With the events erupting over in the Middle East (yet another sign of the times), I have been quite concerned with where things are headed. It appears that extremism is the flavor of the day as regimes are toppled.
What is it that root cause of extremism? It is the exact opposite of what one would expect - which would be a group of people deciding to swing the pendulum to strict obedience to a (religious/secular) law. The exact opposite is actually true. Extremism is bred and fostered in an environment where people are living in gross wickedness and treading all over the very (pious) law that they purport to be living. When people are treading over some socially accepted stricture (in private), the tendency is to over-compensate the public personna to account for the private lack of good principle.
For the modern honor killings (for example), that is an extreme form of punishment likely administered by those who are guilty of the same thing or far worse. In Christ's time, it was likely this very thing that caused Him to begin to delineate the misdeeds of those who were stoning the woman taken in adultery. In Brigham's time, it was likely the mistresses that the powerful in Washington DC were keeping on the side that caused them to lash out against the "immoral" sins of the "backward" people in Utah who were engaging in plural marriage. Of course, this generated one of my favorite quotes by Brigham Young - something to the effect that at least the people in Utah were relatively open about it and their other wive(s) sanctioned the union. Another extreme view taken by some religious circles is the belief that by not having physical union between a man and a woman which was ordained by God in the Garden of Eden, one was somehow more pious in their religious observance. Of course, this decrepit and extreme view has led to widespread buggery in the ranks and caused immense embarrassment for those groups. In the case of the extreme view of the Shakers, their extreme practice led to their very extinction as a group. I am sure the list could go on and on if I continued to take a survey of messed up weirdness in various societies.
I am sure this is why Christ told people to focus on the inner workings of the Spirit and let the outer things be an natural outgrowth of the inner transformation. Truly the letter killeth (and leads to extremism) and the spirit of the law giveth life. The devil's plan is a forced, false and manufactured piety - a thin veneer that dulls and crumbles in its art deco glamour. God's plan should produce a simple, self-inflicted happiness that is contagious and causes others to seek it out for its own merits.
May we all find wisdom to do the right thing for the right reasons and let the light shining from us be a natural thing and not a false and manufactured thing of Babylon.
May moderation with eyes fixed firmly on the goal of a Zion society of love and mutual interest be attained by those who love the truth so that we do not have to endure institutional hypocrisy that is the devil's legacy.
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