Protect me from evil

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_zeezrom
_Emeritus
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Protect me from evil

Post by _zeezrom »

You know how church ordinances were supposed to protect you from temptation and evil? I would like to propose a reason why that teaching might be unhealthy.

Let's say you undergo some ordinance like baptism, endowment, priesthood ordination, etc. A year later, you yield to temptation. What is to prevent a person from feeling even much worse about his infraction than if he had never had the ordinance in the first place? What is to stop the person from feeling like there is something wrong with himself because the ordinance didn't protect him? The ordinance didn't protect him because he is ultra-bad. Like, worse than the bad you see in non-Mormons. Hopeless.
Oh for shame, how the mortals put the blame on us gods, for they say evils come from us, but it is they, rather, who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given... Zeus (1178 BC)

The Holy Sacrament.
_just me
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Re: Protect me from evil

Post by _just me »

I've seen it. It ain't pretty. Someone very close to me feels unworthy and it makes me so sad.
~Those who benefit from the status quo always attribute inequities to the choices of the underdog.~Ann Crittenden
~The Goddess is not separate from the world-She is the world and all things in it.~
_LDSToronto
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Re: Protect me from evil

Post by _LDSToronto »

zeezrom wrote:You know how church ordinances were supposed to protect you from temptation and evil? I would like to propose a reason why that teaching might be unhealthy.

Let's say you undergo some ordinance like baptism, endowment, priesthood ordination, etc. A year later, you yield to temptation. What is to prevent a person from feeling even much worse about his infraction than if he had never had the ordinance in the first place? What is to stop the person from feeling like there is something wrong with himself because the ordinance didn't protect him? The ordinance didn't protect him because he is ultra-bad. Like, worse than the bad you see in non-Mormons. Hopeless.


Perhaps guilt is the mechanism that protects Mormons.

H.
"Others cannot endure their own littleness unless they can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level."
~ Ernest Becker
"Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death."
~ Simone de Beauvoir
_Drifting
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Re: Protect me from evil

Post by _Drifting »

LDSToronto wrote:
zeezrom wrote:You know how church ordinances were supposed to protect you from temptation and evil? I would like to propose a reason why that teaching might be unhealthy.

Let's say you undergo some ordinance like baptism, endowment, priesthood ordination, etc. A year later, you yield to temptation. What is to prevent a person from feeling even much worse about his infraction than if he had never had the ordinance in the first place? What is to stop the person from feeling like there is something wrong with himself because the ordinance didn't protect him? The ordinance didn't protect him because he is ultra-bad. Like, worse than the bad you see in non-Mormons. Hopeless.


Perhaps guilt is the mechanism that {controls} Mormons.

H.


FIFY
“We look to not only the spiritual but also the temporal, and we believe that a person who is impoverished temporally cannot blossom spiritually.”
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Thomas S Monson - Prophet, Seer, Revelator
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