Mormons: The gospel is the plan of happiness! Also Mormons: "Happiness" doesn't mean happiness.
My father-in-law shared a reel from the Stick of Joseph yesterday, and it's making me scratch my head. (I can't link to it directly because of the subreddit's rules, but it was posted on the Stick of Joseph's Facebook page on June 1st at 6:26 p.m. if you want to go find it.)
First, Quentin Cook says that "the pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence is hard to understand (is it? it seems pretty straightforward to me), and then he claims that "some scholars" have evidence that it means the pursuit of goodness or virtue (he does not, of course, provide any citations to these alleged scholars).
Then the Stick of Joseph guy claims that he's always been bothered by that part of the Declaration and that it seems frivolous. First, has anyone ever been bothered by that, or is he just saying that to make it sound like he's on board with Cook's weird claim? And second, isn't this the church that calls the gospel the plan of happiness? Didn't God create us so that we might have joy? Why are they trying to argue that happiness doesn't mean happiness?
And for what it's worth, I can't find any evidence that "happiness" meant "goodness" or "virtue" when the Declaration was written. The Oxford English Dictionary has definitions like "Good fortune or good luck in life generally or in a particular affair; success, prosperity" and "The state of pleasurable contentment of mind; deep pleasure in or contentment with one's circumstances." Webster's 1828 dictionary has pretty similar definitions. So, again, where is Cook getting this?