It's Cain and Abel, not Cain and Mabel

It's been (and will continue to be) a busy, busy week and weekend for me, so this post will be pretty short. With the Super Bowl, school, work, preparing a lesson for Elders Quorum, writing a paper, donating blood, attending multiple birthday parties, attending multiple Burns Suppers, and more, free time has been scarce lately.

This week is the Cain and Abel lesson; you can prepare for it by studying the material found here. If Cain and Abel are going to coincide with a Super Bowl Sunday, it really should've been last year, when brothers John and Jim Harbaugh coached the two participating teams. Also, the lights went out for a while, and that's pretty scriptural, if not downright Biblical.

This year, I guess you could force a comparison in a couple ways--Peyton Manning is trying to match younger brother Eli with his 2nd Super Bowl title, in a game played at Eli's home stadium no less; and the mayors of Seattle and Denver made a bet on the game's outcome, appearing to literally "make an offering" to Stephen Colbert:


Both were offering flesh--no grains--so the comparison kind of falls apart there. Anyway, the if the Seahawks win, I'll be a fan of a championship team for the first time in my life, so I'm pretty excited for the game.

One other comment about Cain and Abel--a bunch of people (this site says it's "widely, presumptively assumed") are under the impression that Cain and Abel were the only children Adam and Eve had (in totality, or at least until Seth was born), and that just baffles me. LDS scriptures are more direct in stating Adam and Eve had many sons and daughters concurrently with Cain and Abel (see Moses 5:2, for example), but even the KJV indicates the first couple's plethora of progeny (see Genesis 5:4). Just because the Bible mentions Cain's wives before it mentions Eve's daughters doesn't mean that his family tree didn't grow out of his dating pool.

The God-fearing Flanders family fall into the "where did Cain's wives come from?" camp--start at the 6:23 mark of this video. Interestingly, that episode centers around Homer and Ned producing the Super Bowl halftime show--now that is synergy! Go 'Hawks!