Lyings
Deceiving - to make someone believe what is false
Envyings
Strifes - a condition of enmity often arriving out of rivalry; April long struggle for power or superiority
Malice - the will to do harm to another
Revilings - to use abusive language to or about
Stealing
Robbing
Plundering - to strip a person or place of goods by force
Murdering
Adultery
All manner of lasciviousness - marked by or expressing sexual lust
. . .Crying that these things ought not to be.
I could not read this verse and not think of the condition of our present world.
In politics we have a president who lies all the time. Never have we had to work so hard to "fact check" what a leader has said.
We also see this tendency to lie and to misrepresent truth on the internet where anybody can say anything. Websites like Snopes and factcheck.org have become invaluable in helping us to wade through the streams of lies.
But worse than the lies is the deceit - the actual presentation of lies told in a way to make us believe them. It is said that if you hear a lie often enough you will believe it. This is called the Illusory Truth Effect. It is know that if you hear something often enough, familiarity overcomes rationality. Teams of trained advertisers and PR people work to do this. Politics is muddy water indeed.
Strife is the #1 game in politics. Leaders have become so partisan that they do not lead. They are too absorbed in their own self-interest. Examples abound as we watch a congress incapable of negotiation and compromise.
Malice - the will to do harm to another is at the root of racism, police brutality and murder. We have been watching the videos over the past weeks and it is disturbing. But then you add the looting and the destruction that have been the byproduct of the legal protest - stealing, robbing and plundering are there before us on the daily news.
And the reviling!! Our ears have been stunned by a president whose discourse is filled with abusive remarks about anyone who disagrees with him. He sets a poor example of moral leadership and has no right to complain when others do the same. The blind cannot lead the blind. But we have become numb to such abuse. There could be entire dictionary just for words used in today's world to inflict abuse and hurt. What a sad commentary.
And finally we come to adultery and lust - sex without love and without responsibility. I won't even go there. It deserves a whole book!
Lynn and I have been watching a series by Jerry Skinner on YouTube. He tells brief biographies of famous people. I'm not a fan of western movies so I had not heard of Ben Johnson before but I was impressed by this man who had such a sense of honor.
At one point John Ford asked him to play a supporting role in the movie, The Last Picture Show but Ben Johnson refused because of the bad language in the movie. Ford put some pressure on him and he finally accepted the role with the condition that he would remove all the swear words from his own part in the script. It was this movie that won him an academy award as best supporting actor. Do we even have such a person in today's world?
I'm sure that we have priests (and bishops and rabbis and imams, monks, etc ) just as in Alma's day, that preach against all these societal ills. But they are preaching to the choir. What we need are moral leaders who will use their roles in government to model moral and ethical behavior and who will call upon the American people to be their better selves.
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