Royal and Temple Themes Common to the Psalms and the Dead Sea Scrolls
There are two message boards that I look at fairly often. (I like to know what’s agitating the people there.) On one of them, there’s invariably a thread every Sunday wherein people list all the wonderful things that they’re doing that day instead of attending church.
Two new links appeared today on the website of the Interpreter Foundation:
Conference Talks: “From Dust to Exalted Crown: Royal and Temple Themes Common to the Psalms and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” by David J. Larsen
David J. Larsen, after showing how many of the Qumran texts rely on the “Royal Psalms” in the Bible—which have a vital connection to the temple drama—then goes on to exaltation in the views of the Qumran community. He indicates how Adam and Eve are archetypal for Israelite temple ritual, which makes humans kings and priests, bringing the participant into the presence of God by a journey accompanied with covenants, making him part of the Divine Council. Bestowed with knowledge of the divine mysteries, one then becomes a teacher helping others on the way through divine mysteries, who then, as a group are raised to the same end. It is, Larsen shows, a journey where one is dressed in royal and priestly robes and receives a crown of righteousness, in a ritual setting.
Interpreter Radio Show — September 18, 2022
In the 18 September 2022 episode of the Interpreter Radio Show, Bruce Webster and Kris Frederickson discussed Ezekiel in the “Come, Follow Me” portion of the show. But they opened the show, in its first hour, with a discussion turned of the Interpreter Foundation’s celebration of its tenth anniversary as well as of Jeff Bradshaw’s new book on Masonry and the Temple. You can listen to or download the 18 September 2022 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show, which has been made available to you at no charge and without the encumbrance of commercial and other interruptions. The second portion of the show, in the second hour, was devoted to a roundtable discussing the upcoming “Come, Follow Me” lesson #44 (Ezekiel 1–3; 33–34; 36–37; 47). The Interpreter Radio Show can be heard live, as it happens, each and every single Sunday evening of the year from 7 to 9 PM (MDT), on K-TALK, AM 1640. If, however, you are unable to dial in — perhaps because you’re in Patagonia or at the mouth of the Zambezi River or on the International Space Station — you can still listen live via the Internet, at ktalkmedia.com.
I’m serenely confident that I’ll shortly receive one or more emails denouncing the fact that I’m now in Florida. My travel — and just generally how I spend my time and my money — is an ongoing cause of angry indignation for an obsessive few out there. So permit me to explain: The last few days in New York City have represented a kind of holding pattern between the cruise that we recently undertook up along the coast of New England and Canada’s Maritime Provinces and our arrival in Florida tonight in order to babysit a granddaughter while her parents are away. It made little sense to fly back to Utah for two or three days only to turn around and come immediately back to the east coast. That probably won’t satisfy the envious, the embittered, and the wrathful, but I think that most normal people will recognize that the act of grandparents babysitting grandchildren probably shouldn’t rank very high on any serious list of the world’s most terrible crimes.
There are two deeply hostile and mocking, mostly aggressively atheist ex-LDS message boards that I look at fairly often. (I like to know what’s agitating the people there.)
On one of them, there’s invariably a thread every Sunday wherein people list all the wonderful things that they’re doing that day instead of attending church.
And, for all I know, they may well be giving an accurate summary of their Sundays. They may really spend the first day of each week gathering berries from beautiful alpine meadows, playing Rachmaninoff piano preludes, winning marathons, finishing novels, and being served breakfast in bed by their fashion-model former-Olympian spouses.
Or maybe they’re not.
But one thing is clear: They seem to spend at least some amount of time each and every Sunday — and, it would seem, for certain of them, a rather substantial chunk of time — sitting alone in front of a computer screen expressing their anger and contempt to a similarly-minded group of invisible strangers for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members.
Whether that’s really better than singing and serving and socializing with friends at church is a choice that everybody has to make for himself or herself. Church isn’t always exhilaration and bliss, of course, but their alternative doesn’t, frankly, look particularly appealing to me. It doesn’t seem healthy. It doesn’t seem very happy.
Some justify their often insulting and sometimes quite hateful posts with the notion that they’re merely attempting to “recover” from the horrors visited upon them in their days as active believers. They’re just using candid and blunt rhetoric — precisely as some who briefly show up in my blog comments do. But blunt rhetoric, for too many, is just a disingenuous euphemism for what you say when you want to indulge yourself without reflecting on the impact it has on others. Such people don’t appear to care about that impact. They don’t seem to know or care that those they’re abusing are real. They don’t even try to hide their rage.
Sad. Not happy.
Finally, it is a curious fact that I located this chilling horror story, which comes from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File©, right here in Florida:
It might help to put this figure into perspective by noting that fifty weeks of full-time employment — that is, a full year of eight hours a day, for five days each week, with just two weeks off for an annual vacation — would total two thousand hours.
Posted from Miami, Florida
