liz3564 wrote:Droopy wrote:I found this especially clarifying and productive of courage, faith, and renewed valence as the Saints (and others of the good, noble, just, and righteous of the earth) face The Great and Abominable Church of the Devil and its factions, wings, sects, sectarian cults, ideologies, norms, nostrums, and mythologies as elucidated in the Book of Mormon, as the days grow short, and midnight approaches.
Who do you consider The Great and Abominable Church to be?
Any ideology, philosophy, belief system, and/or organization, philosophical, educational, ideological, fraternal, political, educational, or of any other kind, that seeks to draw God's children away from him, his gospel, and his Church, and/or is overtly hostile and conflictual with that gospel and Church.
The "Left," in a very broad and widely encompassing sense, is a major - and perhaps the major - element of this "church" as mentioned in the Book of Mormon. It is also the "Gadianton Robbers" which were, in LDS doctrine, not only actually existing mafias and sophisticated criminal gangs in ancient times (and paralleling similar groups today), but political, ideological, and educational - cultural - mafias; groups, movements etc. seeking the overthrow of freedom, liberty, the rule of law, gospel-grounded morality and ethics, and
civilization qua civilization, and a Zion society, in any degree of development.
Well, that is the Left. Start with the French Revolution. Move through Rousseau to Comte, Saint Simon, and Condorcet. Go on to Marx, Engles, and Lenin. Keep going through the leading leftist intellectuals of the 20th century including Dewey and the American Progressives, the Fabians, Gramsci, Lukacs, the Frankfurt School, Kinsey, the New Left, the critical theory (political correctness) movement within academia, and Postmodernism, and although you see a plethora of theories, doctrines, and emphasis within these various movements and philosophies at their periphery, at their core they are all very similar as to fundamental assumptions and premises (just as socialism, national socialism, and fascism, despite their differences in emphasis and de-emphasis, are very similar as to core philosophy and actual practice when in power).
What is normally called "the Left" in political philosophy and political activism is, in my view, really just a very broad, systemic, fractious, and always proliferating manifestation of what the Book of Mormon calls the "Church of the Devil," which is the entire, generalized body of such moments, organizations, and ideologies that have come to dominate the major institutions of the world (it sitteth upon many waters) and defines and determines much of what one sees and is exposed to in the pop culture, in education, in much popular literature, and which dominates attitudes, assumptions, and settled dogma within most governments.
Its not a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination or 9/11 truther sense, but because of the core assumptions underlying all these movements and ideologies, and because all of them, regardless of how they may fight amongst themselves over various points of doctrinal purity, have one, central enemy against whom they can and understand they must all come together (combine) to fight and try to destroy (Zion, the gospel, the Church, and anything that partakes to any substantive degree of its principles, which means in historical practical application the entire western classical liberal/Judeo-Christain social, cultural, intellectual, and ethical tradition; conservatism (across all issues), mainstream libertarianism (in economics, political economy, and the proper scope and function of the state), America, and Israel), it has a strong systemic character: it shares very similar goals and vision, and hence, always works against, and combines against, Christ and this Church, and any social system in which there is a whiff of such principles.
There are things that fall outside the "Left" that are also a part of the GAAC (yes, I know this sounds like a sound you make after you've swallowed a Dragonball Z action figure, but that's why I like it), but even here, the difference is usually a lack of or disinterest in a larger ideological vision and a psychological/emotional commitment to an antinomian lifestyle, not an absolute incompatibility with the Left (and the Left has pretty much absorbed and created elaborate theoretic justifications for almost all known
avant garde behaviors and "alternative lifestyles" known to human beings, so they won't be left out, even if some of the practitioners themselves are non-ideological (even though they may have a developed personal philosophy about such things) about their own approach to life).