Holding historical figures to a 21st century standard!

I finished listening to podcast 3 of 5 today from Mormon Stories on the interview with Bushman. Something he said reminded me of a pet peeve of mine that I see a lot of today in society. That is the idea that society and ideas have continued to progress from the beginning of earth up until today and no one in the past is as smart, intelligent or as wise as us. In fact we have very little tolerance if historical figures don’t walk up to every social norm for the year 2010. One example are the people who complain that people like George Washington should be written out of our history books and instead be condemned as a racist slave owning bigot with nothing good about him. You see it today when an older person uses a word that we today of the younger generation consider racist, but was a social norm for most of their life growing up. Look at how they crucified Harry Reid when he used the word negro. Not only is it impossible for these figures to be held to our social norms and standards today, but it is arrogant to assume that our current social norms and standards are somehow superior to those of the past. I guess it’s normal to think that, otherwise why would they be the social norms? But still.

Richard Bushman mentioned in the podcast how many of the characteristics of Joseph Smith rubbed wrongly against the protestant idea of a true prophet. He talked about how much the protestant culture influences society today and that anything that strays from that norm is considered an obvious fraud! Joseph peeping into a rock in a hat, or believing in obvious obsurdedies such as magic. After all, if he was a prophet, shouldn’t he have been living according to the social norms of the 21st century and beyond? How dare he be a product of his own generation…. of course we are not, right?

The same thing goes for other church leaders. Today, early church leaders such as Brigham Young are ridiculed as being racists because of their comments or beliefs, yet in Brigham’s time, they were persecuted and hated for being against slavery and being too friendly to African Americans.

I think we are a cocky generation of people who condemn anything that doesn’t fit within our social norms of today… whatever society we might be living in. We always assume that we, the people of right now, see things as they are and have the greatest and most accurate view…. that is until next year! lol Yet the truth is that we are all very ignorant and can’t contemplate the truth.

Example:If I locked a new born into a dark closet and somehow fed it for years until it became an adult without it ever knowing I was there, how conscious do you think that person would be of the outside world? Do you think they could even fathom the outside world, or even light or seeing or smelling anything other than a dark closet? Do you think that person would be aware of their own ignorance? I doubt it. They would probably think they have a pretty good and accurate view on life and what life is like. Yet here we are on this planet. Most of us have never even left the country. None of us have left the planet beyond that of the moon. We can see, through advanced telescopes glimpses of what lies beyond. We can’t see, or at least most of us can’t, what exists in other dimensions, beyond the veil all around us. Yet we think that we have a good and accurate view of how things are. We can’t even see things exactly through another persons eyes or experiences yet we assume we know how they feel. We feel so smart yet we’ve never left the milky way, let alone the solar system or beyond our planet. Heck, we haven’t even seen what lies at the bottom of many of the oceans on our own planet.

We dismiss anything that doesn’t make sense, such as document sightings of UFO’s, abductions, government coverups because it doesn’t fit within our current perspective on life. It makes us uncomfortable. The atheist feels like the most logical person on the planet because they are the best at living the social norms, yet they too have to deny the documented hauntings of houses and peoples lives, visions that people claim to see. All of this is dismissed as wacky and not logical. After all, if I don’t know it, how could you possible know it to be true? 🙄

Anyhow, that’s my soap box for today….