Saturday, June 15, 2019

Oaks, Anxiety in Stressful Times


In a recent devotional, Dallin Oaks spoke against the moral evils one finds today, including homosexuality and transgenderism:

 Along with these challenges—and caused by them—we are confronted by a culture of evil and personal wickedness in the world.  This includes:
        Ÿ    Dishonesty
        Ÿ    Pornography
        Ÿ    Perversions
        Ÿ    The diminishing of marriage and childbearing
        Ÿ    The increasing frequency and power of the culture and phenomenon of lesbian, gay, and transgender lifestyles and values
        Ÿ    Finally, you live in a culture that focuses on individual rights and desires rather than the responsibilities and cooperative efforts that have built our societies.
        A major cause of these cultural deteriorations is the loss of belief in absolutes.  A century ago, private and public morality—the sense of moderation and restraint necessary to the survival of a free society—were universally understood to rest on the reality of absolute right and wrong, decreed by God and ultimately enforced in a final judgment.  Then, as this faith was undercut, public morality sagged into the safety net of ethics, a set of rules based on philosophy, pragmatism, or legalities, which rely on enforcement by individual self-interest or imperfect bureaucracies.
        Removed from their foundation of an absolute right and wrong, ethics and legalities have been unable to hold back the tide of immoral conduct that now threatens to engulf us.  People have cast off conventional morality and old-fashioned restraints.  Our society is now in peril from increasing dishonesty, frightening increases in personal violence and other crimes, and shocking increases in public dependency attributable to deterioration in the solidarity of the family. (Anxiety in Stressful Times)

Needless to say, “progressive” members of the Church are triggered as a result, just as with his October 2017 General Conference talk where he denounced the moral evils of homosexuality. My response? Good—the true colours of many so-called members of the Church are coming out in public with disagreeing with the explicit scriptural and moral teaching of the Church.