“Judge a person by their questions, rather than their answers.” – Voltaire
Throughout history, tyrants and freemen have been waging a war – a war of questions. The enemies of agency ask questions in order to confuse, deceive, coerce and enslave. Freemen ask questions designed to clarify, enlighten, persuade and liberate. Prophetic evidence of these questions exists so that we in the latter days can identify those who would seek to trap us or manipulate us.
A great emphasis has been placed upon good music and the singing of hymns in our Latter-day Saint congregations. In fact, it was a only a short time after the organization of the restored church that the Lord gave a commandment to Emma Smith, through the prophet Joseph Smith, to make a sacred selection of hymns. The First Presidency has described the importance of this music in great detail:
Consequence, defined: that which follows something on which it depends; that which is produced by a cause; a result of actions.
We Latter-day Saints know a little bit about consequences. We teach (or at least we should teach) our children from a very young age that we have been given agency by our Creator and that our actions will produce good or bad “fruits”, or in less metaphorical terms, good and bad consequences. We teach our children that sometimes our actions produce consequences that we do not expect. We offer warnings during this learning process – “don’t do x because y will surely follow” – and we hope that our children will be able to grasp the concept without suffering too much.
Yet for all the years of lessons and experiences that should cement the law of unintended consequences into our minds, we often ignore the warnings that we have been given by those who came before us. Specifically, I would like to describe our ignorance concerning the warnings related to unintended consequences that will destroy our agency and liberty.
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