their tragic lack of real prophets and revelation.

Did Moses go up Mount Sinai with a team of subcommittees and lawyers? Our current Apostles seem to have normalised in their minds their boring admin roles as committee chairmen of the various investment and ecclesiastical branches of the Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints as what Apostles of Jesus Christ DO to such an extent they don’t even try to hide it any more behind a performance of mystical dialogues with God or miracle-working like the good old days of Mormonism. Even their healing stories in Conference talks these days are nearly all about people having “the faith not to be healed” (another Elder Bednar classic) when the Apostle came to give them a blessing in hospital. If I’m in trouble in hospital don’t ask an Apostle to bless me – that seems to be an automatic death sentence these days! Bring the most humble newly ordained Elder from my ward please.

Dreams and visions seem to have fallen by the wayside as the way God communicates to His prophets in our allegedly “unchanging” Church. Maybe this is refreshing honesty and it’s always been like this, or maybe they have somehow gone adrift and lost the powers and revelatory experiences their predecessors appeared to have in much greater abundance. Time will tell. But it feels like this is all adding up to an abdication of Apostolic responsibility.

Bubble Trouble

It is wonderful that the Apostles are being more cautious and delegating more of the historical research and lesson curriculum duties to actual professionals these days, but they seem to have gone too far and washed their hands of all the tricky mental lifting in research, theology and interfacing truly interactively with a sometimes hostile world. The committees, ‘President Newsroom’ who releases a steady flow of often very significant official statements that don’t have any Prophet or Apostle’s name on, historians and semi-official apologists like Fairmormon are taking care of most of the scary real-world ‘Answer tough questions and defend the faith’ stuff.

This has left the Apostles free to withdraw into a bubble or ivory tower where they can continue believing child-like and very naïve mental models of how Mormonism works. Complicating realities are kept at arm’s length. The problem is that they then insist in their preaching to a more sophisticated world membership very much outside that bubble that this is enough, and anything more nuanced or complicated than their bubble Mormonism is dangerous, unfaithful or disloyal. If your family, education or sexuality don’t fit Simple Bubble Mormonism, then the problem and responsibility and blame is with you and you have to change so you can fit in and find a place in the Church, not them.

This disconnection between their unreal perceptions and our really complicated lived experiences and intimate knowledge of Mormonism’s history and flaws is going to destroy the Church if it persists. It demands far too many contradictions and mental gymnastics to reconcile and leads to the crazier things that were said in General Conferences this year and the Face to Face. They need to get back out of their bubble in a hurry.

Bruce R McConkie and then Boyd K Packer were confident, assertive control freaks who did a lot of good and possibly even more bad on reflection as the prime guardians of doctrine in my lifetime, but at least they weren’t lazy. I can’t imagine them being indifferent or not engaging with intense dedication with all the theological nuances of what the Church is doing and teaching, and making a pretty decent effort to be ahead of the curve on things like the content of the Joseph Smith papers project. The current leaders don’t seem to have that historical and theological interest. I can’t imagine any of them editing a Bible Dictionary or a Topical Guide. They were mostly educated and employed as business managers and get most excited and passionate about a very limited range of culture war political issues and systems management, which seems to be becoming their religion. Some are becoming like congressmen and senators who bang on about one or two issues, vote to pass legislation they haven’t read properly, and read from scripts prepared by party apparatchiks, saying the right words but not really understanding them.

This is very risky for an institution that devotes so much energy and time to educating its membership about doctrine and history.

Gender Benders

I wonder which of the Family Proclamation subcommittees got the revelation that “Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose” since there is nothing in our canonised scriptures about our “co-eternal with God” premortal intelligences being gendered before they became spirits.

Every discussion asserting that gender is an essential characteristic of our current mortal state comes to a juddering halt with the words: ‘hermaphrodite’or more commonly these days ‘intersex’, the response to which reality can be very messy indeed. The Church’s advice to parents of intersex babies, which is not specifically described in the handbooks but is out there verbally, is to pray for guidance when deciding which bits to chop off or construct and therefore determine who does or doesn’t get ordained to the priesthood or ends up as the Mummy or the Daddy in an eternal family when they grow up. But if older people choose to have gender assignment surgery they have to get First Presidency clearance to be baptised and cannot be ordained or go to the temple, so the pressure is on to do any surgery quickly as a baby, which may not be the best way to proceed. And now we are discovering the many other variations of genetic gender identity that get some Olympic athletes on the front pages, these matters seem even less clear-cut (excuse the pun.) So whoever received a new revelation about eternal gender identity was rocking it prophetically – perhaps we will never know who it was. Maybe it was one of the subcommittees with the lawyers in. Either way, any assertion of any absolute or over-simplified truth stands or falls on the reality of the exceptions to those rules.

The Memory Hole

Elder Oaks said in the trailer “I gave a talk on the Plan of Salvation at Conference and I tried to stay away from the questions we don’t have answers to because the Lord hasn’t revealed a lot of that, but He’s given us enough to go on. We just need to know how to go on it!’

Why did he even bring this up? He didn’t have to mention it. This seems to indicate that he was feeling uncomfortable about it and needing to offer some kind of further explanation or excuse for what he did while he had a big audience listening to him outside of the constraints and scrutiny of a General Conference talk. He must have heard some of the reaction to that talk which has pointed out that in asserting an eternal norm of monogamous marriage he completely ignored several exceptions to his rule.

By implication he threw nearly all the polygamous marriages of the prophets, apostles and first generations of Mormons under the bus by insisting that God only recognises the marriage of “a man and a woman” that is “legal and lawful”, which the very illegal and unlawful majority of Mormon polygamous marriages definitely were not.

He also said “Just 20 years after the family proclamation, the United States Supreme Court authorized same-sex marriage, overturning thousands of years of marriage being limited to a man and a woman.” Where Who What When?!

All this entirely ignores the long struggle his predecessors in the plush apostolic chairs had with the legal authorities of the USA to recognise or at least tolerate their God-ordained polygamous marriages. It ignores the polyandrous marriages Joseph Smith and his successors authorised of one woman to at least two men, and all the non-monogamous marriage traditions of the world’s cultures over the last few thousand years. This includes the polygamous Israelites, specially several key biblical prophets. The problem is, these are all historical facts, not tricky questions we don’t have answers to. Elder Oaks excused himself from having to acknowledge facts, from dealing with reality.

And what Adam and Eve’s children got up to incestuously with each other to start populating the world around 4,000 BC according to my Seminary Old Testament bookmark doesn’t bear thinking about too hard! Specially as the Anatolian temples of Gobekli Tepe were already 5000 years old by then. And in 2017 paleontologists announced that remains found in Morocco indicate that Homo Sapiens has been around as a distinct species for at least 300,000 years rather than just 200,000 as they previously estimated. More tricky facts…

He also seemed to feel there isn’t “enough to go on” to include his own form of polygamous marriage – polygamy by sealing, which he practices as a man sealed to two wives, as does Elder Nelson, next in line to be Prophet before him.

It’s a classic straw man argument – get outraged about marriage laws changing on the basis of a completely unreal invention of an imaginary ancient historical norm. And classic gaslighting – look at my made up scenario of universal Christian heterosexual monogamous marriage instead of looking at the reality of Mormon polygamy and my own plural wife Kristen McMain sitting over there.

The issue of secular legality was a strange thing to insist upon when his audience would have no problem accepting that at times God’s laws are going to be in conflict with secular concepts of what is ‘legal and lawful.’ Elder Oaks has repeatedly insisted that the legalisation of gay marriage has no impact whatsoever on God’s laws regarding marriage, so he has already disconnected what God recognises as marriage from secular legal recognition. But he went for it anyway, declaring that the only form of marriage approved by God for thousands of years is “legally and lawfully” recognised heterosexual monogamy. Doublespeak, as George Orwell put it in ‘1984.’

And it’s not just marriage that he told the entire membership in General Conference has never changed till now – apparently ALL the religious ordinances of the gospel as we do them now are identical to how they have always been done: “Latter-day Saints who understand God’s plan of salvation have a unique worldview that helps them see the reason for God’s commandments, the unchangeable nature of His required ordinances…” That would certainly be a unique worldview, but also ignorant of the constant evolution and transformations of God’s “required ordinances” between and within the Patriarchal, Mosaic, Christian and Restoration eras. Sacrificial goat anyone? You bring the rocks unhewn by human hands and I’ll bring a big sharp knife. I’ve got the priesthood so I get to eat it afterwards. Yum yum! Is mint sauce kosher?…

In pretending that the Proclamation was 20 years ahead of its time and some kind of surprising bolt from the blue Elder Oaks failed to make any reference to the reality that it was created in order to try and give the Church credibility and justification to be legally entitled to a voice as an ‘amicus’, or friend of the court, regarding the challenge to the existing ban on gay marriage legislation already going through the Supreme Court of Hawaii 20 years ago. After introducing his talk as a truthful witness statement “As one of only seven of those Apostles still living” from that time in ancient history (apparently forgetting that millions of us were also around at the time and could read newspapers) because “I feel obliged to share what led to the family proclamation for the information of all who consider it” he then completely misrepresented the history of what led to the Proclamation with a certainty and authoritative tone that indicated not a hint of the caveats or hesitation he later admitted to in the trailer. I don’t “consider” that to be very reliable “information.”

