My family watches political conventions the way that many men watch sports. So far, my response to the Democratic Convention is, “How ’bout them Clintons.”
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The US’s George W. Bush, the UK’s Gordon Brown, Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy — each of them has embarked on a collision course with good usage by declaring Russia’s recent invasion of Georgia “unacceptable.” Haven’t they read rule #11 in Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style? It couldn’t be clearer: “Use the active voice.”

When I hear public figures say that Russia’s actions are unacceptable, I’m left to wonder, “Just exactly who is unwilling to accept them?”
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We’re proud to announce an exciting new addition to our perma-blogger roster: Orwell.

Orwell is a new voice in the bloggernacle, and his addition to our perma-blogger roster is in keeping with our effort to introduce new voices. Like fellow perma-blogger Devyn, he has an usual background; viz., he combines a Harvard education with a healthy sense of humor.

Please join us in welcoming Orwell. We’re thrilled to have him on board.

What follows is the story of how I became active in Mormonism. Roasted Tomatoes and Serenity Valley invited me to write it as a guest post on their old blog, Latter-day Saint Liberation Front. It was part of their “What Next” series, in which Mormons wrote about their experiences following crises of faith. It appeared on Friday, January 13th, 2006, and it was the first article I wrote for the bloggernacle under my own identity. I have (without their permission) reprinted it here in full:

I became an atheist during my sophomore year at BYU. It was late winter or early spring of 1991, some time during the beginning of my 23rd year. That was the year that I found logical positivism, a school of philosophy that has fallen into disfavor in some quasi-official sense. Nevertheless, many of its tenets are now among the key operational assumptions of philosophers and scientists of nearly every stripe.
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At the outset of this season’s NBA Finals, none of the experts thought they could do it. But the Celtics wrapped up the NBA Finals tonight in a series that contained some of the most memorable basketball playing in our generation.

I didn’t follow basketball much this season. Based on how poorly the Celtics had done this decade, I really expected the Lakers to wipe the floor with them. I came away with four strong impressions:

1. Kobe Bryant is not the best player on the planet, though he may be the most overrated man to hold US citizenship.
2. The Lakers are the worst basketball team in recent memory to play really excellent basketball in (short) spurts
3. Whenever the Lakers have a halfway decent team, the world goes crazy over how superlative they are.
4. The Celtics are a much better team than the Lakers this year, outplaying the Lakers even in the games they lost.

This is also a great win for Boston, making it the pre-eminent sports town of the decade.

And I couldn’t happier about the fact that they beat Phil Jackson’s team. Phil Jackson is a man who I find to be perfectly loathsome for a couple of reasons.
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Britain’s Daily Express reports that the UN Human Rights council has identified the British Monarchy as a threat to human rights, saying that the UK must “consider holding a referendum on the desirability or otherwise of a written constitution, preferably republican.” This from a council with members that include Saudi Arabia, Cuba, and Sri Lanka.
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J. Stapley and Brad Kramer have written a detailed review of the upcoming book Massacre at Mountain Meadows. This soon-to-be released book is important, because it’s written by solid Mormon historians, including Richard Turley, who is an Assistant Church Historian for the LDS church.

Anything that Brad and J write in Mormon studies is worth reading, but this review is a must-read.

Building on his popular “The World Is about Me” theme, Barack Obama expressed the hope that that he was the target of Bush’s recent remarks about appeasement:

The fight against terror and extremism is the defining challenge of our time. It is more than a clash of arms. It is a clash of visions, a great ideological struggle. On the one side are those who defend the ideals of justice and dignity with the power of reason and truth. On the other side are those who pursue a narrow vision of cruelty and control by committing murder, inciting fear, and spreading lies.

This struggle is waged with the technology of the 21st century, but at its core it is an ancient battle between good and evil. The killers claim the mantle of Islam, but they are not religious men. No one who prays to the God of Abraham could strap a suicide vest to an innocent child, or blow up guiltless guests at a Passover Seder, or fly planes into office buildings filled with unsuspecting workers. In truth, the men who carry out these savage acts serve no higher goal than their own desire for power. They accept no God before themselves. And they reserve a special hatred for the most ardent defenders of liberty, including Americans and Israelis….

There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It’s natural, but it is deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn responsibility to take these words seriously. Jews and Americans have seen the consequences of disregarding the words of leaders who espouse hatred. And that is a mistake the world must not repeat in the 21st century.

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

(That senator, by the way, was William Borah, a Republican from Idaho known as “The Lion of Idaho”)
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Margaret Young wrote to tell me that on her recent trip to China, she discovered how ubiquitous pirated DVDs are in China. Everything in American theaters is available — even Mormon Cinema movies.

