Meet Traveler.
She is a tri-colored cocker spaniel and a certified pest. Hinky agrees. He calls her RatDog. She calls him the "Pillsbury Dough Boy". It is not always friendly around here but has never come to blows. When traveler's not asleep, when not laying in her mommy's lap, when not waiting at the front door for either me or my wife to arrive home, she will be found staring at me. It is the stare of a desperately intelligent spaniel who needs me to throw her the ball outdoors. She is obsessed with the ball, any ball. The balls can no longer be loose indoors given the ingenious ways she manipulates us to toss it for her. The balls now stay in the drawer until the magic time to go out with daddy. Mommy can't throw it far enough, so daddy is the object of the stare. If I leave her to suffer too long into the day, my wife not so gently reminds me. I can be sick in bed and the penetrating, pleading stare will rouse me out of bed to throw the ball for Traveler. After a throw if the ball needs to dry out because of the snow, she is beside herself if I put it on the counter, reminding me it is either in the drawer or in her possession. GEEZ. Apparently she worries about the ball disappearing.

There have been times while she is racing full bore around the property in the grand search and Hinky will ease to his feet, stroll over to the ball, sniff it, gaze up at her with that glare, and return without it, collapsing at my side. Are live animals sold on Ebay? But I jest. She's a doll and it entertains my wife watching me turn into a raving lunatic around this little innocent ball of "fluffy" joy.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon (second wonder of the World) may never have existed. If so, it existed somewhere else other than its supposed Iraq location. The gardens associated with it did not hang. The error was a misinterpretation. If they existed, they are long gone.

The third wonder of the world, The statue of Olympia was destroyed by an accidental fire 1500 years ago.

The Temple of Artemis, a 120 year project and fourth wonder of the world, was built 2500 years ago, Nothing remains of the original temple.

The fifth wonder of the world is the Mausoleum of Maussollos which stood for 15 centuries until earthquakes toppled it. Nothing remains.

The sixth wonder of the world is the Colossus of Rhodes. Construction was completed in 282 BC after 12 years. It stood no taller than the Statue of Liberty and remained only 56 years, destroyed by an earthquake in 226 BC.

The Lighthouse of Alexandria was built in the 3rd century BC becoming the seventh of the Seven Wonders of the World. About the same height as the Washington Monument, it ceased operating and was largely destroyed as a result of two earthquakes in the 14th century. Nothing of consequence remains above the waterline.

The first wonder of the world, the Great Pyramid of Giza is the tallest pyramid in the world, although not the most massive. It is 4600 years old and the only wonder of the world remaining. The entire interior has no identifying inscription, nor finished rooms. Ancient graffiti can be seen on some of the outside stones. There is neither indication nor evidence as to whom it was built, how it was built, how long it took to build it. It was built presumably to bury some people.

Not a wonder of the world, The Dead Sea Scrolls comprise roughly 850 documents. A relatively small fraction of the contents of the texts can be attribted to what is now seen in the Hebrew Bible, They were written on leather 3 centuries prior to the definition of the original versions of the Bible and discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves in and around the ruins of the ancient settlement of Khirbet Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. Unlike the seven wonders of the world, the texts existed in near perfect condition when unearthed and have meaning. In fact, they have great religious and historical significance, as they are practically the only remaining Biblical and inspired Christian and pre-Christian documents dating from before AD 100.

You can travel to any of the Wonders of the World and be left with the feeling of not ever having arrived...worldly wonders long gone. Before the Dead Sea Scrolls came to the light of day, there was the translation of the Book of Mormon on the American continent.

One day an American boy is scoffed at for making such a find, then as time passes it all becomes quite reasonable.

There are some pets that one cannot own. Cats come to mind.(Thought: must throw cats out of mind...must throw cats out of mind). There. There are some pets that one CAN own. Indeed, meet Hinky who is a tri-colored (chocolate, black, white) purebred male cocker spaniel. Please note that Hinky is sleeping on my new Christmas sweater. He sleeps there not to be defiant; rather, Hinky sleeps upon my sweater because he enjoys my scent. Imagine that. No forget that thought.

In our family, naming our pets is a process derived from revelation. In most cases, the chosen name foretells of things to come (prophesy). Many of our animals have made the process time consuming. In the case of Hinky, no.

Before we were acquainted with then puppy Hinky, we were dismayed to discover the first naughty thing he did in his then brief mortal experience. He got ahold of an Ensign (LDS Church) magazine and ripped to shreds a talk given by none other than our living Prophet Gordon B. Hinkley. Although my wife will call him affectionately "Hinkley", there is just this apprehension within me that requires the drop of the LE. Hinky is peace loving. So, much so that when our cockatoo goes into his screeching fits, Hinky finds the experience painful and will howl as a consequence. He will not quit howling until the bird begins to mimmick his whimpered howling. Obviously, hearing his own whimpered howling from Spirit does not injure his ears.
Before we owned him, Hinkey was a lead runner in the Iditarod. This presently justifies why he does not chase a thrown ball, nor move anything faster than than a sloth. However, everyone here knows he is a sleeping cheetah (loosely speaking).
He is known for his big sloppy kisses and is a gifted lapdog.

