Episode 302 – Preamble

Another way to say it, speaking of Oaks’s recent speech and President Nelson’s leadership, is that for the common good, and to be a good global citizen, you have to be willing to give up your rights.

Even regular old, good muslims, who don’t have a crazy ideologies, can be radicalized far quicker than in any other religion or group, save maybe one.
Since we are talking about Muslims, and I don’t see Dmitri yet, here is a song for the topic (though the song is about Satan tempting and corrupting): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U1ykrpzi2k

I made an obligatory post for last week before I got a chance to listen, to let you guys feel good about yourselves. I was at an undisclosed location at over 9500 feet elevation, and then subjected my wife and sister to last week’s episode on the drive back this last weekend, plus the episode on The Matrix.

Tolkien is the best. I’m doing a run through the audio books right now. I dabble in some world building, so I follow some “Book Tok” channels to check out new books. Most aren’t great. Some are ok but almost nothing comes close to Tolkien and some of the other classics.
Here is a podcast going over three Christ figures in The Lord of the Rings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYOVvaZow8Q

There are a couple of, I guess you’d call them self-taught scholars, who do invoke Nibley and have used his content to continue their studies and a lot of their work on apocryphal texts their ties to the temple endowment and to prove Joseph didn’t and couldn’t have made it all up. I think their videos and books are the only modern LDS “influencers” that I’ve enjoyed recently. They’re not really influencers, even though they do have social media presence, but they mostly just talk about things that they study and publish on some LDS influencer’s channels on YouTube.
One of the ones I’m talking about also writes science fantasy (where he mixes in some temple theology) and worked as an editor for one of my favorite book series of all time, The Sun Eater.