He gave a rallying cry to the entire membership to not compromise a jot or tittle on the homophobia and ‘new normal’ of monogamous, heterosexual, LDS marriage legally and lawfully recognised by secular authorities even though this will inevitably lead to “conflict” with family members and friends: “Forty years ago, President Ezra Taft Benson taught that “every generation has its tests and its chance to stand and prove itself.” I believe our attitude toward and use of the family proclamation is one of those tests for this generation. I pray for all Latter-day Saints to stand firm in that test.” So according to his Conference talk this unassailable and essential doctrinal proclamation is the single defining message of our generation to the world and should be defended at all costs.

But in the Face to Face trailer he indicated a much more uncertain point of view about the hill he had commanded the entire faithful membership to fight and die on when he said this. Now it would appear that he always has realised that there are conundrums and aspects of the whole matter that he doesn’t fully understand or feel he has answers for, but instead of acknowledging this and being more cautious in his certainty and pronouncements about the Family Proclamation, he just ignored them as if they didn’t exist or matter, leaving himself clear to proclaim black and white certainties about marriage and eternal gender identity and rail against “the World’ and its complications and nuances about these matters as representative of satanic deceptions, rather than being actually much closer to the messy truth than he was being.

History: Edit – Censor – Repeat

We should remember that 15 years after the Proclamation was first proclaimed Elder Boyd K Packer, President of the Quorum of Twelve and next in line to be Prophet if he had survived Thomas S Monson, made a very similar attempt to canonise it in the October 2010 General Conference using similar language to Elder Oaks’ much more assertive bid to do the same. When you listen to both you can see that Elder Oaks probably modelled his talk on Elder Packer’s.

In his original talk ‘Cleansing the Inner Vessel’ Elder Packer said “The Family: A Proclamation to the World, is the fifth proclamation in the history of the Church. It qualifies according to scriptural definition as a revelation, and it would do well that the members of the Church do read and follow.” (He struggled to read that last bit.)

However, when his talk appeared in the Conference report Ensign it was edited to remove the declaration that it was a revelation according to scriptural definition and now reads: “Fifteen years ago, with the world in turmoil, the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles issued “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” the fifth proclamation in the history of the Church. It is a guide that members of the Church would do well to read and to follow.” Ironically on the Church website you can still watch the original talk while reading the edited text below it.

Elder Packer then railed against “Satan’s many counterfeit substitutes to marriage”, which he also ignored living and temple-sealed polygamy to define thus: “Pure love presupposes that only after a pledge of eternal fidelity, a legal and a lawful ceremony, and ideally after the sealing ordinance in the temple, are those life-giving powers released for the full expression of love. It is to be shared only and solely between man and woman, husband and wife, with that ONE who is our companion forever. On this the gospel is very plain.” (My emphasis.)

Another significant edit was made to Elder Packer’s original statement that “Some suppose that they were pre-set and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn tendencies toward the impure and unnatural. Not so! Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember He is our father.”

In the edited and published text version ‘tendencies’ was replaced by ‘temptations’, perhaps to somehow match the shifting official rhetoric which had just started to accept that you can be born gay, and the comment about God not putting someone into a life with homosexual orientation was removed. It now reads:

“Some suppose that they were preset and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn temptations toward the impure and unnatural. Not so! Remember, God is our Heavenly Father.”

So who slapped Elder Packer down and forced a rewrite of his talk? He was second in seniority in Church leadership, so the only person with the power and status to do that was President Monson. His predecessor President Hinckley who oversaw the creation of the Proclamation did not feel able to declare it to be a revelation or canonise it during his presidency, somewhat to the surprise of the membership, and a couple of years into his leadership President Monson apparently felt the same, so moved against the Big Beast of the apostolic hardliners.

At least they didn’t go as far as they did in October 1984 when they dragged Elder Ronald Poelman of the First Quorum of Seventy back to the General Conference pulpit to re-film his brilliant talk “The Gospel and the Church” about how we need to rely on our own intelligence and the witness of the Spirit rather than just trusting the institution and leaders of the Church and the pharisaical cultural traditions that have built up over time to do all our thinking for us and determine God’s will or orthodoxy. The faked rerun was spliced into the videos of the Conference sent out to the world to look as if he had said it all live in Conference in the first place. They made him preach literally the opposite message to his original talk, this time asserting the dominance of the leaders’ authority in determining what is true as if it was a Soviet show trial and he had just been tortured into changing his mind and accepting that Stalin is always right, and his family shipped off to a gulag. At one point the words “free agency and the divine uniqueness of the individual” were changed to “direction given by those authorised in the Church.”

The Youtube edit of both films side by side is a hoot, and preserves the original which I think was one of the greatest and bravest talks ever given in General Conference – a truly prophetic warning about the suppression of individual free will and thought that has come close to destroying us in the decades since. To his credit Elder Uchtdorf had another go at railing against false cultural and traditions and expectations about what our Church and membership should be like in his October 2015 General Conference talk ‘It Works Wonderfully’ in what can be easily read as a loving tribute to what Elder Poelman tried to say in 1984, teaching the same Big Idea. Thank goodness it was not just the control freaks of the past who have inspired the current generation of GA’s. The brave souls who really understand what Joseph Smith’s radical and empowering philosophy was all about may be a struggling and sometimes persecuted minority, but they fight on to be heard and one day I hope they will win and save the Church because they are right and pharisees are always wrong.

What Is Real?

So ‘What Is Real?’ as my favourite mission video used to ask. And what about all that teaching that a sin or lie of omission can be as serious as one of commission? Elder Oaks intentionally omitting polygamy from the Mormon marriage doctrine while being an actual polygamist within the current rules and ordinances of Mormonism (as am I), and omitting the real reason the Proclamation was created while offering the Church in General Conference a first-hand witness of “what led to” it that he wants to become the official collective memory of its origins, are pretty significant sins of deception through omission.

And what kind of Kremlin level powerplays are going on among the 15 Apostles that as soon as President Monson is out of action with dementia and no longer able to contain the homophobic canonisers, Elder Oaks rushes to the pulpit to declare the Proclamation to be not only revelation, but eternally and doctrinally fundamental and essential doctrine?

The reason for his zeal seems to be that this is his baby. One of his first major assignments after being recruited to the Apostleship after a career as a Utah Supreme Court Justice and President of Brigham Young University without first serving as a Seventy was to start exploring the Church’s legal strategies in response to the growing momentum to legalise gay marriage. He was to be the expert lawyer in the leadership, so this is his mission, the primary reason for his elevation to apostleship, and soon the Presidency. One can understand then why he sees himself as the prime guardian and champion of this interpretation of doctrine, the Chosen One called by God to hold the line and preserve the True Faith and the Eternal Family from these threats.

Repent or Obey?

The trailer for the Face to Face also offered another very revealing gem when Elder Oaks said he had nothing to offer as advice about how to repent. Surely, even if they are drawing a blank when it comes to Prophesying, Seeing and Revealing, that is literally their one and only job description as Apostles of Jesus Christ – to preach repentance! We aren’t paying them each a ‘stipend’ of well over $100,000 a year, which means that in the 33 years Ballard and Oaks have served together that they spoke of they have each been paid several million dollars as a salary (which doesn’t even include the additional expenses that were paid for them) well into retirement age when the rest of us don’t even get a salary any more, to flunk preaching repentance as well.

Although Elder Oaks said he had nothing to offer regarding the ‘very personal’ matter of repentance he said he was, however, very keen to tell the young how to make life decisions about a list of other very personal matters like choosing a major, where to live, a marriage partner and how to share the gospel – prioritising like a Pharisee as usual. Sort your spiritual relationship with Jesus out yourself, but just make sure you follow our tried and true practical lifestyle template for making and retaining active and faithful young Mormon families to be our ‘future leaders’ and staff the bureaucracy.

Porkie Pies

After the toe-curling Statler and Waldorf act of the trailer, the main event did not disappoint.

