Categories
culture life religion

Religious Obedience

I was listening to a talk today in sacrament meeting where the speaker was putting great emphasis on the fact that the leaders of the LDS church seek for members to obey their leaders out of understanding rather than blindly obeying. I’m confident that most people would concede that this is the ideal for any organization. The question that came to my mind was – in cases where someone has not gained an understanding regarding why they have been asked to do something, would church leaders prefer blind obedience or would they prefer inaction from those who do not understand?

I know some people would find that question easy to answer – those who view church leaders as power-hungry would argue that they would obviously prefer blind obedience in all cases where understanding has not been attained. Since I do not see the leaders of the church as seekers of power I don’t believe that absolute answer. I would think that they would prefer blind obedience only when inaction was identical to opposition. Otherwise it seems that seeking to understand would be of greater importance in most cases than ignorant obedience.

Of course in seeking to understand there is the counsel from the Lord that “If any man will do his will (obey), he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I (whoever is declaring the doctrine or commandment) speak of myself. ” (John 7:17) This suggests that seeking for understanding would require obedience to those things that you do understand as well as an eyes-wide-open test, through action (obedient action being the assumption), in order to gain understanding of whatever the leaders are saying that you do not understand yet. The question is, is that blind obedience, or is that simply a logical, clinical test? I think of it as a clinical test.

Categories
politics

Very Well (Under)Stated

“There’s always the chance that politics are involved in politics.” Steve Urquhart

I wonder if Steve chuckled to himself when he crafted that bit of wisdom today.

Categories
National politics

GOOOH – Elect Regular People

I’m always interested in ways to open up government to the average voter so I was interested when I learned about GOOOH (Hat Tip – Mark Towner). Their mission is to change the way we elect representatives and try to make those representatives more accountable to their constituents.

Because GOOOH is a process for selecting representatives (not an agenda-based party platform) we expect a very liberal candidate to be selected in San Francisco and a very conservative one in Colorado Springs — but it will be up to the GOOOH members in each district to decide.

They obviously recognize that some of their ideas will generate some friction:

The most controversial part of GOOOH is that the founder, Tim Cox, has proposed excluding politicians, actively prosecuting attorneys, and individuals with family assets over $11.5 million (250 times the median income) from the process. They are excluded not because they are bad people, but because they are overly represented in government today and, generally speaking, no longer seem to represent the common man.

Personally, as I have spent lots of time thinking and discussing the issue of term limits, I also have a problem with their current stance of promoting a limit of two terms (4 years) in the House -that seems excessively strict to me. On the other hand, it sparked an idea that I would like to explore sometime about the possible ramifications of having a bicameral legislature where one house is term limited and the other is not – allowing voters to be the term limiters in one house and forcing voters to seek fresh faces regularly in the other.

So I like the general idea and I figure that if I want to have any impact in massaging the positions of the group now is the time to act. In any case it’s worth looking into and I would recommend that anyone who is interested in improving our government should go have a look and decide if this is worthy of their support.

Categories
life

Living My Ideals

With the beginning of my new job I will have the opportunity to use public transportation regularly. I have always been in favor of using public transit but since I have always either worked from home or lived close enough to commute by bicycle I have never really used the transit system in Utah on a regular basis. That will change starting in July as I become a holder of a monthly pass (I’ll be driving to work for my one day of employment in June because I wil not be at my regular office location on that day of orientation).

I hope and believe that I will enjoy that time in transit where I don’t have to worry about the traffic. I plan to read and think during those times as a way to prepare for and unwind from my workday. The hope is that this allows me to really be with my family while I am at home rather than having my thinking interfere with my attention during family times.

Categories
life

Working for Intermountain Health Care

Well, it wasn’t long from the time that I wrote to say that I was looking for work to the time that I got a job. Thank you to everyone who was praying for me and offering suggestions (that includes more than just the people who commented on that post). What was really fast was the speed with which my new employer worked. It took 51 hours from the time that they first called me to set up an interview to the time they called to offer me the position – and I start this Monday.

