Saturday, October 21, 2017

Truth From Fiction

The last talk of the General Women's Session of General Conference focused on attitudes. In it, President Uchtdorf spoke of three sisters who lived under similar circumstances and had similar experiences but experienced different emotions about those experiences. Naturally, President Uchtdorf's message seemed to mostly be that we should try to have positive attitudes and that it's possible to have positive attitudes, even when things are going wrong, but that's not what I want to focus on. My message this evening is that even though these sisters and their story are fictional, we can still learn from them.

Wise people have been using fictional stories to teach important truths for thousands of years. Even Jesus Christ Himself might have done that. Of course, I would assume that Jesus' stories are true - After all, He wouldn't lie. - but it wouldn't actually matter if they weren't. Even if the good Samaritan and the sower and the prodigal son weren't real people, we can still learn from them. In the same way, we can learn from President Uchtdorf's probably-fictional three sisters.

The value of a message isn't affected by the validity of the stories that share that message. If it's wrong to lie, then it's wrong to lie, whether or not there's a blue fairy that made a puppet's nose grow. True morals and principles can be learned from even blatantly false fables and parables. So we shouldn't discard any counsel just because the stories that illustrate its wisdom might be fictional. The lessons we can learn from these stories can be true, even if the stories themselves aren't.

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