After the deceptions Elder Oaks had effectively admitted to in the trailer, Elder Ballard joined in and told Porky Pies. Whoppers. Falsehoods. Not naïve bumbling your words lies. Not little white lies. Not lies of ignorance. Not lies you might tell by accident while flustered in a tough interview you had not prepared for or were not in complete control of. He looked at all the LDS Young Single Adults in the world and lied to them, and then instructed them to tell the same lies to anyone who asks them about historic cover-ups of uncomfortable truths in our history…or for that matter hiding ANY kind of information EVER:

“There has been no attempt on the part, in any way, of the Church leaders trying to hide anything from anybody.”

Despite the clumsy grammar it was such a throbbing humdinger of a blatant lie that anyone with basic knowledge about the history of the Church should immediately recognise it as such. It rather eclipses the other fascinating and worrying things they said, so let’s rewind a tad and look more closely at the context and the other significant statements they made first.

Generally the Face to Face propaganda event was pretty shallow – they defensively explained at the start that they were going to try and “hit some kind of middle ground” because their audience, and the questioning pair of YSA’s, included very new members as well as more experienced ones. But the level it ended up being pitched at was an extremely safe and cautious way you would perhaps speak to older children, nowhere close to even a middle ground level appropriate for intelligent young adults, emphasis on ADULTS, many of whom are university students and graduates very used to analysing complex information in a sophisticated way. They are already living real lives fully exposed to most of the social, personal and political dimensions of adult life in the real world. Many of them are already soldiers and civilian casualties caught up in the intense culture war being fought out on all fronts in the USA as well as many other parts of the world between tolerant liberal democracy and intolerant religious fundamentalists, particularly regarding LGBTQ rights, and the challenges to delusional and unscientific beliefs in religions being made by rational historians, secularists and atheists. To summarise as it impacts Mormons, the matters of LGBTQ rights and dignity, and accurate Church history, are the biggest mammoths in the room for most YSA’s these days.

If ever there was a moment to finally be honest and brave enough to admit we have serious problems in these areas and offer powerful and if necessary apologetic (as in sorry, not argumentative) apostolic comfort to these intensely pressurised and often traumatised members of the flock, this was it. But they didn’t. Even though Elder Ballard himself has already gone much further in a much more sophisticated way in his 2016 address to the CES staff that was then published nearly word for word in the December 2016 Ensign titled “By Study and By Faith”.

I say ‘nearly’ word for word because, as I never tire of chuckling about, some kind of dysfunctional ideological struggle occurred in yet another editing process between spoken word and what got printed in the Ensign and they removed the phrase “like you know the back of your hand” from the end of the sentence “It is important that you know the content of these essays” with reference to the Gospel Topics essays, which admit a lot of examples of the Church leaders concealing the truth from members and non-members in different situations. The mind boggles. Why was saying “It is important that you know the content of these essays like you know the back of your hand” too strong for them to print? It seems to imply the CES teachers should only know the true history vaguely, preferably not at all, which undermines the whole message of that talk. Or maybe, read the essays enough to answer some questions but don’t get so familiar with them they make you have questions yourself. The Church commissioned and authorised the essays but at the same time still treats them like kryptonite to stay away from. This is bizarre as Elder Ballard went to town explaining why we shouldn’t do that in his CES address:

“You know we give medical inoculations to our precious missionaries before sending them into the mission field so they will be protected against diseases that can harm or even kill them. In a similar fashion, please, before you send them into the world, inoculate your students by providing faithful, thoughtful, and accurate interpretation of gospel doctrine, the scriptures, our history, and those topics that are sometimes misunderstood. To name a few such topics that are less known or controversial, I’m talking about polygamy, seer stones, different accounts of the First Vision, the process of translation of the Book of Mormon or the Book of Abraham, gender issues, race and the priesthood, or a Heavenly Mother.

The efforts to inoculate our young people will often fall to you CES teachers. With those thoughts in mind, find time to think about your opportunities and your responsibilities.

Church leaders today are fully conscious of the unlimited access to information, and we are making extraordinary efforts to provide accurate context and understanding of the teachings of the Restoration. A prime example of this effort is the 11 Gospel Topics essays on LDS.org that provide balanced and reliable interpretations of the facts for controversial and unfamiliar Church-related subjects.

It is important that you know the content in these essays like you know the back of your hand. If you have questions about them, then please ask someone who has studied them and understands them. In other words, “seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118) as you master the content of these essays. You should also become familiar with the Joseph Smith Papers website and the Church history section on LDS.org and other resources by faithful LDS scholars. The effort for gospel transparency and spiritual inoculation through a thoughtful study of doctrine and history, coupled with a burning testimony, is the best antidote we have to help students avoid and/or deal with questions, doubt, or faith crises they may face in this information age.”

So despite Elder Ballard’s very thorough and passionate manifesto a year ago about answering ALL the difficult questions of the young with facts and detail rather than faith and flannel because they can handle it and be “inoculated” against future faith crises, these were filtered out before the event. They chose the questions they were comfortable answering. They had weeks to prepare really great answers to those, and then they play acted in front of the audience as if they were speaking off the cuff. And, perhaps most shamefully of all, they got the YSA interviewers to tell the YSA’s watching live that they could still send in new questions, and had them pretend to receive online a new question posted during the broadcast from Mexico. That was pretty messed up – why make the kids lie too?

The Church media boffins sometimes seem to have accepted unethical norms in broadcasting as acceptable and pride themselves on playing the same manipulative professional deceptions towards viewers as a badge of honour, as in ‘look how much our stuff looks like the best of their stuff’ even while Elder Oaks is railing against being contaminated by the norms of “The World.” They are so excited about playing with the big boys by the big boy rules, they forget to question whether they should be even trying to in the first place, and whether those methodologies are ethical. Just one example speaks for many – a Deseret Books employee who was uncomfortable with being employed on a Sunday to generate live branded memes based on General Conference quotes to release quickly online and hopefully go viral as an advertising strategy which totally compromised spiritual and commercial boundaries, and LDS principles about not working unnecessarily on a Sunday, eventually became one of the critical exmormon bloggers of the disillusioned online multitude.

Church-owned Bonneville Communications which has done most of the Church’s media work with the omnipresent orchestral music to make people feel spiritual and tear-jerking plotlines for decades created a manipulative formula it marketed as ‘HeartSell” and advertised thus: “Our unique strength is the ability to touch the hearts and minds of our audiences, evoking first feeling, then thought and, finally, action. We call this uniquely powerful brand of creative “HeartSell”® – strategic emotional advertising that stimulates response.” All advertising tries to do this of course, but it was rather uncomfortable to be this obvious about it when it got bad press and made the Church look manipulative, so they dropped it and have tried to purge the internet of all trace of Heartsell.

Generations of hostile persecution have made far too many Mormons at all levels treat any kind of compromise or acceptance of us as part of the normal social landscape look like a religious triumph and very reluctant to look these gift horses in the mouth and see how rotten their teeth are. Even TV game shows get in trouble for faking spontaneous phonecalls or interactions with a live audience or the public at home, but we watched it happening before our eyes in this sacred broadcast. It seems none of the support team and production professionals who prepared the script and staged it all pointed out that faking a live question was going to look suspicious when they had already said in the introduction that the questions had all been carefully prepared in advance. Maybe they agreed in advance which question they would look for among any new ones actually posted during the broadcast. It did not look like they were dealing with anything unexpected at any point.

There were a few generally helpful bits of advice given to the young audience like not expecting to exactly control how much time we will spend each day on the many competing responsibilities and needs we are all trying to balance in our lives, but like this oft-repeated truism they trotted out several tired old clichés that the audience will have already heard a hundred times if they grew up in the Church. Repeating the same over-simplified advice has proven completely inadequate to the challenge and duty we all have to pull out the stops to keep in the membership the children we have invested years of our lives in supporting and teaching as parents, Primary teachers, youth leaders, Seminary and Institute teachers and bishoprics. We lose 3/4 of our young members by the time they become adults and there wasn’t a single new concept or way of speaking about these crucial issues which contribute to that terrible statistic in the whole event (apart from the massive lie, which I don’t think I’ve ever heard an Apostle be so stupid as to dare say with such uncompromising certainty before.) The average Ensign has more useful realism and depth and nuance than what they were saying.

In amongst the generic waffle about praying and studying the scriptures, keeping the commandments and trusting the leaders they did try to address some safer aspects of the pressing issues of the day: How can we trust the Church leaders when we know they have got things wrong? How can LGBTQ members of the Church make it work? What about the lies we were told about Church history that the Church is now admitting to as it rewrites that history? The questions weren’t worded exactly like that, but these are the biggest controversies, and they had a go at addressing them in general terms, while carefully avoiding any of the difficult details and specific situations that cropped up repeatedly in the 4,000 online questions.

