Josh Writes This

John F. Kennedy said that in 1962 when he declared that we would go to the moon within a decade.  And we did it.

Generally we don’t say things like that, though.  Generally we say quite the opposite.  We like to do things BECAUSE they are easy, and avoid the hard things.

The world is a complex and opaque mechanism, of which we are very small parts.  Like a gear in a machine we may have no idea what the machine itself does.  We may not know what the gear next to us is for, how we come by the lubricant that keeps us running smoothly or to what end the machine which we help to function was made.  And we may be fine with that.

Because that is easy.  It’s easy to spin in place, meshing with the gears next to us and doing SOMETHING important, though we may not know what it is.  In reality if we do not understand what we are doing than what we are doing is merely spinning in place.

The difference between a gear in a machine and us, people, thinking agents, is that a gear cannot possibly know what it is doing or to what end it was made.  We can.

Every action that we take has a reaction that reverberates through the world.  Every decision has consequences that we don’t see UNLESS WE LOOK.  To think that we CAN’T see the consequences of our actions is ludicrous.  Most of the time we just don’t want to, perhaps subconsciously aware that seeing would make us uncomfortable with doing things that are easy.

I’m reading Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” at the moment, an incredible book.  I’d like to draw one example from it.

You purchase a hamburger from McDonald’s.  Let’s ignore everything except the beef patty, which they may claim, with some righteousness, is made from “corn-fed” beef.  Their claim is correct.  It is corn-fed beef.  What is incorrect is the righteousness.  Cows don’t eat corn.  They are made to eat grass, and that is all they have ever eaten for thousands of years (or at least, all their ancestors have eaten since the cow as we know it now never really existed in nature).

That patty started life on a farm where it drank milk from its mother and ate grass on the range as cows have done for a very, very long time.  But after a few months the farmers are ready to move the cow forward in its march towards McDonald’s.  It is shipped to a feedlot, where it will spend every day for the next year or so wallowing in it’s own mud and being fed corn, liquefied fat (generally beef tallow, though not always), and a protein supplement, generally molasses and urea.  That, mixed with silage, estrogen pills and truckloads of antibiotics to keep the cow from dying (and the cow’s stomach from rejecting it’s decidedly un-natural diet), makes up the cows breakfast lunch and dinner.

The corn itself springs from chemists tables where it is genetically engineered to produce its own pesticide, and is fed by fertilizer produced from petroleum.

My purpose is not to condemn or judge anyone but merely to illustrate that the illusion we so often have of the origins of our happy meal are easily dispelled by reading one book (or any of a number of books, whether it be Fast Food Nation, Food Inc. or the book mentioned).  The picture of the calf frolicking in a field where it will grow until it is one day mercifully killed and shipped to McDonald’s is just something we imagined to make ourselves feel more comfortable.

Our lives are filled with such instances: times when we could easily understand the consequence of our actions or the cost of our lifestyles but choose instead to assume something that serves to assuage our minds and make. life. easy.

My personal challenge throughout my life, one which has met with successes and failures, is to know what I am doing, and why.  That’s all.  It leads to changes in habits from diet to shopping to leisure.  It’s hard.  But I guess that’s my challenge to myself and to anyone who would care to listen.  Not to do this “because it is easy, but because it is hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win…”

All it really takes to change the world, as was demonstrated here in the united states some four decades ago, is a desire to do what is right, because it is hard.

So one day Jesus was eating lunch with his disciples.  Or some meal–it might not have been lunch.  In any case, the scribes and pharisees sauntered up to bandy words and asked him a pointed question, to whit:

Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? for they wash not their hands when they eat bread.

A good question, really, as it was, well, it’s actually pretty complex, so let’s understand a bit of Judaism first.

Moses came down from Mount Sainai with two tablets, containing ten commandments.  The whole thing, if everything God spoke in Exodus 20 was written on these tablets, was less than 400 words.

