"Abstain from all appearance of evil."

Curt,

I like it. I think it’s a much better approach than the traditionally misconstrued notion.

It’s often been interpreted as “Don’t do stuff that might make you look like you aren’t 100% righteous… like, don’t hold the door for an old lady who is walking into the liquor store, because someone might think you just came out from there.”

I like to look at that verse as saying (my interpretation): “don’t do the things that seem wrong to you.”

Let me quote here the NIV:

Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all; hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil.

In other words, do what’s good and don’t do the things that seem wrong to you. In our own very peculiar situation, this passage is really aligned with what we do. We generally try not to treat the Church, its doctrines, its leaders or its people with contempt, but we feel completely at liberty to embrace the good of it and reject the bad of it.

I think it matters why we are motivated to be in a situation that has an “appearance of evil” and the attendant risk. There are good reasons not to be at certain places at certain times – but sometimes there are external motivations to do so.

I think that people in general tend to distill motivations behind actions down to 1 single reason that is usually incomplete and inaccurate. I also think that people don’t give others they know only superficially the benefit of the doubt and allow additional, more complicated motivations to emerge.

I wound up going to a religious family-owned pharmacy (crosses and cross-stitched bible verses on the walls) for a labor inducing medication to complete a 1st trimester miscarriage. The couple knew what the medicine is used for. The couple also could tell that I was not pregnant. They did not make their judgement explicit that I was doing something wrong, but I felt their implicit non-verbal judgement for my choices. It is possible that I am misjudging their intent to judge me (putting words in their mouths). But, my husband was there and felt that they were giving off weird vibes as well. I wanted to tell them, “Look, I am not aborting a baby because there wasn’t one by anyone’s definition”, but I couldn’t figure out a socially acceptable way to do so (not to mention dealing with the personal potential eye faucets at the time). I know that I owe them no explanation to cause them re-assess their opinion, but I wanted to make sure the facts were represented accurately, and that my character standing in the new community did not take the hit.

The irony is that the pharmacy usually doesn’t come to mind as a place of evil, nor do people usually think it evil to fill a prescription. I was filling the prescription to complete a process that had already started and to preserve my health.

Abstain from evil no matter its appearance – no matter how it looks.

I find this approach fascinating precisely because it can turn the common LDS misinterpretation of this verse on its head.

‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

The parable does not give a motivation for why the priest or the levite neglected to help the man in distress. To modify the parable a little – What if the man who had been beaten was a Samaritan and the Priest and Levite declined to help because of how it might look to the community if they came into town in the company of a Samaritan? Then their preoccupation with the negative “appearance” of the good deed they would be doing would itself be a form of evil and would be exactly the sort of thing that Jesus would condemn.