Welcome to the 21st century, where knowledge abounds at one’s finger tips – often for free….

To many people, technology means video games, music, Twitter, Facebook, and email.  While these are great tools, I fear most of us under use the greater capabilities of the Internet that are now available to us.

Less than 20 years ago, the Dead Sea Scrolls (discovered in 1947, 45 years before) were almost completely unknown to people, including most scholars.  With the exception of a few scrolls that had been translated, thousands of scrolls and fragments still remained sequestered in the clutches of an elite few.  Suddenly, technology allowed scholars and students to reproduce some texts by using a published index of each word.  Then, high quality photographs of the scrolls were soon released.  The scrolls were freed, and in the last 20 years, the majority of the scrolls have been translated and given to the world.

BYU had an early hand in digitizing the texts, and using new technologies to “see” text that had faded over the millennia.  Now, Google is beginning to put the scrolls online for free:

5 Dead Sea Scrolls now online

This is just one example of the free information now available to us online. Want to take some college level courses for free and no hassle of taking tests? Try Stanford, Cornell  MIT, or several others:

Free College Courses online

How about Yale’s Free Open Courses?  Here you go!

College too advanced for you? Then try the free high school courses that are praised and sponsored by Bill Gates. Try Sal Khan Academy. Schools now use his free videos to help teach kids in math, science, etc.

If you like reading, try the thousands of free classics at Project Gutenberg.

You love reading LDS books, but are too cheap to spend hundreds of dollars a year on them, and don’t live near a Utah library to borrow them?  For 5 bucks a month, Deseret Book will let you go online to Gospel Link and read hundreds of books on their list.  You can try them out for free for a month.

Of course, this does not include the thousands of websites and blogs on science, history, politics, literature, religion, etc.  My own blog that covers the Sunday School Gospel Doctrine  lessons has more than 5000 views a month.

Twenty years ago, most people did not have access to the Internet. Like with the Dead Sea Scrolls, most people had limited access to great volumes of ancient and modern knowledge and information.  Now there is little reason why people cannot become great thinkers and readers.

What are some of your favorite sites for learning?  (And no, video games and Facebook do not count.)

Any parent who has watched kids play has watched while one kid will do something incredibly unfair and then appeal to the parents to impose his sense of fairness.  For example, at Joe’s birthday party, Mike will immediately take Joe’s brand-new toy, and when the toy is returned to Joe, Mike will say, “that’s not fair!”

Appealing to “fairness” is silly and childish because fairness is by its very nature subjective.  What you perceive as fair, another doesn’t.   Throughout history, kings thought it was “fair” for them to own most of the land because they organized armies to protect the country.  Slaveowners thought it was “fair” for them to buy and sell human beings.  Stalin thought it was “fair” to send millions of counterrevolutionaries to the gulags to protect the Soviet system.

It should seem self-evident that we don’t base society on subjective goals of fairness.

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Studies show that Obamacare will probably cause at least 1/3 of small businesses to stop providing health care, forcing their workers to turn to the government option.  In the case this happens, Obamacare suddenly will cost $1 Trillion more than predicted, because Pres Obama’s belief is only 7% would drop coverage. But why would a company keep paying for health care, if they do not have to?  That the coverage they end up getting may not be as good as what they now have is another issue entirely.

As it is, even Howard Dean, a doctor and former DNC chair, admits that this is what probably will happen.  He thinks it is a good thing.  Of course, no one is asking us how we’ll pay for the additional $1 Trillion.

http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/dean-employers-will-drop-coverage-under-obamacare

I have never met Connor Boyack.  We are friends on Facebook, and I enjoy his blog Connor’s Conundrums, which deals with politics from a Mormon perspective.  Let there be no doubt:  Connor is a real libertarian, not a mamby-pamby fly-by-night libertarian like somebody like me.  He hates the state with a passion, and could correctly be described as a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist.  He is anti-war, anti-state and pro-market, but most importantly pro-liberty.

