A rose by any other name.

In Moroni 7:10-12 we get some good doctrine about how good isn’t going to come from evil source.  It is impossible for anything bad to come from God and for anything good to come from Satan.

I used to read this as absolute.  If you are a bad person you do bad things.  If you are a good person you do good things.  End of story.  That is how things would work in a perfect world, I think.  We don’t live in a perfect world (had you noticed!?) so there aren’t absolutes.  I don’t follow God one hundred percent of the time.  When I do bad things it isn’t because God is telling me to but because I have stopped listening to him and am instead following another spirit.

I used to think that this scripture meant that the good acts of a staunchly anti-God person are really evil acts because they are vocally declaring that they are not following God and Christ (and thus, by process of elimination, must be following the devil).  I think I always knew that this didn’t make any sense so I tried not to think about it too much.  Last night I realized that the good acts really indicate is that the person is following some portion of the light of Christ even if they loudly protest that they are doing nothing of the sort!  An evil person can do good things, but the good things don’t come from evil, they come because the person still has some connection to God.

The moral is that we are complex critters with complex motivations.  When we do good, we are following God.  When we do evil, we are not.  This is true even if we say otherwise.  Just because we call evil good and good evil doesn’t make it so.  Anyway, I am pretty sure that blessings follow our good acts regardless of why we think we’re doing them.