Predictable Madness

Come Follow Me (Alma 8-12)

Alma's mission to Ammonihah makes for some thrilling reading; it runs the gamut of beauty and quite literally - ashes. It's another account so timely, it makes you wonder at the inevitability of history repeating itself, as similar stories continue to darken our nightly news.

Those with eyes to see, see the wisdom of God in sending one ordinary man with an extraordinary message. (Alma 9:2-6) How else can a loving Father honor agency? He saves His sermons of nature for special circumstances, punctuating His message with earthquakes and such to get His fickle children's attention according to His will and timing. But generally, He sends one obscure man to give His children the chance to approach Him privately with the question, "Is this guy for real?" And as an equal opportunity Parent, He's ready to answer the sincere truth-seeker with a witness from the Holy Ghost - the only sure way to know anything not of this world.

Ammonihah's response to Alma's preaching is fascinating to me. It follows a pattern which repeats through the millennia and begs this question: how do people respond to truth who only want to be a law unto themselves? (D&C 88:35)

Short answer: badly.

Watch the pattern unfold in the chapters of this extraordinary mission:

First line of attack: those who would be a law unto themselves - let's abbreviate them as the lawless - mock and dismiss any contrary ideas to that ideology.

Second: amplify that dismissal by darkening the mockery to vilification. People who believe become enemies of the community.

Third: criminalize the ideas, so that any believing them become criminals who can be "legally" prosecuted. Persecuted. Potayto. Potawto.

Fourth: eliminate any whose beliefs oppose the lawless. So insecure in their lawlessness, there can be none who dare to oppose them. And the opposition needn't be simply rhetorical. Someone even quietly existing in the corner, harboring an opposing belief,

strikes at the very heart of the lawless ideology. This elimination happens by way of complete expulsion for those who can get out, or by legalized murder posing as "legalized" executions for those who can't.

I need to parenthesize for a moment and ask: why the insecurity? Why is it so threatening for those who don't believe to co-exist with those who do?

David Kupelian was onto something about this insecurity when he wrote:

"I conducted a little thought experiment a while back, while looking out over the Pacific from the Oregon coast. Drinking in the vast expanse of the ocean, the pounding surf, the seagulls, the salt air – ultimate serenity and ultimate power all in one timeless moment – I asked myself: How can one experience all this magnificence without believing in a Creator? 

"So I tried, just as an experiment mind you, to conceptualize the existence of the fantastic creation I was beholding, yet without a Creator. I consciously tried to adopt an atheistic worldview, even for just a minute, to see what it was like. 

“What I got was a headache, a psychic shock, a momentary taste of another realm – an empty, prideful, appalling dimension of hell-on-earth, masquerading as enlightenment and freedom.

"That's why the conflict between theism and atheism is not just a philosophical topic for polite debate over tea. It's a spiritual war of the worlds. That high anxiety I felt momentarily, as I tasted the "other dimension" that animates those who reject the very idea of God, was minor and passing. But I'm quite sure hard-core atheists feel agony when the opposite happens to them – that is, when they chance to experience a fleeting moment of realization that God exists, and that they are accountable ultimately to Him. 

"This would account for the near-explosive emotion that always seems to surround this "objective, scientific" subject. Underneath all the scientific pretension, it's all about man being master of his own destiny, about freedom from accountability to God, about being released from Judeo-Christian sexual morality, about making up your own rules, about sustaining the life of pride and individual will.

"In a very real sense, it's about being your own god." 

From David Kupelian, “How Atheism is Being Sold to America”, October 11, 2007

Back to our story.

Amulek makes an interesting observation before those who accepted the message either fled or were rounded up:

"...if it were not for the prayers of the righteous,...ye would even now be visited with utter destruction;....

"...it is by the prayers of the righteous that ye are spared; now therefore, if ye will cast out the righteous from among you then will not the Lord stay his hand; but in his fierce anger he will come out against you; then ye shall be smitten by famine, and by pestilence, and by the sword; and the time is soon at hand except ye repent." (Alma 10:22-23)

A society can survive - even flourish - when both believers and non-believers can co-exist peaceably. But it's when a society no longer tolerates religion and believers that a society decays and falls apart.

This feels like natural law at work again. If that's true, then it means a society somehow naturally sustains residual blessings by having faithful believers among them. The Lord must intervene and protect that society against the natural consequences of destruction when there are righteous people who obey God's law within a wicked society. When that tolerance is no longer extended to the righteous, God doesn't stay His hand. The natural consequences of wickedness must follow - destruction.

And please - hear me now, believe me later: God doesn't do the destroying. The wicked destroy themselves with their own disobedience. You can only pretend natural law doesn't exist for so long before gravity takes over and there's a cosmic spiritual splat.

Notice that Amulek warns of the inevitable natural consequences, he lists the same destructive methods mentioned in the Old Testament: famine, pestilence, and the sword. It's worth noting that the order is often different and accentuates how natural the consequences of supreme selfishness are - as war tends to lead to food shortages, which lead to sickness. War, famine, pestilence - is very often the order you'll see in actual fulfillment of disobedience.

But the patterns are the same. The descent into madness is predictable.

Which is why it can be stopped if enough righteous people see it in time. Sadly for Ammonihah, there weren't enough. Some escaped. But sadly, not many. Sorry about that big ol' spoiler for next week. :(