Extremism Is Not Modesty - and Extremism Hinders Perfection

A friend once asked me why women's clothes are more revealing than men's - in the context of a conversation about modesty and how it is taught in the LDS Church.

It's an interesting question, and I think it's an important one to ask as a launching pad for any discussion about dress standards and why they tend to fall more heavily on women than on men.  The following response is nowhere close to exhaustive, and it is a bit generalized, but I want to include it in this post to make a broader, more important point about modesty and how we talk about it - and ought to talk about it differently - in the Church:

It's evolutionary (a survival of the fittest instinct to attract men and ensure protection), cultural (look at the fashion and celebrity industries, where "innovation" and "attention" are paramount), biological (there is a physiological difference between women's breasts and men's chests), power-political (most communal leaders throughout history have been men, and they think more about women's bodies than about men's bodies), etc.  It's a complex, fully human issue, and it is influenced by just about every aspect of communal life. 

It's not a simple issue that can be fixed easily, but I like the concept of leadership teaching the correct principle, without specifics (modesty meaning moderation in all things, not just those related to sex and how we clothe our bodies), and governing ourselves. In that way, this topic is no different than tithing (individuals determine how to pay, based on a general principle), Word of Wisdom (individuals determine how to be spiritually and physically healthy without unnecessary addiction), church attendance (individuals determine how much time they can spend in church-related meetings while maintaining a proper balance with family, job, community, personal health, etc.), and on and on.

True modesty allows us to do and be more than we can at any extreme - and that's interesting to consider when our ultimate goal is to be "perfect" - meaning "complete, whole, fully developed". Extremism inhibits that type of perfection, while modesty allows it.

I Don't Care about "Plainer" Translations of Scriptures

I view scriptures as records of how people from the past viewed God and his relationship to them - and not much else, when it gets right down to it.

That's really important to me, but it doesn't say much about how WE view God and his relationship to US. Absolutely, it can and should influence us, but I believe in an evolutionary model of understanding that includes religious understanding - that "further light and knowledge" and "ongoing revelation" are FAR superior to past pronouncements of scripture, with the exception of the words attributed to Jesus of Nazareth.

I think that is axiomatic to Mormonism.

Thus, while I value scripture highly (from all faith traditions), I don't really care much about spending time trying to translate them more plainly - since, in the end, I believe translations reveal much, much more about the worldviews of the translators than they do about the worldview and intent of the original authors, scribes and abridgers.

Why It's Not Hard for Me to Accept Evolution as the Process By Which God Created Our Bodies

For what it's worth, evolution is an easy issue for me to reconcile. (I'm not saying it should be for everyone - only that it is for me.) There are a few things that make it so easy for me:

1) There never has been a unanimous voice rejecting evolution among the apostles and Prophets. There always have been some who accept it as the process by which the physical creation happened. Thus, in accepting evolution I'm not rejecting the Church leadership in any way; I'm just picking the ones with whom I agree. (*grin*)

2) I don't sustain church leaders in any way as scientists, and I don't expect apostles and even Prophets to understand science better than scientists. (That actually might be the main reason.)

3) Almost every personal rejection of evolution I have read is based off the assumption that evolution is founded on the belief that there is no God, even among those who otherwise reject a young earth theory. In other words, when someone is working from a faulty foundation and incorrectly feels their very core belief in God is being attacked (which is not incorrect in some cases with some advocates of evolution), I understand reacting negatively - and even over-reacting. That is true especially with regard to things that we simply don't understand fully.

4) The Pearl of Great Price supports the general idea of physical evolution MUCH more clearly than the Bible does - which means I feel justified in believing that physical evolution is much closer to being taught in "Mormon" scriptures than in other Christian scriptures.

5) The temple presentation of the creation of Adam and Eve used to state unequivocally that the depiction was figurative with regard to the man and woman.  That doesn't endorse evolution as the creative process, but it also leaves that door wide open as a possibility. 

6) The "current" official position of the Church (a 1909 First Presidency statement that was reprinted in the Ensign in 2002) explicitly leaves open the possibility that evolution was the source of the creation of Adam's physical body. When you read the statement carefully, Adam being the first man ONLY means that at some point there was someone who differed from all other creatures in that he consisted of a mortal body and an immortal spirit child of God - thus, he was the first "man", as the Church defines that term. Seriously, I'm not stretching anything by saying that; it's the way the actual statement is worded. I can accept that, especially when the same statement says that his body might have started out as an embryo.

7) I believe the Garden of Eden narrative is allegorical and that the "Fall" happened when we chose to follow Lucifer to this earth, leave the presence of God and be subject to mortality, sin and death - so I have no problem with the general idea of no death before the Fall. The passages in 2 Nephi that many use to reject evolution actually have no bearing on the actual mechanics of earthly creation for me.

In saying all of that, I am not arguing that our bodies were created through evolution.  I think that is the most likely answer, but I really don't know - and the Church's official position is that we don't know. 
 
I think this is a great example of how scriptures can be interpreted to mean various things, how it's important for us to be open to different ways to understand them, how we don't have to throw out the baby ("I am a child of God.") with the bathwater (young earth creationism that rejects evolution entirely). It is VERY easy for me to reconcile physical evolution with the Plan of Salvation as it is taught in the Church. I just have to be OK with not everyone agreeing with me - and that just isn't a problem at all.