Sikhism's Value

On Mondays, our family has weekly activities to give us an opportunity to teach our children the Gospel and other life lessons. We have young kids so the lessons tend to be very simple.

As a result of the shooting almost two weeks ago we had a lesson specifically on how everyone on earth is important and should be treated with love and kindness. We colored crowns to show that we are all important and that God loves and wants the best for us. He is equally the Creator of us all.

It struck me that this lesson was not inspired directly from my own faith, but by the memories of when I studied Sikhism in a comparative religions class. They have a richly symbolic and beautiful faith. A strong belief in and history of defending those that are less powerful. I think we can learn a lot from these people and we benefit by having them in our society.

All are created from the seed of God. There is the same clay in the whole world, the potter (God) makes many kinds of pots. -Guru Amar Das, Bhairo (source)

Asa Gray's Christian Calling

I am currently reading a biography of Asa Gray. I was turned on to it from a series of posts at biologos.org. The posts themselves are pretty good, but I have been more interested in who Dr. Gray was. Asa Gray was a professor of Botany at Harvard University and was a contemporary of Charles Darwin (and Emerson and Joseph Smith, some of my favorite people). Many consider him the first defender of Darwin’s Origin of Species in America. He was also an orthodox Presbyterian throughout his life and saw his science as truly important and not at odds with his faith. In fact neither really did Darwin, he just struggled for other reasons.

Many years earlier, when Gray first moved, theologically, from a more material rationalism to a more fervent orthodoxy he made the following statement about his Christian calling:

 Whenever I see clearly that my duty calls in any other direction I shall throw up science as a profession, if not without a sigh, yet without a moment’s hesitation. Meanwhile I feel that the labor of years would be wasted if I did not turn the knowledge I have acquired to the greatest account. (pg. 46 of the 1959 hard bound edition) 

That really resonated with me as I feel most people serve the Lord by being good at their profession and integrating their professional life with church life. By this I mean using those skills and influence obtained in the “secular” world to advance the cause of the gospel. Dr. Gray is a good example for this and I am really enjoying the 50 year old plus biography. I’m only part way through it and may return to themes I get from it. One is his example of living the Sabbath, important for this coming Sunday’s lesson.

2 of 66 down

A new future

So it has been a rough start for the blog. I have a goal to make it a habit of publishing regularly, the problem is I am afraid that regular, but not every day will make it difficult to establish a habit. In researching what it will take to establish a habit I thought first of the general statistic of 21 days. Apparently this was based off of completely unrelated issues (how quick an injured person could adjust to the loss of a limb). In 2009 some research showed that on average it takes 66 days, but depends on the task in question.

Well lucky for me I can combine the two :) I recently had spinal surgery and while I didn't loss a  limb I now have a neurostimulator with a remote that feels like a limb and I am slowly learning to rely (more on that soon). So hopefully somehow that will help me with my unrelated goal of blogging.

I think I was over-analyzing the blogging thing, I know now I needed to just relax, at least in my mind, lets see how well it translates to my emotions. As a result I think some of the posts will be sort thoughts (with bad spelling) and others will be more fleshed out ideas. Like a censored and sometimes extended journal. I do have a few analogies/parables I have been working on and hope to share shortly.

So here is day 1 of 66!

Elder Ballard on Consecration

“I urge you to make a commitment to yourself and to Heavenly Father to dedicate your life and consecrate your time and talents to the building up of the Church of Jesus Christ in anticipation of the Savior’s Second Coming,

“Let the motive of your thoughts and actions be to glorify God and to bless your fellowman. Let this desire inspire you to greet each new morning with enthusiasm. Let it fuel your thoughts and actions throughout each day. If you do this, you will be blessed in the midst of a world that is fast losing its way, and you and your loved ones will be secure and happy.”

Elder M. Russel Ballard, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. BYU-Idaho commencement (source)

The Cost of Powerloss

Random story I thought was pretty funny. 

Yesterday at work the power blipped out, then went out for a few hours. When my lab was sitting around we started estimating how much the department lost because of the lack of power. Use of the sequencing machines to generate genome sequences (i.e. DNA) cost about $40K a run and we had more than ten running at the time of the blip. So, with those runs, the preparation of samples for redoing the sequencing, salaries for the lab workers to reproduce these preps., and anything else that may have been running it easily could be half a million dollars lost in about two seconds. The supercomputers, including my own work, also shut down, so when power turns back on I will see what the damage is for me.

The immediate response of most people was to run and check the -80º C freezers. When they found out theirs were not connected to emergency power, they were moved around quickly like bumper cars. These are very large freezers and it was hilarious to see corridors fill with these bulky objects (see left, which is normally clear). Everyone was looking for a non-standard plugs, powered by emergency generators, as the temperature rapidly increased for the precious samples held within.

My own difficulty came with the elevators being shut down. I work on the third floor so my plan was to wait out the power outage to avoid the stairs. Within 15 minutes the weather turned from sunny with blue skies to a snow squall. I decided that I had to take my chances with the stairs. As a result I will be down and out for the next few days; Gotta love neuropathic pain. Anyway I am home and safe with my doctor prescribed narcotics.


