Latter-day Saints and latter days

October 4th, 2015 by Charles Cameron

On July 24, 1847, Brigham Young arrived at an overlook for his first view of the Salt Lake Valley. “While gazing upon the scene, . . . he was enwrapped in vision for several minutes. He had seen the valley before in vision and upon this occasion he saw the future glory of Zion and of Israel, as they would be, planted in the valleys of these mountains. When the vision had passed, he said: ‘It is enough. This is the right place. Drive on.’

Or as Jacob much earlier said, as quoted by Sir John Mandeville in his Travels, referencing the Vulgate’s Genesis 28.16:

Vere locus iste sanctus est, et ego nesciebam, which is to say, ‘Surely, this place is holy, and I knew it not.

Mandeville’s memory of the Latin text is a little inaccurate, but he gets the point and offers it to us with admirable brevity.

**

Unknowing:

  • Maimonides, 13 Principles, 12, I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah; and even though he may tarry, nonetheless, I wait every day for his coming

  • Matthew 24.36, But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.

  • Quran 31.34, Verily the knowledge of the Hour is with Allah (alone)

  • D&C 51.20, Verily, I say unto you, I am Jesus Christ, who cometh quickly, in an hour you think not. Even so. Amen.

    • Patience:

  • R Yochanan ben Zakkai. Avot d’Rebbe Natan 31b, If you have a sapling in your hand, and someone says to you that the Messiah has come, stay and complete the planting, and then go to greet the Messiah.

  • On the authority of Anas b Malik, the Prophet said, Musnad Ahmad 12981,, If the Hour arrives and one of you is holding a date palm sapling, then he should go ahead and plant it before getting up from his place if he is able to.

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    Posted in Apocalyptic, Charles Cameron, Mormon, scriptures, Uncategorized | 14 comments

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    1. Lynn C. Rees:

      October 5th, 2015 at 3:42 am

      Growing up, Dad, a geologist, would point out the Wasatch Fault as we passed. He like to pontificate that, if an earthquake happened along the Eastern Bench, along which the Fault runs and where I grew up, its force would grow as it moved west. The Salt Lake Valley is former lakebed. It grows more lakebed the further west you go, as you approach the depths of old Lake Bonneville.
      .
      The intersection of tremor and unsettled lake bed can lead to soil liquefaction. Buildings can get sucked straight vertically into the ground as retired lakebed turns into quicksandish goo. When it was Earthquake Panic Day at school, the 1985 Mexico City quake was usually the precedent my teachers helpfully cited. The Valley of Mexico shares many topographic details with the Salt Lake Valley, though on a larger scale.
      .
      During the massive reconstruction of Interstate 15, running north-south through the valley, newly raised roadbeds were left to settle for over year before road was laid as one step in combating liquefaction. Many prominent historic buildings have been rebuilt to be more earthquake resistant. There is a yearly Great Utah ShakeOut to raise public awareness of earthquake preparedness. Once or twice I shook myself to build public awareness. Since my shaking had little observable impact on the public e.g. sales of bubble wrap neither rose nor fell, I’ve let my Great Utah ShakeOuting out lapse.
      .
      I am a non-observant Great Utah ShakeOuter.

    2. T. Greer:

      October 5th, 2015 at 4:12 am

      More worried living in Washington.

    3. Cheryl Rofer:

      October 5th, 2015 at 11:55 am

      Charles, I am in no way faulting your collection of predictions, but instead have some questions that your collection might allow some insight into. I am wondering if you can’t find predictions for almost any day or hour if you are willing to sort through a great many sects. Is that your experience in doing just such research? Do they tend to cluster together? To compete with each other for “their” dates? Any other patterns?