The Fox and the Grapes or The Christian and the Temple

"A FAMISHED FOX saw some clusters of ripe black grapes hanging
from a trellised vine. She resorted to all her tricks to get at
them, but wearied herself in vain, for she could not reach them.
At last she turned away, hiding her disappointment and saying:
"The Grapes are sour, and not ripe as I thought." Envy denied.

So much of the Christian world has been subject to the regular haunting of the ghost of the temple—a ghost unbelieved - the ghost of Christmas past. The temple has never lost its power to enlighten our collective imaginations and excite our emotions. Who could be subdued over the exciting possibility of a literal and tangible bond between heaven and earth? Ah, but the passion most noted from within the Christian breasts has certainly been that of envy. Suppressing the passion of envy brings a greater danger.. The temple has cast a pall over the assertions and the self-belief of the Christian church from early times and undiminished in our own day.

The fall of Jerusalem had the same meaning for Christians as for the Jews, i.e., "the sudden removal of the original authority,". The loss of the temple in Jerusalem was the central event in the entire catastrophe, yet it is regularly minimized by those Fathers pressed for comment and those claiming to that authority lost.

Driving east through Philadelphia and across that famous American River, you will find New Hope, NJ. It is what it claims to be. A creatively artsy village of extraordinary life. And, as I said, it is found just across that famous river previously crossed by couragous men before.

There is a great historical bearing here. The orthodox Christian church sits figuratively in the ghettos of Philly. You might recall Aristarchus (310 BC - circa 230 BC) was a Greek astronomer and mathematician, born in Samos, Greece. He is the first to place the Sun, not the Earth, at the center of the known universe. Unfortunately for him and the world, he was not Alexandrian. His astronomical ideas were subordinated to religiously influenced errors of Aristotelian Physics, Platonic theory, and the Ptolemaic Wheels for the early Christian age. Claudius Ptolemy being an Alexandrian astrologer lived with the great church fathers during that supposed enlightened time of the first and second centuries AD. He custom built the Ptolemiac (wheels) theory for the Church fathers stating the universe was a closed space bounded by a spherical envelope, with the Earth at its center. Everything revolving about us and nothing existed beyond that closed spherical envelope. It was the only way he could explain what the Alexandrian Church Fathers wanted. It took centuries for Copernicus to arrive and later Galileo, at the cost of his life, to experiment and prove the true state of things. TYCHO DE BRAHE at the end of the 17th century through experimentation shattered the church's own "permanency and immutability of the stellar sphere". This was a fundamental doctine of medieval Christianity. Kepler followed upon the death of Brahe to prove that the church driven ideas of circular motion and uniform speed had prevented progress in astronomy for two thousand years.

Man, it was believed, was ALONE made by God in His image. Man was the next thing to God, and, as such, superior, especially in his best part, his soul, to all creatures. These church Fathers stated and Brahe concieved. The Great Fathers claimed man (and woman being subordinant) did not even take a place within the natural world. - This has been a philosophy which has proved disastrous to the earth's environment. - The correct even enlightened theories of Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe, and Kepler lead men to know that they are simply part of nature and not superior to it. It took 20 centuries but most of us understand this mortal and spiritual truth.

So, what should this teach us?

All of this is a connecting web because today we talk about another experiment that the traditions of the church fathers would murder to stop. And out of some ancient duty to them, some Christians hold fast to the darkness of a closed canon. It would seem that they are rooted to it and cannot escape. But that is myth.

Returning to Claudius Ptolemy's Earth centered closed envelope: The theory lives on today in the form of a closed windowless room whose walls were the brightest white 1700 years ago. So many of us live there now. The radiance that once filled it has been reduced to near darkness, leaving grayed walls. Nothing from the outside has been permitted in for 20 centuries, only for the edict that there is nothing on the outside to be found. But there is hope. For the oldest fathers among us here in the room, in the dimming light, see order in the ceiling paint. Blemishes in the paint appear as celestial objects, until over time everyone simply realizes the total absence of light has left our minds to retreat to a near faithless, hopeless, loveless state, where even consciousness cannot be trusted. We sink together to the floor to die from too many idle years while leaning against an external doorway long boarded up.

In the Book of Mormon, there is a heroic tale where the sons of Helaman, with their father's permission, set off to the land of their sworn enemies to deliver the true Gospel. Individually, they took separate paths into the land. They were imprisoned but were determined to do whatever it took to deliver their ancestral brothers and sisters from their darkness. They committed most of their lives to that task. And they succeeded.

Your Loving Father in Heaven and His only begotten Son did not create a closed room. Man did, all the way back in the time of an erring ancient astrologer.

May this post bring you the courage to look for a life of New Hope, across the river.

A postscript: The notion that Fluffy is every bit as cherished by God as any human insults the medieval minds of a new age Christian orthodoxy. This is because they give honor to their Church Fathers. And in doing so, they have been blinded from the so many real truths.