I, Tin Woodman

The Tin Woodman knew very well he had no heart, and therefore he took great care never to be cruel or unkind to anything.
"You people with hearts," he said, "have something to guide you, and need never do wrong; but I have no heart, and so I must be very careful. When Oz gives me a heart of course I needn't mind so much."

-L Frank Baum, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" 

   I'm splitting this big long honking thing up, and getting over my inhibitions about polishing it up and showing it to the world. It's late, and stuff, and Mom said how people freak out when she wonders about things, like, she's freaking out about those things when she's not, which is just exactly the thing that had been holding me back till now. But it can happen to my mom, so. Sometime's people's understandings is the last thing you want, because you know that they'll be misunderstandings.

   We fight because we think we understand each other, though if we truly did, we wouldn't be fighting. We misunderstand, and attack our misunderstanding of the other's argument. Maybe we close our minds to understanding altogether, I don't know. That's certainly the case when we try to "win" an argument.

   So we're not always honest all the time. We don't broach subjects, not because of any taboo of them, though it amounts to the same thing. Not being 100% honest is of course not the same as being at all dishonest, but it's stifling. Truth is freedom, and concern can be a restriction. So, cards on the table-- I struggle with this whole morality thing. Not immorality, don't struggle with that, but intellectually, morality, I wonder often about the definition of it; I haven't brought it up till now because, I'm afraid that someone might freak out.

   So not being 100% honest is a moral issue; and I'm hesitant on posting this, so-- I've got morality! oh joyous. Because the thing I'm never as honest as I'd like to be, the topic I've been hesitant in broaching, is morality, and how I fear sometimes that I don't have it. In a traditional sense. Even as the world's ideas of morality continue to divorce from the Church's, it sometimes feels like wherever I'm at, it's closer to the world's ideas, but also still so very far away.

   That's what I was listening for during Conference over last weekend. How our duty is when dealing with enemies of God's Kingdom, who don't even have to be "enemies," of course, but, more like, the world. Well-meaning people, but maybe misguided, I don't know. As for answers to that question, I caught a mention of tolerance of others in there somewhere-- could that be it? Obviously. It's what we've always preached, and tried to practice. But as the world's idea of tolerance includes shutting down the intolerant as though that would somehow advance tolerance's purposes, God's idea is to love someone but disallow all sin. But I can't love someone and have a different set of morality from their own.

   As religionists, we think we have all the answers-- and that is, because that's true. We do have all the  answers. But we think that we understand them.

   We say, some of my best friends are X. Some of Jesus's best friends were hookers.