I will update with a picture of the hallway in its normal state when I get back in.


UPDATE: Here is the hallway in its normal condition:

Vainglory vs. the Glory of God

This week in Sunday School* I was reminded of an op-ed I read in The New York Times about the faith of a Jeremy Lin. I am not familiar with Lin, other than he has been in a lot of headlines recently. I don’t follow sports; I’m more of a nature documentary kind-a-guy. Anyway the thesis of the op-ed was that the ethos of sports was entirely incompatible with the ethos of religion. After thinking the article through we can really generalize his argument to the statement that the ethos of competition or accomplishment in the world is incompatible with the ethos of religion. He defines the ethos of sports as:

…oriented around victory and supremacy. The sports hero tries to perform great deeds in order to win glory and fame. It doesn’t really matter whether he has good intentions.

Or in one word it values the virtue of “courage” about all others, according to the article.

The religious ethos, according to the author is “about redemption, self-abnegation and surrender to God” with the primary virtue of “humility”.

He then concludes that success and glory must be incompatible with humility and submission. I disagree, though I understand the difficulty in integrating the two. My first gut response was to think of a recent General Conference talk by President Dieter F. Uchtdorf: “You Matter to Him”. Pres. Uchtdorf states:

“This is a paradox of man: compared to God, man is nothing; yet we are everything to God. While against the backdrop of infinite creation we may appear to be nothing, we have a spark of eternal fire burning within our breast. We have the incomprehensible promise of exaltation – worlds without end – within our grasp. And it is God’s great desire to help us reach it.”

Pres. Uchtdorf goes on to discuss two extremes in this paradox, believing we are everything (pride), and believing we are nothing to anyone, including God. This pride is equitable to the motivations ascribed to the op-ed’s ethos of sports. And in the religious ethos God awards glory only as a result of submission to God. But this paradox can turn the sports vs religion conflict on its head. We are less than the dust of the Earth according to scripture, but Heavenly Father wants to give us everything he has and give us a path to succeed at what we do, so we can be greater tools in his hand.

Returning to the original article, the author makes one big assumption that negates his conclusion. When he writes of seeking success and glory, he implies that the answer to the question ‘Why do we seek such success?” is selfish ambition as the only goal. However, an alternative response is that we are trying to glorify and love God with “all [our] mights, minds,and strength”. It is the first great commandment. This is consistent with the author's definition of the ethos of sports i.e. “It doesn’t really matter whether he has good intentions”, so if it doesn’t really matter to the world why you seek accomplishments and glory then being motivated by service to our God is acceptable under that ethos.

In fact I would argue that the Lord does want us to become the best in our fields and that this is entirely useful to Him. One letter to the editor responded to the article by saying “Therein lies the tension: to strive for good things but not be consumed by them.”

One of my favorite examples of this can be found in the book “The Essential James E. Talmage” (obviously about Elder Talmage):

In late 1924 he was called to replace Elder David O. McKay as the head of the church’s European Mission…. Almost immediately he tried to visit with the editors of various newpapers to see if their anti-Mormon articles could be stopped. In one city he presented his calling card to a newspaper employee who gave it to his editor. At first the editor refused to see the Mormon apostle. But with the abbreviations F.R.S.E, F.R.M.S, F.R.G.S., representing the scientific societies of England of which he was a member, clearly visible, he could not be early ignored.

In this case the apostle was able to get an advantage in the cause of God by having accolades in the world of men. God wants us to do our best, and we do need to keep the focus on whom we are serving and why we are doing it. 


*After reading the scripture 2 Ne 27:19-23, and asking why Heavenly Father would chose an uneducated farm boy, the teacher followed up with the question (paraphrasing): "Does that mean the Lord only can use the uneducated and we shouldn't seek success?" We all answered in the negative.) 

Elder Nelson: Healer

This is a very cool story from lds.org:

Dr. Russell M. Nelson was in Manzanillo, Mexico, in February 1978, attending medical meetings with the group of doctors he had graduated with 30 years earlier. Suddenly, one of the doctors became seriously ill, suffering from massive internal bleeding in his stomach. Under normal circumstances, any of the physicians in the room could have treated him. But in a remote fishing village with no hospitals nearby, no planes that could fly at night, and no medical equipment, they realized they were helpless as they watched their colleague suffer. 

“All the combined knowledge and concern there could not be converted to action to help our friend as we saw his life ebbing before our eyes. We were powerless to stop his bleeding,” Elder Nelson said. 

The man asked for a blessing. Several of the doctors who held the Melchizedek Priesthood immediately responded, and Dr. Nelson acted as voice. “The Spirit dictated that the bleeding would stop and that the man would continue to live and return to his home and profession.” The man recovered and returned home. 

“Men can do very little of themselves to heal sick or broken bodies,” Elder Nelson said. 

“With an education they can do a little more; with advanced medical degrees and training, a little more yet can be done. The real power to heal, however, is a gift from God. He has deigned that some of that power may be harnessed via the authority of His priesthood to benefit and bless mankind when all man can do for himself may not be sufficient.”