Posted by:
slskipper
(
)
Date: November 17, 2017 09:53PM
The LDS church loves its genealogy program, obviously. I understand part of its interest- to provide a means of documenting names for temple work. Having each person research his or her family certainly makes sense in this regard. But there is another motivation, which IMO requires a bit more caution. When you trace your lineage, you are at each step limiting the set of ancestors to one member of a family. The attraction is to determine the illustriousness of each ancestor- and the implication is that those illustrious ancestors all passed on their increasingly illustrious genes to make you the most illustrious of all.
What all this overlooks, of course, is that everybody is the same. We all have ancestors of the same degree of illustriousness. WE ARE ALL RELATED. That is the message of Darwin. Somebody calculated that, within a 70th-cousin spread, you are related to every other person on the planet.
As the world gets smaller and smaller due to improved communication media and better means of transportation,the clan model implicit in the LDS genealogy initiative is becoming outmoded. It's time to expand our definition of who does and doesn't belong to "our" family. Everybody belongs to my family.