Philosophy
Hidden Wedges: Spencer W. Kimball
The Allegory of the Cave: Plato
I find that it’s not so much that your religion ought to be your life as it is that your life ought to be your religion, and that is how I try to live. I am not only going to be answering to God for my actions in relation to my religion; I am going to be answering to God for every action that comprises my life, and so, every question on which I am called for action, or even deliberation of thought, is a question that concerns the welfare of my soul - a moral question. Thus, my life becomes my religion because each and every choice concerns my moral code. My church of my choosing is merely a set of moral code I choose to add to my religion because it is in line with the way my conscience runs my life and it builds upon it.
I think ‘religion’ is just a label for what we call a certain category of facts. Facts that, in our present thinking level, we cannot fully comprehend – things that are beyond our understanding, logic and reasoning. I think there is so much more to our feelings and minds than we have a handle on and religion is just one way to help us grasp how they work and guides us to control them and use them properly. Most religions are based on the same principles, principles of kindness, love, goodness and all things beautiful, and the farther you trace them back, most likely, the closer together they would get. It is the best way to explain the unexplainable in the world around us, and by enlightening our minds and souls with knowledge that is beyond most, it gives us hope and lifts our spirits and fills the uncomfortable gap of incapacity that is within us without it – which is more the ‘religion’ part. I think it to be facts that we can’t fully fathom, so we need to use faith until we reach that level of understanding, for the most part. I know there is much more to it all and could be discussed for days, but that sums up at least a little bit of what I think of a part of religion, granted I’m not completely factoring everything I know about everything, so don’t quote me exactly on everything I have said, things always change when we begin to more understand what we know about something.
Every day that I wake up and go to class, every day that I am compelled to learn the things other people tell me I need to learn in order to make a living, every day that I am drawn away from what I think is the best way to spend my time for the Lord’s purpose, I cannot help but think that I lose a little bit, a days worth, of my faith. Time I spend trying to get a certificate of education that I may provide myself a living is time I spend losing faith in God and building trust in my own abilities. The laws revealed in ‘the secret,’ and the doctrine set forth by Jesus in Matthew chapter 6 say that if I serve God the best way I know how, follow my conscience and do what I love, and I have faith that what I do will supply me and my family everything we need to live comfortably, it will be so; all I need to do is work in faith. Earning a degree of recognition among men was never something my conscience guided me to; it was never something I thought would be the best way to serve God. “Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven, and all these things shall be added unto you,” says Matthew 6:33. “Consider the lilies of the field,” Jesus says in verse 28. If He will clothe the grass of the field that is cast into the fire the next day, how much more will he be willing to clothe me, His Son?
In response to the questions and choices of right and wrong, I think it is a simple matter of the law of retribution. Bad is restored unto bad, and good is restored unto good. If you are willing to, say, steal from somebody or yell at somebody, hit somebody or smear their name, anything of that nature, whether it be done from or to a group or individual the principle is the same, then it is a plain statement that you would be perfectly fine if someone were to do those very things to you. I believe these things to be wrong because when ripped from the position of the aggressor and put in the shoes of the victim you experience an obvious feeling of injury in one form or another, so taking this personal gauge of how we would respond to actions, we can know what to do and refrain from doing to others because most of the time we feel and think alike in our basic thoughts and instincts.
It’s interesting to see how time has changed over the decades. What is even more to note is that no matter how much it’s changed, it hasn’t really changed at all. A hundred years ago, people washed their clothes in a bucket and hung them to dry; they used candles for light, and they walked when they wanted to get somewhere. A hundred years ago, they didn’t have hardly any of the technology we live off of every day. Times indeed have changed, but if you think about it, a hundred years ago, people still had friends the same way we do; they had the same issues with those friends as we do. People fell in love with other people and felt the same childish hormonal stress we feel today when feelings come into our life. People got depressed and sad for most likely the same reasons… nobody likes them; they don’t fit in; they don’t have enough money, and life seems overwhelming and trivial at the same time. These people that knew nothing of what we use every day still felt the same joy we feel when we make somebody smile, do something great for somebody or do fall in love with somebody. Life and all of it’s joys and sorrows are felt by all no matter what technology we use. Technology - something that is suppose to make our daily tasks go by faster, yet how many people do you know that has a good amount of free time? I think it’s only complicated our lives. A hundred years ago, people spent their time surviving and learning how to live. They went out and grew the food they needed or went and hunted in the right season. Today we go out and spend time doing random things that give us money, money we use to eat. All we have done is put in some middle man so that he can get money. How many times a day are we thankful that a washer and dryer or an oven and fridge saved us a whole day? What did we use that day to do besides survive? Somewhere between the understanding of what life is really made up of and our effort to make it easier, I think we forgot what we were doing and confused the generations that would follow us. Though there is no such thing as simpler days in the spiritual sense, there were simpler days when we didn’t have so many physical things distracting us at every turn - even the computer you are on right now.
I don’t think numbers have the effect on people that most people expect. We hear reports of countless people dying of starvation, they give us a massive number - almost incomprehensible - and then it just stays in the back of our minds for a week or two. That could also be because we get it so much we’ve become desensitized to the whole bleak picture of suffering. If I hear that 10,000 people died today because they didn’t have enough food, sure, it hits me pretty hard, but when it all comes down to it, that will always be only a number to me in my mind - a point in a system that somebody made up to count things; it won’t mean a whole lot to me. If I put myself in somebody’s shoes though, just one person, who went through their short lives full of the worry of, “How am I going to stay alive today?” If I imagine how it would feel to not know if I was going to make it to tomorrow and feeling so helpless and alone I will never forget it. That one example will push me to action, compassion and gratitude more than the countless reports of numbers of people who went through it - and it will increase the meaning of those reports too. So, don’t guilt trip people into being like Christ to try and make the world a better place one person at a time. The only way that it can happen right is for the person to have a sincere desire to have the charity of Christ and act as He did, and He got it from feeling each individual persons sorrow, not being told the number of people who were going to suffer in life. The things that really stick on us and impress on our lives the most are things that do not need words to relay, indeed words just clutter it up and make it confusing.