Hello Again.

Hey Everybody,

Wow, its been a while since my last post. It seems like it has been a long time coming and a long time gone, whatever that means. Well, I wish I could sum up my summer, but I didn't have much of one. It seems like most of the summer was going back and forth to Yerington and New Plymouth, and I guess helping dad a little bit. We also, went to so David in Washington for about a week or so in the summer. That was nice. There was some great scenery and I think David was the last person in the Family that I saw after my mission, so that was good. Then there was Marae's wedding. That was a treat. Now Marae and Ben are expats in London, FUN, FUN. After the wedding we spent some time with Micheline and Bret and their family. Included in the stay was the opportunity to see Lindsey's Baptism.
Then as you all may know we headed up to BYU-IDAHO and I have been here since then. Great Stuff. Now it is almost midterms.
Last week we had a pretty good devotional by Dallin H. Oaks . Actually, there has been quite a bit of buzz on the issue. Some people have even called it historic. I guess they talked about it on the frontpage of the LDS.org website. Since I went I thought I would put up some quotes. A lot of the talk was about laws and the nature of religious freedom in this country.

Some things he pointed out were:

Our constitution was inspired by noble men of God. Now almost every nation on the earth has its own written constitution.

The People have a right to decide what kind of government they want.

Constitution instituted so everyone may act for himself and be accountable.

He talked about popular sovereignty and how everyone has a responsibility to govern themselves.

He talked of religious freedom and how the constitution outlines that there is no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion and no law that ties one religion to the state.

-He noted that there the Vitality of religious freedom is being attacked and the effort he has noticed in his lifetime that has been made to silence the religious- or christian- voice in the public square. And these people have grown very good at demeaning their opponents and discrediting those with religious views.

He spoke for a moment on the rage that was expressed against the church with regards to prop 8 and the appearance of 'newly alleged civil rights.' He said the the "supporters of Prop 8 were exercising their right to defend their views" and that those who sought to silence the voice of the supporters of Proposition 8 were seeking to silence us and take away our very real civil right to freedom of speach.

Then Elder Oaks gave guideline to follow for the future when the time may come when others try to silence our voices and our opinions.

1. speak with love, don't revile against revilers.
2. Don't be persecuted or coerced into being silent. And when "people speak out they have right to freedom from retaliation."
3. Insist on freedom to express our beliefs.
4. The religious will be most successful when they show respect for those who oppose them. Wise religious leaders will not support a religious test (such as at places like the ballot box).
5. Then he said the religion of a candidate should not be an issue in choosing a political candidate.
And we can not loose the influence of the religious candidate in the public square.

These are basically most of my notes I took. It was a pretty good talk.

And Here is a picture I found of Dallin H. Oaks on creative commons.



and here is a picture I made for my humanities class. I think I was supposed to do a cubist picture but I saw this option on the computer so I ended up making kind of a Pop Art Picture.



And here is one more picture.



I guess I might have to try and find some of the other stuff I did for this class.

Well, I guess that is it for now.