Monday, February 9, 2015

HOW DO YOU DEFINE THE IDLER?

This was kind of a mind-bending thought that I lifted from FB:

"And the inhabitants of Zion also shall remember their labors, inasmuch as they are appointed to labor, . . . for the idler shall be had in remembrance before the Lord" (D&C 68:30). Note that it is not the withholding of lunch but the observant eye of the Lord that admonishes the idler. This refers to all of us as laborers in Zion, and "the laborer in Zion shall labor for Zion; for if they labor for money they shall perish" (2 Nephi 26:31). That is the theme here: "Now, I, the Lord, am not well pleased with the inhabitants of Zion, for there are idlers among them; . . . they also seek not earnestly the riches of eternity, but their eyes are full of greediness" (D&C 68:31). An idler in the Lord's book is one who is not working for the building up of the kingdom of God on earth and the establishment of Zion, no matter how hard he may be working to satisfy his own greed. Latter-day Saints prefer to ignore that distinction as they repeat a favorite maxim of their own invention, that the idler shall not eat the bread or wear the clothing of the laborer. And what an ingenious argument they make of it! The director of a Latter-day Saint Institute was recently astounded when this writer pointed out to him that the ancient teaching that the idler shall not eat the bread of the laborer has always meant that the idle rich shall not eat the bread of the laboring poor, as they always have. "To serve the classes that are living on them," Brigham Young reports from England, "the poor, the laboring men and women are toiling, working their lives out to earn that which will keep a little life in them [lunch is what they get out of it, and no more]. Is this equality? No! What is going to be done? The Latter-day Saints will never accomplish their mission until this inequality shall cease on the earth."28 But the institute director was amazed, because he had always been taught that the idle poor should not eat the bread of the laboring rich, because it is perfectly obvious that a poor man has not worked as hard as a rich man. With the same lucid logic my Latter-day Saint students tell me that there were no poor in the Zion of Enoch because only the well-to-do were admitted to the city.

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