I’m excited to report that it looks exactly like the type of work I enjoy and I was very impressed with how welcoming the team members were when I met them. I’m quite confident that I am going to enjoy working there with such quality teammates. (Besides all that the compensation skipped straight past “reasonable” and landed on “very generous”.)

Categories
politics State

A Fresh Face in Congress

I really don’t mind so much if the voters in Utah always choose Republicans to represent them in Congress so long as they replace at least one incumbent on a regular basis (I’d say at least one new face every other election cycle). For that reason, if for no other, I was happy to hear that Jason Chaffetz ousted Chris Cannon in the Republican primary yesterday. District 3 will have a new face and we are guaranteed to have another new face by 2012 with the addition of District 4.

Categories
politics State

Republican Primary – State Treasurer

Today I am hoping that Republican primary voters show that they can see through party connections to select a candidate who might actually be qualified for the office of State Treasurer by selecting Richard Ellis to represent the party on the November ballot.

There are other races where I have a preference, but no others that I could vote in.

Categories
life

More Than Enough

In 2006 I wrote a post asking What kind of God do you worship? I was reminded of that post as I thought of my personal answer to the question this evening. I was watching The Testaments: Of One Fold and One Shepherd with my kids and it really hit home in the final scene.

In the scene we have a father, Helam, and son, Jacob, talking as they observe Christ among the Nephite people. Jacob is describing the Savior to Helam who has been blinded because of an accident while helping Jacob.

Jacob: You have looked for the Messiah all your life and now He is here and because of me you cannot leap for joy. You cannot even see Him.

Helam: But you can see Him. And that is enough.

At this moment the hand of Christ reaches to Jacob’s shoulder and Jacob moves so that Christ can heal Helam’s eyes.

Helam had been satisfied that his son could see the Savior, but the Savior allowed him to see as well. That is the kind of God I worship – the kind who is willing to give us more than enough of our heart’s desire if we will persist in seeking Him even more than we seek the things of the world.

Categories
culture

A Real Solution

For all the political talk about what ails our society and how our “leaders” in Washington can fix it, I think that Peter Lovenheim has identified one real solution that can put everything back into perspective – recapturing the meaning of “neighbor.” He asks this very important question that I’d like to take a stab at answering.

Why is it that in an age of cheap long-distance rates, discount airlines and the Internet, when we can create community anywhere, we often don’t know the people who live next door?

My first guess is that this is a matter of scarce resources (time) becoming spread too thin. Because we can stay connected with our college buddies when they are spread around the country we spend less time getting to know the neighbors who may not share any interests with us. When it was more cost prohibitive to keep regular contact with our old friends we were more likely to reach out to the neighbors where we could afford to build the relationships. In fact, I think that we can safely say that prior to easy travel we had the added incentive to build neighbor relations because there was also a higher chance that we were staying closer to home and so our neighbors were likely to have history or family connections with us.

I would not argue that this is acceptable. In fact, I think that this tendency toward disconnection on the local level feeds into our growing propensity to seek solutions to all our problems on a large scale. The less we identify with our local neighborhood the less likely we are to think about concerns on a local level. The more we think in terms of national problems the more we insist and accept the erosion of liberty that almost universally follows when we try to address concerns (rightly or wrongly) on a national scale.

Does anyone else have perspectives to round out my thinking?

Categories
culture life

No Shortage of Rules

It’s amazing how many rules we have to govern everything we do. We took the family to the swimming pool today and were surprised at how few people there were there – until we learned that the pool had run out of plastic diaper covers, which are now required in addition to swim diapers after the rounds of sickness last year. Later in the day we had to return an ink cartridge that was bad and we learned about how strict the store policy is on returning ink.

In both cases the rules make sense when you understand why they were made, but it got me wondering if we would need all these rules if people would just be honest, reasonable, and responsible for their own actions. Sometimes it seems that many and strict rules or policies tend to encourage us to turn off our brains (especially for those who are low in the rule enforcement hierarchy) and abandon common sense or even simple decency (neither of those things happened today).