Judge Not

We were out of town visiting extended family for Christmas. We attended sacrament meeting in a ward where we knew a few people from having lived there over a decade ago. As you can guess, there was a mixture of a few people that we knew well, a few people we recognized but couldn't remember their names, some we weren't sure if they remembered us, and then plenty of new people.

While my wife was talking to one couple sitting right inside the chapel door, I was trying to get her to follow and get one of the few remaining soft benches before being relegated to the hard seats in the gym. I was holding the baby so I couldn't take off while she was still talking, since they were talking about the baby. We ended up sitting in the gym.

The part that was strange, however, wasn't the conversation with that couple. It also wasn't that we had to sit on hard chairs. I'm okay with the hard chairs, but it's simply easier to deal with kids in the confined space of a bench than in an open gym.

So where it got weird was the random people sitting next to the couple we were talking to. She's someone who we probably know but were having trouble placing. As we were showing off the baby to the couple we did know, the other lady out of nowhere starts commenting on the outfit the baby was dressed in. She was wearing a little Santa-esque outfit: satin red pants and matching flare waist top with a silver bow in the middle and silver shoes. She had a huge red bow on her head. To be fair, her car seat buckles probably covered up most of the bow on her top, the car seat head support may have partially blocked the huge bow (but no way it could have blocked all of it), she was wearing pants (at church, I know), and she has really short hair. To counter-counter-balance that, however, her carseat cover is very pink. So the lady we don't really remember and aren't talking to says something about "the things we do to our children" and then something about taking a picture of him and showing it to his fiance when he has one.

Of course we ignored and walked away and then stewed about it later. Him? How could she not see the huge bow (it has its own weather system) or the pink carseat cover? How dare she call our baby girl a boy? Even if we did dress our man-child in red satin and silver shoes, what business is it of yours?

Fast forward to after the sacrament. Several times during the talks and musical numbers, a teenage girl sitting in front of us, probably about 14 years old, leaves and comes back about 3 times. But it's not the fact that she can't sit in her seat for an hour that has me wondering; it was the length, or lack thereof, of her skirt. Her parents were turned around and looking at our new little one and commenting on how cute she was when she woke up and I picked her up during the sacrament, so obviously they have some sense of what's cute even if they don't have sense enough to comment on the cuteness until after the sacrament is over (or preferably the entire meeting). It all starts to come together as I begin judging them: talking during the sacrament, the father not wearing a white shirt, kids coming and going freely during the talks and music, daughter wearing inappropriate clothing...

Then it hit me. Judge not that ye be not judged. Just as I hadn't liked having a random sister judge what my daughter was wearing, I shouldn't be judging what that family was wearing or what their actions were during the meeting. I can think of all kinds of reasons that someone might wear slightly inappropriate clothing to church or have to get up and go several times during the meeting, and whether or not any of those applied was none of my business.

Of course, then I remembered Joseph Smith's correction. Judge not unrighteously. Maybe it is okay for me to judge; it was a very short skirt after all. But how do you know if you're judging righteously? As luck would have it, Elder Oaks gave a talk on this topic several years ago. He points out that there are two types of judgment: final judgment (which is reserved for God to make) and intermediate judgment (which we are commanded to make according to righteous principles). Of course he then gives us the righteous principles by which we may know if we are righteously judging:

• Refrain from declaring that a person has been assured of exaltation or from dismissing a person as being irrevocably bound for hellfire, since that is a final judgment.
  
• Judgment should be guided by the Spirit of the Lord, not by anger, revenge, jealousy, or self-interest (it is given unto you to judge, that ye may know good from evil; and the way to judge is as plain...as the daylight is from the dark night...for behold, the Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil).
  
• Judgment must be within our stewardship.
  
• Refrain from judging until we have adequate knowledge of the facts (perhaps thou shalt say: the man has brought upon himself his misery...whosoever doeth this the same hath great cause to repent).
  
• Whenever possible we will refrain from judging people and only judge situations.
  
• Forgiveness is a companion principle to the commandment that in final judgments we judge not and in intermediate judgments we judge righteously (forgive, and ye shall be forgiven).
  
• A final ingredient or principle of a righteous judgment is that it will apply righteous standards (with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again).

The easy part is I'm not the girl's father or YW leader, nor am I the family's Bishop or even home teacher. So, simply put, without going through all the other principles, it's not my stewardship, so it's none of my business.

