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I’m not sure why this bothers me so much and why I feel it my “duty” to disagree when it comes up in a class (or HPG as it may be yesterday), but it absolutely drives me crazy when there is a lesson or comments made about how wicked the world is getting with an emphasis on the misguided idea of “we the chosen Mormons” versus “any and everyone who is not Mormon”. How do you guys deal with it when it comes up? Yesterday in HP group, the lesson was on that talk from the October General Conference entitled “It’s Never Too Early and It’s Not Too Late”. A chunk of the first part of the class was spent on how wicked the world was. The teacher even commented that the Andy Griffith show promoted non-traditional families! Really?! This was followed by how important it is to do all the church stuff we should be doing with our families.
When I couldn’t take much more, I piped up that I see very valuable and important events that happen within society to teach our families. I’m reading “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” right now and said how important of a lesson that the history of the Native Americans has for us today. I also mentioned the importance of remembering what Martin Luther King day means since it passed so recently. I conceded that video games are more graphic and perhaps disturbing, but just as people get addicted to them today and fail to act productively, they did the same thing when I was younger. It’s only that the game was “Space Invaders”
How do you comment in situations like this? I strongly dislike the mentality of “everything’s h*** unless you are part of the church”. There are so many things that we have in society today that make it much better than decades or centuries past. Thoughts? I don’t want to be a jerk when people bring up that mentality, but I do wish they would think a little more about what they are saying and have a little more understanding, and perhaps admiration for ethical, caring people outside of the Church and what a help they can be to their own families.
I’m looking forward to responses because I have the same issue. I am fortunate to have a couple like minded individuals in my HPG, but I do struggle on an almost weekly basis with what you describe. I don’t want to be “that guy” who is always heckling the teacher or stymieing the discussion yet I also don’t want to let it go that despite how evil the world is we still need to love our neighbors and we’re not the only ones that have truth. Where’s the line? It is an unfortunate aspect of the Church… and of nearly all revolutionary religions. Early Christianity was the same way. Here’s what I wouldn’t be afraid to bring up in a Church meeting because I think it diffuses and replaces the thoughts with something more powerful: IMO, the gospel is something to run toward, not a list of things to run away from. The invitation to “come unto me” is far more powerful than “thou shalt not”.
I see it as a part of what we do to validate the decisions we make to ourselves. You mentioned video games. Big mistake, now I’m going to run with it.
This post isn’t about video games BTW. I was going for a window into the psyche of us vs. them. It’s everywhere you look. It’s encoded in our DNA.
What do I do when I hear it in church?
1) Most instances I just ignore it. Sometimes you find the world you are looking for and if you’re looking for the world to be wicked then that’s exactly what you’ll find.
2) I made it a personal rule to leave the room if things get out of hand. My rule was to leave any time someone starts to badmouth other religions, like calling out specific religions by name. Over the years I’ve only had to leave the room a half dozen or so times. Maybe this is one of those scenarios where the “spirit becomes offended and leaves” but then the criticism is that the spirit should have stuck around to help someone in the very moment it was needed the most. It’s not a hard and fast rule, it can change should I learn some tact.
NewLight wrote:The teacher even commented that the Andy Griffith show promoted non-traditional families!
😳 I have started to try and do the following. First I try to diffuse the confrontation by starting out, “I don’t feel I know THE truth and it is all a bit confusing” and then go on to talk about how the very early Christians though Christ was returning and the world was coming to an end in their lifetimes. Early members of the church have several times felt (and even been “revealed”) that they or their children would see Christ returning. But when I look across a broad swath of items, there are many areas where the world is improving. You only have to go back about 3 or 4 generations and there was a valid concern even in the US about girls getting kidnapped taken away as slaves. There are less people dying from wars than before. Medicine is all but miraculous when compared to my grandparents generation. I also mention that I have started trying to focus on the good and only look at the “bad” to see where I can make a difference. I then mention microloans, doctors without boarders, habitat for humanity, etc.
http://mormonmatters.org/2012/01/17/70-is-the-world-getting-worse/ ” class=”bbcode_url”> http://mormonmatters.org/2012/01/17/70-is-the-world-getting-worse/ http://bycommonconsent.com/2014/10/15/the-handbasket-is-empty/ ” class=”bbcode_url”> http://bycommonconsent.com/2014/10/15/the-handbasket-is-empty/ I could swear that Natasha Helfer-Parker just did a blogpost about this with some good statistics. I just can’t seem to find it.