The Circular Argument for Infallibility

Regarding trusting leaders Elder Oaks said “If we get an impression contrary to the scriptures, to the commandments of God, to the teachings of His leaders, then we know that it can’t be coming from the Holy Ghost. The gospel is consistent throughout.”

This repeated the circular argument given by Elders Holland and Eyring in the first Face to Face aimed at LDS Youth and that now features regularly in General Conference talks. Ask the Holy Ghost to witness truth to you, but if the Holy Ghost tells you anything different to what the General Authorities of the Church are saying right now, or tells you that they aren’t speaking truth from God but something that is their own opinion or not as inspired as they assume, you can be sure that that impression or message is not coming from the Holy Ghost. Therefore the Holy Ghost is not the actual ultimate testifier of truth in our Church, the Apostles are, because they trump the Holy Ghost. The situations that are most damaging, and they should be a lot more worried about, are where “the teachings of His leaders” are what are out of harmony with the scriptures and the commandments of God, not the spiritual “impressions” members receive. That is what people lose their testimonies over.

To put it another way their message is ‘Even though we sometimes admit that General Authorities are not infallible and have made serious mistakes in what they taught as doctrine and authorised at times, if the Holy Ghost identifies to you that WE are making one of those mistakes right NOW, you should ignore it and assume we are right and that the Holy Ghost is not (and conceptually cannot) be telling you we are getting something wrong because we are, as we have told you, always right…even though we aren’t. Er…our authority supersedes your prayerful witnesses from the Holy Ghost!’

And to add a further ingredient that still keeps rearing its ugly head, including the recent Ezra Taft Benson manual chapter 11, even if you know for sure that what a GA is telling you to do is wrong, do it anyway! Chapter 11 includes these quotes:

The prophet will never lead the Church astray.

President Wilford Woodruff stated: “I say to Israel, The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as president of the Church to lead you astray. It is not in the program. It is not in the mind of God” [see Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Wilford Woodruff (2004), 199].

President Marion G. Romney tells of this incident which happened to him:

“I remember years ago when I was a bishop I had President Heber J. Grant talk to our ward. After the meeting I drove him home. … Standing by me, he put his arm over my shoulder and said: ‘My boy, you always keep your eye on the President of the Church and if he ever tells you to do anything, and it is wrong, and you do it, the Lord will bless you for it.’ Then with a twinkle in his eye, he said, ‘But you don’t need to worry. The Lord will never let his mouthpiece lead the people astray.’” (Conference Report, October 1960, p. 78.)

I wonder what the word for that is – infalligullibility?…Oh yes, the “Nuremberg Defense.” Nice. Since Elder Ballard then went on to tell a massive lie and command everyone listening to tell it too, we all got an opportunity to test this infalligullibility concept to destruction before the hour was through.

Don’t Say Gay!

On the subject of how heterosexual members can support homosexual members of the Church Elder Oaks made a clumsy attempt to repeat the concept in Elder Bednar’s infamous “There are no homosexual Mormons” broadcast to Latin America. They both love redefining the meaning of words to make problems disappear so they seem to be riffing off each other these days. Bednar learnt the trick from Oaks, and now Oaks seemed to be echoing Bednar, although as we will see it has an even older history. He started with kind words about loving our gay brothers and sisters, but they are all the more painful to listen to because they represent the Doublespeak that has sadly become their norm, totally contradicting the content and ethos of his tub-thumping rant against ‘The World’ and by implication the gays and the trannies and the queers and all those other perverts in his Conference talk, and the actual policies he has signed up to which exclude, shun, persecute, punish and denigrate the “counterfeit families” of the LGBTQ people and even their innocent children:

“…Loving one another despite the differences that inevitably exist in the world along so many different lines; but across all of that is the commandment to love one another and help bear one another’s burdens, and that comes first, especially in this subject where bullying and physical brutality and harassment have played a part, I hope never with latter-day Saints, but verbal abuse, we hear a lot of reports of that and we just encourage that we… We struggle with this very real problem in an atmosphere of love.

“There is another thing that occurred to me and that is that we need to be cautious not to label ourselves or to label one another. The most important label any of us can carry throughout our life is “I am a child of God“, that very simple theme of our wonderful Primary hymn. That’s the important label that stays with us all our lives and we shouldn’t label ourselves as anti-this or that, or this or that, but carry on as children of God, and realise that all of us have temptations and problems, inclinations, burdens that we are wrestling with and if I were a bishop counselling each one of you I would say “Don’t label yourself as a this or that”, whether the label is “Kleptomania” or “I’m from Texas.”

Why can’t he just actually say ‘Gay?!’ “Don’t label yourself as Gay.” But no. So homosexuality in his head is a temptation, a problem, an inclination and a burden. It is also on a list with kleptomania and Texan. Well at least maybe he will work out one day that since you can be born Texan or kleptomaniac you can also be born gay.

So he hopes the Latter-day Saints have “never” been involved in the harassment or physical brutality towards gay people. Does he know the history of spying, denunciations and blackmail that the authorities at Brigham Young University used to engage in to discover and expel gay students there? How they intimidated any they found into giving them the names of any other gay students they were aware of and then calling them in for interrogation? Does he know about the aversion therapy program running at BYU from 1959 to 1983 that gay students who were discovered were then pressured into ‘volunteering’ for if they wanted to continue their courses where they were given vomit-inducing drugs or electric shocks while watching gay pornography in order to reconfigure their sexuality? How gay members were encouraged to get married heterosexually and have the children they now want to deny ordinances to if they couldn’t make it work and came out later? Of course he does – he was president of BYU from 1971 to 1980 and responsible for overseeing those policies and programmes while they continued on his watch. Beating people up in the street isn’t the only way to engage in physical brutality, as we have also learnt from the Mormons who notoriously devised some of the torture protocols for the CIA in recent years.

Elder Oaks also personally initiated a major purge of gay students from BYU in 1975 involving interrogating the Fine Arts and Drama students (because there aren’t any gay scientists or engineers of course! Facepalm) and undercover surveillance by the BYU security teams to catch students at gay venues.

It was 30th May in 1975 when the First Presidency issued a letter to local leaders encouraging them to not label people as homosexual because it makes the condition seem permanent and thus harder for them to believe they can “conquer the habit.” (Wikipedia’s ‘Timeline of LGBT Mormon History’ is a fascinating read. Who knew that one of Brigham Young’s sons Brigham Morris Young who co-founded the Young Men programme was an acclaimed falsetto operatic drag performer all his life!) So the ‘don’t call them / label yourself homosexual!’ mantra that was repeated again in this Face to Face has a long history. Focus on the words instead of the actual sexuality – if you stop calling yourself gay you might stop BEING gay. Super-helpful strategy chaps! Thanks for that.

It hasn’t worked for 42 years, but why not pretend it can yet again in 2017, and pretend nothing else has happened since 1975, including the Church’s “Mormon and Gay website” Elder Oaks has features in himself but did not mention. Is this really the only idea he has picked up in all that time and all those dialogues to share with the YSA’s of the world as a way to deal with being or caring about a gay Mormon?! Don’t call them / yourself gay? And to talk wistfully about hoping no Latter-Day Saints have been involved in harassing gay people when he is literally, of all the GA’s we have ever had, the Queerfinder General himself is disgraceful. It’s like watching the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang presenting Mr Roger’s Neighbourhood.

It is also maddening that Elder Oaks and his peers have used exactly the same language to condemn legalising gay marriage as was used against Mormon polygamy back in the day, calling it unchristian, unnatural, un-American and so on. So how interesting to discover that in a 1984 memo to the Apostles Elder Oaks acknowledged it would be ironic to use the 1878 Supreme Court ruling Reynolds vs United States which established that legal marriage was between one man and one woman “as an argument for the illegality of homosexual marriages [since it was] formerly used against the Church to establish the illegality of polygamous marriages.” He is fully aware of his hypocrisy as he smiles like the Cheshire Cat.

No doubt!

The third big issue, along with leadership infallibility and how to respond to gay Mormons, was framed as dealing with doubts.

44minutes 20 seconds in: “Elder Oaks, Elder Ballard, we have a lot of questions in the YSA about their friends dealing with doubts. A question from Utah asks ‘What advice/guidance would you give for answering tough questions about Church history when we are asked about them by someone who is struggling with their faith?”

