Great Conjunction, What's Your Function?

This week, I learned that a "great conjunction" is not just something that happens in the movie The Dark Crystal. As it turns out, you can see one here on Earth. On Monday night, we were able to see the "Star of Bethlehem" in the nighttime sky in the form of an alignment of the planets Jupiter and Saturn.

In my neck of the woods, it looked something like this (first zoomed in, then normal view):

And what a pretty sight it was. Apparently, this is the first time in eight centuries that such a sight has been seen on Earth.

The Great American Solar Eclipse of 2017

The Great American Solar Eclipse of 2017 was everything it was cracked up to be. I heard and read all about the hype for the months and weeks leading up to last Monday, August 21, and since then I've seen and heard numerous accounts of the event from people who traveled up to Idaho or Wyoming or other places to witness it from the path of totality. From what I've learned, I would definitely go out of my way to travel a good distance to see the next one from its path of totality so I can see things for myself.

Some of these accounts have even compared it all to a spiritual experience, and it's hard to see it any other way. Mother Nature can put on quite an amazing show if we stop, look, and listen to the majesty that surrounds us everywhere.

Anyhow, my experience with the eclipse (this time) was this: I put on my Clark Planetarium-approved sunglasses (yay, six eyes!) over my regular glasses and watched the eclipse from a patio chair in the backyard. Though I was not a witness in the path of totality, it was nevertheless a beautiful sight:

(No, the sky didn't turn this dark here; the background is black because the photo was taken from under the retina-protecting safety glasses.)

A photo can't really capture it. But it was beautiful. Here in North Salt Lake, the sky at 11 a.m. darkened to the point it normally would look at about 7:00 or 7:30 p.m. at this time of year. It was a bit surreal. I think there's really something to all of this astronomy stuff.

The Incas, whose descendants I lived among and served in Peru, worshipped the Sun. They also had a lot of weird traditions and sacrificed human beings, but they were onto something in their adoration of that celestial body that provides us all with light, heat, photosynthesis, and countless other wonders. Today, Peru's unit of currency (you'll thank me when/if this is ever on "Jeopardy!") is the sol, which is Spanish for "Sun."

For me, it all points to our Creator. Like Alma testifying before Korihor, it makes me want to proclaim:

"All things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator" (Alma 30:44).

With this eclipse, I feel like He basically dropped the mic.

"Churches Which Are Built Up, and Not unto the Lord"

As I mentioned in a post last week, I've been reading the Book of Mormon again. And, in the process, I'm finding some pretty great things.

In chapter 2 Nephi 28:3, Nephi prophesies about the things he writes coming forth in a day in which there would be "churches which are built up, and not unto the Lord" (emphasis added). These churches would spread "false and vain and foolish doctrines" (2 Nephi 28:9). A few chapters after this, Nephi laments, "I am left to mourn because of the unbelief, and the wickedness, and the ignorance, and the stiffneckedness of men; for they will not search knowledge, nor understand great knowledge, when it is given to them in plainness, even as plain as word can be" (2 Nephi 32:7).

I feel Nephi's pain. I look around at a world that has built up churches "not unto the Lord" everywhere; churches to science; churches that champion the natural man rather than the humble disciple, where personal responsibility and consequences are shirked; and even churches that worship celebrities, sports, and other hobbies or schools of thought. I've found that even those who claim to be agnostic or atheist are, for the most part, still religious about other ideas or things.

No, there is nothing wrong with most hobbies and sports. There's nothing bad about science in and of itself, either. It was by far my least-favorite subject in school, but I got no beef with medicine that cures illnesses of both the body and the mind, or a trip to the planetarium to look up at the stars, and learning about other wonders scientific minds have discovered. The problem, I believe, is when we, like Billy Joel once said, "go to extremes."

I cringe, for example, when I see so-called "science" (cough gender is now supposedly "fluid" and is determined not by chromosomes but is on an ever-evolving spectrum on, didn't you know? cough) making new "discoveries" that surpass basic common sense and that, worst of all, confuse and befuddle the children of God about what their true identities and possibilities are.


