Who will be our Copernicus?

Here's a quick question to ask ourselves:

In a world of ever increasing geocentric morality, where the Son revolves around the earth and not the earth the Son, who can the world count on to be our Copernicus?

Hopefully the answer to that question resounds in your soul and in mine with greater force today than it did yesterday.

(Side note: I don't think that it is a coincidence that the word "son" and the word "sun" in English are homonyms, being that the motion of the planets is a witness of Christ (Alma 30:44).)

Image obtained from news.discovery.com

My Testimony of Women

People the world over search for meaning in their lives. They search for purpose, identity, and direction. When they don't find the true reason for our existence on earth, they choose, in the mean time, to fill their lives with other things instead. Many people find good causes to espouse and spend all their time trying to make the world better, after whatever pattern better might be to them. Many others turn inward and let selfishness take the wheel, hoping in vain that its blind eyes will take them somewhere that they want to be. Most of us, however, have a smattering of both selfless and selfish streaks strewn across the canvas of our lives, like a Jackson Pollock of human virtue and vice. And with each passing day we choose which color we prefer and we load our brush increasingly.

I feel inexpressibly blessed to have been given a true understanding of who I am, why I am here, and where I am going, through the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. Yet even still, I find myself painting with colors that I desperately wish I could wipe from my palette forever. I can see how Jesus made his life a Master-piece, filled with perfect form and light, and my heart can hardly see how mine will ever become something worth hanging in the halls of heaven. But as I look back through my time before the easel at all the human influences that have both steadied my hand and put vision in my eyes, none have been greater than the women in my life.

As I have tried again and again to stencil in an image of Christ on my countenance (Alma 5:14), it has been the women in my life that have provided the closest pattern of pure love (Moroni 7:47) for me follow. Their kindness, slowness to judge, and willingness to sacrifice in my behalf makes me weep even now. Their belief in me, even when my canvas seemed everlastingly unsalvageable, brought hope surging back into my soul like the pure white gesso of Jesus. Any semblance of the Savior that has taken shaped on my soul has been tenderly and patiently nurtured by women.

I testify that women are angels in every sense of that word. I testify that their power and influence on this world and, more importantly, on the world to come is far greater than they know. I testify that someday all men across time will bow their heads in humble gratitude to God for gracing their lives with mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, aunts, and friends.

(To my wife, my daughter, my mom, my sister, my grammie, and many others)

"Experience is a brutal teacher."

When I first saw the film Shadowlands I was profoundly impacted by something that C.S. Lewis, played by Anthony Hopkins, said after passing through an extremely difficult and painful event in his life. He said, "Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn...you learn." This short line from a really great movie has stuck with me for a long time. It often resurfaces in my mind from the depths of my daily existence like a great whale, blasting a hole in the seemingly endless waves of fear, selfishness, and ingratitude that frequently fill my soul in times of adversity. Each time it surfaces to draw another deep breath, it reminds me that other places exist beyond the current, bleak view from the crow's nest of my little vessel. It reminds me that I have a destination, a New World, that will someday appear on the horizon, if I will just trust my heading and keep a steady hand to the helm.

There is something inherent in experience that gives it a power beyond other forms of learning. We often try to learn by observation, by reason, by study, or by other means, but they all pale in comparison to experience in terms of how quickly you learn and how deeply the lesson is impressed into your mind and heart. You can read about touching a hot stove, you can reason through why it might be a bad idea, and you can even watch someone else touch the stove, but nothing will teach you that lesson like getting burned. That experience can then be applied to other situations with hot objects, effectively accelerating your learning process exponentially. Experience is in large measure the reason we are here. Learning about mortality and the challenges of choosing righteousness in the midst of that mortality was something that we could only do to a limited extent in pre-mortal life. Here we are to learn by our own experience the good from the evil and to prize and choose the good.

