Last Sunday I woke up feeling really ill.  I was dizzy and sleepy and off and on really hot.  I fell asleep about 1pm and woke up around 4pm, yet I still felt myself exhausted.   So at 9pm I went to bed for the night.

Feeling that way I called in sick the next day for work.  Then feeling a bit better that night I went to a meeting and Tuesday I went to work.  By Wednesday it was obvious I was still feeling the effects of some sort of flu, in fact each day until Friday I felt ok in the morning and awful as the day wore on.  By wednesday just sitting at my desk I broke out into a sweat like I was running a marathon.

So I went home early and stayed away from work for the following day.  Only on Friday did I feel good enough to go back into work and actually do normal things.

At this point if you have not tuned out I will explain why all this description is so significant.

Our local hockey team the Edmonton Oilers on Wednesday announced that at least one player had come down with the H1N1 (aka the swine) flu.   At the same time many other players on the team had gotten the flu over the past week or so. 

Meanwhile in a panic our local government rolled out the H1N1 vaccine which was a complete disaster where people lined up for over five hours in some cases to get a vaccine, and now they have run out after doing only 1/10th of the population.

I am not sure if I had that particular flu, or a couple of others did or not but I definitely had a number of the symptoms.  As the week went on it turned out that many in our ward had also been infected by H1N1.  So suddenly on Saturday warning that the church was initiating pandemic rules and that the ward was going to have to go through some strict rules.

So on Sunday, I left a couple of our family at home who were still suffering symptoms.  Amazingly the church was set up in a very specific way.   You were allowed only into doors that were close to the washrooms.  At which point if you were suffering flu like symptoms you were asked to go home.  If you were not you had to immediately wash your hands.

My son who was holding the mike for a blessing and passing sacrament had to wash his hands a few more times.  It was an incredible introduction to the organized way the members were watched over by the leaders of the church.

So after my flu filled week it was fascinating to see how each sector of our society dealt with a possible outbreak of a serious virus.

Well, today was first day of my Masters degree.  After a year and a half since my last class ended on my Bachelors I have anticipated this day for a while.

So far getting familiar with a new professor and a new system of dealing with submissions, discussions and readings has left me grasping a bit this morning.  As I had to go back to my fourth year history course to grasp exactly what was required.

It has taken a bit of stumbling and crawling around back with words and phrases that are not part of normal conversation.  Précis comes readily to mind.

After about an hour though I am finding my stride again, should be interesting course “Historical Research Methods” while seemingly a boring title underlies an important phase of historical understanding.    The course has reminded me a lot of my US Civil Rights course in that it offers a seminar style which obviously is the way graduate courses work.   The good thing is that the style is familiar.

Hopefully it is the start of better things to come.  As always as I work with the focus of my arguments I will bring some of them here for your perusal.

Anyway, self indulgence away!

Ok lets be honest.  An appeal to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is probably the stupidest thing a government wanting to stop something could do:

The British Columbia government will not launch an appeal after criminal charges against two polygamist religious leaders were recently thrown out of court, the province’s attorney general announced Thursday.

Instead, Mike de Jong said he will ask the B.C. Supreme Court to clarify the controversial polygamy laws, and rule on whether they violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The announcement comes a month after a B.C. court threw out the charges against Winston Blackmore and James Oler.  Read the rest of the article here.

That sounds good in theory, but the record of the Charter on ruling on these things is well pretty poor.  Courts have ruled in favour of the following:

1. Same Sex Marriage – see in Canada it is a civil right, sorry Elder Oaks

2. Group sex um parlours – yeah less said here the better

3. Abortion laws and other moral laws get thrown out often

So asking the BC Supreme court to rule on the whole of Polygamy and charter rights sounds like a land mine waiting to be stepped on.  I get the impression they just do not get it.  Of course I could be wrong and maybe the court will rule against them but I suspect the FLDS will be head over heels at present.  Unable to bring a charter challenge themselves they have goaded the BC government to do it for them.

British Columbia the new home of Polygamy, just in time for the Winter Olympics, maybe that Egyptian bobsled team can bring their wives now.

Just reading the latest John Whitmer Association journal.  In it is an excellent article on the Cutlerites.

For the second time in the last few months I came across the idea that the church wanted to get the Nauvoo temple finished before they left because if it did not it would be under condemnation.

the specific verses are in Doctrine and Covenants section 124:

31 But I command you, all ye my saints, to build a house unto me; and I grant unto you a sufficient time to build a house unto me; and during this time your baptisms shall be acceptable unto me.

32 But behold, at the end of this appointment your baptisms for your dead shall not be acceptable unto me; and if you do not these things at the end of the appointment ye shall be rejected as a church, with your dead, saith the Lord your God.

33 For verily I say unto you, that after you have had sufficient time to build a house to me, wherein the ordinance of baptizing for the dead belongeth, and for which the same was instituted from before the foundation of the world, your baptisms for your dead cannot be acceptable unto me;

I focus on the bold because I have seen two instances where this comment is used to justify various ideas.   For Cutler and Strang the fact they did not get the church built meant that the LDS church was condemned thus their strains were approved.

In the LDS faith it meant that the church continued working at finishing the and dedicating the temple right until the end.

For me that seems like a very strange leap of logic to say that the Saints failed, as the Cutlerites, and I believe Lyman Whight and James Strang also argued (I will reference these later when I can find them).   It seems like an excuse and nothing more.   One thing I have seen from the revelations we have is that the Lord is not a god of absolute demands of his mortal children.  In fact he appears to accept the “good effort” often enough.

In fact that whole of our faith is built on the idea that we are fallible creatures in need of salvation from our perfect older brother to make up for us.   So I could hardly see God faulting Saints under extreme pressure to get out of Nauvoo from taking right to the bitter end to finish the work on his house.    The fact they even got it finished speaks of an acceptable offering.

For me the faith that I have in God predicated on the understanding that we all fall short of his glory allow us to not live up to his ideal.  Certainly I do not.

I have noticed something when the media cover the Church.

They will, whether through ignorance or purposely, make basic mistakes about things with the church.  I could not imagine a quality newspaper not knowing or at least looking up say a quote from the Talmud or Koran.

This happened again in the last day.   Paul Hinman, a Mormon from southern Alberta was voted in recently in a by-election.  With the win Hinman returns to the Alberta provincial Legislature for a second time.

So as part of this process he was sworn in yesterday.  He brought with him his Bible as we do not normally swear on them anymore.

Well in the article they said he had a quote:

Hinman told me he got it in 1978 when he was on his Mormon mission in the Philippines. He used it when he was sworn in after his first election victory in 2004 and placed his hand on it again today.

“It’s always been near and dear to me,” he said. “And it’s traveled a lot of miles with me.”

It features a map of the Philippines on the back. On the front is a picture of Jesus and the words “The Glory of God is Intelligence,” a quote from the Book of Mormon.

However the quote comes from the Doctrine and Covenants:

93:36 -  The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth.

In a way it makes me sad because while it is not a big issue, and the article was nice, it is a basic mistake. I was listening to Hinman talk about it and I am sure it was not his fault that the reporter had the wrong book.

I think a Google search could have sorted it out.

It makes me wonder how often they get things wrong for other religious groups.

To tell the truth I know the reporter and I like him.  He probably just made an honest mistake but this is obviously not the first time this has happened, considering the Church public affairs department has a news room dedicated to making similar corrections on articles about the church.

Anyway just a note from the field.