Stephen E. Robinson, Following Christ: From yesterday’s post. . . “If we have too much of the wrong kind of contact, our emotions can create new kinds of attachments or dissolve old ones when we didn’t intend for that to happen. Our emotions are a poor substitute for the Spirit as a guide in our lives, and to follow our unbridled emotions is as foolish as to follow our unbridled flesh. I express it as my opinion that in the resurrection, our emotions, if we have subjected them to our spirits, will no longer be out of control, will no longer be fallen, but will be subject to our will. They will then be as God’s emotions are—always under control and always redemptive in their expression.
Continuing . . . Also we are fallen morally. That means our sense of right and wrong is defective. While it may be true that we can usually let our conscience be our guide, different individuals get contradictory indications from their consciences, and often conscious does not state any opinion whatsoever. The desire to do the right thing doesn’t help much if we don’t know what the right thing is. The light of Christ gives all people enough information to be accountable for some sins, and perhaps to avoid some sins, but it cannot be a substitute for the Holy Ghost. The light of Christ does not have sufficient intensity to serve as a guide to all people in all circumstances—especially if a fallen reason and a carnal nature are urging us in a different direction. Yet mortality requires us to make complex moral judgments about what is right and wrong. In the absence of the gift of the Holy Spirit, we will simply come to the wrong conclusions, and we may even do it while thinking we are right.
The total effect of being fallen in all these ways (physically, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and morally) is to make the test of mortality much more difficult. At the same time we receive a physical body, which naturally seeks pleasure rather than righteousness because it has no ability to distinguish right from wrong—flesh has no conscience. I mean that literally. Just as a thermometer cannot detect radiation and a Geiger counter cannot detect heat, so our flesh cannot detect light and truth—it wasn’t designed to do it. Flesh can distinguish only between pleasure and pain, between “feels good,” and “doesn’t feel good,” and therefore it urges us to act upon that distinction alone. The unredeemed carnal self, our flesh and its desires, readily serves the devil because it has no moral sense, no spiritual discernment, and no conscience. It was not designed that way—the ability to make those distinctions was given to our spirit. Unredeemed and without the guidance of the spirit, our flesh is morally blind and is therefore an enemy to God, for Satan can successfully argue to the flesh that sin is pleasurable even when we can’t argue to the spirit that sin is right. Consequently, being both incredibly powerful and morally blind, until and unless the carnal self yields to the enticing of the Holy Spirit and accepts the leadership of our own spirit with its moral vision, it remains a loose cannon and an enemy to God (Mosiah 3:19).
But please note that we do not seek to destroy or escape the flesh or the carnal self but to rather subject it to the Spirit and to sanctify it. The capacity for pleasure is not, after all, evil. It is necessary and desirable—not when it is our highest priority but rather when it accepts the leadership of the Spirit and serves the interests to the Spirit.
~Stephen E. Robinson, Following Christ (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2019). 319-21