He gave more commandments than that–they’re all throughout the Bible.  But he only numbered ten of them.  Those were the important ones.  I suppose the rest were left un-numbered so that people would go through and read the rest of the Bible, and find out for themselves what they should and should not do.  But some enterprising Israelite decided to help people obey the laws by making a very thorough list of all the laws in the Mosaic law that must be obeyed, which led to the creation of the Mitzvah, or the scripturally based Jewish laws, of which there are (by the traditional count) 613.  If you go to that link you can see them all, and there are a lot of good ones, mixed in with a few that could best be describe as “hard core” (try 33-41).

The 613, however, do not cover every eventuality, so the Rabbis added seven more mitzvot, among which is the commandment to ritually wash hands before meals.  That was also not enough, and so the Mishnah was created.  So, we start off with ten commandements and a book.  The Jews figure out from the book 613 more commandments.  Then the rabbi’s add seven more.  Then another book is compiled.  So the commandment to wash hands was not in the original commandments, it was a later addition.  Back to the story.

So the scribes and pharisees ask “Why don’t  your disciples wash their hands before meals, according to the tradition of the elders?”  Jesus responds, essentially, “Why doesn’t your tradition follow the commandments of God?”  He then continues, stating a specific example of how the Scribes and Pharisees used their Elder’s tradition to avoid following one of the original commandments (the tradition was called Corban, the original commandment was the fifth).  That’s not the part I want to talk about though.  I want to talk about what comes next.  The Lord makes the following declaration:

17 Do not ye yet understand, that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught?
18 But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man.
19 For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies:
20 These are the things which defile a man: but to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man.

The Lord did something really important here (well, all of what he did was important, but this is important to the present discussion).  He pointed out a doctrine of man and brought the people listening back to the actual commandment of God, the thing that was ACTUALLY important.  He said, in essence “That whole hand-washing thing?  That’s fluff!  What’s really important isn’t what goes IN to the mouth, it’s what comes OUT of it, what comes from the heart.  THOSE are the things that defile someone, not whether or not he washed his hands.”

People interpret. Even when something is written in black and white it is open for interpretation, whether it be a poem or something that, at first blush, appears much clearer.  It’s just what people do.

And interpretation is GOOD!  I’m all for it.  I believe it helps us to understand what a philosophy, or religion, or creed, or whatever it may be really means to us.  It helps us figure out what things are important and what things are not.  That said, the interpretation should be personal.  And it is in this that we find the delicate line we must all walk.

I am a member of the LDS church, as previously mentioned, and so I am familiar with a lot of commandments like one I’ve mentioned before: the word of wisdom.  To put it simply we might call the word of wisdom the “Mormon Diet.”  It is not a list of every thing you can and can’t eat, it is a set of guidelines that the Lord has provided to help us make decisions.  All commandments are like that.  They are not cases that tell you what to do in every situation, they are guidelines that, when followed with prayer and commitment, will help you understand what the Lord expects of YOU, personally.

Take the aforementioned fifth commandment (honor thy father and thy mother).  What does that even mean?  Does it mean to always do what they say?  Does it mean to speak when spoken to?  To take care of them in their old age?  To bring honor to them by being successful in life?

The point is not to say exactly what one must do, a commandment is more like God calling attention to something, saying “Hey guys, it is important that you do this thing,” and then it is up to us to find out for sure what that thing means.  That’s why we have the scriptures.  We can read the ten commandments, and then thousands of other chapters searching for how to apply those ten commandments in our lives.

This is where many people run in to problems.  They don’t want to interpret, they want to KNOW.  They want a rule book, long and detailed, so that as long as they abide by it they’re in the clear, much like the Iraelites made.  But that’s not the point.

The Lord was not about expanding commandments, he was about contracting them.  He didn’t want to make MORE commandments.  In fact, surveying his native Israel and the myriad commandments there were at the time I’m sure he wanted very badly to remove the complexity.  And so he preached a simple gospel.  In fact, he whittled everything down to two commandments:

37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
38 This is the first and great commandment.
39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

That last verse is key to me.  The commandments are like an inverted pyramid.  At the tip are these two simple commandments.  As each level progresses you get more and more commandments, but they are all merely attempts to clarify the first two.  The commandments after the first two rely upon those two commandments.  Any commandments that come later on that interfere with those two (see 33-41 of the mitzvah mentioned above) simply should not be followed.  If we were able to perfectly follow the two greatest commandments we would, by their very nature, be following all the other commandments that we should.

