Back when I was young and Baptist, one of the wise mothers in the church told me this story as a response to something I've long forgotten. One of her friends was Mormon, and she agreed to read much of the Book of Mormon together with her. Politely, the Baptist mother said that, in the end, she didn't believe the Book of Mormon was the word of God. "Pray," said the Mormon friend, "that the Holy Spirit will tell you what is true." The Baptist mother agreed, and the next week, waiting for laundry, the Mormon friend asked if she had.
"I did."
"Did the Holy Spirit speak to you?"
"It seemed so, but I find it very hard to tell the difference between the voice of the Holy Spirit within myself and my own thoughts voicing themselves within me."
And so it is. We cannot distinguish inward sources with much precision. Are my facts aesthetic preferences after all? And so on, even to the divine. The message matters more than the messenger not because this would be quite so if we knew the messenger, but because we do not.
Is my hatred for hate virtue, or even moral, or a weak stomach? The wrong question.
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