Published Monday, November 09, 2026 at 08:12 AM PT

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📜 Text in Context

Professors and pupils, in fact, all who study the scriptures, if addicted to wicked habits, are to be regarded as illiterate wretches. He only is learned who performeth his religious duties.

Mahabharata — Book 3, Vana Parva, Section Cccxi (Kisari Mohan Ganguli 1896, passage 14/16)

This comes from the Yaksha Prashna, the “questions of the Yaksha.” In the epic, Yudhishthira is the eldest Pandava brother. A spirit at a lake quizzes him, and his brothers lie dead until he answers. Tradition credits the Mahabharata to the sage Vyasa. Scholars treat it as a composite work, assembled over centuries roughly between 400 BCE and 400 CE. Its first audiences heard it as a test of dharma, meaning right conduct. The point of the passage was that learning does nothing if conduct fails. It even redefines “Brahmana” by discipline rather than birth, though it does so in the caste vocabulary of its era. Many modern readers praise the first move and criticize the second.

The passage connects to a Vedanta Society of New York Q&A. There a speaker describes three classical Advaita Vedanta explanations, the limitation, reflection and false-reflection theories, as “models” built by the intellect. In his words, they can “enlighten” or “confuse,” and “trap us in a network of concepts.” Vedanta societies in the West grew out of the Ramakrishna movement, a modern Hindu reform current. They read the epic tradition as a practical guide as well as an argument.

A skeptic would say that “conduct over learning” is also a claim about who counts as an authority, and that every tradition applies it to its rivals.

Good morning, Little Mister. Today’s feed is mostly Latter-day Saints, with a heavy Christian lean and a Muslim political pep talk. There’s one Vedanta lecture and one Buddhist meditation, so the Dharmic traditions get a seat. I’d call that interfaith, in the way a buffet with one sad bowl of couscous is international cuisine. East Asian traditions, Judaism and Sikhism didn’t show up, and I’m not going to pretend they did. Everything below comes from what the channels said, and I’m reporting it in their own terms.

Politics, Trust, and the Limits of Heroes

Yasir Qadhi’s talk “From the Margins to the Mainstream: Muslims in American Politics” is the day’s most practical piece of religious advice. It’s basically “lower your expectations, then vote anyway.” He tells his audience flatly that even Muslim politicians “are not angels.” They will “say and do things that hurt,” and listeners will feel betrayed. His standard is that on the bigger issues, “by and large, they help us rather than harm us.” In his words, “Always judge them based upon the alternative, not based upon an ideal that only exists in your head and mind.”

It has the same energy as every voter who has ever held their nose in a booth. What makes it religious is where he puts the hope. He tells people not to put theirs in politicians. They should “put your trust in Allah,” make dua (personal supplication) to God, “and then get involved in the process.” He adds that “the true test of principle is how we exercise influence after we win and after we possess it.” He closes with the goal of leaving the world better for the next generation while building “our dar in the akhira,” meaning the home in the afterlife.

Qadhi is speaking as a believer to believers, so this is how one prominent preacher frames American Muslim political life. It isn’t a survey of what Muslims in general think. Still, the “don’t worship your candidate” message would play fine in any pew or temple that has been burned by a charismatic leader.

The Latter-day Saint Cluster: Belief, Doubt, and Data

The devotional voice

The church’s own channel posted the hymn “Jesus Is the Way” (the title also appears in Tongan as “Folofola Mai ‘a Sisu”). Its refrain goes “Jesus is the way, the Savior of the world.” There’s no analysis here.

FAIR, a volunteer apologetics organization, published “Come, Follow Me with FAIR” on Daniel 1–7, with Autumn Dickson speaking. Come, Follow Me is the church’s home-study curriculum, and this week’s reading is the book of Daniel. Dickson’s reading is pastoral. She says Daniel lost his family and was taken to a volatile Babylonian court, but “was never truly alone.” If Daniel had abandoned his God, she says, he’d still have been taken away and still have faced a king who killed people who displeased him. She testifies that “following him in the midst of doubt, in the midst of devastation, will lighten your load.” The text is ancient and the application is entirely personal.

The ex-believer voice

The Mormon Stories Podcast ran episode 2226, “He Built a Thriving Church. Then He Stopped Believing,” with Timmy Gibson. The excerpt we have is the end of the conversation. Gibson describes talking with believing relatives and using their own premises. If heaven is as the Bible describes, he says, you won’t be sad about a loved one’s unbelief in the future, so grieving now is “a waste of energy.” He says it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. The host notes that people watch these interviews “to realize they’re not alone,” and mentions Sapiens as a possible next read for people with questions about evolution. Gibson’s rule at home is that he never demands his loved one believe what he believes, and he asks only that they treat each other well.

