LDS priorities
 

A friend and I were discussing this yesterday, interested in your thoughts.

Orthodox: Conforming to whatever is traditional, customary, or generally accepted.

I voted, but this is a dumb, incoherent poll.

Care to elaborate?

Yeah, if you rounded up a herd of Orthodox Mormons (assuming you could actually identify who they were) and posed this question as stated, do you honestly think any of them would choose the Word of Wisdom?

The answer is obvious (from the 1926 Improvement Era)*:

http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q...racter1926.jpg




*see: http://www.keepapitchinin.org/?p=159

That would take about 10 seconds where I live in Utah.

Unfortunately my answer is absolutely.

Living the Word of Wisdom is a lot easier for most people than living the myriad of items that encapsulate "Christian values". So if someone lives the Word of Wisdom but fails to live according to Christian principles, it isn't because they place more value on the former than the latter, it's just that the latter is a lot harder to adhere to consistently.

89:3 Given for a principle with promise, adapted to the capacity of the weak and the weakest of all saints, who are or can be called saints.

I am pretty confident that most orthodox Mormons feel that being Christlike is more important than the WOW. Being Christlike, however, is much harder to quntify than the WOW. Most people can give a fairly straightforward Yes or No answer to "Do you follow the WOW?" It is much harder to answer "Do I live by Christian Values". And this is just when we look at ourselves. When we look at others, determining the virtue of someone at Church is basically impossible. Determining whether they follow the WOW is much easier, so you are much more likely to hear someone criticized as a WOW breaker than as un-Christlike. This does not mean, however, that people think it is more important.

Scottie, I like you but your poll is kind of dumb. I don't know any mormon who believes that living the WOW is more important than Christian love and honesty. Now I think a better poll would be if the LDS Church puts too much emphasis on the WOW by making adherance to it neccesary for worthiness to participate in temple worship. I probably agree with you that the LDS Church overemphasizes the WOW and I believe for cultural/historical reasons. I also believe that the overemphasis, which I believe is rooted in the late 1800's and early 1900's where attendance at the bar was the great political and social dividing lines in Utah and how we children of the Light identified unwanted gentile dross, has had negative consequences on the greater LDS culture at large. However, it is fundamentally dumb in my opinion to conclude there is a greater emphasis on the WOW than being a good Christian.

"What do you think is a higher priority to or emphasized more by the orthodox member of the LDS Church?" is how I should have phrased it.