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!

Celestial bodies

Here are a couple more thoughts about celestial resurrection and eternal perfection. If we get back every hair on our head, does that mean we get back every hair of our back, or our belly, or of our legs, or bikini line? Will we have super smelling powers? Will we be able to smell everyone's sweaty, hairy bodies? Will we ever have to deal with any physical discomfort again? For example, does God ever get anything in his eye? Sand? Pollen? Dust? I know he's not supposed to be vulnerable to physical danger or harm, but what's going on with his eyes? Does he have cherubim with flaming swords fighting off stray particles? Is the surface of his body somehow repellent to everything? Are celestial beings ticklish, or is that an earthly frailty?

Jesus, our Lord and Annihilator

Torture and death can really change a man. Take Jesus for example. Just before dying on the cross he offered this prayer:

"Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." (Luke 23:34)

That was pretty big of Jesus and must have been really hard for God. Shit, let's be real! It might have been hard for Jesus too. However it doesn't seem he had much forgiveness left after keeling over. Look how unforgiving the Savior of the World is toward folks on the other side of the world just moments (hours?) after his crucifixion.

"And it came to pass that there was a voice [Jesus'] heard among all the inhabitants of the earth, upon all the face of this land, crying: Wo, wo, wo unto this people; wo unto the inhabitants of the whole earth except they shall repent; for the devil laugheth, and his angels rejoice, because of the slain of the fair sons and daughters of my people; and it is because of their iniquity and abominations that they are fallen! Behold, that great city Zarahemla have I burned with fire, and the inhabitants thereof. And behold, that great city Moroni have I caused to be sunk in the depths of the sea, and the inhabitants thereof to be drowned. And behold, that great city Moronihah have I covered with earth, and the inhabitants thereof, to hide their iniquities and their abominations from before my face, that the blood of the prophets and the saints shall not come any more unto me against them. And behold, the city of Gilgal have I caused to be sunk, and the inhabitants thereof to be buried up in the depths of the earth; Yea, and the city of Onihah and the inhabitants thereof, and the city of Mocum and the inhabitants thereof, and the city of Jerusalem and the inhabitants thereof; and waters have I caused to come up in the stead thereof, to hide their wickedness and abominations from before my face, that the blood of the prophets and the saints shall not come up any more unto me against them. And behold, the city of Gadiandi, and the city of Gadiomnah, and the city of Jacob, and the city of Gimgimno, all these have I caused to be sunk, and made hills and valleys in the places thereof; and the inhabitants thereof have I buried up in the depths of the earth, to hide their wickedness and abominations from before my face, that the blood of the prophets and the saints should not come up any more unto me against them. And behold, that great city Jacobugath, which was inhabited by the people of king Jacob, have I caused to be burned with fire because of their sins and their wickedness, which was above all the wickedness of the whole earth, because of their secret murders and combinations; for it was they that did destroy the peace of my people and the government of the land; therefore I did cause them to be burned, to destroy them from before my face, that the blood of the prophets and the saints should not come up unto me any more against them. And behold, the city of Laman, and the city of Josh, and the city of Gad, and the city of Kishkumen, have I caused to be burned with fire, and the inhabitants thereof, because of their wickedness in casting out the prophets, and stoning those whom I did send to declare unto them concerning their wickedness and their abominations. And because they did cast them all out, that there were none righteous among them, I did send down fire and destroy them, that their wickedness and abominations might be hid from before my face, that the blood of the prophets and the saints whom I sent among them might not cry unto me from the ground against them. And many great destructions have I caused to come upon this land, and upon this people, because of their wickedness and their abominations." (3 Nephi 9:1-12)

Can you say "take it easy, Jesus"? That's A LOT OF REVENGE! This Book of Mormon Jesus just wiped out thousands of people. Entire cities. Men, women, and children. Wow! And this right after dying for their sins. Weird.

Resurrection

This doubt takes me back many, many years to when I was in elementary school. I remember learning about how the atoms that make up our body are in constant flux and are constantly being replaced. Physically our bodies are not the same matter for even a single year and are almost completely composed of entirely new atoms in just over a year. The way I understood this was that my body was never really my body. I have no permanent body.

So I had to wonder what exactly gets to be called me and resurrected. I remember thinking about this almost every time I passed a cemetery. What's left of these physical bodies? What atoms count as their bodies? How is it that those atoms will reunite to reform the living, perfected body?

It wasn't long before I concluded that it didn't matter which atoms made up our body and that upon being resurrected the necessary elements would magically be whisked and whirled together to form our perfect body basically like Beast's transformation at the end of Disney's Beauty and the Beast. It was going to be awesome!

You might be wondering how I doubted the mechanics of resurrection rather than the idea of the dead coming back to life. What can I say? I was truly a child of faith.

Redeeming the dead

So now on to my first Mormon-specific doubt that comes to mind. Baptisms for the dead. On the one hand it only makes sense that God should provide a way for people who never ever had a chance to hear of Jesus to get a shot at accepting the Straight and Narrow via baptism, on the other hand it was recognizably insane even in my pre-teen brain. 

(What's a 9-year-old girl doing in the temple? And what's with the yellow dress?)

The thought of having to perform baptisms for every person who has lived since the ministry of Christ gets increasingly complicated when you consider things like the sheer number of people who have lived in the time spanning the Resurrection to today - only the smallest fraction of a percentage of which were baptized "by authority" - and the fact that no recording of names was ever made for the vast majority of those people. Even if some record had been made of a birth, a death, a marriage, a purchase, or anything else, chances are it doesn't exist anywhere. 

The way it was told me, the Mormon solution to the billions of forgotten and unresearchable names of the dead calls for the assistance of angels who will, I guess, whisper entire, unending genealogies to temple workers during the Millennium. Angels always get their facts straight so there won't be anything to worry about, right? Well, maybe. I didn't find it very convincing myself, but I doubted my logic and found faith in faith.