I never cease to be amazed at how practical and comprehensive the Gospel of Jesus Christ is and yet how hard it is for some to embrace it. Having had a significant number of years in the university setting, either as a student or faculty/administrator, I was exposed to many and varied philosophies of life, most of which seemed to emphasize a narrow aspect of life or man’s behavior in relationship to it. Yet there were classes taught, books written and article after article published describing one philosophy or another in all of its narrow facets. Many professors became famous for their knowledge of a particular philosophy and went on the circuit as a speaker and expert in the field.
I well remember one school of thought, popular when I was in graduate school. It was called Existentialism, a philosophy that was very true, in my mind, as many of its precepts could have been taken right out of the Book of Mormon. Essentially, it is described as a philosophy that believes in the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or often indifferent universe. It regards the human existence as unexplainable, but stresses the freedom of choice and a person’s responsibility for the consequences of their own acts. At the least, members of the church should be able to relate to the often uniqueness of individual experiences in a sometimes hostile world. We can relate to freedom of choice and accepting the consequences of our acts in life. Programs to modify behavior in troubled people were built around that philosophy, and I’m sure much good was accomplished by many of those programs.
Another relatively common philosophy, mostly practiced in Asia, but very popular here, was Zen. Zen is a school of Buddhism that asserts that enlightenment can be attained through meditation, self-contemplation and intuition rather than through faith and devotion. If we were sitting in a Sunday school class and the instructor asked for ways one might be enlightened, more than likely he would receive all of the common church answers; prayer, scripture reading, plus everything the follower of Zen would say about meditation etc.
A person could review most, if not all, of the philosophies of the world and find some valuable gem here and there, I’m sure.
The question is, why not find all of the wonderful gems in one place, a way of life that is comprehensive, that if followed will provide a way to modify behavior and that will teach us how to become enlightened even until we progress and reach, the “perfect day“ (D&C 50:24). The church provides a very important ingredient that the various philosophies subscribed to by the world ignore, that is service to others. Service is that element that causes one to grow in harmony with his fellows, it is where compassion is born, where charity thrives.
Medicine has various philosophies, as well, one of which should make sense for members of the church, it is called Holistic Medicine. Holistic subscribers believe that living matter is made up of organic and unified wholes that are greater than the simple sum of its parts. Essentially saying that when we have a health problem, a practitioner might be wise to look deeper than just the place where one feels pain.
The church is holistic too, in that it is made up, similar to the ‘holistic body,’ of many parts. For example, the head can’t say to the feet I have no need of thee, the arm can’t say to the hand, I have no need of thee, etc. (1 Cor 12:13–27). The body of the church is a whole, and only as the whole church does it encompass all that is good and true. Paul speaking to the Colossians warned “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.” My philosophy of life is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and I apologize not.