But the truth is that we are living in the age of libertarianism, mostly because all of the predictions made by people like Rothbard are becoming true literally before our eyes.   There is no way of understanding our current economic malaise (in my opinion) without understanding the key role of monetary policy in creating stagflation and without understanding that business cycles are inevitable.   Markets must be allowed to clear.  Government intervention, as we have seen with TARP and the many bailouts, only makes things worse, and at the end of the day it is the poor and the middle-class workers who suffer the most while the well-connected profit from our misery.  Meanwhile, we are seeing the folly and horror of endless wars and the loss of our civil liberties.

Connor’s positions make many intellectual Mormons very uncomfortable.  He is clearly a smart guy, but he is so darned dogmatic.  And he seems to think he know the answer to everything.   And he is so consistent, always arguing for more liberty and less government.   Doesn’t he know the world is much more complicated than he claims?  And doesn’t he know that all good Mormons must always be in favor of more government to show they actually care about the poor.

Well, as Connor shows in his book “Latter-Day Liberty, A Gospel Approach to Government and Politics,” all good Mormons should be in favor of liberty, not confiscating other peoples’ money so you can be beneficent with it.  But make no mistake:  Connor’s book will also make many traditional conservatives very uncomfortable.  He is anti-war and lays out an unassailable case that the Book of Mormon creates a well-developed just war theory.  He is pro-immigrant, pointing out that “it is an inescapable fact that the current immigration laws are founded upon racism and protectionism.”  And he is against the war on drugs.

To sum up:  Connor Boyack will upset a lot of people with this book.

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Let’s face it: We would all love to live in an Utopian society.  At least our own version of it.

With perhaps a few exceptions like Enoch’s city, so far, no religious, political or economic system in modern times has shown itself capable of providing perfectly for everyone and remain a resilient system for a long period of time.

Attempts at Marxist socialism and communism have all failed miserably.  Most of these efforts led to the death of millions of people, and never brought the people out of poverty.  That many in Europe and here in the USA learn to depend upon their entitlements, all derived on socialist concepts, means that Greeks protest when they are told they will have to work until they turn 55.

Capitalism does much, much better.  Still, it has business cycles, which enrich people for a time, but then leaves them hurting whenever a bubble bursts.  There’s also the good odds that capitalism merges with government and we get corporatism, instead.  So, instead of helping out the poor and middle class during this economic crisis, the vast majority of bail outs went to global companies.  While we save banks and Government Motors, ever increasing numbers of people are slipping from the middle class into poverty, while more are losing jobs, homes, and hope.

It seems that we cannot escape corruption long enough to actually come to a resilient solution that lifts all boats.

In the Book of Ephesians, of which I just wrote on for my Gospel doctrine blog at Joel’s Monastery, we find the Paul seeks the unity of the people.  Contention and division seem to be the norm in Ephesus, even among the Christians!  Paul dealt with division frequently in his letters, as he saw some claim to be of Paul, others of Apollos, and yet others of Cephas.

Yet, Paul gives the answers to a unity in his epistles.  First, all must come unto Christ and be saved through faith and repentance (justification).  Second, we must become holy through following the guidance of the Spirit (sanctification).  And Paul notes that there is a foundation to all of this: apostles and prophets with Christ as the chief cornerstone.  Only in following the prophets, apostles and other inspired leaders, can we “all come to a unity of the faith” and no more be “tossed to and fro” by every contentious concept of man.

In the early days of the modern Church, Joseph Smith sought to establish Zion, our own little Utopian society.  It was based upon sound principles: Consecration, where we gave all we had to the bishop, had a portion returned as our private property/stewardship, then tithed thereafter on any increase.  Each was to increase his own talents and abilities, in order to toss them into the storehouse for use by the whole.  All were to be equal: meaning that as long as you worked for Zion, you would receive a fair portion.

Sadly, the early Mormons were often contentious, selfish, and disloyal. The system broke down for a variety of reasons, but mostly because few were completely dedicated to the Lord and its success.

Today, we live the law of tithing, a terrestrial law. Yet, in the temple, we promise to individually consecrate ourselves to God’s work.  Still, I look at my own sad efforts and realize we are so very far off from building or establishing Zion.

While we await our Utopian Zion, what can we do as individuals, wards, cities, or as a nation to arrive more closely to that heavenly goal?