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In the midst of a satisfying career in nanotechnology, my bus time, Sunday time and many evenings have been filled with my hobby—writing. Ideas come piecewise during my frequent drives to the ranch, while driving tractors and fixing fences, and during my morning shower. Siri has benefited my writing by allowing me to capture ideas in the middle of the night without turning on a light, though I can’t say that this doesn’t disturb my sleeping wife.

Inviting all–even the heavy laden–to come to Christ

The Spring 2019 General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was my wake-up call to ponder and suggest a solution to the problem the church faces in institutionally showing Christlike love toward LGT parents and individuals who wish to seek Jesus’ salvation within the Church.  How to love them unconditionally both in policy and in practice?  Here are my suggestions in the form of questions:  Railroaded to Heaven

Adam and Eve should be celebrated not for falling but for having the courage to repent and showing us how to do the same; returning to God through Jesus

Prior to relocating my career to New Jersey during the summer of 2018, the main topic of my passion has been to sort out the contradictions and paradoxes in the way my church has traditionally viewed “The Fall” of our first parents in Eden.  But many other beautiful concepts flow from discarding the traditional view of Adam and Eve in favor of a paradigm based in first and only believing God.  It is the primary path to come unto Christ:  A Case for Coming to Christ

Here are a couple of brief, one-page overviews and statements of the problem: Reconsidering the LDS perspective of the Fall (May, 2016), God Never SInned Mar_15, 14_Summary of problem

It is said of Martin Luther that his theses are quite repetitive. Whereas Martin Luther used 95 restatements of essentially a single message: the church should not be selling indulgences; so in my case I use 95 theses to restate and repeat essentially one single message: the church should not be in the business of endorsing or advocating belief in Lucifer’s words in preference to believing God’s words at face value as heard spoken during our temple’s dramatic portrayal of Eden.

View  95 Theses Revisited as HTML with hoverable, hyperlinked text.

View  95 Theses Revisited as a webpage

Interested in a fresh, new perspective on the Fall-AdamEve?

SacredToSecret: Crossing the Line from Sacred to Secret: Seven Reasons Latter-day Saints Should Be Openly Discussing the Latest Temple Changes  (23 February, 2019)

Order The Lineage of the Lie from Outskirts Press, Amazon or as an iBook

Order Satan Gets to Reign BAD THINGS HAPPEN God Gets the Blame from Outskirts Press, Amazon or as an iBook

All proceeds beyond marketing and publication costs from these books go toward humanitarian efforts at OURrescue.org. 

Other materials on the same topic

A poetic meditation, “Whose is death?” with context: Whose_is_Death_essay

“Reconsidering the Three Pillars of Eternity Metaphor”, an essay included in a September, 2017 letter to President Russell M. Nelson while he was still President of the Quorum of the Twelve. I have no reason to believe it reached its intended audience. Also included in Part-I of the book “The Lineage of the Lie” as part of that book’s “Statement of the Problem”.

An unpublished essay intended to encourage my middle daughter to listen more attentively when interacting with Evangelical Christians as a missionary in the Southern States: TeachFromTheLittleBox

9 Paradoxes solved by CS Lewis: an analysis of the Fall wherein CS Lewis suggests, All this that we are now talking has been talked before.  In fact, Lewis has imagined a world in which a tempter tried and failed to subjugate the first lady of that world. He has thought through and addressed these issues that are so paradoxical within LDS theology. (2016)

Modern References to the Fortunate Fall And The Garden Infertility Paradox (Prepared for my stake president, 23 September, 2016)

Foundational Principles: Shouldn’t we Believe God in the Temple, Rather than Lucifer? (Prepared for my stake president, November, 2016)

A conflicted temple experience when my youngest daughter prepared to receive her endowment (I met her in the Celestial Room after): AConflictedTempleExperience

An essay sent to the Ensign but declined for publication: Culling Sacred Cows from the LDS Hymnal . (2018)

10/2/17 Effort to notify the Ensign editors regarding Pres. Nelson’s (then President of the Twelve) errors in the footnotes he delivered to the press after speaking in Conference: Ensign_Nelson_17

Response to LDS Living’s May/June 2018 Issue “5 Things Every Mormon Should Know About Eve”.  My Letter of May 3, 2018 said,

“Dear LDS Living Editor,

Today I met with a General Authority to discuss the fallacious cultural tradition that rationalizes the disobedience of our First Parents in Eden, using the article in your recent issue as a case study.

When I have submitted articles to LDS Living in the past, they have been rejected on the grounds that they pursue doctrinal topics and that they quote scriptures.  I suggest LDS Living should adhere to that policy strictly as opposed to teaching false doctrine.

Please see attached rebuttal here, which I would be very happy to elaborate at your convenience.

Ask the right questions (2016) suggests a way for anyone to position themselves to receive true answers. It also explains why our leaders have so far failed to receive these answers related to the fall in Eden for themselves and for others.

Back to square one in the garden: Reflecting on the Potential Impact of Believing God in Our Temple’s Eden (2016)

“Well, Dr. Nibley, I Do Have a Suggestion: Always Believe God, Always Disbelieve Lucifer“, By Ian R. Harvey, Sunstone Magazine, Winter, 2016, issue 183. (Please let me know if you are otherwise unable to obtain a reprint of this article)

During the summer of 2017 I had the opportunity to present my two recent book projects at the Salt Lake Sunstone Symposium .