She suggested that this is part of God’s plan: “We get the Chinese people to steal LDS DVDs and sell them to each other, and voila! We’re in!”

In this spirit, she suggested the following poll:

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Hat tip: Margaret Young

The Mormon Mentality servers have the honor of hosting the voting for the Niblets this year, and the voting has now commenced. Please do not lose your opportunity to vote in them.

The link to the voting page is here. Of course, we expect all of our loyal readers to vote early and vote often for Mormon Mentality and its permabloggers.

Congratulations go to the following Mormon Mentality participants:

• Devyn S, who was nominated for Best Blogger and whose post “Mormon Grad Students on Welfare” was nominated for best post.
• Brian Gibson, whose “My Heavy Boat” post was nominated for Best Post.
• annedb, who was nominated for best commenter
• all the commenters and bloggers who have helped to make this a great blog, so that Mormon Mentality was nominated for best blog and best large blog

Incidentally, I was contacted anonymously by Trash Calls to help with the Niblets voting. If I were to have gone with a survey site (like Survey Monkey or Free Online Surveys), then we’d either have to tolerate limitations or pay for an unlimited survey. I wanted a good survey, and I already pay to have my own server to host Mormon Mentality and LDSelect. So I just installed Lime Survey, an open source survey engine, and I set up the Niblets survey at no additional cost.

If anyone wants to conduct a survey, let me know. Now that the software is installed and running, I’m happy to put it to good use for anyone who can use it.

In my last post I called the King James Bible “crap”, partly because of its poor English, and partly because its translators do violence of the underlying text, so that their translation destroys whatever literary or poetic structure was present in the original language.

There seems to be some remaining misunderstanding about this. At least a few commenters claimed that the alleged literalness of the KJV somehow preserves rather than destroys the structure of the biblical texts and their accompanying nuances. To illustrate that this claim is mistaken, let’s look at the first chapter of the Epistle of James, which I’ve included at the bottom of this post in a parallel presentation of the King James and the New Revised Standard Versions.
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The King James Version of the Bible (hereafter KJV) is crap. It’s a sketchy translation from an era in which scholars were largely ignorant of the nuances of ancient languages and understood little of the provenance of major biblical texts. To be sure, the KJV has (brief) moments of unsurpassed eloquence, but on the whole its Jacobean English is ham-fisted and at times it is altogether unintelligible.

The popular myth is that the language is brilliant, but archaisms make the text difficult for the modern reader. In other words, if one doesn’t enjoy reading it, it’s her fault. Read more »

Joseph Addison at Trash Calls is hosting The Niblets this year. For those of you who don’t know, The Niblets are the Oscars/People’s Choice Awards of the Bloggernacle.

Obituaries already abound for William F. Buckley, dead today at 82, and he’s well-known and well-remembered enough that there’s not a lot more that can be said about his life and his achievements than is already being said about him by the mainstream press, by his associates, and by his friends.

I was 10 when I first learned of William F. Buckley, sitting with my father in front of a television watching Firing Line, his PBS talk show. My first reaction to him was, “Holy Crap!”

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john f is one of the founding perma-bloggers here at Mormon Mentality, so it is with sorrow that we announce that he is being released from his responsibilities here to become a perma-blogger at By Common Consent, where he will continue to make valuable, challenging, and insightful contributions to the Bloggernacle. He remains an emeritus blogger, and his posts here can still be accessed from the sidebar with the eponymous link under that category.

We’re grateful for the contribution that john f made to Mormon Mentality, and we wish john f the best wherever he blogs.

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Gentlemen of the bloggernacle, would you make love to this man?

Just when you thought it was safe to forget about the poor guy, Congress finally gets around to officially punishing Larry Craig, the Senator from Idaho. According to Roll Call, he received an “official rebuke,” whatever that means.

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There’s a holiday for pancakes, and it’s today. So take some time out today. Relax. Kick back. Have a smoke and a pancake. You know, a cigarette and a flapjack. A cigar and a waffle. A pipe and a crepe. A bong and a blintz.

Happy National Pancake Day!

Spoiler alert: If you want to wait to find out what’s going to happen to the GOP between now and the convention, do not read the following post.

Romney has “suspended” his campaign, Huckabee is not going away, and McCain has a choice to make for VP. What will happen, and what does all of this mean? The evolution of the campaign has introduced new uncertainties, and these new uncertainties mean that the time is ripe for me to move back into prediction mode.
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