This poem is better than any LDS scripture (below)... and these words stand out:

"The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

Question: Post Mormonism, is there anything left to believe in? What commands your passionate intensity?

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The Second Coming (W. B. Yeats)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I for one seek to avoid that kind of "passionate intensity" and try to side with the ones lacking "all conviction". After all, they are the best, right?

Besides, I don't wish to help along that rough beast.

Human, Yeats lover

"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

Isn't this birth of the new beast a reflection of the collective unconscious "Spiritus Mundi" of intolerance, hate, bigotry, anger, fear, greed, etc "of the worst full of passionate intesnity?"

I watched the execution of the reporter (mostly) posted on youtube. I wonder if the "worst are full of passionate intensity," like the executioner, and "the best lack all conviction." What hope does humanity have?

Let's substitute "European life" for "humanity" and say our hope lies in the fact that we survived WWI. If that wasn't a rough beast then there is no such thing. We're different on this other side of those twenty centuries, but we survived.

Although the image of the beast comes out of "Spiritus Mundi" the actual beast comes from this our earth and us its inhabitants. Yes, as you say, all those bad things you list that characterize the worst in their "passionate intensity" are upon us like an executioner. It is a Damoclesian sword, however, and so each generation after Yeats quotes this poem to express a feeling that the gig is up. For you the feeling comes from a (probably propaganda) youtube video. Personally I saw that "passionate intensity" written all over Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/ and the vast majority of traumatized post 9-11 Americans ready to shock and awe and torture the cradle of civilization, The Mesopotamia, passionately, intensely; while "the best", the ones I relied on to counter the madness, for the most part, sat on their hands, lacking conviction. C'est la vie. (Those who did counter are very noble and notable exceptions.)

Chin up Yeats, and have hope. The Second Coming is a coming that keeps on coming, over and over and over until it is finally over and it ain't over yet.

A little of yourself for yourself:

"Ah, do not mourn," he said,
"That we are tired, for other loves await us;
Hate on and love through unrepining hours.
Before us lies eternity; our souls
Are love, and a continual farewell."

--William Butler Yeats--
--"Ephemera"--


Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

--W.B. Yeats--
--"The Circus Animal's Desertion"--

That last one is emblematic of my leaving LDSinc, by the way. I learned that I have my human heart and that that is enough.

Human