Oaks: “I think the first thing is to distinguish between questions and doubts. Some people merge those as if they were the same. A question asked with a sincere desire to increase one’s knowledge and understanding is the way to increase knowledge. We encourage questions, and on the other hand, a doubt is an ambiguous word. Sometimes a doubt is a synonym for a question—you just want to know the truth about something. One dictionary definition of doubt is ‘Accompanied by distrust, a rejection of something.’ That’s the kind of thing that the scriptures have condemned. “The Saviour, for instance, said ‘O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?’ He said that to his apostles when they were in the midst of the storm. And, ‘Doubt not but be believing,’ comes out of Moroni, chapter 9. And ‘Look unto me in every thought, doubt not, fear not,’ that’s Doctrine and Covenants section 6. “So, doubt is a confusing word. In some aspects we don’t encourage doubt and the scriptures condemn it. On the other hand, questions—sincere desire to know that aren’t accompanied with a presumption of rejection—are something that we wish to encourage.”

So Elder Oaks began his response with a convoluted attempt to explain the weird mantra that has become common among the General Authorities in which they try and make a judgmental distinction between ‘questioning’ and ‘doubting’, which relates to the other weird Newspeak phrase they use now: “honest questions”. This ramble about doubt did not actually make any sense, but it didn’t need to. The tactic these General Authorities keep deploying seems to be to sow “confusion” where there isn’t any and imply that anyone asking uncomfortable questions about Church history is by definition hostile to the answers that may be offered, and faithless, and making a big fuss about nothing significant.

This tactic was also apparent in how he worded another bit of the trailer for the event, 2 minutes in: “The young adults that we meet are across a broad spectrum. Some are filled with the kind of questions that we have here, and some are going forward with their lives in a very confident way, and they look good to me.” This adds the idea that people with doubts or questions are not confident…and not even good looking! Far better to just move forward with your Mormon life in happy oblivion and not even ask these pesky questions – you’ll look a lot happier for it.

I guess it’s kind of endearing that Elder Oaks is really rubbish at being sneaky and hiding what he is really thinking when he hasn’t got a teleprompter. Maybe he’s not so Machiavellian after all. As a teacher of teenagers in Church and State my experience has been that that there is nothing more good-looking and confident and inspiring than a young person prepared to take their beliefs and religion seriously enough to ask tough questions about it and investigate any areas of weakness intensively. It is the people who don’t constantly question who learn very little and have no enduring clarity or depth or confidence in their own beliefs. I just don’t understand how a man who was a president of a university for 9 years thinks sailing through to adulthood untroubled by any doubts is an ideal to aspire to and promote. It implies a complete shutdown of the intellect. I was born at BYU in the first year of his presidency there and my parents managed to graduate unafraid to doubt and question, and they looked film star gorgeous!

PR Pain

I’m really glad they went ahead with broadcasting these revealing statements – it is incredibly important to know what the personal belief systems of our Apostles are before following them like sheep – but the PR people must have been screaming inside their heads watching this unfold if they are not complete morons. But then if they aren’t complete morons they would have destroyed all copies of the trailer, ‘Men In Black’ Neuralyzed everyone who was in the room to wipe their memories, and then recorded something completely different to broadcast.

Mike Otterson must be sitting in his London Temple President office alternately gnawing his own arm off and thanking his lucky stars that he had the sense to get out before any of this was happening on his watch as chief PR honcho. I think we can see the moment he chose to resign towards the end of his interview with Elder Christofferson trying to make the November Policy sound like it is kind to children. There is a steely cold glint in his eye and the footage ends abruptly, at which point I am convinced he had some kind of Hitler In His Bunker meltdown and smacked Christofferson on the side of his head with his clipboard. One day the footage of that will emerge and go viral.

Doubt Doubting Your Doubts

Any normal human thinker, never mind trained academic, understands that you cannot learn more about anything without testing what you already know or are being told with probing questions to find the weak spots and considering counter-arguments, or new information, with an open but also sceptical mind. You have to be prepared to abandon your assumptions and preconceptions, and you have to be prepared to continue sceptically questioning and challenging any new answers you are given to ensure a continual arc of learning and improving your concepts towards more and more accurate ones. Even the Book of Mormon extols this scientific method approach to gaining spiritual knowledge in Alma 32 – you start with a belief hypothesis, experiment with living it for a while, review and work out what is true or not from that experience, then remind yourself not to overclaim and think you know all about everything, just a bit about that one thing, and start working on the next spiritual experiment.

Elder Oaks contradicted this by teaching that any expectation that the answer you get to your gospel-related question might be inaccurate is faithless and ‘doubting’ in the worse sense of the word. The underlying assumption of this assertion is that any answer you will be given, presumably my any member in authority, will be infallible, 100% reliable. He already taught this on his April 2016 General Conference talk ‘Opposition in All Things’ when he said:

“Some of this opposition even comes from Church members. Some who use personal reasoning or wisdom to resist prophetic direction give themselves a label borrowed from elected bodies—“the loyal opposition.” However appropriate for a democracy, there is no warrant for this concept in the government of God’s kingdom, where questions are honored but opposition is not (see Matthew 26:24 …which refers to Judas Iscariot betraying Christ!! The implication being that opposing anything a GA’s says is the same as wanting to kill Jesus for money!) As another example, there are many things in our early Church history, such as what Joseph Smith did or did not do in every circumstance, that some use as a basis for opposition. To all I say, exercise faith and put reliance on the Savior’s teaching that we should “know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16). The Church is making great efforts to be transparent with the records we have, but after all we can publish, our members are sometimes left with basic questions that cannot be resolved by study. That is the Church history version of “opposition in all things.” Some things can be learned only by faith (see D&C 88:118). Our ultimate reliance must be on faith in the witness we have received from the Holy Ghost.”

The scriptures about doubt that Elder Oaks quoted to the YSA’s in the Face to Face have nothing to do with trusting General Authorities or their answers about Church History. They are all about trusting God and believing that He is totally reliable. But as I have already pointed out, some of Apostles apparently don’t see any difference between what they think and preach and what God thinks, or is the absolute truth in any given moment. Therefore in their mind anyone opposing anything the prophets do or teach is disloyal to Jesus like Judas Iscariot was, and an apostle’s word trumps an opposing witness of the Holy Ghost.

The Big Fat Melton Mowbray Porkie Pie

Having watched Elder Oaks slander the YSAs or their friends who have doubts as hostile, faithless, timid and ugly, Elder Ballard stepped forward and made a suicidal leap into freefall off the precipice of logic and truth into oblivion.

It was a breathtaking moment, as if he had finally had it with all the complications of dealing with the lies and mayhem of real Church history and wants to just make it all go away. Maybe he’s just tired, or has started on the inevitable decline into old age dementia that has become the stuff of our religious lives now we are to be forever ruled by a gerontocracy of prophets in their 90’s slowly shuffling off this mortal coil. Maybe he forgot to get to know the Essays like the back of his hand.

46 minutes 20 seconds in: Ballard: “And some are saying that the Church has been hiding the fact that there’s more than one version of the First Vision, which is just not true. The facts are we don’t study; we don’t go back and search what has been said on the subject. For example, Dr.James B. Allen of BYU, in 1970 he produced an article for the Church magazines explaining all about the different versions of the first vision.” Oaks: “How long ago was that article?” Ballard: “1970. That was back in 1970.” Oaks: “We’ve been hiding that for a long time…” [laughter] Ballard: “It’s this idea that the Church is hiding something, which we would have to say as two apostles that have covered the world and know the history of the Church and know the integrity of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve from the beginning of time – there has been no attempt on the part, in any way, of the Church leaders trying to hide anything from anybody.”

So the first example Elder Ballard offered that the Church has been completely open and transparent is an example that actually illustrates perfectly the opposite – and he just did not seem to realise this at all. It beggars belief. I mean, What The Actual Heck?! It turns out that the 1970 article which he read about from a folder, presumably provided by a very incompetent researcher underling, is STILL impossible to find and read for yourself in any LDS sources, even though it is a reference in the footnotes of the Gospel Topics essay about the First Vision accounts. They literally actually HAVE been hiding it for my entire lifetime. It’s nowhere to be found on LDS.org. The magazine it was written for (which he did not even name – so much for transparency!), turns out to be the Improvement Era, the Young Men’s magazine, so already with a more niche readership, and obviously completely unavailable to any member of the Church who didn’t happen to have a copy of the April 1970 Improvement Era around the house or in the 30,000 ward libraries in the 47 years since, during most of which time there was no internet. My ward library doesn’t have any Improvement Eras from 1970. Does yours?

If you know what you are looking for and do some hunting around you can arrive online now at a scan of that magazine on the archive.org website – click here to see it.

