Taking the Lord's Name in Vain: Beyond OMG

Now that Trump has lost the election, I feel it's important to start revisiting some of the fundamentals of basic human decency that he has destroyed over the past 4 years.

I'm starting with the ten commandments for myself. One jumped out to me especially.

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain. Let's talk about what this means and what it doesn't mean.

To take the Lord's name in "vain" doesn't just refer to invoking the divine for no reason, or in an epithet like OMG with no purpose, as in the second definition. It also means using God's name to aggrandize oneself, to harm others, and to generally being a self-righteous bully.

For people who value having a relationship with Christ, and who choose to develop that relationship through association with a Church, that doesn't give us a license to use our supposed proximity to God as a weapon against other people.

Remember the Zoramites in Alma 31. The way I've been taught about this story, you'd think that all the people repeating the exact same prayer was the only thing that made this prayer vain. The Zoramites based their entire identity on the belief that they were superior to other people. It was apparent in their words, their actions, their appearance, and their desires. This self-righteous attitude from the Zoramites is a key political strife that carries on through the Book of Mormon and leads to the destruction of the civilizations described in it.

Why does Mormon tell this story? It was a crucial turning point in their history, bending them towards destruction.

We are leaving the administration of a president who has convinced millions of people in this country that it doesn't matter who they hurt, so long as they get theirs. Many of them have justified that belief the same way the Zoramites did—through pride and self-righteousness. Church didn't save the Zoramites, and it won't save anyone else out here trying to pull these same stunts.

Your relatives and the people around you can claim there's no sin in that—as long as they go to Church, they're still in with God and it'll all work out in the end. They're in for a rude awakening when they meet God face to face and they realize She's a stranger to them.