So what’s the problem? We aren’t anywhere near being able to follow the first two.  Not even remotely near.  I mean, it’s not even a contest.  Our chances of perfectly following those commandments are worse than those of the Providence Steamrollers beating the Green Berets in a night game of capture the flag.

So we have commandments to help us follow those two commandments.  The problem is when people get involved.  They not only interpret, but spread their interpretations, leading to what I’ve called the “popular gospel,” which is when the interpretation of men begin to take precedence over the actual gospel as taught by the Savior.

We’ll use one example: welfare.  I mentioned in my previous post that many members of many churches view welfare of any kind as an evil, that we are making people lazy and ignorant by allowing them to get by without having to earn everything they receive.  Self reliance is very much so an important gospel principle, taught by the Savior himself (for example, the parable of the unjust steward).  But there are people who take this to an extreme, who would say “Well if they don’t earn it they shouldn’t get it!”  I debunked that myth sufficiently in my last post, so I won’t retread that tire here.  The main point is to think about it in terms of the two most important commandments.  If your neighbor needs something, and you refuse it them becuase you don’t think they’ve worked enough for it, are you loving your neighbor as yourself?  In the parable of the good samarita did the samaritan go to the man and say “Hey, is there anyway you could’ve avoided this, had you been shrewed?  Yeah?  Well then FORGET IT SUCKA!”  No, the Samaritan did not say that.

I go to what is called a “singles ward.” It is a church group that is primarily made up of people who are single, making it easier to meet others and, hopefully, get married eventually.  When I came to Utah, my first sunday in the new ward, I was sitting in our sunday school when the teacher asked “Why are we here?” referring to here in church.  Lots of answers went through my head.  We’re in church to learn from each other, to strengthen each other, to teach what we know and find out what we don’t.  Above all we’re here to partake of the sacrament in remembrance of the Savior’s sacrifice for us, and as a renewal of our baptismal covenents.  While these answers went through my head a girl in the front raised her hand and said “We’re here to find someone to marry.”

As true as that may have been, it’s not REALLY why we were in church.  But it’s a commonly held belief.  Some missionaries believe that it is their duty to be married six months after they return from their mission (I did not follow this crowd and, though I’m soon to be married, it is significantly longer than six months since I returned from my mission).  Some believe the man is to work and the woman have babies and that’s that, that’s what a marriage is all about and, if that works for them, more power to them!  But that’s not the gospel.  That’s the “popular gospel.”  To put a definition on it in concise terms we can define the popular gospel as something that may or may not be true, that is believed by a large number of people to be a part of the gospel, that is not actually something taught by the Savior or his representatives on the earth.

This post has been really difficult to write, and turned out really wordy, because this concept is important to me, but it’s also a tricky one to talk about.  Mainly because, in writing my beliefs, I am forced to live by them, one of which is not to judge, and so it’s hard to point things out without judging.  I’ll admit I might be judging a little here, or a lot in some cases, but what I want to point out is that the Gospel is what the Lord said.  And especially the two great commandments.  As popular as anything else is, even amongst people who may be very pious, if it doesn’t directly relate to those two commandments it’s just fluff.  Just a popular gospel.  How do you avoid falling in to the trap of the popular gospel?

Make the gospel personal.

I was at work recently, waiting for people to call in, and overheard a conversation with some of my coworkers.  They were expressing disgust at Obama’s plan to make unpaid internships illega, under certain conditions.  Namely, if the intern is doing something you’d normally pay someone to do, and it’s not strictly an educational program for the intern, you should probably pay them.  While the article is from foxnews.com, and carries it’s fair share of conservative-bias, the main points are there.

And the main arguments against it as well, arguments that came up in my conversation with my co-workers.  They thought that it was a bad idea since, if they had to start paying interns, more companies would have to cut out the internship position all together.

Companies don’t have unpaid internships because they can’t afford to pay the interns, they have unpaid internships because they don’t have to pay the interns.  It’s a simple case of supply and demand: there are lots of college students who want internships and comparatively few internship positions.  Some students want the position so badly they are willing to take it for free and voila, you get unpaid internships.  Not because the companies are poor, but because the students are desperate for experience.