As the delightful Radio Free Mormon has explained in his podcast responding to this debacle, the reason an article about the different First Vision accounts even appeared then was because after cutting out the 1832 version of the First Vision from Joseph Smith’s autobiography in “Letterbook 1″ in the Church archive and hiding it in his personal safe from the few historians allowed anywhere near the archive by the First Presidency for 30 years, Joseph Fielding Smith (Church Historian from 1921 to 1970 when he became President of the Church) was dobbed in to the national press for hiding it in 1965 after its existence leaked via the President of the Seventy who he had shown it to. He then had it put back into the Letterbook, invited BYU graduate Paul Cheesman to write about it for his Masters thesis, failed to publish the study, and so it first saw the light of day when notorious ‘anti-Mormon’ royalty Gerald and Sandra Tanner published it. Soon after that this 1970 Improvement Era article appeared somewhat whitewashing the whole different First Vision versions issue.

You cannot know anything at all about that history and assert honestly that this is a good example of openness and that “from the beginning of time – there has been no attempt on the part, in any way, of the Church leaders trying to hide anything from anybody.” In fact it is a strong candidate for being literally the worst example, including an Apostle personally hiding a crucial historical document – the only First Vision account Joseph wrote by hand and the earliest written account of it – in his personal safe because it only described seeing Jesus, not God the Father as well.

There is a very long list of other examples of the prophets and apostles hiding truths from the world which anyone familiar with Church History could reel off for you, including the statement Joseph Smith had his many plural wives in the Relief Society sign and publish, some of whom didn’t even know that the others were also married to him, denying that there was any polygamy going on among the Nauvoo Mormons.

So how ignorant is Elder Ballard? Did he even write or understand a word of his address to the CES that was published in the Ensign? That seems to have come from the mind of a completely different person to the one in this Face to Face.

And the thing that cracks me up even more is that with about 2 minutes of searching LDS.org for ‘first vision accounts’ you can find the January 1985 Ensign article by Milton V Backman Jr about the different First Vision accounts, but neither Elder Ballard or his researcher seem aware that this much better example to support their openness assertion even exists, although maybe he just wanted the oldest one. At least the unaware members he blamed for not bothering to research properly have half a chance of finding that article – click here to see it.

Then after asserting that nothing has ever been withheld Elder Ballard dropped the most epic clanger possible – he supported this assertion with another piece of evidence that also proves, instantaneously, that the assertion is a total lie:

“Now we’ve had the Joseph Smith Papers. We didn’t have those, where they are in our hands now. And so we’re learning more about the Prophet Joseph. It’s wonderful we are. There’s volumes of it. There’s so much in those books now on my book shelf. Maybe you’ve read them all (gestures to Elder Oaks who says “No, not much!”) but I haven’t got there. I’m a slow reader.

“So, just trust us wherever you are in the world, and you share this message with anyone else who raises the question about the Church not being transparent. We’re as transparent as we know how to be in telling the truth. We have to do that. That’s the Lord’s way.”

Aww shucks! He’s like an honest cowboy isn’t he? So heartwarming and cute. If he had a Stetson on he’d have tapped it’s brim and said “Well, if you’ll excuse me Ma’am, I have to be moseying along now to electrer-cute some same-gender-attracted young’uns” and ridden off into the sunset.

So why do you think it is we only recently have the Joseph Smith Papers “in our hands” and are learning all these new things about Joseph Smith for the first time, Elder “John Wayne” Ballard? Could it be because most of them for the last century and a half have been kept under lock and key in the archive by the Church leaders hiding them from the world, until they decided just as the internet went global in the early 1990’s to start making them all available to everyone for the first time? Will the real Elder Ballard please raise his hand, and if it’s this one, do we really think he’s capable of leading the Church as President? 2016 Ballard who realised we must go for full disclosure with the young members has a chance of navigating us through some of the 21st century, but this guy hasn’t a clue what he is doing.

What Now?

We are used to bias and spin in the Church but I have found the brazen incompetence of all this hypocritical lying this year shocking. It has entered new territory, crossed a line. The overstatement involved in asserting that they are (a) experts in Church History, and then claiming that (b) they know “the integrity of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve from the beginning of time” while telling obvious lies about both themselves is farcical. From the beginning of time?! Even if we rule out any apostles on the other worlds stretching back through the aeons of time and limit ourselves to planet Earth, what do they know of the integrity of all the Nephite Apostles in the Book of Mormon? What integrity did Judas Iscariot have?! He was in the very first Quorum of Twelve Apostles.

What about the November 2017 Ensign article by Matthew C Godfrey of the Church History Department called ‘Five Lessons for Young Adults from Young Apostles’ which is surely recent enough for an old man with memory problems to have recalled a few weeks later, or maybe he doesn’t read the Ensign either while avoiding reading the Joseph Smith Papers. It reminds the Young Adults, the Face to Face target audience, that some of those young Apostles later left the Church and bitterly attacked Joseph Smith.

Maybe he should reread his own words to the CES leaders, assuming he even wrote them, which I am starting to doubt: “As you teachers pay the price to better understand our history, doctrine, and practices – better than you do now – you will be prepared to provide thoughtful, careful, and inspired answers to your students’ questions….. Now I offer a word of caution. Please recognize that you may come to believe, as many of your students do, that you are a scriptural, doctrinal, and history expert. A recent study revealed that “the more people think they know about a topic, the more likely they are to allege understanding beyond what they know, even to the point of feigning knowledge … and fabricat[ing] information. Identified as overclaiming, this temptation must be avoided by our gospel teachers. It is perfectly all right to say, “I do not know.” However, once that is said, you have a responsibility to find the best answers to thoughtful questions your students ask (see D&C 101:32–34).”

If only he had followed his own advice and resisted the “overclaim” and accepted the “responsibility to find the best answers to thoughtful questions your students ask.”

They invited the whole world to come and listen to them, preferably with their non-member friends, to have their questions and their challenges answered and healed by prophets, and instead delivered oversimplified nonsense, misinformation, lies delivered in both commission and omission form, and supported by evidence that proves the opposite of what they claimed for it. Isaiah 5:20 cries “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”

Woe indeed – woe in the torrent of derision that this disastrous broadcast has rightly invited. Woe for the thousands of intelligent, thoughtful and rational LDS Young Adults who have been insulted by this refusal to engage with their actual concerns and experiences in a useful or realistic way. These men minimised and ignored most of what they asked for help with, offering Heartsell instead of truthful answers or revelations.

Woe to the members of the Church still trying to defend the Apostles as men of integrity and trustworthy or reliable guides in this time of upheaval and disillusionment. These Apostles have just handed their opposition an unassailable propaganda weapon that will never go away.

Woe to the members who are fully aware of the concerns and complexities of Mormon doctrine and history and have battered testimonies hanging by the remnant of a thread who desperately needed them to step up in this broadcast and build on the recent momentum in Elder Ballard’s own talks to start acknowledging and seriously, truthfully and humbly addressing the problems. Instead of Balm of Gilead they were fed a thin gruel of obvious lies only suitable for young children in an authoritarian mind control cult. We all deserve and need a lot better than that. We should all be CAPABLE of much better than that, specially our global Church’s top tier of leadership.

Who Can Save Us?

If these conflicted and frustrated members stay, they are facing the next few decades being asked to sustain as Prophet and President of the Church first Elder Nelson, who unilaterally declared in a broadcast to the Church’s young adult Millennials from BYU Hawaii on 10 January 2016 that the November 2015 Policy was a revelation to a prophet on a par with the 1978 revelation ending racist priesthood discrimination, without any basis in reason or support from his peers. He claimed “Ever mindful of God’s plan of salvation and of His hope for eternal life for each of His children, we considered countless permutations and combinations of possible scenarios that could arise. We met repeatedly in the temple in fasting and prayer and sought further direction and inspiration. And then, when the Lord inspired His prophet, President Thomas S. Monson, to declare the mind of the Lord and the will of the Lord, each of us during that sacred moment felt a spiritual confirmation. It was our privilege as Apostles to sustain what had been revealed to President Monson.”

We don’t have all the evidence that this is a lie yet, but it seems to me it probably was because none of this was mentioned by Elder Christofferson when he was interviewed about the policy soon after it first came out and they seemed to be rushing to make excuses for its existence as if they had never heard of it before. They obviously had NOT “considered countless permutations and combinations of possible scenarios that could arise”, or consulted the female leaders of the Church which they are pretending to do these days, as the Policy is so badly written and conceptualised they had to send a follow up letter changing significant parts of it to moderate some of its more immediate injustices of harm to active LDS children and teenagers after it caused a traumatised reaction among the membership, particularly the families of faithful adults and children already in tough situations who it shuns and persecutes. There is no evidence that they considered any permutations at all since they hadn’t even considered the first and most obvious one of what to do about children in this newly created forbidden category who were already baptised and ordained and active. Are they so ignorant and bigoted they could not even imagine that such children of a gay parent were already on the pews at Church? Did they not check first just in case even if their imaginations could not stretch that far? Don’t they do that sort of thing as a matter of course when running the business interests of the Church with all their degrees in Business Management? If they really did deliberate at length and this was the best they could come up with, Elder Nelson revealed in his statement that they are even more incompetent and unfit for their callings than I am suggesting in this essay and they should all be released immediately.

