Easter Sunday

Jesus is alive today, and because of him we will all one day live again after we die. I know that to be true both with my mind and by the witness of the Holy Ghost, and I know that you have the right to know it too, through study and prayer.

Happy Resurrection Day!

-Max

Greek values and the morality of infanticide

From https://wng.org/opinions/protect-the-children-1650019354 ...The rise of Christianity created moral intuitions we now take for granted: Children are uniquely vulnerable, and we must physically protect them and work to preserve their innocence.

Don't take my word for it. The essential text here is When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity by the Norwegian theologian O.M. Bakke. Before Christ, Bakke observes, the ancient Greeks essentially created a societal hierarchy around their notions of "logos" or reason. Free male citizens were said to possess the most capacity for reason. Women and older men had less capacity, and children possessed even less rational capacity. Therefore, they were valued even less.

Indeed, unwanted children were frequently abandoned in the ancient world for trivial reasons, such as the desire to have a son instead of a daughter or in response to political or economic instability. The practice was known as expositio, where infants were simply left outside to die of thirst, exposure, or animal attacks...

Ohhhhh! Suddenly those old Greek myths about babies like Oedipus and Paris being abandoned to wild animals suddenly has a context: the Greeks' moral system didn't consider children to have moral value because babies aren't intellectually impressive! They were wrong of course but no wonder it was a part of their stories.

-Max

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I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

George Lucas on happiness

I think this is a good definition of joy. "Joy is something you can recall." That matches scriptural usages of "joy".

I've discovered along the way that happiness--you live in two worlds here. Happiness is pleasure, and happiness is joy. You know, it can be either one. You add them up and it sort of falls under the uber category of happiness. Pleasure is short-lived. It lasts an hour, it lasts a minute, it lasts a month, and it peaks and then goes down--it peaks very high, but the next time you want to get that same peak you have to do it twice as much. You know, it's like drugs--you have to keep doing because it insulates itself. No matter what it is, whether it's shopping, whether you're engaged in any other kind of pleasure. It all has the same quality about it. On the other hand is joy, and joy is the thing that doesn't go as high as pleasure, in terms of your emotional reaction, but it stays with you. Joy is something you can recall. Pleasure you can't. So the secret is that even though it's not as intense as the pleasure, the joy will last you a lot longer, and people who get the pleasure, they keep saying, "Well, if I can just get richer and get more cars..." You'll NEVER relive the moment you got your first car. That's it. That's the highest peak. Yes, you can get three Ferraris and a new Gulfstream Jet, but you have to keep going, and eventually you run out. It doesn't work. So if you're trying to sustain that level of peak pleasure, you're doomed.

Pleasure's fun. It's great. But you can't keep it going forever. Just accept the fact that it's here and it's gone, and maybe again it'll come back, and you'll get to do it again.

Joy lasts forever. Pleasure is purely self-centered. It's all about YOUR pleasure. It's about you. It's a selfish, self-centered emotion that's created by a self-centered motive of greed. Joy is compassion. Joy is giving yourself to somebody else or something else, and it's a kind of thing that is in its subtlety and lowness much more powerful than pleasure. If you get hung up on pleasure, you're doomed. If you pursue joy, you will find everlasting... happiness.

-George Lucas

Source: https://youtu.be/sCP2SGTIz28?t=503

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I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.