And here is where we run in to the inherent unfairness.  Imagine for a second that there was an important track meet, one of the powerhouses was a religious school, and the track meet was rescheduled to fall on that religions sabbath (you don’t have to imagine it because it’s happened before, more than once).  One might infer that it was unfairness on the coaches, trying to eliminate competition so that their own team (who has no problems with the day chosen) might rise in the standings.  This is easy to imagine because it’s religious discrimination.  We’re quite used to the idea.

Let’s look at these unpaid internships though.  Who do they disqualify?  What group must remove themselves from eligibility because something about the set up of the internship makes it impossible for them to participate?

Or, put another way, who can’t afford to go several months without pay?

The poor, obviously.  And often, not even the poor.  I myself couldn’t ever afford to go two or three months with no pay.  It just wouldn’t happen.  I have a car payment and insurance and school to pay for and it just wouldn’t work for me.  So unpaid internships give a definite advantage to those people who’s parents are paying for their education.  In other words, they favor the wealthy.

This is discrimination based on socio-economic status, something we’re less familiar with specifically because few people point it out, but very familiar with practically since it goes on all the time.

So I made this point to my co-workers who came back with “Well then you should work two jobs!”  This simply wouldn’t work.

Never mind the fact that the participants in this conversation have never worked two full time jobs simultaneously, and thus wouldn’t know how it would work or not, the point is it’s just impossible to make it work except for a very, very few people.  But let’s run the numbers really quickly.  Obviously an internship will demand specific hours from you, probably eight to five (as my last internship, paid mind you, did).  So you will need to find a way to get eight hours of work in after five o’clock every day.  Let’s be generous and say you start at five thirty and don’t take a lunch or anything (which are generally unpaid).  This means that you will have to work from 5:30PM to 1:30AM  Monday through Friday.  Let’s be generous again and say you’re home and asleep by 2:00AM.  Which means you sleep from 2:00 to 7:00 every night, netting five hours of sleep, which is doable, but difficult.  Of course, this means that during the entire week you will have NO free time.  Whatsoever.  At all.  Not even to do laundry or buy groceries or anything of that nature.

In addition, the kind of job you could get from 5:30 to 1:30 AM would not be high paying because it is off hours.  Most likely you would end up working fast food, at a grocery store, security, or a restaurant, meaning you would be earning minimum wage or barely above.  So for myself, who makes roughly double minimum wage, I simply could not take an unpaid internship and then work for half pay until two in the morning every day.

This conversation led to one about welfare in general.  My co-workers were saying that all forms of welfare are bad and that the government is making people lazy by trying to level the playing field for those with less economic means.  They appealed to religion, stating the commonly held belief that you have to work for what you get and that if you get anything for free it is evil.

This coming from people who’s parents are funding their education, along with pell grants from the government and student loans (subsidized by said government).  But I digress.

I am LDS, or a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Now, as with most churches, there are two parts of the doctrine.  There is the actual doctrine, you know, that thing taught by Jesus and the Apostles and, in our church, the modern day Prophets and Apostles.  And then there is the popular gospel, which is a fusion of the teachings of the savior with the common ideas of prominent church members (I shudder to say Glenn Beck plays a terrifying role in the creation of the popular gospel in my church, since he is a member) and various myths and legends that have cropped up over time.  The popular gospel is, quite frequently, more powerful that the real, actual gospel, in the mind of the people.  Two cases involving Utah spring to mind with ease, but I will mention only one.

In 1933 Utah became the 33rd, and deciding, state that voted to abolish prohibition.  This was in spite of significant campaigning by three prominent church members who would later go on to lead the church.  Much more significantly, alcohol had been prohibited in the LDS church by revelation given exactly 100 years ealier, in 1833.  It is somewhat ironic to me that on the 100th anniversary of the reception of the Word of Wisdom Utahns would use their voting power to approve of a substance that their religion says is harmful and addicting.