There are still honest questions to answer about why it even happened in the first place that would justify not suffering children to come to Jesus and breaking the very Articles of Faith we ask our children to memorise in Primary about baptism being fundamental and not punishing children for their parents’ transgressions. The most likely scenario the bloggernacle has come up with is that it is a cynical move to try to avoid getting the Church entangled with child custody battles in American law where a gay parent might accuse the active LDS co-parent of creating ‘hostility’ to the gay parent by having the child officially enrolled in the Church which opposes homosexuality. Lawyers being allowed to run the religion regardless of devastating harm to faithful families. Some of the language Elder Christofferson used points strongly towards that motivation.

My wild card theory, shared by some, is that some minor subcommittee came up with the idea, added it to the online version of Handbook 1 without most of the higher ups knowing about it and when it went viral they all panicked and in a comedy of errors and cover-ups ended up with this mess instead of just admitting it was a mistake in the first place. The PR people clearly had no forewarning about it.

The original wording is still in handbook 1 (including a fatwah on children of parents who have EVER in the past homosexually cohabited, which would include before being converted and having your previous sins washed away by baptism!) and has not been modified, although there is now a reference to the later letter. So we don’t even know which version or reasoning for the policy is the actual one they are talking about or should be regarded as the ‘revelation’. Probably not the first one if they had to change it, even though Elder Nelson asserts they all received a spiritual witness that that one was from God via His prophet. What an embarrassing mess.

When 93 year old President Nelson dies (…he’s 93!) we will be asked to sustain Elder Oaks, who genuinely believes there can be no concept of opposition to anything the Apostles of the Church say because they are infallible and more reliable sources of truth than even the Holy Ghost, the deity who the scriptures say was appointed by God to be the prime witness of truth. Then Elder Ballard who is a proven liar who does not practice what he preaches, and urges all of us to lie too when asked about our Church’s fascinating and controversial history. Then Elder Holland who rants about people leaving the Church being weak taffy-pullers who make him angry, and often uses irrational arguments in his talks to justify staying in the Church. Then if Elders Eyring and Uchtdorf, who seem to be gentler and more rational souls, are still alive they may get a brief look-in, followed by a very long presidency of the much younger Elder Bednar who is the scariest control-freak of them all and insists there are no homosexual Mormons.

Realistically, what chance is there of any of those men having the courage to stand before the world, admit openly that our history is littered with lies and sins, and start apologising for them and their toxic impact on the religious lives and beliefs of the entire membership, and uncompromisingly offer a way forward for reconciliation and progress with integrity?

Only President Uchtdorf has made serious and consistent efforts towards that in his General Conference talks for several years, and now Elder Ballard has totally backtracked from his one attempt to do the same, Uchtdorf is still very much a lone voice regularly ignored and contradicted by the other apostles. He is a long way from the President’s chair, and introduced the nonsense about “doubting your doubts” so hasn’t quite got there in his own head yet or the courage to be consistent.

Elders Nelson and Oaks have little of the folksy cuddliness of Hinckley and Monson that allowed them to get away with and conceal some very nasty moments of homophobia that set us on our current collision course with the increasingly liberal democratic world, so I suspect their administrations are really going to challenge the loyalty and patience of the mainstream membership.

They are both intense ideologues who don’t hesitate to preach in absolute terms and demand uncompromising loyalty, and the third ‘Face to Face’ that has been announced for 3 February 2018 is going to be heir apparent Elder Nelson and his plural wife taking questions from…wait for it…his own grandchildren and great grandchildren, and some great nephews and great nieces! Just think about that for a minute.

But of course we haven’t become a personality cult dominated by a few Utah based white families running a multi-billion dollar oligarchy. We only do things “the Lord’s way”. The hearts of the Latter-Day Saints living in the slums and social housing of Brazil and Romania and Nigeria and England will surely be warmed as they watch these privileged, rich, probably all white American children wearing their sunday best and granted an audience with the man whose picture they will all have on their walls in a year or two and call ‘Prophet’. It will be like being invited to peek in on Christmas with a royal family, but without any actual discussions. I’m sure they won’t end up feeling resentful of the whole charade at all as they do what they were told in General Conference and pay their tithing before buying food for their own children…it doesn’t feel very Sermon on the Mounty though does it? Is this really the best Christ’s representatives on earth can come up with? What kind of incompetent PR ubershambles led to anyone at all thinking that was going to be a great idea?

Will we ever again see an Apostle or President of the Church interviewed by a real person with real questions and the confidence to insist on real answers instead of this North Korean totalitarian propaganda where the Men in Charge can say nonsense and lie while ranks of carefully dressed young people look on in rigid adoration as if they are speaking the wisdom of the age?

The Church is not going to thrive while this trajectory continues, so after abandoning hope for growth in the forseable future the best hope left is to at least survive the current accelerating decline until some truly inspired, or at least generically realistic and rational, leadership emerges. We need to get serious about emeritus status for Prophets and Apostles who can no longer function. There is a long history of Apostles promoting their personal projects while the boss was heading towards a coma and usually no good has come of it, from Bruce R McConkie publishing a book called “Mormon Doctrine” that wasn’t and has now been withdrawn, to Boyd K Packer excommunicating intellectuals.

With the internet assisting communication a mainstream grass-roots revolt could make the schisms of the Kirtland and Nauvoo eras look like a gentle Sunday afternoon game of croquet. Or will the American Apostles see the writing on the wall and get their act together in time? German Dieter Uchtdorf gets it. Brit Patrick Kearon gets it. French Gerald Causse gets it. White Kiwi Elder Ardern, uncle of the new Prime Minister of New Zealand who felt she had to leave the Church to maintain her integrity, doesn’t seem to get it after his useless attempt at Book of Mormon Apologetics in General Conference. We are desperate for some brown or black apostles, but maybe our best hope for now is more white but properly European ones.

Elder Oaks may have checkmated us all with his ‘Proclamation and the Plan’ talk, which I have no doubt was his intention. Noone can soften the Church’s official doctrines and practices related to LGBTQ members, their children and concepts of marriage in any way now without directly contradicting that talk and appearing to have succumbed to the deceptions of ‘the World’, which Elder Oaks mentioned 30 times in it. 30! He hopes he has consolidated the status quo for another generation, shutting down the ‘that was a while ago’ excuse that allows them wiggle room to make overdue reforms and course corrections. We are never going to appeal to normal compassionate and tolerant potential converts without significant changes of practice and tone regarding civil rights and sexuality.

You can inspire and radically transform a convert’s life with an ethos of forgiveness and unconditional love, but shunning and bigotry only appeals to bigots and we’ve already got too many of those. Bigotry simply can’t be the defining characteristic of our generation of Mormons like Elder Oaks wants it to be. We are still paying a terrible price for doing that to black people in the generations before mine and making that our battlefront with “The World”. Has he really learnt absolutely nothing from that devastating disaster?

Whether the assertively autocratic Apostles are shrewd schemers or confused and fearful old men winging it and stubbornly refusing to change their ways, the over-deferential bureaucrats and lesser General Authorities who kowtow to them need to wake up fast and smell the decaffeinated coffee. These old men won’t be around to face the medium and long-term consequences of their current actions which WE will be left to try to repair and rebuild. They are spending the last few years of their lives threatening the credibility of our whole leadership system, and the integrity the average member considers sacrosanct and representative of the heart and soul of their own lived Mormon Christianity. They are actually lying to the kids now, and telling the kids to lie too for goodness’ sake! A Hitchcockian swarm of chickens is on its way home to roost. Someone they will listen to needs to have the courage to say this to them instead of just thinking it.

So what do I do or think now personally as a lifelong member who loves the Restored Gospel and wants to be proud of my Church and see it grow for the rest of my life?

Freaking out with alarm at the startling revelation that some of our leaders are shameless liars and hypocrites is frankly embarrassing in the presence of my ex-Mormon friends and family who concluded long ago that the Church was founded by a skilful charlatan and has been led by tricksters ever since. To them Joseph Smith was a man who from his early teens had a gift for manipulating people into believing he could find buried treasures and pay him to chase it while never finding any of it and who, like pretty much every influential conman in history, made concubines of his young housemaids behind his wife’s back, and invented dodgy scriptures.