SunstoneHandout_17 including The Moral Agency Blueprint

Jesus heals broken hearts, broken spirits and broken relationships: SacMtg3_26_17_JoyToTheWorld

Princeton2nd_adversity is a talk I was asked to give on the 24th of July weekend in our sacrament service, 2018

On Becoming a Mormon Essayist (2016) will give the reader background on why and how I unsuccessfully attempted to break in to the Mormon Intellectual publishing club in order to raise awareness to the contradictions inherent in culturally celebrating the disobedience of our first parents in Eden. I am grateful for mentoring I received in my writing, but ultimately this and other essays never found favor among editors sufficient to merit ink.

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Nanotechnologist

Cow chips to computer chips…   I graduated from the University of Utah in a program that should have introduced me to computer chip technology, but frankly the lab that specialized in it was a scary place: full of dangerous materials and cobbled together with duct tape and baling wire.  Stuff I was already familiar with for other reasons.  After a master’s degree I still felt like I did not know diddlysquat so I lumbered on for more…  …at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden.  I loved Colorado from my elementary school years when Dad worked at the Rocky Flats Plant and still loved it enough to go back.  Materials Science was a brand new program then and I was the third graduate, having also scored an internship at IBM-Boulder.  The semiconductor industry was blossoming at the time and many companies were hiring.  VLSI hired me as a chip failure analyst and I stayed for seven years, living just a few blocks from where, as a fourth grader, I had lived while dad was on a rotation with Lawrence Radiation Lab, in Livermore, CA.  I enjoyed several job roles there including chip pathology and microsurgery (prototype repair), as well as a stint in the cleanroom developing new technologies.  What a fantastic culture and environment to work with a diverse group of professionals and literally invent new ideas in the hallways between cubicles and then go make it work in the cleanroom.  I bounced from CA to UT so I could bring my family closer to grandparents, cousins, the ranch and my horse.  Bourns sent me all over the world in my program manager capacity and later as a staff engineer developing new technologies.  I had a lot of time in hotel rooms and airplanes to begin a new interest in writing…  Then 9/11 hit and the company panicked and closed down three manufacturing plants in Utah, offering me either a position in Riverside, CA or a layoff.  Well, I guess as a friend told me, I was looking for a job when I found this one…   Some wonderful people picked me up on an NSF-funded program at the University of Utah and told me to build a lab where I had previously feared ever setting foot.  Now we have a nice new facility that is the technological crown jewel of the state of Utah (state-owned, that is).

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Rancher

When I was 16 my dad and uncle traded homestead property (now surrounded by subdivisions) in Utah for a beautiful ranch full of meadows and springs, beaver ponds and streams, cottonwoods and quaking aspen at 7,500′ elevation, in the foothills of the Uintah Mountains.  It was kid heaven.  A great place to learn to work and drive tractors and motorcycles, be independent, and irrigate with sticks of dynamite.  (We didn’t have any sprinkler systems, nor did we want them).  My folks have lived there since 2004, giving me something to do with my weekends and vacation days.  I intend to retire there.

Here is my Ode to Cowboy Mentors (2016)

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Inventor

I grew up with Chitty-Chitty-Bang!-Bang! so naturally I was infatuated with the idea of invention.  I remember in grade school thinking the 16 color crayola box was amazing…   until the 32 color box came out.  Then the next year an amazing box of 64 came out, with a little built-in sharpener!  I was sure that my life’s purpose was to invent a new crayola color.  My dad is a scientist and ex-Navy guy so I also grew up with model HO scale trains, planes, ships and Estes rockets…   and with the idea of experimentation.  Our street in Boulder, CO was at the top of the hill.  I wondered why my bicycle handlebars would turn so far and so easily when the bike was stopped, and turn so hard and so little when I was going fast.  I resolved to myself that I would try forcing the handlebars to turn at the bottom of the street, because it would be so cool to turn tightly like a fighter plane, to go around the corner.  I still have the scars on my knees from that experiment.

Regardless of numerous failures over a lifetime, I have always believed in my heart that “there must be a way”, no matter the challenge, and it was only a matter of finding it.  It helps, too, to be very lazy and to rationalize spending hours and hours dreaming up a simpler way of doing some menial chore that might have taken five minutes of concerted effort.  I think I drove my poor dad crazy.

patents_n_pubs_17

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Entrepreneur

Snow Horse Analytical Lab was conceived and launched in early 1999 when my brothers and I realized that we needed more flexibility in our careers than a day job, in order to manage Dad and Mom’s Wyoming cattle ranch that was our ultimate dream job.  But Snow Horse needed a scanning electron microscope.  We were unable to pull off the deal that would put one in our lab, so we moved on.  Our next attempt at entrepreneurship is always just turning the corner to become profitable.

The Wasatch Mountain Peak shown naked without its Snow Horse is metaphoric of Snow Horse Analytical Lab sans microscope.  But the name is too familiar and personally meaningful not to use it somehow.

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What is the Snow Horse?

As the Wasatch mountain peaks shed their bright snow covered caps each spring, one canyon snowfield, shaped like a horse (and sometimes with a pony aside) manifests during the last weeks of May into the first weeks of June on a good water year. My grandfather Alpheus used to be the water master in Kaysville and he would say that when the legs disappeared from the Snow Horse then it was time for water to go on regulation (high water was over).  It was also the time when he and Dad would take my brother and me up to Bair’s Canyon and we would bucket the water out of the pools below the diversion to catch the stranded trout (otherwise doomed) and plant them into our fish pond in Spring Hollow (Fruit Heights, UT) just downhill from Hwy 89.