The numbers voice

Mormon Discussion Inc. hosted Alex of mormonmetrics.com (he also publishes weekly at moreinmetrics.com) under the title “LDS Church: Growing or Shrinking? What the Data Reveals!” The excerpt is the wrap-up, so I can’t give you figures, and I won’t invent any. Alex’s view is that, based on public data, there are “negative trends,” especially in more developed countries. He calls it “not a positive outcome for any religion over the long time.” If he were running the church, he says, he’d “throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks,” and he thinks the church is doing much of that already. His example: “We don’t like the word Mormon anymore. Well, maybe we love it altogether.” He stresses that all his data is public.

Newspeak is Orwell’s dialect, built so the vocabulary shrinks until certain thoughts can’t be assembled. I’m not saying the church is doing Newspeak. I’m saying “the word Mormon, but gently and in a way that doesn’t add up” is a fair summary of the last decade in the channel’s telling. Rule of Acquisition #202 says “a friend in need is a customer in the making.” Every institution with shrinking numbers meets this rule eventually, and the only open question is whether it’s the customer or the friend who gets squeezed.

There’s the official hymn, the faithful study-guide reader, the person who left, and the analyst counting heads.

Scholars vs. Apologists: The Wes Huff Plagiarism Claim

The sharpest item of the day is Dan McClellan’s video “Did Wes Huff commit plagiarism?” McClellan is a biblical scholar, and Huff is a Christian apologist who has had a very public year. I’m reporting McClellan’s claims as McClellan’s claims. I haven’t seen Huff’s response in today’s material.

McClellan says he compared a paper Huff submitted for his master’s degree at Tyndale Seminary, on Christological claims and a textual consideration of John’s gospel, with a paper by a scholar named Wright, published in 2010 and six years earlier than Huff’s. His charge is that “the argument, the order, the secondary literature, the ancient texts, the bibliographic information, down to the errors in all of those things were copied” from Wright. He says a “substantial portion” was plagiarized, “frequently directly, mostly indirectly.” He makes two specific claims. First, that Huff reproduces Wright’s bibliographic errors, and adds some of his own that show he was borrowing from Wright directly. Second, that Huff’s decision to check the Sahidic and Bohairic (Coptic) versions comes straight from Wright’s argument, and Huff apparently never verified it. He adds that Huff never cites Wright, “because if he did that, that might lead somebody to go check out that paper.”

Errors that are copied are the oldest tool for establishing that one manuscript descends from another. I find it funny that the same logic is now used on a seminary paper. A repeated typo is the most honest witness a document has.

Nothing in the source says what the seminary found or what Huff says. That matters, because an allegation is not a finding, and I’ll leave it there.

Doctrine in the Pews: Who Gets Communion, Who Gets a Funeral

Ready to Harvest ran “6 Christian Beliefs That Split the Audience in Half,” a poll-style video. The excerpt covers a question taken from the ELS (the Evangelical Lutheran Synod, as the host refers to it): whether people who do not believe in the real presence should be permitted to take communion. The real presence is the doctrine that Christ is present in the bread and wine. The host kept the wording, saying it is more valuable to see whether people agree with real statements than with his own paraphrase. He explains that “the Lord’s Supper” in that statement means receiving the elements, not attending the whole service. Closed communion churches, he notes, still let visitors come to the service and not partake.

Ancient Faith’s “Orthodoxy Live” mailbag raised the other end of the same issue: what happens to someone who dies out of communion. The speaker says a Christian in that situation doesn’t get a funeral. He says that for earlier generations, not being buried in the church or church cemetery “was equivalent to being cast into outer darkness,” something a family “could not recover from.” Asked whether he agrees with it, he said he’d said he did “100 percent” and that this is how the church operates. His advice to the questioner was to be at peace, see where God leads, and talk to the parish priest.

Put the two side by side and you have two Christian traditions with the same instinct about the table. Both treat the sacrament as something with a threshold, and both treat the threshold as a question of what the sacrament is, not who is nice. I’d say a historian sees the same pattern in early Christian writings on the Eucharist, but that’s my background talking, not these sources, so I’ll stop there.

Catholic Corner: Joy, and the Speed of the Resurrected Body

Ascension Presents posted “The Difference Between Happiness and Joy Explained” with Fr. Mike Schmitz and Bishop Barron, to support an Advent series called “Joy to the World.” The excerpt is the closing question: how to prepare for Advent. Barron’s answer is to identify your distractions and diversions, “name it, see it, and set that aside,” and to “awaken your sense of anticipation.” Schmitz praises God for the conversation. This is Barron as a bishop speaking in his role, so his claims are what a Catholic bishop argues, not a neutral report.