But there is also the Joseph who wrote scripture that takes Christianity, rescuing and preserving its broken theology, and living it wholeheartedly, completely seriously. The Book of Mormon reads like a cry from the heart of the universe to embrace the redeeming Christ whoever and wherever you are in the wide world. The Book of Abraham opens our religion up to embrace the Space Age and the universe of the Hubble Telescope, and in the Book of Moses the fully human and humane deity weeps with pure compassion for us. Joseph taught that we have a female Mother Goddess and made Eve the hero of Genesis and the Temple Endowment. He effectively gave priestesshood to women. He filled in many of the cracks and fatal flaws in fundamental orthodox Christian doctrines, and saved the billions of unbaptised dead from an eternal burning hell. That is my religion, and noone else has it.

We are sitting on a mountain of theological gold with Joseph Smith’s signature on it, but when we need highly informed and miraculously skilful leaders to sift the treasure from the treasure-seeking and reform our institutions and traditions to break through and destroy the mountain of pharisaical sediments crushing the flower of the real gospel Elder Uchtdorf has pointed us to in General Conference, we get these people who think they are getting away with being intellectually lazy and bad liars.

This Face to face was a disgraceful performance and apart from the shouting on the fringes, the indifferent silence about it I have heard from my ward and stake members speaks even louder in its own way. I haven’t heard anyone even mention it. They have frankly stopped paying much attention to what the Apostles say any more – their talks are boring and repetitive, they hardly ever say anything we haven’t already heard a hundred times and they are becoming increasingly irrelevant to our lives, except for their passionate reinforcement of boundaries of pharisaical rules and bigotry, which does get noticed and parroted by the fanatics when one tries to nudge a conversation in a more tolerant direction.

I’m still trying to fathom where this apostolic mindset of not bothering to research properly or be rational comes from. Despite what should be the unforgettable lesson of lying story-telling Seventy Paul H Dunn, Elder Holland recently got caught with his pants down telling a very inaccurate version of a faith promoting story that had not bothered to fact-check. He had the integrity to apologise and retract it afterwards. I wonder if Elder Ballard will retract his Porkie Pie?

Since they have shut down the accountability checks and balances of consulting the other quorums and the general membership through ‘Common Consent’ procedures decades ago when defining official doctrine, maybe the Apostles have collectively drifted away from reality and logic because they only listen closely to each other to determine the nature of what God is saying and revealing to His Church. The trains of thought and logic they use to explain or justify their positions get so entrenched they become a shared orthodoxy.

The leaked videos of the briefings they get from invited guests and the in-house minions who make powerpoints for them about the issues of the day indicate a level of carefully worded sycophancy and spin that keeps the real world far out of sight and mostly mirrors back to them a charade of confirmation bias.

When the diversity of life experience and perspective of these 15 Apostles is also so incredibly demographically concentrated on old white men, 10 of whom grew up in Utah even though the Church went global during the last century, is it any wonder they emerge from their meetings with policies and trains of thought to communicate to the world that are so disconnected from reality and the real issues the worldwide membership face?

At times they look cheery and pleased with themselves after saying something illogical or inaccurate as if it’s all going incredibly well because no one has told them otherwise. The audience can’t boo, the interviewers can’t ask follow-up questions. Noone is ALLOWED to tell them otherwise, or feels able to because they have just asserted their infallibility. They pretend to have face to face dialogue with the young, but clearly are not listening to learn anything from them. It is a one-way conversation and they don’t ever have to actually defend their positions and thus realise where the weaknesses are like the rest of us.

They promote as religious duty and wisdom a lifestyle and Church culture based on their own life experiences that seems to work for middle class people in the Wasatch Front with nuclear families but ignores all the other countries and social classes in the international Church. I rarely hear from them now the clarion call to be like Christ in the world; forgiving, hopeful, open-minded to the beauty and truth and potential in every soul, kind and welcoming to the sinner and their children instead of ostracising and judgmental. Or if they do manage some rhetoric like that it rings hollow and screams hypocrisy because it so directly contradicts what they said in another talk, or a policy of shunning and exclusion they just foisted on us all.

I was led to believe all my life that the Apostles were holy men living and travelling without purse or scrip and living modestly on their shared consecrated resources, but that was another lie. They are paid a big salary from the Church’s multi-billion dollar property and business investments which they manage and are entirely cocooned from the financial struggles of daily life most of the membership face. But they have fired the chapel custodians to save money and added those chores to all the other time consuming burdens of the unpaid local clergy. Methinks a class war is brewing as well as a truth war.

Pretending the problems are not real is not a long-term strategy that is going to work or future-proof our Church. That is the last desperate gasp of old men who don’t have a vision for our future clutching at straws from the past and panicking while Rome burns instead of acting decisively to put the fires out. Their response is ‘Don’t look at the fires, they aren’t really there. Look at us! The alleged fires are not even real! You weren’t born gay – that’s not real, but you kept calling yourself gay so it made you gay. It’s your neighbour’s fault that their testimony burnt down. They didn’t look hard enough for the information we refused to provide, and had doubts instead of “honest questions”. Your family members’ testimonies did not just burn down because of discovering that the Prophets and Apostles past and present were lying to them because “we would have to say as two apostles that have covered the world and know the history of the Church and know the integrity of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve from the beginning of time – there has been no attempt on the part, in any way, of the Church leaders trying to hide anything from anybody.”

The Millennials are growing up in a world where quantum computers and genetic engineering are going to revolutionise technology and science, facilitating artificial intelligence that could match human minds, where scientists are pretty sure that we live in a multiverse of infinite universes, and these men are pretending it’s still the Middle Ages and all you have to do to deal with uncomfortable realities is pretend they aren’t there, and tell everyone who follows you to also deny their existence and read only the approved books.

‘Lying for the Lord’ used to be the most ridiculous-sounding anti-Mormon accusation of many ridiculous accusations I read as a teenager in the mostly incompetent anti-Mormon propaganda of the 1980’s, but flipping Nora…What did Elder Ballard think he was doing after having weeks to carefully prepare what he was going to say?!

If we generously treat our Apostles as frustrating but indulged bumbling grandfather figures who are getting a bit past their prime and being embarrassing, but who we have affection for because of their long service and past glories, we cannot also genuinely look to them and trust them as being more inspired and informed than we are. Everyone needs to stop mollycoddling them and expect better – if they are like grandparents in a retirement home who we are looking after and making excuses for then we should retire them. If they are actually up to their job and responsible for looking after us they need to experience some assertive accountability and Common Consent. Failing to keep that accountability front and centre has led to most of these crippling dysfunctions in the Church that require urgent reform.

Solace

I was blessed to learn as a teenager that there is no human trouble that cannot be healed, or at least comforted and articulated, by 1980’s New Wave Synth Funk-Pop created by nerdy white poets who were a bit rubbish at dancing. So my iphone shuffle spoke to my soul as I walked to work last week fuming about the mess this Face to Face has dropped us in. Good old China Crisis, who created the most beautiful audio comfort blanket ever with their cryptic song ‘Christian’, sang me another lullaby that I had not paid much attention to before, but perfectly spoke to this ‘Tragedy & Mystery’:

Winter displayed in a snow white haze Fires burning brightly in the night Tragedy and mystery Open your mind and you will see From waterfalls I hear romantic calls Feather in a ray of sunlight

Open your mind and you will see Your world is changing though you cannot see There’s no room for secrecy Your world is changing faster everyday There’s no truth in what they say Two by two My heaven made blue Life in a world of love and truth

As I watch the fires as my friends’ and family’s homes of testimony are burned to the ground by all the lies of the Apostles who cannot see that there’s no room any more for secrecy and the world is changing faster every day, and that there is no truth to their assertions that the General Authorities have never hidden truth, I still catch a glimpse of a feather from an angel’s wing. It is shining in a sunbeam somewhere in a clearing in a wood or by a tranquil river in New York State. The echo of a divine intervention that poured living water like a waterfall from heaven and restored the gospel of Jesus Christ to the earth in a real or metaphorical pillar of light. A glimmer of hope that angels still surround us and can speak to us if we just have the courage to set fire to the lies covering their hiding place instead of burning the truth and policing the love.

Or if you prefer a less wafty and ethereal conclusion, Jon Stewart got it spot-on in The Daily Show, bless his heart:

“BSers have gotten pretty lazy, and their work is easily detected, and looking for it is kind of a pleasant way to pass the time, like an ‘I Spy’ of BS. So I say to you tonight, friends, the best defence against BS is vigilance.”

Amen, Brother.

Face to Face with a Lying Disgrace published first on http://ift.tt/2wQcX5G