Which Brings us to the Main Point.  When it comes to welfare what is the “popular gospel” and what is the actual Gospel?  From Elder Bruce R. McConkie’s “Mormon Doctrine” (not a definitive guide of actual Mormon Doctrine, but a sound book nonetheless) we read “Kindness and help towards beggars is a basic principle of pure religion.  It frequently happens that temporal prosperity has no relationship to righteousness or the lack of it.”

Even more appropriately, in one of the greatest discourses in the Book of Mormon itself (other than those given by the Savior) King Benjamin says:

16 And also, ye yourselves will succor those that stand in need of your succor; ye will administer of your substance unto him that standeth in need; and ye will not suffer that the bbeggar putteth up his petition to you in vain, and turn him out to perish.
17 Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him of my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just—
18 But I say unto you, O man, whosoever doeth this the same hath great cause to repent; and except he repenteth of that which he hath done he perisheth forever, and hath no interest in the kingdom of God.
19 For behold, are we not all abeggars? Do we not all depend upon the same Being, even God, for all the substance which we have, for both food and raiment, and for gold, and for silver, and for all the riches which we have of every kind?
20 And behold, even at this time, ye have been calling on his name, and begging for a remission of your sins. And has he suffered that ye have begged in vain? Nay; he has poured out his Spirit upon you, and has caused that your hearts should be filled with joy, and has caused that your mouths should be stopped that ye could not find utterance, so exceedingly great was your joy.
21 And now, if God, who has created you, on whom you are dependent for your lives and for all that ye have and are, doth grant unto you whatsoever ye ask that is right, in faith, believing that ye shall receive, O then, how ye ought to impart of the substance that ye have one to another.

More important than any of that, though, are the words and actions of the Savior.  When we examine the new testament we find numerous cases where the Savior healed people, a large number of these being poor or otherwise outcasts.  In fact, in the Lord’s day there was an even tighter correlation, in the minds of the people, between poverty and disease than in ours.  Leprosy was a sign of wickedness, and those who were outcast because of it were not just poor and sick, but considered unrighteous as well.  And yet the savior healed them time and time again, never saying at any time “Go and heal yourself, because if you were really a good person you’d work your way out of this!”  No, he instead instructed his disciples “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

Glenn Beck is right.  There is a disease in many churches.  It is not, however, social justice, as he would have you believe.  That is, in fact, an important part of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

No, the problem is that people consider themselves “Republicans” or “Democrats” more than they consider themselves “Disciples.”  No matter your religious affiliation I think anyone can agree that Jesus of Nazareth taught some amazing, harmonious, and good things.  And members of “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” should, above all else, consider themselves followers of the aforementioned Jesus Christ, and followers of his teachings.  I’m not an authority on the teachings of church leaders, the teachings of Jesus Christ, or anyone’s teaching at all, really.  But I feel I can say with Nephi “I know that [God] loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things.”  And if there is anything that helps “the least of these,” then I am all for it.

It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog post solely because there’s something I want to say.  Most of my recent one’s have been for my IP&T class, which has been a good experience, but I want to talk about something that struck me this morning.

I woke up and, as usual, checked the normal news sites for updates on the goings-on in the world.  I found only one article to read this morning (Saturdays are generally like that) but it struck me, not so much for the content of the article itself, but for the comments following it.  The article is entitled “Marketing games: the art of the pole dance,” and talks about this gaming journalists experience at a marketing stunt.  It’s a good article, and I recommend giving it a read through.

In the article he details how this gaming company used a fake night club scene, complete with strippers, to market the game.  The author points out that he didn’t feel comfortable, and so he left.  What ensued in the comments was the typical flame war, with some people blasting him for not being a man, others lauding his decision.  What really surprised me was the huge number of people who came to the defense of the strippers, saying, in essence “It’s just another job, and a well paying one at that, so why worry?”

This bothers me, profoundly.  It’s a sort of laissez-faire morality, one which says that we can’t judge what anyone else does.  They make their decisions and we make ours and everything is just hunky dory.  If the strippers thought they were objectifying, or if that bothered them, women they wouldn’t be strippers.  But they want to be strippers, or pole dancers, and people want to pay to see it, so why not let people do what they want to do?

People who espouse these ideals fail to recognize a very fundamental fact of life.  We are all interconnected.  Not in the lion king “circle of life” kind of way, but in that everything we do effects everyone around us.  It is unavoidable.

