"The Gospel is True; The Culture is Not"

Too many terrible cultural norms to ignore.

Part of the Sunday School lesson this past week was about how Elijah restored the sealing power to the earth. I couldn't find that in the scriptures- can you? (I found a bunch of scriptures about Elijah turning hearts and binding stuff, though.)

After a few minutes of research into the Hebrew origins of the words, I came to the conclusion that bind and seal are two very different things. And I was careless enough to voice my findings in class. Bad idea. Apparently, Sunday School does not tolerate disagreement. A young, well-meaning woman told me that, in the bible Dictionary, the meanings are the same. I said, "There's a lot of inaccuracies in the Bible Dictionary." She says that the Bible Dictionary is true; it was written by the prophet. I said, "No it wasn't". Her young, well-meaning husband steps in and says that the Bible Dictionary is part of the Standard works and, as such, considered scripture. I said, "No, its not". He told me that saying that the Bible Dictionary isn't scripture is apostasy.

Their ignorance is adorable

 Oddly enough, I feel proud of myself for being called an apostate by this blissfully ignorant, young, well-meaning couple.

Just another day in my life.

Robert Matthews: look him up

By the way, Robert Matthews is largely responsible for the LDS version of the Bible Dictionary, not
Thomas S. Monson. Not even the Bible Dictionary itself claims to be scripture: "This dictionary is provided to help your study of the scriptures and is not intended as an official statement of Church doctrine or an endorsement of the historical and cultural views set forth."


Just sayin...

Order vs Respect

I just remembered a conversation I had with a friend in Utah a few years ago. She said that she wanted to live in Europe because of how beautiful it is. I told her that i would love to live in Sub-Saharan Africa because it was so beautiful and the birthplace of civilization.

The topic somehow turned to what constitutes an advanced civilization. She insisted that advanced civilizations were clean and orderly, had a good police force that served and answered to its citizens and citizens were allowed to participate in the governing process without disturbing the peace. I strongly disagreed and posited that real civility embraces messy differences instead of brutally forcing a fake sense of clean homogeneity. Whether or not a nation is democratic makes no difference- unless citizens' differences are acknowledged and accepted, the clean and orderly streets of that civilization are merely a facade masking injustice and intolerance.

We talked about it for a while and I realized that she was raised to think that order equates to peace and justice. I was raised to think that respect equates to peace and justice. 
How to reconcile? I have no idea...