Mormon vs. secular - where we're going

WHERE AM I GOING? WHAT HAPPENS AFTER I DIE?

We all ask ourselves these question from time to time, don't we? They're two of life's greatest mysteries... unless you're a Mormon. If you're a Mormon you're pretty sure that you're not going anywhere. Check it out. When you die you'll roam the Spirit World (probably just another dimension of our physical earth) as a missionary seeking to teach of Christ and convert the spirits restricted to Spirit Prison (yet another earth dimension?) to the One True Church. Then you'll be resurrected into a perfect body! Then you'll be judged by Joseph Smith or whoever he's delegated judgment to. But you'll be found spotless because you've truly repented and been saved through Christ's Atonement! And you'll be welcomed with open arms by Heavenly Father, the Great Elohim himself, into the Celestial Kingdom, which just happens to be... EARTH! But not like it is now. Earth will be exalted and perfected as well, which means it will be a gigantic seer stone, or Urim & Thummin. It will be beautiful and we'll all be immeasurably happy forever.

Now if you're not good enough you'll still have a perfect resurrected body (so that's good news) but you won't get to live on a crystal ball with the rest of us and if you're really, really bad (like, apostate bad!) you'll have to float around sadly in absolute nothingness with Satan and his defeated angels. That would totally suck, so for the love of God don't apostatize please.

Secularists really have nothing on this happy explanation. They think our bodies just decompose and enter that whole stupid scientific circle of life bullshit, and make no claims about an eternal spirit (because they're too afraid to make BIG CLAIMS without any backing evidence at all!). How is anyone supposed to be sold on something so... natural? It's like they think we're supposed to observe the world and somehow conclude that we human beings are just a part of it instead the purpose for it!

Mormons clearly have the better explanation. Never mind that it produces an endless string of unanswerable questions that quickly lead to ludicrous and infantile notions of what life after death must be like. Thinking too much about it might lead to doubt and we don't need any more of that!

Becoming Satan and devils

The whole War in Heaven story gave me a lot of grief. It's supposed to be so simple and straightforward: rebellion against God is bad, so choose Good instead of giving into temptation. But let's go back and look at this story a bit more closely.

How did Lucifer fall? He was full of pride, right? He wanted the glory of God all for himself, right? Where did that evil pride and ambition come from if not from God? Did Heavenly Father, the Perfect Being, produce imperfect seed? Is it Heavenly Mother's fault that Lucifer turned rotten?

No! the believing Mormon will tell you. Good and Evil predate God and births of all of his spirit children (but don't ask why we worship Heavenly Father instead of the Goodness that predates him). God became God because he was obedient to the laws of righteousness and Lucifer became the Devil because we wasn't obedient. But where did Lucifer's faulty will to obey come from? Who first tempted Lucifer, our dear brother Morning Star, to stray from the Father?

It doesn't matter! says the believing Mormon. It was all part of the Plan. Heavenly Father needed opposition in his plan. He needed a satan. Lucifer is merely filling that extremely important role of providing bad choices to avoid. Without Satan, we wouldn't have Good and Evil to choose from.

So why is Satan being punished for his rebellion against God if his rebellion and all his tempting are so incredibly vital to the whole plan? Shouldn't he at least get awarded Best Supporting Actor in this whole charade?

One last thought: if Heavenly Father's plan was to have us all choose between his Plan and Satan's alternate, evil plan, and everyone already knew that Heavenly Father's Plan ends with Satan getting his ass kicked, why did anyone, including Satan, vote for the alternate plan?

Pride! the true believer will say again. And I say, really? I thought the rebellious spirits all wanted a guaranteed return to Heavenly Father. Wouldn't they automatically realize their rebellion was pointless the second they heard Heavenly Father say "Hey, you little fucks, stop rebelling or I'll cast you into Outer Darkness FOREVER!"? Wouldn't that have been enough to change the minds of all of those spirits who were too scared of making bad decisions in the first place?

Can you see why I doubt the veracity of this story? It lacks rhyme, reason and plausibility.

Mr. Satan

"The biggest lie Satan can sell you is that he doesn't exist!"

I know you don't have to sit through LDS meetings to hear this frightening warning. No matter where you hear it, the point is clear: you had better not stop believing in Satan. That muthafuckahz the real thing! And he's scary as shit!

