Book Review: Exploring Mormon Thought, vol 4, God’s Plan to Heal Evil, by Blake T. Ostler

Evil exists.

Pure, unadulterated evil exists. It exists in nature. It exists in humans. We see the evil in war, in genocide, child sex trafficking, deadly diseases that ravage the bodies of the victims, earthquakes, and famines that slowly starve the innocent to death. Evil exists.

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I wanted to bring to your attention this very interesting case in which courts discussed whether or not the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is Christian.

To sum up: a superior court ruled that the Church is not Christian, but an appeals court determined this is not an issue that secular courts can judge. I will quote extensively from the original article on the Volokh Conspiracy:

From In re Ball v. Ball, decided yesterday by the Arizona Court of Appeals, in an opinion by Judge Paul J. McMurdie, joined by Judge Maria Elena Cruz joined:

Mother and Father married in November 1999 and have two minor children. In December 2017, Mother petitioned for dissolution. The parties represented themselves during the initial dissolution proceedings, and the court entered a default decree (“Decree”). Filed simultaneously with the Decree was a parenting plan, signed by both parents, that they prepared using a court-provided form (“Parenting Plan”). The court adopted the Parenting Plan’s terms as part of the Decree. The Parenting Plan provisions relevant to this appeal are as follows:

Approximately one year after the divorce, Father joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (“Father’s Church”), and the children occasionally joined him at meetings. After Mother learned the children were accompanying Father to his church, she petitioned to enforce the Parenting Plan, claiming Father’s Church is not Christian. Mother also asserted other violations of the Parenting Plan.

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It has been amusing to watch progressive members of the Church cheer when they perceive Church policy is in their favor. I refer to recent cheering related to promoting mask wearing as the most recent example.

Here at M*, we have always supported Church policy. So, when the Church came out against same-sex marriage, we added our voice in favor of the Church’s position. Most progressives didn’t like that at all. And when the Church came out in favor of a compassionate immigration policy, we were in favor. Many traditional conservatives didn’t like that either. And when the Church came out against drug legalization, we supported the Church position, and of course many libertarians were upset.

As a blog, we always support Church policy, and this includes mask wearing. So, as one of the founding members of this blog, I would like to re-emphasize that I personally support Church policy on mask wearing. People should wear masks at Church and they should wear masks at the temple, and they should wear masks in other common sense situations.

We are also in favor of the Church policy against fear. In fact, if you search on lds.org, you will find dozens of talks urging Church members to have faith and not fear the world around us. I have never seen a talk that says that you should not fear, except when there is a virus with a 99.5 percent survival rate if you are under 70 years old.

Fear is one of the greatest motivators. I think we can safely argue that one of the reasons President Trump won the presidency in 2016 is that he used fear against Hillary Clinton and fear against many other groups to motivate people to vote for him. Joe Biden also presumably won in 2020 by ginning up fear against President Trump and against the virus. Fear is the basis of many successful marketing campaigns.

But ginning up fear is primarily about manipulation, and manipulation usually means emphasizing certain details while ignoring others. So, we hear about some studies, but others, which are better in quality, are conveniently ignored because they don’t stir up enough fear. Many of us are smart enough to know when we are being manipulated, but many others are not. Of course, the primary source of evil here are the people doing the manipulating, but we also have some responsibility for controlling our own fears.

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