Alma taught that if you try "an experiment upon [the word]," the experience you gain from seeing the word "enlarge [your] soul" will give you confidence that the next gospel principle that you put to the test will also enlarge your soul (Alma 32). Shiblon, because of his experience, knew "that the Lord did deliver" him (Alma 38:4). The Lord told Joseph Smith that all of his adversity would "give [him] experience, and shall be for [his] good" (D&C 122:7). Even Jesus, though "the Spirit knoweth all things," had to experience suffering "according to the flesh that he might take upon him the sins of his people" (Alma 7:13). And actually experiencing the withdrawal of His Father's Spirit during that suffering surprised Him enough to exclaim in momentary fear "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matt 27:47)

Experience really is a brutal teacher, but you learn, in a way that no other form of learning can give you. So, the next time that you feel your little vessel might be swallowed up by the sea, when you cry in your prayers "Master, carest thou not that [I] perish?" (Mark 4:38), please remember that "all these things things shall give thee experience" and in the end "shall be for thy good" (D&C 122:7). Remember that God will not forsake you (Joshua 1:5, Isaiah 49:16), even though you may momentarily fear that He has. Remember that the "mountain waves which [brake] upon [you]" (Ether 6:6) are there so that you "may be taught more perfectly" (D&C 105:10). And always remember that the very winds that create those waves are the same force that will "never cease to blow [you] towards the promised land" (Ether 6:8).

(If you feel this may help others, please share it with them. Thanks.)

The Plan of Salvation Inc.?

Too many people think of the Church or the Plan of Salvation like a business. When others get assigned certain roles or put in certain offices, people's subconscious takes them through job interviews they have had in the past. They picture God as a CEO, sifting through résumés looking for the person that will be the best person to hire for that position. They see God scrolling down through their education, work history, awards, hobbies, etc and saying to Himself, "Yep, she's (or he's) the one for the job. She clearly stands out from the rest. She's the one that will bring this company to the next level."

God is not interested in having His company make it on the Fortune 500 list. He is not looking to grow His company to be an industry leader. He could accomplish that with His hands tied behind His back. What God is trying to do is build people. He is trying to make Eternal Beings out of average folks like you and I. He gives people jobs, not because they are the ones with the stellar résumé and references, but because the job will help turn them into what He wants them to be. He doesn't choose the person that is best suited for the job, He chooses the job that is best suited for the person. He looks more at how the calling, assignment, office will change the person in it, and less at how the person will "propel the company forward." Now, the really cool thing is that His company still rolls forward to "fill the whole earth" (D&C 109:72), despite having a bunch of amateurs working for Him.

It is crucial to understand that the principle stated above is how God works. If you don't, you start feeling inferior or unappreciated or undervalued when God doesn't give you a job that you think is important or validating. This is especially true when we are talking about traditional family roles. Many women have felt and continue to feel underestimated, undervalued, and dismissed when society or God asks them to be primarily in the home. They feel somewhere inside that unless they are filling the exact same role as men, they will never be equal to men (as if that has always been a great thing to aspire to anyway). They feel dismissed when they are known as a homemaker and not an executive, a stay-at-home mom and not a business manager. I can understand why they might feel this way, especially if they don't quite understand the importance of mothers and if the don't understand God's approach to building people. I have mentioned this before, but it's worth repeating. The family is not organized the way it is because "women just can't hack it in the market place" or because "men are better suited to be corporate leaders." It is organized that way because those roles are designed to change men and women into what God wants them to be, Eternal Fathers and Eternal Mothers. It makes me think of the words of Hugh B. Brown that God "is the Gardener here, and [He] knows what [He wants us] to be".

Image obtained from roebuckfp.com

Moral Law: Part II -- To the friend

To the friend,

I am writing this post in response to the thoughts shared with me by the person to whom you introduced my blog. Through a lot of thought and prayer I have decided to address my response to you. I don't know who you are, but I want to share with you a few of my thoughts concerning your friend's remarks. I pray that I can communicate them to you with clarity and plainness and through the Holy Ghost. I hope that nothing I say comes across as being anything but respectful towards his positions and his right to have those positions and promote them in the public square. I care for him, as I care for you. I direct myself to you, instead of him, for my own reasons, and I hope to say something that may effect you for good and help you in your life.

