A Few Retractions From Yesterday's Post

In response to my blog post yesterday, my mom called into question something that I had said, and now that I've reflected on her comment and mine, I have to agree with her.

I said "In the Green Lantern's oath, he recommits himself to the detection and opposition of evil. We don't do that." I had meant that we don't physically look for evil-doers to fight, but now that I consider it spiritually, I think we do (or at least should) try to detect and oppose evil - not so much in other people, but in ourselves.

Satan is very good at planting temptation into our hearts, and doing it subtly. Sometimes, we don't even know we're being tempted. Yet, we need to fight against that temptation in order to choose the right, so, in a sense, we need to detect and oppose evil on a regular basis, just to stay spiritually clean.

We all have vices. We each have some kind of inclination toward sin. If it wasn't already within us as a result of being born mortal, then Satan probably put it there. No matter how the evil within us came to be there, we need to fight it, and to do that, we first need to know that it's there. So the detection and opposition of evil is not only something we can do, but something we must do.

Mom also remarked on something I said about drawing closer to God not giving us super-powers. She pointed out that, being omnipotent, God can do everything the Green Lantern can do, and much, much more. When we draw closer to God, we become more like Him, and as we grow to be more like Him, we gain increasing portions of His power. By following this path, we will eventually gain all the power any Green Lantern ever had, and more. I had meant that we wouldn't gain super-powers in mortality, and that's still probably true, but that doesn't mean we won't get super-powers later down the road.

Man, I love our religion. From the Mormon perspective, humans are way more awesome than they are according to other religions. In mortality, we can receive inspiration and guidance from the Spirit, which essentially gives us a form of extra-sensory perception, and if we use that power to detect and oppose the evil within us, we'll eventually gain powers too incredible to imagine! Looking at it that way, we already do have super-powers, and if we use them wisely, we'll gain even more. That's pretty dang amazing.

Mom, thank you so much for posting that comment. What I learned just now is so awesome that I'm genuinely glad you pointed out that I was wrong.