Last Sunday in church the speaker took a page out of the Fox News playbook (our friend Rick passed me a note saying it was like the speaker was trying out for the Mike Huckabee Show) to decry the state of the modern world. I knew the speaker was sincere and meant well, but the talk annoyed me the way all LOOK AT HOW EVIL WE ARE NOW rants annoy me.
Not that I don't think there's bad stuff in the world, because there is. OBV. But these kinds of talks always focus on the wrong things, it seems to me. Not only that, but (and this is the thing that bugs me the most) they always display a lack of historical perspective. There's this underlying assumption that somehow the world--and specifically America--used to be a better, more moral place. And I always want to say GO READ SOME HISTORY.
Right now I'm reading THE BLACK COUNT--a biography about Alexander Dumas' father who was the son of a slave and an aristocrat. Who knew? Anyway, the point is this: there was nothing pretty about the French slave trade. There was nothing pretty about the class system in France. So don't go around saying that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
We've pretty much already been there.
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9 comments:
Gasp! Hope there's room for you in that handbasket, Missy, cause you just bought yourself a ticket. How we ever going to get to End of Times without we're the most evil generation?
Amen, Ann!
More than one wise person has told me that the key to being a Mormon is knowing when to fall asleep in church.
Hey! I knew that Alexander D. had Black blood in his veins - not because I studied that bit of literary history, but because I saw Django - I AM going to Hell in that handbasket!!!
P.S. I am reading NO ORDINARY TIME about FDR, Eleanor, and the home front, and I'm learning more nasty stuff about discrimination in the armed forces and the labor force during WWII. Sad, sad, sad!!!
Yeah...because, you know, Rome was a city of high moral standing. Geesh...sometimes I loathe sacrament meeting.
thank you thank you. I only go to church occasionally, even thought that makes me feel wistful...but when I go, it seems like there's a better than even chance that there's gonna be some rogue mention of some particular politico-moral notion that doesn't belong, and that annoys me. The Sunday before Christmas, for instance, where in the single speaker's talk, he managed to clarify that only God's definition of marriage mattered. 'What the hell?' I muttered from my pew, whence my son-in-law heard me, and smiled.
I think twice a month is good enough.
Aside from their sincerity, there is at least one great thing about the woe-is-the-World, finger-pointing, Huckabee-ites. They keep me from falling asleep in sacrament meeting.
I proved I am not a robot by typing 3352448 1, which coincidentally, I think is the number of sacrament meetings until rapture.
CSIowa your comment made me laugh right out loud. We don't have Huckabees in Canada.
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