David Marsh

New data coming out about how many people have been leaving the LDS church is shocking! Using the decade 2000–2009 as a baseline, the rate of disaffiliation multiplied dramatically in over the next three successive five year periods. Christians we have so many opportunities to get the gospel to these people who are leaving! Most of them become atheists which is upsetting.

Larry Wheels thought he could survive a round with former UFC champ Merab Dvalishvili He tapped 3 times in 1 minute 😭

Piazza-culture is extremely pro family and I'm experiencing first hand why and how. I live in a remote medieval village in Italy with my children and here, the tradition is for everyone to come down to the piazza in the afternoon/evening and just hang out. The parents drink a coffee or a beer, the children play together, often an ice cream truck shows up (selling real iced cream of course), elderly people hang around reading books, socialising and gossiping. Even though I don't speak Italian very well, I am learning so fast because of these evenings. My children don't need me to organize social activities for them because it is built into the society. I make friends easily with multiple age-groups of people. Childcare and motherhood has become drastically less isolating for me because I don't have to organize coffee meetings with friends that I put into my calendar and then it becomes a special interrupting event of the day, rather, we just all show up at the same place regularly and friendship and socialising is part of the rhythm of living. Children get fresh air and exercise in a natural way. There are dogs and cats that hang out and everyone looks after them; they don't pose a threat or nuisance to anyone. I notice also that although the piazza is packed with people every evening, there is zero litter, and everyone respects their surroundings. This wouldn't be possible by the way without the Italian way of being. You can't just put a piazza in any culture and have it work. The Italians are extremely warm and open-hearted and that's what makes this work. I know because I've seen similar physical settings in other cities and the coldness/insularity of other cultures precludes this kind of open social atmosphere. Italian piazza culture helps bring all those groups of people together who are normally isolated in capitalistic/materialistic societies: the elderly, the small children and the mothers. The main threat to this culture are foreigners who move to Italy for the weather and the cost of living, but reject Catholicism, Christ, family and the core aspects of Italian culture which are all about loving your neighbour. This little pocket of humanity in the world needs to grow. We need to protect this and we need more of it. If you want the benefits of a Christian society, you can't turn your nose up at the values that create it. (picture not mine)

I don’t think people realize what an existential threat to civilization this is.

Emily Wilson completely changed the meaning of a key word in the Odyssey to make it seem like Helen of Troy didn't blame herself for starting the Trojan War, when in fact the text makes it clear that she did. In 4.145-146, Helen calls herself κυνώπιδος (dog-faced). This is an insult meaning "shameless." It is commonly used to refer to unfaithful lovers. For example, it is used elsewhere in the Odyssey (8.319) to refer to Aphrodite after she cheats on Hephaestus with Ares. Fagles translates 4.145-146 to: "all you Achaeans fought at Troy, launching your headlong battles just for my sake, shameless whore that I was.” Lattimore translates 4.145-146 to: "for the sake of shameless me, the Achaians went beneath Troy, their hearts intent upon reckless warfare." Wilson completely changes the meaning of κυνώπιδος to "hounded" (she is trying to be cute by translating 'dog-faced' to a word that still relates to dogs, even though its actual meaning is completely unrelated). She then applies this word to the Achaeans, saying that they were hounded, not Helen. Her translation is in the image below. This is obviously an ideological change that she made because she personally believes Helen shouldn't be blamed for the Trojan War. She deliberated distorted the meaning of one of the foundational texts of Western literature to conform with her modern beliefs.

"You forget that Joseph said the same sociality that exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory, and you forget the audacity of this claim. Every other religion in the history of the world has imagined heaven as something other than this, a dissolution into pure spirit, a union with the impersonal absolute, a beatific vision of God so total that all distinctness disappears, a sleep until resurrection, a vague communion of saints whose individual identities are softened into the general bliss. Joseph said no. Joseph said the friendships you forge here go with you. The laughter at your kitchen table goes with you. The particular way your wife laughs when something delights her, that goes with you, in her actual face, recognizable, hers, forever. This is so strange that we have nearly stopped noticing how strange it is. Sit with it. Heaven is not the dissolution of the self. Heaven is the perfection of the relationships the self has already begun to build. Your son who is six years old will be your son when he is six hundred and six thousand years old. The conversations you have not yet had with your wife will be had, in some upper room beyond the veil, in language you do not yet have words for. The friend you lost in your twenties, the one whose death you have never fully processed, is not gone. He is waiting. He has been working in the spirit world, the way Joseph said all of us will work between death and resurrection, and when you cross over he will know your name and the two of you will pick up exactly where you left off, except now neither of you will be in a hurry, because neither of you will ever die again." -- your pioneer ancestor