Making Choices in a Fallen World
A friend reached out with a dilemma. He lives far away from the meeting place of his religious community. They use Zoom to broadcast their meetings for those who can't attend in-person. For many reasons, he avoids using proprietary software (software that is not free as in freedom), but he was seriously thinking about installing Zoom in this case. I can empathize with his dilemma. All of us have to make choices like this every day.
I told him community is important, humans need it, and that if I had to choose between using proprietary software and being isolated and lonely, I'd choose proprietary software.
He installed Zoom. I look forward to hearing about his experience.
I have been struggling to reconcile a lot of conflicting concepts and values like this in many areas of my life, lately. But an acquaintance recently tipped me off to a talk by Dallin H. Oaks from 1986 that has helped clarify some things for me:
We should also remember that the principle that the Golden Rule governs our earning activities is difficult to apply in practice. We should not consider employees responsible for policies they regret but cannot control. A decision that is made by the owner of a market should not inflict feelings of guilt on a conscientious but powerless Christian who runs the checkout stand. Similarly, a part-owner does not have freedom to impose his standards on business policies if he has partners who do not share his moral concerns. An incorporated business may be controlled by stockholders who have no concern for the destructive human effects of a profitable product or policy.
We live in a complex society, where even the simplest principle can be exquisitely difficult to apply. I admire investors who are determined not to obtain income or investment profits from transactions that add to the sum total of sin and misery in the world. But they will have difficulty finding investments that meet this high standard. Good things are often packaged with bad, so decisions usually involve balancing. In a world of corporate diversification, we are likely to find that a business dealing in beverages sells milk in one division and alcohol in another. Just when we think that our investments are entirely unspotted from the world, we may find that our life insurance is partially funded by investments we wish to avoid. Or our savings may be deposited in a bank that is lending to ventures we could not approve. Such complexities make it difficult to prescribe firm rules.
We must rely on teaching correct principles, which each member should personally apply to govern his or her own circumstances.
I also told my friend that we live in a fallen (imperfect) world and we have to do the best we can with what's available to us. But God knows our hearts.
I believe that if we are seeking to become more aware of the huge gap between what we do and what we know we should do, who we are and who we know we should be, and we are trying our best to close that gap, it is enough. We will always fall short on our own. But God's grace – the grace given through the atonement of Jesus Christ – is sufficient to bridge the gap and then some.
But choices still have consequences. So I will keep trying my best to align my thoughts, words, and deeds with correct principles, re-calibrate and adjust as I learn new information, and trust that God knows my heart and will accept my meager and imperfect efforts. I have to trust that, or none of this would make any sense to me at all.
#100DaysToOffload (No. 108) #faith #life #tech #Christianity