Can a leftist be considered a faithful Latter Day Saint?
Posted: Fri Jul 04, 2008 1:14 am
Or, more appropriately and less inflammatory perhaps, can anyone, whatever he labels him or herself, who holds to the positions below, be considered a faithful Latter Day Saint?
To avoid a scattergun approach, I'll take a group of issues and beliefs traditionally supported and maintained by the Left, and open this up to a critique of the possibility of harmonizing these specific traditional leftist positions on these issues with the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ.
1. Convenience abortion on demand (ideally federally funded) from the moment of conception to the moment the fetus enters the birth canal (essentially the legal extent of the Roe decision and the traditional position taken by NOW, NARL,and the Democratic Party (especially its leadership).
2. Full explicit sex education from the early grades, including frank discussion of sexual technique and the indoctrination of the young in morally relativistic concepts of human sexuality (including deviant sexual behavior such as male homosexuality, lesbianism, and transsexualism).
3. Class envy. Hostility to business, personal achievement, and wealth, and resentment of others who have different skills, talents, and abilities and who have achieved greater financial success and security than others because of those abilities and various choices made throughout life.
4. Egalitarianism. Equality of outcomes. If one achieves or gains something, all must, and no one should be allowed to advance or achieve anything faster or farther than the slowest or dullest in the group ("outcome based education", for example). This also involves mass consciousness. What happens to the group happens to all, and is shared by the group (this includes successes by individual members of the group as well as the absorption of responsibility for immoral or criminal actions by individual members of the group by the group as a whole).
5. Environmental determinism. All bad, immoral, or criminal behavior, no matter how extreme, is a product of the social environment and the unfair and oppressive structure and institutions of society. The victims of crime (at least the bourgeoisie middle and upper classes) deserve, in a very real sense, their victimization because it is they who have created the victimizers (this is especially true in the case of black criminality). There is no free agency, only conditioned responses to environmental stimulus.
6. Statolatry. Government is the engine and provider of human felicity and happiness, and human beings should willingly abrogate their liberty and associated free agency in return for the minimization of life risks, guaranteed economic subsistence, and an enveloping blanket of protection from a plethora of risks and consequences associated with personal agency, including poor financial decisions, destructive lifestyle choices, choice of diet, how many hours a week they will work, who they may associate with, and the kinds of information they may have access to and in what manner (the Fairness Doctrine etc.).
7. The delegitimization and destruction of the traditional family, marriage, gender roles, and sexual norms in favor of pansexual hedonism divorced from committed male/female bonding and domestic responsibilities, the feminist abandonment of family for career and material aggrandizement, and moral relativism (the sexual revolution and "situational morality"). All beliefs, moralities, ethical systems, and, with Multiculturalism, all cultures are of equal value and worth, and no discriminations can be made between them that are themselves intellectually or morally legitimate.
8. Human beings are nothing more than very intelligent primates generated by purely blind, random physical and chemical processes who's personalities are themselves epiphenomena of those blind, random chance natural interactions. All morality, beliefs, ideas, and feelings are the derivatives of genetic, biochemical, and physical antecedents and have no inherent, underlying meaning or purpose. The universe is non-teleological.
To avoid a scattergun approach, I'll take a group of issues and beliefs traditionally supported and maintained by the Left, and open this up to a critique of the possibility of harmonizing these specific traditional leftist positions on these issues with the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ.
1. Convenience abortion on demand (ideally federally funded) from the moment of conception to the moment the fetus enters the birth canal (essentially the legal extent of the Roe decision and the traditional position taken by NOW, NARL,and the Democratic Party (especially its leadership).
2. Full explicit sex education from the early grades, including frank discussion of sexual technique and the indoctrination of the young in morally relativistic concepts of human sexuality (including deviant sexual behavior such as male homosexuality, lesbianism, and transsexualism).
3. Class envy. Hostility to business, personal achievement, and wealth, and resentment of others who have different skills, talents, and abilities and who have achieved greater financial success and security than others because of those abilities and various choices made throughout life.
4. Egalitarianism. Equality of outcomes. If one achieves or gains something, all must, and no one should be allowed to advance or achieve anything faster or farther than the slowest or dullest in the group ("outcome based education", for example). This also involves mass consciousness. What happens to the group happens to all, and is shared by the group (this includes successes by individual members of the group as well as the absorption of responsibility for immoral or criminal actions by individual members of the group by the group as a whole).
5. Environmental determinism. All bad, immoral, or criminal behavior, no matter how extreme, is a product of the social environment and the unfair and oppressive structure and institutions of society. The victims of crime (at least the bourgeoisie middle and upper classes) deserve, in a very real sense, their victimization because it is they who have created the victimizers (this is especially true in the case of black criminality). There is no free agency, only conditioned responses to environmental stimulus.
6. Statolatry. Government is the engine and provider of human felicity and happiness, and human beings should willingly abrogate their liberty and associated free agency in return for the minimization of life risks, guaranteed economic subsistence, and an enveloping blanket of protection from a plethora of risks and consequences associated with personal agency, including poor financial decisions, destructive lifestyle choices, choice of diet, how many hours a week they will work, who they may associate with, and the kinds of information they may have access to and in what manner (the Fairness Doctrine etc.).
7. The delegitimization and destruction of the traditional family, marriage, gender roles, and sexual norms in favor of pansexual hedonism divorced from committed male/female bonding and domestic responsibilities, the feminist abandonment of family for career and material aggrandizement, and moral relativism (the sexual revolution and "situational morality"). All beliefs, moralities, ethical systems, and, with Multiculturalism, all cultures are of equal value and worth, and no discriminations can be made between them that are themselves intellectually or morally legitimate.
8. Human beings are nothing more than very intelligent primates generated by purely blind, random physical and chemical processes who's personalities are themselves epiphenomena of those blind, random chance natural interactions. All morality, beliefs, ideas, and feelings are the derivatives of genetic, biochemical, and physical antecedents and have no inherent, underlying meaning or purpose. The universe is non-teleological.