    4. Charles Cameron:

      October 5th, 2015 at 1:30 pm

      In terms of the “end times” humans seem to have a dogged determination to know the unknowable, Cheryl, and they tend to make use of anniversaries of religiously significant events for that purpose. But the dates will differ considerably between religions, with Islam and Judaism following lunar calendars, while Christian calendars tend to be solar. For Islam, the clock really starts with the Hijra, for Jews with creation, for Christians with either the birth or death of Christ — giving a 33 year recurrence to any particularly favored date based on his assumed birth.
      .
      Then there are such matters to consider as the specific dating of the point of origin, whether that be Archbishop Ussher’s dating of the creation in Genesis 1.1 to 4004 BC — or more precisely, Wikipedia tells me, “the entrance of the night preceding the 23rd day of October… the year before Christ 4004” — or recent calculations that posit the birth of Christ in 4 BC — Christ Before Christ, a lovely conceit!
      .
      And then there are some spectacular coincidences. The rollover between 1999 and 2000 CE, which could be viewed as a Christian or a secular calendrical event, coincided with “the arrival of Kali Purusha (Kalki Avatara) Sree Sree Sree Veera Bhoga Vasanta-raya Maha Swami by the year Kali 5101” according to one (minor) Hindu source, and to the purificatory year 5760 according to one Jewish source — as I reported in Y2KO to Y2OK, my retrospective on the rollover, which I had tracked at the time for The Arlington Institute.
      .
      And then again, there’s the matter of calculation, bedeviled by the fact that “a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night” — Psalm 90:4. So I’d say there’s plenty of cause for clustering, and room for a little scattering too.

    5. Grurray:

      October 5th, 2015 at 1:43 pm

      The big discussion lately is about the earthquake swarms occurring in southern states like Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Western Alabama
      http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0613/Mysterious-earthquake-swarms-in-Alabama.-What-s-going-on-video
      Arkansas also saw earthquake swarms in 2001 and 1982. There’s a big debate going on in Oklahoma about stopping shale fracking, although this just seems to me to be too convenient an explanation.

    6. Charles Cameron:

      October 5th, 2015 at 1:45 pm

      Thanks, Grurray. And yes, there are also “signs” that may occur at any time — the “tetrad” of blood moons being another recent example.

    7. Grurray:

      October 5th, 2015 at 1:51 pm

      According to The Gutenberg-Richter Law, earthquakes occur according to a power law distribution. I recently read a book called How Nature Works: the science of self-organized criticality by Per Bak, in which this was discussed:
      http://oi60.tinypic.com/fazas.jpg
      If there are 1000 earthquakes of magnitude 4, then there will be 100 earthquakes of magnitude 5, 10 of magnitude 6, and so on.

    8. Grurray:

      October 5th, 2015 at 1:56 pm

      Now consider that if geological formations may have a “long reach”
      https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23409-can-big-quakes-trigger-others-far-away/
      there are then unseen causal links reaching far and wide operating according to universal order.

    9. Cheryl Rofer:

      October 5th, 2015 at 2:43 pm

      Given the number of world religions and the number of their commemorative days, it’s not surprising that some would overlap. I think it’s something like 26 people are more likely than not to have two with the same birthday. But yeah, that would help stoke someone inclined to see the end of the world coming soon.

    10. Charles Cameron:

      October 12th, 2015 at 11:11 pm

      Here’s an extra quote from Maimonides to go with the one above:

      One is not to assign him a specific time of arrival, nor should one use Scripture to deduce when he is coming. For the Sages have said, “The souls of those who calculate the end will be shattered.”

    11. larrydunbar:

      October 12th, 2015 at 11:36 pm

      “One is not to assign him a specific time of arrival, nor should one use Scripture to deduce when he is coming. For the Sages have said, “The souls of those who calculate the end will be shattered.””
      But wasn’t the Christian Bible warning in The New Testament about false prophets saying pretty much the same thing?
      Those souls “of those who calculate the end” being the aforementioned false prophets?

    12. larrydunbar:

      October 12th, 2015 at 11:44 pm

      “Now consider that if geological formations may have a “long reach”
      https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23409-can-big-quakes-trigger-others-far-away/
      there are then unseen causal links reaching far and wide operating according to universal order.”
      True enough. But, in the power-law, in the distribution of energy, far and wide also has to have a component that is relative to deep or shallow.
      If the relationship is shallow, the distribution has to increase velocity, and such lower pressure, unless the distribution is deep, then the pressure becomes higher, as the velocity slows, making up for the change in distance, in both sides of the equal sign.

    13. Grurray:

      October 19th, 2015 at 2:21 pm

      “in both sides of the equal sign.”
      .
      Yes, pressure and velocity in relation to elevation and density all balance out according to Bernoulli and the first law of thermodynamics. Isn’t it interesting, though, that in this tension to satisfy and equal out differing elements, an unrelated, emergent propagation results?

    14. Charles Cameron:

      October 19th, 2015 at 4:10 pm

      Indeed.