Confusion at Christmas

I was looking for a chapter in the Book of Mormon that talked about Mary, Christ's birth, his baptism, and his life. It's something I shared fairly often on my mission. I wanted to find it, as it's Christmas time, but for whatever reason I couldn't remember where it was. I googled it, and surprisingly had a really hard time getting it to come up. Eventually I found it by looking through the chapter headings of the first and second books of Nephi. It was in the second half of 1 Nephi 11. Through some footnotes, I was also able to find Alma 7, which teaches a similar lesson.

What I did find when I was googling the topic kind of took me off guard. I suppose it shouldn't have, since I've read other similar anti stuff before, but I didn't realize how much debate there was out there on the particular topic of the virgin birth.

I don't like wasting a ton of time on this kind of stuff, as I'm aware of how it sucks away the spirit. It ends up being kind of a vicious cycle, where the more anti stuff you read, the less the spirit is present, and the more confused you become. That, of course, is a specific sign that something is wrong, but if enough confusion is present, you can actually be so confused that you interpret everything backwards. That is, you may incorrectly interpret that your confusion means the church is wrong, rather than that the anti literature is wrong.

I'm not going to give them any link love, but they're easy enough to find if you really want. In several sites I glanced through, however, it became apparent that they were all parroting the same basic argument. So one person put together this little logic chain, and everyone has copied that person. One guy even talked about how much research he'd put into his writeup, although it became quite clear that he was relying completely on secondary and tertiary sources. What I mean by that is that his research was just copying and pasting anti literature from other people's websites.

This particular guy that claimed he did so much research did have a relatively comprehensive review of the anti literature on the topic. Among his claims are that we believe that Mary was not a virgin and that she committed incest (sex with both her father and brother). The way their logic chain works is that they quote Ezra Taft Benson, Brigham Young, and others pointing out that the words of a modern prophet trump the written words of past prophets (i.e., the scriptures). Then they quote, out of context, some early church leaders saying that Jesus was conceived the same way we were, physically, not by a spirit. Since the modern prophet disagreed with what it says in the Book of Mormon and Bible, we therefore believe something different than is written in the scriptures. We don't actually teach that, but then they claim that we have changed our teachings to be more in line with the real Christian world, so we don't even realize that we believe something totally different. What? Do you feel the confusion yet? If you do, it's because this is completely false and wrong.

It's practically ridiculous and a waste of time to even talk about, and yet here I am.

Even in the contextless quotes I read on these sites, not having been back to read the primary sources yet myself, I see nothing in any of them that is out of line with what we believe nor with what the scriptures teach. There are several general authorities who say Jesus was conceived the same way we are. Okay, so conception, as defined by Princeton's WordNet, is "the act of becoming pregnant; fertilization of an ovum by a spermatozoon". Just like when the rest of us were conceived, an egg was fertilized.

The Holy Ghost does not have a body, so of course would not have sperm. The Father does. I don't pretend to know exactly how this process happened, but I do know that artificial insemination is a fairly common process nowadays. While the joke is likely often told about the doctor impregnating thousands of women, no one really thinks of the doctor who facilitates the pregnancy as the father. The sperm donor is the physical father. Is it a stretch that the Holy Ghost delivered the Father's sperm through an act other than intercourse?

The obvious anti answer to this will generally include the term 'cognitive dissonance' or 'belief disconfirmation' or some such other description of the psychological process by which one changes or ignores certain components of their beliefs that are discongruent. Then, of course, if you ask the person you're talking to how they think Jesus was conceived, if they'll even give you a straight answer, they'll say that there is no father or that Jesus is his own father or the Holy Ghost is the father or they'll get into the whole Trinity thing about how they're 3 yet 1 at the same time, etc. In all that, they won't be able to explain the process by which conception took place. To me, their statements make less sense and are filled with just as much cognitive dissonance or belief disconfirmation, if not more than what we believe, especially given that while others disagree with what we teach, they also disagree greatly with each other.

I do not believe it is blasphemy that we can become as God, seeing that many scriptures teach that we may inherit God's glory. I believe it is a great blessing that we have such a potential. Isn't it wonderful, as Nephi and Alma taught in the verses I linked to in the first paragraph above, that Jesus condescended to be with us and suffer the things we suffer so that he might have direct knowledge with which to bless us and help us? That is the story of Christmas. It is not confusion and debate as to the nature of God but rather an understanding that God knows what we go through and loves us.