Right and Wrong

I believe in the existence of Right and Wrong (upper case). I believe that Right and Wrong are absolute, or universal, meaning that they exist above mankind and are independent of mankind. Every person, with a few exceptions, is given a basic understanding of Right and Wrong, of Good and Evil, through the light of Christ, or our conscience (Moroni 7:12-19). That basic understanding of Right and Wrong expands as we are presented with Good and choose to accept it and incorporate it into our lives. It shrinks when we choose not to accept the Good presented to us and instead choose to fill our lives with other principles (Alma 12:9-11). Thus, our understanding, as individual humans, of what is Right and what is Wrong is what changes; that is what is relative. It changes based on those two things, a person's basic understanding of Right and Wrong, through the light of Christ, and their willingness to accept it. People often spend a lot of time and intellectual energy to talk themselves out of what is Right, because it contradicts what they want. It may change what is right (lower case) for them, but it will never change what is Right. As we all grow and learn, hopefully our ability to see absolute Right and Wrong gets clearer; like flipping through lenses at the eye doctor until the bottom line of the chart finally comes into focus. I don’t claim to have the perfect lens yet, but I believe that I am improving.

Morality and Law

It is the absolute Right and Wrong that would, in an ideal world, determine the laws of our society. (I am keenly aware that the existence of absolute Right and Wrong is vital to the positions that I expressed in my previous post, and that if there is no Right and Wrong, then I have no footing.) Again ideally, laws exist within the realm Justice, and they should represent perfectly the principles of Justice. In order for laws to be just or unjust, there must be some standard of Right and Wrong that makes them so. Therefore, when we refer to a law as being just or unjust, we knowingly or unknowingly assert that a Right and a Wrong exist and that we are trying to hold the law up to that standard, as best we understand it, to see how the law measures up. Without Right and Wrong, there can be no just or unjust, and laws become meaningless; they become a person’s, or group of persons’, opinion of how society should be run. Thus, Right and Wrong are the barometer of what is just and unjust, not logic. The moment that we accept that laws can be just or unjust, we accept that there is Right and Wrong, and morality immediately enters the scene. Now, so long as each of us have an imperfect understanding of absolute Right and Wrong, our own right and wrong (lower case), the laws we make as a society will be imperfect. But we have a duty to try as best we can to make our right and wrong align with absolute Right and Wrong and to seek just laws accordingly. Each of us will be accountable to God for our efforts in that endeavor. And so, until we cease to believe in the existence of Justice as an eternal concept, we must include Right and Wrong in our analysis of the laws we make. And if laws indeed can be just, and not merely logical, then morality is forever tied to them.

As I mentioned above, human perception of Right and Wrong is what varies, and each person is entitled to express and promote their understanding of right and wrong, as protected by Justice. We take our understanding of Right and Wrong, our right and wrong, and apply it to the events of each day. My moral choices may differ from the moral choices of others based on our different understandings of Right and Wrong, and the closer we each get to having our right and wrong match the absolute Right and Wrong, the more alike our moral choices will become until we each arrive at Morality. And as Right and Wrong never changes, so Morality never changes, no matter how much men and women would like it to. Each person's morality, lower case, may differ, but Morality can not change. God seeks to teach us Right and Wrong and Morality, through revelation from the Holy Ghost, inasmuch as we desire it, are willing to learn it, and diligently seek it.

And so we come together as a society, with each person's intellect, reason, and morality, to decide what the laws of our country will be by the voice of the people. That is the beauty of our system of government, that each person has the right to voice their stance on a law or policy or topic and to promote it to others. Religious people and non-religious people alike have the right to take their intellect, reason, and morality and promote their positions in the town square, and they should be able to so without persecution or bullying from those that differ in their views. We should all be able to freely take a stance to promote laws that our reason and morality dictate, so long as we do so respectfully and civilly. Respect and kindness toward others is what I expect from myself in the discussions on the laws we adopt in society, and I expect those same things from others towards me.

Rights

I believe that a person’s right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness are a part of that absolute Right and Wrong. Rights are given to men and women by God, and the protection of those rights is absolutely Right. Thus, laws that violate those rights can be and are unjust. The state does not give men and women rights, though it can violate them. And the idea that rights given from God only exist if they are enforced right now is not true. I have an eternal right to liberty, and even if the state does not enforce it's protection, the person who takes away my liberty will one day stand accountable to God for the violation of my right. Though God may allow people during mortality to violate the rights of others "that the judgments that he will exercise upon them...may be just" (Alma 14:11), there will come a time when God will everlastingly enforce the protection of the rights of all mankind. Just as the state's enforcement of rights doesn't always happen in the moment of the violation, so God's enforcement will eventually come.

