Ryan Byrd’s Ramblings

Who said there wasn’t drama in the BOM?!? Here are a few of my favorites:

• 10- Night Attack — While enemy is asleep, sneak inside their city (Alma 62:23)
• 9- Bait and Bash — Use kids to attract attack, and then beat them down from behind (Alma 56:30)
• 8- Now You See me, Now You Don’t — Split your army in two divisions, hide and wait for the enemy to get in between (Alma 43:52)
• 7- No Soup For You! — Lay siege to the city and intercept the provisions (Alma 57:10)
• 6- Improv Everywhere — Knock off main guy, put on his clothes and impersonate him, make off with the goods (1 Nephi 4:7-11)
• 5- Drunk ‘n Dash — Get guards so drunk they pass out, then bolt (Mosiah 22:7-10)
• 4- Come Out and Fight Like a Man — Decoy opposing army out of key city, then sack it (Alma 58:21, 52:24)
• 3- Have Some More Wine… — Send strong libations to guards. Once they’re out, slip in and arm the prisoners (Alma 55:8-16)
• 2- Midnight Javelin Toss — While enemy sleeps, sneak into tent and toss a spear into him (doesn’t work if you’re angry) (Alma 51:34, 62:36)
• 1- Perfidy 101 — Make a secret surrender pact with opposing army to become second in command, poison the general, return home, stab the king, marry the queen! (Alma 47)

Well, it’s that time of the year again, where LDS members gather en mass in downtown Salt Lake and at church-houses everywhere. Today’s meeting marked the first LDS general (read “world”) conference since the passing of its beloved president Gordon B. Hinckley. Whenever a church president dies, the first session of the next conference is referred to as a solemn assembly and during that assembly, the church members vote to sustain the new leadership. It’s quite the impressive sight to watch as the congregation stands in groups and pledges support in unison.

Random Thoughts: Somehow we got seats just six rows back from the front, so our view of the proceedings was fantastic. So, too, were the acoustics– the choir sounded majestic. One of the speakers, Kenneth Johnson, evidently from the UK (which reminds me of my new year’s resolution to develop a convincing English accent…), talked about the importance of the family. They must have cleared out all the flowers from the Garden of Eden and brought them into the building to garnish the stand and podium. The lights behind the large organ pipes change from orange to blue to signify the conference is about to begin. There are a series of three robotic cameras which raise and pivot around fluidly to capture everything on video for the global television transmission. Immediately in front of us were two attractive French young women accompanied by an energetic American guy; it was my greatest love with my greatest hate; beautiful French juxtaposed with a boorish, butchering of Franglais. Did I speak with the women? Yes. Did they find my Swiss intoned French simply delightful? Of course.

You’ve read on RBDN about the 176th Semiannual General Conference, and the 177th Annual General Conference. Well, it’s October again and that means it’s time for the 177th Semiannual General Conference. I attended this morning’s 2 hour session and I noticed that there were fewer protesters than usual, probably due to the rainy weather. Oh, sure, you can stand on the corner and heckle us incoherently when the sun is shining, but as soon as a little, tiny rain shower comes along, you all flee back to your Jesus-hates-everything, always-use-outside-voices, bathing-is-for-sinners “churches.” Some protesters you turned out to be.

Oh, and I snapped a few photos — enjoy!

Happy Easter!

A couple of days ago I blogged about the compatibility of Science and Religion. I am apparently in good company. Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in his new book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, says “I am a scientist and a believer, and I find no conflict between those world views.” Check out the CNN article on Dr. Collins.

Remember how I wrote about how science was unable to address many essential questions? Collins enumerates some of those questions:

• What is the meaning of life?
• Why am I here?
• Why does mathematics work, anyway?
• If the universe had a beginning, who created it?
• Why are the physical constants in the universe so finely tuned to allow the possibility of complex life forms?
• Why do humans have a moral sense?
• What happens after we die?

Discussion Points:

• “Die Religion … ist das Opium des Volkes” — Karl Marx
• “In a world brimming with increasingly destructive technology, our infatuation with religious myths now poses a tremendous danger. And it is not a danger for which more religious faith is a remedy.” — Sam Harris, the modern day Anti-Christ
• Why won’t God heal amputees?

Related Links

• Wikipedia’a Coverage of science and religion

Some of you know that I’m a Mormon, and one thing us Mormons do is hold a global conference every so often. This weekend, for example, marks the 177th Annual General Conference for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The LDS church, as I see it, helps improve the world by inspiring men and women to be better and by strengthening families. I believe that cause is noble.

Yet, religion is not always seen favorably in the popular press or among some people at large. It has even been libeled with oft-repeated assertion that “the more you know, the less likely it is that you will buy into a religion.”^* I seriously doubt the correlation is as strong as is claimed and I know this much personally: as I approach the end of my post-graduate degree, nothing I have learned inside or outside of school has weakened my belief in a wise, beneficent God. To the contrary, it seems to me that the more learning I acquire, the greater this conviction becomes.

I’ve heard people state that those who support both science and religious dangerously cater to contradiction and inconsistency. Yet, I see no incompatibilities. Any honest scientist will freely admit that science fails to answer many questions. For me and others, religion nicely patches gaps that science doesn’t (or cannot) fill. Religion completes the picture. You’ll excuse my oversimplification, but to me, it is evident that true science and true religion firmly anchor themselves in veracity and as such, they fit nicely together.

What do you think? Are intelligence and religiosity inversely proportional?

New in the Church section of this site is the Mormon Vocab Dictionary. I typed up the definitions myself. How’d I do? You probably noticed this represents two sequential blog postings of a religious nature. That’s a record for Ryan Byrd dot net.

During church today I thought about how foreign a Mormon religious service might be for a non-member. I took out my yellow legal pad and, three pages later, we have (in the Church section of this site) Going to Church, Mormon Style

Are you Christian? Jewish? Hindi? Buddhist? Muslim?

Introducing a quick way to find out — the 20 question Belief-O-Matic belief test!

Below is the result of my Belief-O-Matic test showing how closely my beliefs adher to those of a number of religions. I think the results came out pretty accurate, in as much as I am a Latter-Day Saint. How did you do?

1. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (100%)
2. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (87%)
3. Jehovah’s Witness (82%)
4. Orthodox Judaism (80%)
5. Islam (73%)
6. Bah?’? Faith (71%)
7. Eastern Orthodox (69%)
8. Roman Catholic (69%)
9. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (67%)
10. Sikhism (57%)
11. Orthodox Quaker (56%)
12. Seventh Day Adventist (56%)
13. Hinduism (49%)
14. Jainism (44%)
15. Reform Judaism (41%)
16. Liberal Quakers (40%)
17. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (37%)
18. Theravada Buddhism (37%)
19. Mahayana Buddhism (36%)
20. Unitarian Universalism (31%)
21. Neo-Pagan (26%)
22. Nontheist (23%)
23. New Thought (20%)
24. Scientology (20%)
25. New Age (17%)
26. Secular Humanism (17%)
27. Taoism (13%)

Are you Mormon and do you like temples? Well, I thought it would be pretty cool to map out the world’s LDS temples with a Google Map. I wrote a script to transcode temple addresses I scraped from an LDS temple site and obtain the latitudes and longitudes. My script created a nifty LDS temple XML file which is read by the first of my maps, the LDS Temples in the United States map

the temple page might not work well in Internet Explorer. Get Firefox

NOTE:

Several (Spig, GK, etc.) have noticed that the google map is missing a few temples. 9 to be exact. Remember I wrote a script to get this information. The site I got the temple info from has several incorrect addresses. Don’t worry I’ll add the missing temples by hand next time I get a sec.