Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol and Mormonism

While Dan Brown’s fans have been eagerly awaiting his novel, The Last Symbol, Latter-day Saints were less enthused.  KSL had published this article a few years ago, reporting that the popular author had come to Salt Lake researching this next book, had noted what he took for Masonic symbols on the temple, and was researching the Church’s possible connection to the Masons.  The question loomed:  would the Church take a hit in Brown’s novel as the Catholic Church had in his previous two, Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code?

Brown’s book, released this week, is predictably at the top of the Amazon bestseller charts, and those who have read it have noted that any references to the Church only appear a couple of times.  Once in the book, Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist, declares his skepticism about Joseph Smith translating the Gold Plates and in the other reference, Langdon says people who don’t understand rituals sometimes take them out of context like the practice of Mormon baptism for the dead.

Mitt Romney at the Value Voters’ Conference

At the annual Value Voters’ Conference in Washington DC, Mitt Romney told the conservative crowd, that only a year ago people were writing off the conservative movement.  Not so, now. “These are times that call for a strong America.  Our own economy is reeling and our debts are becoming astronomical.  Free, hardworking, family-oriented, opportunity seeking people have always been the source of this nation and they always will be.”

He said that the best policies are those that expand the freedoms of individuals, that broaden their opportunities, that allow people to keep more of what they earn, that afford them better education, that let them choose their own health care and turn loose the free enterprise system so that it can create jobs.

In a presidential straw poll at the event where 597 voted, Romney came in a distant second with 74 votes to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who garnered 170 votes.

Pornography and You
By Rebecca Hagelin

A recent edition of Salvo Magazine (a publication I'm honored to serve as a pro-bono senior editor for) entitled “Silent Bondage” paints a grim picture of the future by outlining the harms we now know our children are currently suffering due to their own pornography consumption. Salvo features the work of Drs. Judith Reisman and Jill Manning, seasoned experts in the dangers of porn. Their research shows that the images "encourage and stimulate anger and aggression" in users and causes them to treat other people as objects. Children who use porn have a lack of interest in marriage and in having children of their own, and are at an increased risk of developing sexual compulsions and addictive behavior.

According to Dr. Manning, the type of porn viewed today, by both adults and children, is "deviant, vile and graphic. Young people are witnessing rape, torture, and all kinds of degrading material." Why would anyone gravitate to such horrible inhumane depictions? Dr. Reisman has carefully studied and documented the effects that exposure to pornography has on the brain – it acts like a drug and can easily capture the “casual observer” and result in serious addiction, causing the user to crave greater quantities of ever more perverse images.