Law and Emotion

I agree with your friend that laws should not be based on emotions, and the hardest thing about morality and its unbreakable connection to law is the responsibility we each have to separate our morality from our emotions when making decisions about the laws we adopt. I believe that emotions are often connected to morality, but not Morality to emotions. Morality is based on what is Right and what is Wrong, regardless of how I feel about it. There have been many times in which I learned that I was wrong on a moral issue and I was obligated to accept that I was wrong, despite my feelings. I will also be the first to admit that many religious people, many Christian people, have been morally wrong about certain issues in the past and have made unjust laws based on their emotions and an incorrect understanding of absolute Right and Wrong. I do not excuse them for that. And I accept the fact that there are things about which I may be wrong. But all I can do, all any of us can do, is try our best to meet the monumental challenge to use our reason, intellect, and help from God to separate our emotions from our morality and take a position on laws and issues based on what we believe to be Right.

It is important to make the distinction here between the Holy Ghost and emotions. The Holy Ghost is not an emotion, though emotions are often evoked when the Spirit speaks to us. The ability "feel" the Holy Ghost is a sense, just like sight, hearing, and touch. It is a means by which information is conveyed to our minds and hearts. In truth, it is the strongest sense that God has given us, in that it has a connection not only to our mind but to our spirit. Do not let people confuse you into mistaking the impressions of the Holy Ghost for emotions. Because we often describe experiencing the Spirit as "feeling the Holy Ghost," that does not mean that it is an emotion. It is a "feeling" like our sense of touch gives us a "feeling" of roughness when we touch sandpaper. People can quickly dismiss your emotions, but they cannot dismiss your senses.

Logic

A final word about logic. Logic has two basic meanings. One is that logic is the use of reason and intellect to be able to think about something rationally and to come to a conclusion. This is not the definition that I wish to address at this time. The second definition is that logic is a science that studies language, essentially. It is a study of semantics and other elements that exist in a certain language with the sole purpose of being able to win an argument. It is not a study of the content of the argument, but rather the form that the language takes in order to win or to lose that argument. In its basic form a "logical" argument consists of a number of premises or statements that lead you to a certain conclusion.

One of the first things that you learn when studying formal logic is that it is similar to statistics. Both are vehicles used to present ideas to people and both can be used to say anything that you want them to say, especially when using them against someone who is not formally trained in them (i.e most of the population). In statistics, people are paid a lot of money to be able to make the numbers say what the client wants them to say, and there are many ways of doing that. They pass the data through a set of equations, and if they don't like the results, they run the data through another set of equations until the results say something consistent with the client's best interest. The majority of the population does not understand the inter-workings of statistics well enough to know when the numbers are being fudged a little, or a lot. We just read the statistic and trust that the message it conveys is true. Logic is much the same way. Most people are not formally trained in logic. So they listen to a long argument with many complex premises and then trust that the message it conveys is true, because "it seems to make sense." In statistics the truth can get smudged in the calculations done to reach the numbers. In logic it gets smudged in the form that the language takes in the argument.

In the Book of Mormon there is an account of a man named Sherem. It describes Sherem in these words, "he was learned, that he had a perfect knowledge of the language of the people (i.e. he was trained in logic); wherefore he was able to use much flattery, and much power of speech, according to the power of the devil" (Jacob 7:14). Sherem used his knowledge of the language, or logic, to either convince people of his position that "there should be no Christ" (Jacob 7:2) or to intimidate his opposition into silence. Many of those that study logic know that most people do not have time or ability to study it in depth. They study it because it gives them power over other people. It allows them to either convince others that they are right in whatever it is that they wish to say or to intellectually browbeat people with opposing views into silence. Be wary of people who want you to appeal to logic alone when they argue with you about your positions or beliefs. In the hands of honest and good people both logic and statistics can be good and useful. However, both are commonly used for deceit and to gain power over others. I am not saying that your friend is trying to deceive you; I know nothing about his character or motives. I am saying that there are many out there whose goal is deceit or the acquisition of power, and they use their knowledge of language to do it.

I hope, my dear friend, that I have shared something with you that will help you in your life. I have prayed about you and felt that these are the things that I needed to share. I know that God exists, that He loves you, and that He will always lead you towards happiness as you seek to follow His Son, Jesus Christ.