As G. K. Chesterton taught: "Unfortunately science is only splendid when it is science. When science becomes religion it becomes superstition."

I did a little fact-checking on Twitter to provide an example of celebrity worship, and I learned that the ever-fascinating mind of Kim Kardashian, to name one of our (sarcasm alert) most fascinating modern thinkers, is followed by more than 52 million people. By contrast, only two million people follow the members of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles combined.

It's a strange, bewildering time we live in. Yes, we have a lot of work to do, collectively, to spread the hopeful, wonderful message that the gospel carries with it. Nevertheless, the Lord has shown us the way so that we may see the truth through the lies and learn to discern "things as they really are" (Jacob 4:13).

Through my latest elders quorum teaching assignment a couple of weeks ago, I came across these powerful words from President Gordon B. Hinckley:

"Of course we believe in the cultivation of the mind, but the intellect is not the only source of knowledge. There is a promise, given under the inspiration from the Almighty, set forth in these beautiful words: 'God shall give unto you knowledge by his Holy Spirit, yea, by the unspeakable gift of the Holy Ghost." (D&C 121:26.)

"The humanists who criticize the Lord's work, the so-called intellectualists who demean, speak only from ignorance of spiritual manifestation. They have not heard the voice of the Spirit. They have not heard it because they have not sought after it and prepared themselves to be worthy of it. Then, supposing that knowledge comes only of reasoning and of the workings of the mind, they deny that which comes by the power of the Holy Ghost.

"The things of God are understood by the Spirit of God. That Spirit is real. To those who have experienced its workings, the knowledge so gained is as real as that which is acquired through the operation of the five senses. I testify of this. . . .

"Let us not be trapped by the sophistry of the world, which for the most part is negative and which so often bears sour fruit."

Did You Hear about Pluto? That's Messed Up!

Whenever the subject of science comes up, the first thing I usually think of is the word science being said, or rather yelled, whether in my head or out loud, just like that one guy in the '80s new wave song "She Blinded Me with Science" by Thomas Dolby:

"SCIENCE!"

Like many other things that happened in the '80s, you had to be there.

Speaking of science, it was, by far, my weakest subject in school. Life Science gave us the chance to dissect earthworms and frogs, which should have been cool in theory but instead let me know I am nauseated by the smell of formaldehyde, as well as earthworm/frog insides. Things didn't get much easier in earth science and Biology, and by the time I took chemistry in the 11th grade, I was downright befuddled by half of the stuff I read and/or was tested on.

The thing is, though, as little as I understand about science, I sometimes feel like some scientists honestly don't understand much more about it than I do.

A couple of days ago, I came across an article online with the headline:

“Everything We Know about the Big Bang Could Be Wrong”

Sarcasm alert: And here I had put so much stock into the Big Bang. My day was ruined for about one-eighth of a second, and then I kept on scrolling.

I think also of the planet Pluto, formerly the non-planet Pluto, which had previously been a planet the first time I learned about it when I was an elementary school kid growing up in the '80s.

Like I said, you had to be there in the '80s, or it just wouldn't make much sense.

I don't say any of this to bring on an onslaught of "Oh yeah, well science gave us this and science gave us that, and here's a Snopes article on this thing, you nimrod, and science cured polio, blah blah blah." If science is "all that" to you and your world, then I say, congratulations. Science has done some great things, to be sure. It has, indeed, cured diseases and helped us understand a lot about how people and animals and things work, and made inventions, and I'm not disputing any of that.

It is not, however, an exact science. So to speak. There seems to be a lot of guesswork involved in which a best guess is simply accepted as fact. In another decade, Pluto could be reclassified an asteroid, or a comet, or a giant, floating space paperweight, or the result of a bowel movement shot into space by Jabba the Hutt thousands of years ago.

My recurring thought is simply this: I'm glad that real, powerful, everlasting truth does not change. By definition, it never has, never does, and never will. It is not altered nor modified when people change their minds, because it comes from God. And I'm grateful I know the places I can go to find it.