sock puppet wrote:Those who have been both TBM and not at different times of their lives, during which period were you more inclined to give a $1 or $5 or $10 bill to someone on a street asking for help?
I grew up poor. Not the romantic kind of poor that everyone says they grew up in, you know, one car, had to eat leftovers. No, I grew up poor - we lived in government housing, I lived in a motel for a year when I was 9, and when we finally got a government-sponsored home, I spend the first 6-8 months sleeping on my mom's winter coat on the floor. My dad eventually got work planting trees, and made enough money to buy a car which he used to deliver pizzas. I remember that he would come home every night and put his change into empty Pringles chip cans and that change was used to buy groceries and pay bills. Coin rolling was something we did as a family. Every last penny counted.
I learned a few things growing up poor. First, being poor sucks. It sucks to be hungry, it sucks to sleep on floors, it sucks to not go on school trips. Second, every bit of money counts when you are poor. A poor person can make a few dollars stretch. Because I learned these two things, I have always given money to the homeless that I see on the street. Where I live, in the suburbs, I rarely encounter this. But, when I go to into the city, I know I will see many people who need help. So, ever since I've worked and had an income, I've always made certain that I have a pocket full of loonies and toonies and I make sure I don't come home with a full pocket.
I don't say any of this to brag. I say it because I want to make one very important point: Human beings can care for each other without religion. My moral grounding comes from my experience and my humanity.
Anyone, is it more important that you refrain from drinking beer than being kind to others?
No.
Do the TR interview questions ask if you are keeping the Word of Wisdom? IIUC, then the answer is yes. And ask if you are kind/generous/helping your fellow man? Why not?
What makes you think for one moment that the TR is about increasing the general well-being of humanity?
Is it really more important not to drink beer than whether you are kind/generous/helping? Why is the LDS Church more concerned with beer drinking?
Of course not. The TR focuses on control and authority, not how nice a person one is.
Can you be generous to the degree God wants and needs us to be with each other, if we are passing judgment on others, labeling them deficient in some way, such as labeling them 'homeless', 'pan handlers', etc.
I don't think it's the labels. It's the attitude. The one time I got genuinely angry and came to tears in High Priests was about 5 years ago when the lesson was on self-reliance. The High Priests began talking about the 'bums on welfare', smoking and drinking away government money. “F”, it still pisses me off to retell this story. Anyways, they were on and on about single mothers, and welfare bums, and how they never make anything of themselves. An Area Seventy was in the room and he was in on the discussion too. I couldn't take it, so I interrupted and asked if they felt I was worthless. No, they answered. And so I told them how disappointed I was that a bunch of men of god would speak of my own mother the way they were. I told them how I lived in a motel for a year, how my parents were on welfare for years, how neither of them drank, and how angry I was that they would ever, for a moment, judge from their comfortable middle class existence.
Poverty pisses me off, big time. Huge. I hate it. And I hate when people use religious crap like 'self-reliance' to bully the poor and justify not helping them. That is why stuff like Cedar Creek make me so angry!!!
H.