I’m LDS, or a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Some who are familiar with the church know that we don’t drink coffee, or alcohol, or smoke, or use drugs, or anything of that nature.  We were instructed to do so by revelation, which is recorded in a book called “The Doctrine and Covenants.”  The Doctrine and Covenants contains revelations given to Prophets in our day.

In addition we use the Book of Mormon, a book that was hidden up by the inhabitants of the Americas thousands of years ago which tells of their dealings with the Lord.  It was eventually delivered into the hands of Joseph Smith, and he translated it.  If you want to know what this has to do with pole dancing and non-LDS society just bare with me, I’ll get there.

Now, in addition to being a member of the church, I served as a missionary for two years, from the ages of 19 to 21.  During that time I met thousands of people and unabashedly shared the gospel with anyone who would listen.  It was a great experience.  Unavoidably, though, some people were determined to “prove” us wrong, by trying to point out seeming contradictions in our scriptures.  A common one was the fact that in the Doctrine and Covenants we say you shouldn’t drink Alcohol, but the Book of Mormon, New Testament, and Old Testament all mention the consumption of wine.

When people bring this up I would point out that times have changed, and that the beauty of having prophets in our day is that they can instruct us on what the Lord would have us do in our particular circumstances.  In fact, in the revelation given in Doctrine and Covenants it says that the commandment to abstain from certain substances is given “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.”  In other words, this commandment is given to those people who would have problems with those substances.

It is a commonly known fact that addictions can be hereditary.  However, a proposal called “Hypoism” posits that addictability is actually what is inherited, in other words, people inherit the propensity for addiction.  One person could have a beer a day, get slammed every weekend, and then decide to quit and have no problem.  Another could have one sip of alcohol and be addicted for life.  How do you know?  Only by trying.  And that is why, in the LDS faith, everyone abstains.  Paul put it best in his epistle to the romans when he said:

13 Let us not therefore judge one another any more: but judge this rather, that no man put a stumblingblock or an occasion to fall in his brother’s way.
14 I know, and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus, that there is nothing aunclean of itself: but to him that besteemeth any thing to be unclean, to him it is unclean.
15 But if thy brother be grieved with thy meat, now walkest thou not charitably. Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died…
21 It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak.

In other words, if there is something that can cause someone else pain we should avoid doing it ourselves, for in so doing we indirectly cause them pain.

Now let’s get back to strippers and pole dancers.  There are people who can go to a night club, have a good time, and not have it effect them at all.  They could even go home to a family and be a great husband and father.  I don’t doubt this one bit.

But there are others who are not so lucky.  Others who the exposure to women in any form, whether it be pornography or a strip club or a pole dancer, will addict them, will change them.  It will effect how they view their wife, their family, and the people around them.  It will cause them to objectify women in a way that is damaging both to them and to the women they come in contact with.

I would wager that the guy who goes to a strip club and is not effected really doesn’t need to go to a strip club.  If you took that out of his life he wouldn’t care either way.  But for the guy who gets addicted?  The guy who goes one weekend with friends on a dare, then gets into pornography, which increases in depravity until he is looking at child pornography or treating the women in his life with contempt because they don’t look or act like porn stars or strippers?  It would make a HUGE difference to him if there were strip clubs in his life.

And that’s why laissez-faire morality just doesn’t work.  Live and let live is not a valid philosophy, because it is entirely impossible to function as those who ascribe to it wish it did.  I have never touched alcohol or coffee or any drugs in my entire life.  And why?  Because I don’t want to risk an addiction that may, or may not, occur.  But more than that, I have friends.  I have siblings and relatives, and if they saw me drinking or smoking or doing whatever, they might decide to try it.  And they might get addicted, for life.  By an act that many people would say is entirely in my control and effects only me I could utterly and completely destroy the life of another.

This is not just theology or philosophy.  This is not “Josh the Mormon” talking about why he believes what he believes.  This is reality.  Every decision you make has an effect on those around you, whether large or small.  So why not make choices that support those around you?  Why not eliminate from your life the things that not only make you stumble, but that make others stumble as well?