A third category of people who follow the way of death (the way of the devil) are those who follow a worldly philosophy that we know as secular rather than religious. The insidious argument that neither heaven nor hell exists, that there is not good nor evil (in their absolute forms) allows us to redefine good and evil as it suits our intentions, and remake it constantly with our self-justifications.
Even Joseph Smith might not have been able to foresee how powerfully this new paradigm of thought would pervade the world’s understanding. Bolstered by evidence of the observable, the conception of a relative good or evil can intellectually dismiss the overarching presence of an unobservable eternal good and evil. Removing those absolute bounds of ethicality and morality, the world becomes more open to the morality of exigency.
The complication of this philosophy is that there are times when there is a demonstrable variable in the definition of good. Neither Nephi nor the Lord are denying that there are times and seasons among men, and that our working out our lives on this earth may create social variations, and different understandings of good in the most localized and temporal of senses. It is the denial of Good in the eternal and universal sense that is the downfall of the philosophy. As with so many of the tools of the devil, it is not the outright lie, but the partial falsehood that is so dangerous. Just as with the complacent in the previous verse, the condemnation is not against all that they do, but in the very specific inability of those people to see and accept the way of God.