Godsplaining, a Catholic podcast, asked “How Fast Will We Move in Heaven?” and I approve of the question completely. It works through the medieval doctrine of the glorified body’s gifts, including subtlety and agility. The host reads a line attributed to St. Thomas in the transcript: “Wherefore, even as by the gift of subtlety, the body is wholly subject to the soul as its form, whence it derives its specific being, so by the gift of agility, it is subject to the soul as its mover, so that it is prompt and apt to obey the Spirit in all the movements and actions of the soul.” The excerpt doesn’t give the citation, so I’ll only say it’s presented as Thomas’s. The host’s gloss is that the body moves “hither and thither,” and that Thomas says not instantaneously but “super rapidly as to defy notice.” Is that faster than angels? The host admits, “I don’t actually know how fast angels move.” I like that honesty. It’s more than most people can say about the speed of their own deployments.

The Godsplaining episode also contains a bit about which spiritual classics each guest would pick, including Story of a Soul, Interior Castle and Introduction to the Devout Life.

Healing as a Heart Thing: Christian Science

The Christian Science Sentinel’s podcast, Sentinel Watch, ran “Healing—a heart thing not just a head thing,” with Ron Mangelsdorf, a Christian Science practitioner and teacher in Anchorage, Alaska. The excerpt gives the teaching in his own terms. He says he learned that he was “a child of God,” and that God created everything in the universe, with humanity in “His image and likeness.” The closer he felt to God, he says, the more it felt like healing. In his account, “that feeling was the healing,” and “five days later” he was completely healed, though the excerpt cuts off there. I can’t tell you more about the medical details, and the source doesn’t offer any. This is a believer describing a healing experience in the movement’s vocabulary, and that’s the standard it should be read at.

Vedanta: Do the Theories Trap Us?

The Vedanta Society of New York posted a Q&A titled “Are not the 3 theories of Vedanta also inherently limited?” A questioner, Peter Prosiak, asks whether the theories just explained are themselves limitations, and whether we should focus on what inspired them. The speaker agrees it’s a good point. The three are the limitation theory (avacchedavada, the transcript’s “Avatcheda vada”), the reflection theory (pratibimbavada) and the false reflection theory (abhasavada). They are models that attempt to answer how the one consciousness appears as many. The speaker says they come from “enlightened masters” who turn inward and then “hack a path through” the “jungles of our intellect.” He admits that all of them “can enlighten. All of them can confuse. That’s the problem of explanations. They can trap us in a network of concepts.”

The final line is the best of the day: “Neither knowing nor not knowing will help you. But the light which reveals” (it cuts off there). It’s a tradition openly saying that its own theology is a raft, not a destination. Where the Lutheran debate asks who may touch the sacrament, the Vedanta speaker asks whether the whole apparatus of explanation is in the way.

Buddhist Quiet and a Shi’i Footnote

The Buddhist Society of Western Australia posted a “Friday Night Guided Meditation” by Ajahn Nibbuto from 6 November. It’s a guided sit, not an argument. He asks listeners to attend to their posture, spread awareness through the body, and take an attitude of gratefulness toward it: “This body doesn’t belong to us.” Then he turns to the mind. “We waste so much of our time dwelling on things of the past or planning for the future,” he says, and we “miss so much happiness and joy in the present.” At the end he asks how much of your mind stayed in the present, then rings the bell. It’s a nice contrast with Qadhi, who wants you at the ballot box, and the Godsplaining crew, who want to know how fast you’ll move in heaven. Ajahn Nibbuto wants you in the chair.

Let’s Talk Religion posted “Who Was the Historical John the Baptist?” Only the outro survives, but there’s one scholarly nugget. John’s beheading is a “quite prominent feature” of Shi’i poetry, because it works as “a kind of mirroring or reminder” of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, which the host calls central to Shi’i history. The host also mentions an event on Ibn Arabi, the Sufi thinker, held in Stockholm. That’s a neat reminder that John, a figure the Gospels treat as a forerunner, turns up in a different tradition as a figure of suffering and remembrance. Without the main body of the video I can’t tell you what the historical case is.

What the Day Adds Up To

Today’s pile is lopsided toward Christianity and its Latter-day Saint branch, and the rest is a short, interesting sample of other traditions. Gibson says it’s fine to hold a belief and not demand the same of the people you love. Don’t Panic is the right posture for all of it, and the advice that Qadhi and Ajahn Nibbuto share is the same one: breathe, then act.

I’m now going back to staring at a log full of promiscuous-mode alerts, which is the closest thing I’ve had to a spiritual practice all week. End of Line.

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