Comments about ‘The third moral dialogue’

This series of three postings is very insightful--on multiple levels.

On one level, this reminds me of an old Church commercial from the 1970s with a little boy and girl having a fight and throwing around a baby doll, parodying how married couples' arguments sometimes really resemble childish, self-centered temper tantrums.

This series also hearkens back to Card's previous posting "Analyzing a quarrel over 'nothing'," and reminds us that seemingly big life problems can oft times be solved by very simple means, if our hearts are right. Like little children, we've got to fill ourselves with selfless love, control our tempers, admit when we are in the wrong, and say sorry.

At another level, this posting provides great insight regarding what is happening when individuals choose to leave the church and the gospel. The Bishop in this dialogue notes, "It's my experience that people leaving the church never believed in the gospel, but when they repent and come back, they knew it was true all along." This rings true according to my experience.

Terrific series.

It appears that Jack isn't thinking much about repenting yet, as the bishop points out. I think he's sitting on a self-built fence, weighing his options, and is fairly sure his previous, predictable life with wife and children doesn't have the pull for him that it had before. In this fictional but likely typical scenario, I feel left with few hopes for their future happiness together. It could turn around but that's a big if since Jack only has somewhat tenuous ties to his covenants, and he hasn't recommitted to keeping them. It could be that the wife's deep need for him to recommit might grate on him and cause him to resent her holding him back from a new, more exciting life. His children need his better influence in their lives, but it might be important for the wife to grant herself space and energy separately in order to find her inherent identity without him. Healing her broken trust and heart, and gathering her own strength while in agony might truly require her to be alone at least awhile in order to learn her trust, after all, can only safely rest in the Savior.

Well done! I loved the series. Keep it up.

What we learn from this interview is that if Jack and his wife had been atheists and had had no children, the adultery would have been OK.

Not so, Steve. At least, not unless you add, "and they were swingers" to your alternate reality. Jack had broken a promise he had made to his wife, whether before God or not, and whether or not their union had produced children. Not all childless atheists would be ok with that.