LDS Quotes on Secularism & Worldliness
“Not all will follow the map [Heavenly Father has given us]. They may look at it. They may think it is reasonable, perhaps even true. But they do not follow the divine directions. Many believe that any road will take them to a ‘happily ever after.’ Some may even become angry when others who know the way try to help and tell them. They suppose that such advice is outdated, irrelevant, out of touch with modern life. Sisters, they suppose wrong.”
| "Your Happily Ever After," Ensign, May 2010
“It would seem that a major underlying cause of divorce is in not understanding that marriage and families are God-given and God-ordained. If we understood the full meaning we would have less divorce and its attendant unhappiness…The current philosophy—get a divorce if it doesn’t work out—handicaps a marriage from the beginning.”
| Marriage and Divorce
“The intense human intimacy that should be enjoyed in and symbolized by sexual union is counterfeited by sensual episodes which suggest–but cannot deliver–acceptance, understanding, and love. Such encounters mistake the end for the means as lonely, desperate people seek a common denominator which will permit the easiest, quickest gratification.”
| Human Intimacy: Illusion and Reality
“Your love, like a flower, must be nourished. There will come a great love and interdependence between you, for your love is a divine one. It is deep, inclusive, comprehensive. It is not like that association of the world which is misnamed love, but which is mostly physical attraction. When marriage is based on this only, the parties soon tire of each other. There is a break and a divorce, and a new, fresher physical attraction comes with another marriage which in turn may last only until it, too, becomes stale.”
| Faith Precedes the Miracle, 130–31
“When something is wrong, increasing its commonality cannot really confer respectability.”
“Our sexuality has been animalized, stripped of the intricacy of feeling with which human beings have endowed it, leaving us to contemplate only the act, and to fear our impotence in it. It is this animalization from which the sexual manuals cannot escape, even when they try to do so, because they are reflections of it. They might [as well] be textbooks for veterinarians.”
| Seven Deadly Sins
Call it secularism or modernity or the technological age or existentialism on steroids—whatever you want to call such an approach to life, we do know a thing or two about it. Most important, we know that it cannot answer the yearning questions of the soul, nor is it substantial enough to sustain us in times of moral crises.
| Religion: Bound by Loving Ties
“Lowering the Lord’s standards to the level of a society’s inappropriate behavior is apostasy.”
“In a pluralistic society, it is easy to regard different belief systems as equally true. There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of; almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.”
“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.”