Quotes by John R. Young

“I remember a young man coming to see me when he had just left school and begun work in London. He had given up going to church, he said, because he could not say the creed without feeling that he was a hypocrite. He no longer believed it. When he had finished telling me what he thought, I said to him, ‘If I were to answer your problems to your complete intellectual satisfaction, would you be willing to change the way you live?’ He smiled slightly and blushed. The answer was clearly ‘No’. His real problem was not intellectual but moral. This, then, is the spirit in which our search must be conducted. We must set aside apathy, pride, prejudice and sin, and seek God – no matter what the consequences. Of all these hindrances to the search for truth, the last two are the hardest to overcome: intellectual prejudice and moral self-will. The reason is that both are expressions of fear – and fear is the greatest enemy of the truth.””

“Tradition holds that Mary was engrossed in reading at the moment the angel made his annunciation. Christ formally announced the opening of his ministry by laying hold of a book. The central epiphany of the Restoration was the result of the reading habits of a young teenager, and Joseph's nephew, Joseph F., followed that same tradition, sitting in his room on the eve of General Conference, reading and reflecting "until the eyes of [his] understanding were opened.””

“HP-UX is a pretty good implementation of BSD, although it's not as featureful as SunOS.””

“Shinzen Young’s formula suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance (S = P × R) applies perfectly in these types of situations. We magnify any pain by the degree to which we fight it. When we stop reproaching and start accepting, suffering diminishes.A big part of the Self-Worth Safari adventure is that of reconnecting with your intrinsic reality, rather than living in the mental movie theater of self-assessment and self-reproach. The terrain of romantic love can be painful enough without adding any additional penalty points. If you have lost a partner (or someone you hoped would be a partner), even if love has eluded you entirely, that’s enough to deal with. You don’t need the additional burden of negative judgment about yourself. The pain of loss heals with time, but self-reproach is like a cancer that eats away at happiness and energy.Self-acceptance is a deep understanding of who you really are, with honest acknowledgment of (so-called) strengths and weaknesses as well as your needs. It means accepting your reality, even when it’s not “enough”.””

“To be “in the Spirit” (which in Pauline language is the same as to be “in Christ”), to “have” the Spirit, to “live by the Spirit” and to be “led by the Spirit””

“FEAR DOESN’T CHANGE THE STATISTICS Fear about guns seems to be greatest among those who know the least about them. It takes some familiarity to know that young children can’t simply fire a typical semi-automatic pistol. Few are likely to know that the slide needs to be pulled back to put a bullet in the chamber. Those who do are unlikely to have the strength to do so. And, of course, they may not be aware that the safety has to be switched off. Maybe more media attention should be given to the dangers posed by everyday items. In 2014, motor vehicles killed 303 pedestrians under age ten.8 Bicycle and space heater accidents take many times more children’s lives than guns do. Suffocation claimed over 1,100 lives. The most recent yearly data available indicate that five-gallon plastic water buckets claimed the lives of more than thirty children under age five. Again, the problem with gun-phobia is that without guns, victims are much more vulnerable to criminal attack. Guns are used defensively some 2 million times each year.9 Even though the police are extremely important in reducing crime, they simply can’t be there all the time. In fact, they virtually always arrive after the crime has been committed. Having a gun is by far the safest course of action when one is confronted by a criminal.””

“The media is doing quite a job of scaring people. A recent 2014 study in the journal Pediatrics received massive media attention, including extensive coverage in USA Today and an entire hour on ABC News’s 20/20.40 Here’s how ABC’s World News Tonight reported the findings:41           Looking at children and guns, the most recent statistics from 2009. And take a look tonight, they are eye-opening. The new numbers are arresting. . . . 7,391 children rushed to the hospital every year because of those gun injuries, so often accidents in the home. Four hundred and fifty-three of those children die at the hospital. The vast majority of these “children” are actually young adults. These are not little kids who accidentally hurt themselves by firing their parents’ gun. Consider these facts:          •    Seventy-six percent of these injured “children” were seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen years old.          •    Sixty-two percent of injuries were the result of criminal assaults.          •    The injuries are overwhelmingly concentrated in large, urban areas. These deaths are clearly tragic. But they are largely a result of gang violence, a problem that won’t be solved by scaring law-abiding Americans into not owning guns.””

“Compare this scenario to a recent case in Bremerton, a city in western Washington State. An African-American man, waiting for his girlfriend to get off work, was “insulted and challenged” by three drunk young white men who “used racial epithets.” One of the young men ordered his pit bull to attack. The African-American “pulled a handgun from his car” and fired it to defend himself against the dog. “By the time deputies arrived, things had calmed down, the black man was found to have a permit to carry the gun,” and he declined to press charges against his attackers. Fortunately, no one was injured.81 Without a gun, it is not obvious what else the African-American man could have done. He was outnumbered three to one and attacked by a pit bull, and there were no police nearby to help.””

“There are too many such comments to cite, invariably from these leaders of women’s organizations who, given the endemic nepotism in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are usually the wives of wealthy and influential public figures, often of a half-understood Westernized bent”

“An investigative report by the BBC in July 2007 found that thousands of young Egyptian men try to enter Europe illegally every year. Sometimes they set sail from the Egyptian coast aboard fishing boats run by people smugglers. Mostly, though, they undertake the perilous crossing to Italy from neighboring Libya, a country they do not need a visa to visit.””

“Government neglect and endemic poverty means that, aside from the constant hassle tourists must suffer from the legion of touts, many of the city’s young men become prostitutes as the only hope of earning a living. In the 1990s, Luxor became the center of male prostitution in the Middle East. The studs sold themselves to older foreigners (the john’s gender made no difference), who arrived throughout the year for unabashed, but for the most part locally denied, sex tourism.1 Luxor’s mayor, Samir Farag, was arrested after Mubarak’s ouster on charges of rampant corruption, as were many other mayors up and down the country; but a few years earlier he had told an Arabic-language newspaper that as many as 30 percent of Luxor’s young men had married an older foreign woman, and in most cases this was covert prostitution2”

“In any event, as a hint of what is now in store for Egypt, consider the city of Alexandria”