Thursday, May 04, 2006

How Mormonism can take away our humanity

What is moral development? Moral development may be when the actor in life begins to make decisions that lead to an overall approach to beauty and goodness in her life. These decisions are made by the individual, and then the consequences of those decisions become evident as reality takes those decisions and extends them to their logical consequences.

Giving all of your decisions away to another creates an inauthentic individual. Within my religion, and perhaps most christian religions, there is an insatiable desire to give away our decisions to god. In fact, once we have felt god's spirit, or the holy spirit, our minds then simply go into automatic and we then commence to make every decision with the aide of this spirit.

As those consequences occur, the actor then can make up her mind to the rightness or wrongness of that action. If it leads to life, beauty, and authenticity, it is good. If it leads to pain, suffering, hurt or death, it is bad. As the actor takes on more and more challenging decisions, these decisions begin to become apparent, and then, almost magically, the actor begins to see a pattern. As she acts according to correct moral principles, correct things occur to her and around her.

Why, then, would any individual give up those most precious decisions to another? There is a complex answer, but I think it suffices to say that giving them up damns the individual. Giving up your decisions, whether they be to god, to the spirit, or to another individual, robs the individual of the opportunity to extend their understanding into reality. It robs them of their humanity. It robs them of their life.

What then is the purpose of the Holy Ghost? I cannot say that there is a purpose. Further, the Holy Ghost acts with such uncertainty and wanton existence that it is quite impossible to rely at all on the spirit to make decisions. So, to complicate this paradigm even more, the individual not only gives up their decisions to this spirit, but the time when the spirit decides to show it self is neither casually related to circumstance or at all reliable, even if the actor has done everything to secure its presence. In fact, you'll have people go to such lengths to have this spirit that they will do most anything to get it. When in reality, it's testimony has no real effect on our decisions because we cannot reasonably draw any real conclusion from its appearance whatsoever. For even if it does appear, we are left to our own devices to determine what if anything this spirit meant. That is a most inefficient and haphazard paradigm of making decisions that I have ever heard.

This cannot be the way of the universe. There is no order there. There is only chaos. There is only guessing, and as such, the actor is left swaying in the wind to anyone that can interpret this spirit to them, or simply goes upon their own biases and beliefs that they had in the first place.

This idea of giving all decisions to the spirit results in a moral quagmire. It makes the decisions of the individual mute. It makes the individual unable to ever authentically act because the actor has to constantly check with the other in order for their actions to be 'right', or the 'will' of god.

Now imagine you had a child. Imagine that your could give the child advice anytime they wanted. But when you gave advice to that child, the words were mere feelings of burning, or good feelings. And then the child was left to their own devices as to what the feelings meant. Now say that the child will no longer act at all on his own volition without having confirmation from your advice that their action was 'right'. This cannot be correct. This simply cannot be the way that we are able to choose correct decisions. It is horribly inefficient and inadequate and it robs the child from ever developing by realizing the consequences of their very own actions.

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