The problem with “Us vs Them” in the church may be our greatest sin. Instead of embracing the love of god, we put ourselves in the place of god and judge others. When we do this, we sever ourselves from the love of god. As mormons, our baptismal covenant is best expressed in Mosiah 18: to lift each others’ burdens, to mourn with those who mourn, to comfort those who stand in need of comfort, and to be a witness of God in all times and in all places we may be. If “God is Love”, then witnessing to god is to love one another, unconditionally, and without regard to their “worthiness”.
I’m reading a book by Greg Boyd, “Repenting of Religion: turning from judgment to the Love of God”. In this he equates our judgment of others as “religious sin”:
Greg Boyd wrote:irst it is important to notice that religious sin is the only sin Jesus publicly confronted. The religious variety of the forbidden fruit [judging] is the most addictive and deceptive variety. Instead of acknowledging that the knowledge of good an evil is prohibited, religious idolatry embraces the knowledge of good and evil as divinely sanctioned and mandated. It gives the illusion of being on God’s side even while it destroys life and hardens people in direct opposition to God.
Religious sin is the most destructive kind of sickness, for it masquerades as it feeds off the illusion of health. Far from being open to a cure, this kind of sickness thrives on the illusion that it is the epitome of health. By its very nature, it resist soft correction. Indeed, because it gets life from the rightness of it’s beliefs and behavior rather than from love, the religious version of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil tends to construe all compassion, accommodation, and unconditional acceptance as compromise. People afflicted with religious sin thus tend to disdain compassionate love, even if it is extended toward them. Hence, Jesus’ approach to leaders who fed off this illusion could not be to gently offer them a cure. Rather, for their sake and the sake of those who blindly followed them, he had to publicly expose their sickness.
What does this mean for the church? We have seen that the church is called to be the corporate body of Christ that unconditionally loves and embraces all people, regardless of their sin, and invites them into its own celebration of the cessation of the ban [on judging]. The only exception to this otherwise unconditional embrace is the sin Jesus confronted in the religious leadership of his day… Religious sin [judging] is unique in that it is the only sin that can keep a community from fulfilling the commission to unconditionally love and embrace everyone. As we have said, it is a sin that by its very nature resists the cure of God’s unconditional love and embrace.
Our Ward Conference Priesthood lesson was about unity, and I said that the purpose of the Atonement, by definition, is unity in differences. I said that one of the greatest sins of this generation is the polarization of people based on differences and that we need to do everything we can to avoid war rhetoric that divides and pits us against other people, since it keeps us from understanding and living the Gospel Jesus taught. I speak up against divisive language every chance Inget, and I try to ground my words in the Sermon on the Mount and 1 Corinthians 13 – as well as our Articles of Faith. Few people will argue against those references.
Thanks for the feedback everyone. Loved the blog from the women who received all kinds of help in her struggles. I see this in the world today too. I agree that “us vs them” is a huge problem in our church as wayfarer has stated. It focuses on separating instead of supporting. In HPG group I really struggle sometimes to find the right comment to get people to expand and not accept this form of the status quo. Much of the time my comment comes out as “dudes, we all need to love everyone and be there for each other”. I guess I got to start somewhere
Thanks for the book reference Wayfarer, he brings out some fantastic points. One part also jumped out at me as an example of the paradoxical reality of life, and how our unique perspectives and definitions can make communication difficult. I have changed two words in the Greg Boyd quote below to demonstrate how it first hit me:
wayfarer wrote:
I’m reading a book by Greg Boyd, “Repenting of Religion: turning from judgment to the Love of God”. In this he equates our judgment of others as “religious sin”:Greg Boyd wrote:… religious idolatry embraces the knowledge of love and hate as divinely sanctioned and mandated. It gives the illusion of being on God’s side even while it destroys life and hardens people in direct opposition to God.
My immediate question was: “how does the knowledge of love put people in direct opposition to God?”
The problem is when I read “good” or “righteousness” I instinctively see it as “Love” or synonymous with “charity” or “the love of God.” Obviously Greg Boyd had another concept in mind, one that involved details, commandments, or some tangent from love that can lose the original point.
My point is only to build awareness of how others often see things differently than ourselves. When we are discussing the finer details there is a good chance we mis-communicate more often than not.
NewLight wrote:Much of the time my comment comes out as “dudes, we all need to love everyone and be there for each other”.
“Be excellent to each other” Bill
and
“Party on Dudes!” Ted
:thumbup: Orson wrote:My immediate question was: “how does the knowledge of love put people in direct opposition to God?”