The horns are maybe more symbolic than literal, it's true, but let's just take a moment to recognize that many, many people have had visions of a Satan with horns and wings. They're tradition at this point, and Lord knows we Mormons love tradition.

And the folks who love Satan most really prefer this more traditional approach.

Now consider for just a moment how badly Satan wants you for himself.

Terrifying! Of course, Mormons know better than the Church of Satan (those satanist assholes have totally been deceived), they know he doesn't look like a goat or have horns or wings. He looks like us, for he is our spirit brother born of our Heavenly Parents. Some say he looks a bit like Barack Obama. Others think he's white.

More important than what our fallen brother looks like is what he wants. Satan wants you to suffer, brothers and sisters. He wants you to be fucking miserable for all eternity because that's exactly the kind of heartless, bodiless bastard he is (that's right, he was too rebellious to be given a body). He tempts and torments you at all times setting traps and waiting for you to fall into sin. I don't even like to think about his evil ways.

"Taste my happiness, y'all mothafuckahz! We got this!"

Good thing other people have thought about it for me. Take Bible scholars for example. These dudes have looked very carefully at the use of the Hebrew word satan (שָּׂטָן), which means "adversary", to understand where Satan comes from. As it turns out satan is a term that describes a variety of human and celestial beings who in some way create opposition for someone else. The Devil (meaning  "slanderer"), Great Lucifer the Fallen, the Father of All Lies, doesn't come onto the scene until hundreds of years later on in the tradition of satans when the Hebrew tradition was able to absorb more of the dualism from surrounding religious traditions, at which point Satan, Yahweh's mortal enemy, was born into the world. Here's a brief explanation in video form:

So where does this leave us with regards to a scary bogeyman named Satan? Do we trust Joseph Smith's tweaking of the Christian tradition or do we recognize the tradition has untenable origins and that we've been caught up in one of the longest running ghost stories on earth today?

Pay attention to how frequently our prophets, seers and revelators use the "because Satan" argument. Why should we find that argument convincing?

CTR rings

LDS children who attend Primary are given a very special gift: a ring designed to help remind them to make good choices.

The acronym stands for Choose the Right. You just crimp this beauty around your young finger and you'll be shielded from from the Devil and his evil angels. Primary doesn't get much cooler than that CTR ring. And it's awesome to get something tangible from the Church that isn't a paper you colored on.

Maybe that's why LDS teens and adults can't give up the CTR ring wearing thing. They're nostalgic for the days of physical gifts in the form of a magic-feeling ring instead of the adult situation of really boring talks and lessons and refreshments you have to prepare yourself. Nothing will make you feel better than a CTR ring with (fake) diamonds. It's like the awesomeness of Primary amped up by marriage-likeness and the joy of pretending you have some serious Disney princess bling! So good!

Getting into the Bible

Here are a couple of insightful comments about the Bible.

Haven't we all felt at least a little that way? It's probably just Satan trying to keep our eternal spirits down.

Jesus killing things

Remember when Jesus gets pissed off at a fig tree for not having any figs for him to eat so he curses the tree and it dies? Was that not weird? Why would the Son of God, Creator of the Universe, Savior of the World expect a fig tree to have figs in early spring? Why would a perfectly loving demi-god/god-god (however that's all supposed to work) allow his hunger to piss him off enough to curse a tree to death? How un-Christ-like of Jesus!

And previously to this little episode of wrath there was that extremely unsettling moment (maybe the scariest in all the New Testament) when Jesus transfers the legion of demons possessing a dude into a herd of pigs and makes them jump off a cliff. "My name is Legion, for we are many!" has to be the scariest lines spoken by any Bible character, but Jesus' behavior is pretty scary too. Why does he, the Master of the Universe, have to kill anything? Why couldn't he, The Final Judge, just catapult the evil spirits into Outer Darkness? How the hell can the spirits of our brothers and sisters who chose Satan's side exist in a pig's body anyway? Could Jesus send my soul into an animal body if he wanted to? And why, if Legion was able to occupy one human body, did it require a whole herd of pigs? Couldn't Jesus have sent all of the evil spirits into one pig and then sent that one demonic pig toppling over the cliff to his death all by his lonesome thereby saving the swineherd a lot of stress? What happens to those spirits after the pigs die, by the way? Are they supposedly trapped in pig flesh? Are they freed of their fleshy tabernacle to once again roam the earth tormenting the souls of man? Either way I hope Jesus had the decency to fully compensate the swineherd for his huge loss.