The problem is when I read “good” or “righteousness” I instinctively see it as “Love” or synonymous with “charity” or “the love of God.” Obviously Greg Boyd had another concept in mind, one that involved details, commandments, or some tangent from love that can lose the original point.
My point is only to build awareness of how others often see things differently than ourselves. When we are discussing the finer details there is a good chance we mis-communicate more often than not.
true. miscommunication abounds, and not everything Greg Boyd says resonates with me. He refers to the partaking of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil as putting ourselves in gods place, or as Satan put it, “ye shall be as the gods”. Whether you replace Good and Evil with Love and Hate – either way, its a kind of predefined knowledge structure.I think our temple teachings have a deeper meaning, one which isn’t available to boyd. The purpose of the temptation of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was to take a short-cut — Twice the temple ritual discusses that the purpose and Plan is to “learn through our own experience”. Interestingly, a “tree of knowledge” sounds an awful lot like an ontology — a schema of information in an organized “tree” hierarchy, and when we add “good and evil” on it (or in your case “love and hate”) it becomes a specific ethical schema – a set of orthodox knowledge, represented in strictly dualistic terms: good and evil, love and hate, white and black, etc., and thus your eyes will be opened, and you shall have “knowledge”.
As i contemplate the specific emphasis that Satan puts on the term “knowledge”, I have to observe how this “knowledge” embodies our LDS certainties: “I know that God lives”, “I know that Jesus is the Christ”, “I know that Joseph Smith was a prophet”, “I know the book of Mormon is the word of god”, “I know the Church is the only true church on the face of the earth”, “I know that Thomas S. Monson is a living prophet.”, and “I know that the prophets cannot lead us astray”. In specific terms, when Correlation began, Elder Harold B. Lee laid out a complete hierarchical representation of all knowledge a church member needed to “know”: a tree of knowledge of good and evil, that would be followed with exactness in the Church curriculum, talks, and media.
We might say that such ontological dualism is necessary to provide a framework for religious education; but instead of helping us, the dualism creates a strict splitting of things within the Mormon symbolic universe, and that which resides without. And, the “we/they” mentality is the natural result. Everything becomes constrained by the boundaries of the “tree of knowledge of good and evil”, and the easy choice is then to “love our neighbors (those within our universe), and hate our enemies (those outside our universe)”.
Boyd certainly makes the case that judgment is gods provenance — and while I agree, I think the deeper meaning is that God is One, and we are One in God through the atonement. Dualism denies the Oneness of God, and as such, keeps us separate from the mystical reality of God’s love.
I think we need to speak up when someone starts to bad mouth another religion . I do hate the us vs them thing !!!!!!! I have spoken up before on this very subject and visited it in my temple recommend interview . The only reason someone would say that this is the only true church and everyone else is headed for outer darkness is because they don’t know !!!!!!! i tell people I believe this church is true because it is my religion, if I were another religion I probably would say the same about that religion. It is the only true church too me !!!! Anyone that says anything else and bad mouths a religion is just full of it as we are all here on this planet trying to figure it out . God doesn’t care what church you belong to he cares what is in your heart and if you tried to be a good person and help others . Were you kind caring compassionate help others in their time of need or were you self absorbed and only concerned about yourself ???????? The book of Mormon is true only because I believe it is !!!!!!!!!!! I hope you get my point and I am clear enough for you I sometimes feel this view of things is as clear as mud to others but i have found peace with it. I see this as mostly an all-to-human ego-trip and example of tribalism that the Church exploits (intentionally or not) to encourage extreme loyalty to the Church as well as a general attitude of disrespect and fear toward the outside world. This is one of the most common characteristics to watch out for that you will find in many mind control/cult checklists because it is fairly typical of high-demand religious groups. As far as any claims about things supposedly getting worse overall I don’t believe that for a second because when I look at things like the World Wars, Vietnam War, the Great Depression, slavery, etc. it makes what most Americans have to deal with now seem rather mild by comparison and I don’t believe some of the Church’s outdated notions about supposed sexual morality are all that important in the first place. Where two or more are gathered together in my name … there is sure to be in-group and out-group dynamics. It’s just a part of the human condition. It’s hard to avoid it even when you know it’s there. But, yeah, we as Mormons do have a very strong persecution complex, and we’re trained from a young age to be very distrustful of outsiders.
I think little comments in Church here and there are good to rattle people just a little bit, but I’ve found more peace in just accepting that there’s nothing I can do to change it
marty wrote:Where two or more are gathered together in my name … there is sure to be in-group and out-group dynamics.
:thumbup:
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