The Second Mindfulness Training

Reading Thich Nhat Hanh's Five Mindfulness Trainings, and despite him being a Buddhist and all, the Spirit whispered to me that he's probably taken out his endowment at some point (think "time, talents, and everything with which the Lord has blessed you or with which he may bless you" as you read this!):

"Aware of the suffering caused by exploitation, social injustice, stealing, and oppression, I am committed to cultivating loving kindness and learning ways to work for the well-being of people, animals, plants, and minerals. I will practice generosity by sharing my time, energy, and material resources with those who are in real need. I am determined not to steal and not to possess anything that should belong to others. I will respect the property of others, but I will prevent others from profiting from human suffering or the suffering of other species on Earth." The World We Have, pp. 11-12 (alternate version here)

OK, so it's not totally LDS but the Spirit's still telling me a lot of Mormons could really get behind this. It's like, you know, one of those those fragmented bits of truth out there in all religions that fits so neatly into the whole entire Truth found within the doctrine of the Church, right? Make sense to me (kind of). Except for the fact that here it feels like Buddhism has something to add to Mormonism, rather than Mormonism adding to Buddhism.

Where in Mormon doctrine do you find explicit prohibitions of exploitation of people, animals, plants and minerals? When was the last time you heard a prophet or apostle tell you to oppose anything causing "the suffering of other species"? The best we have is an awkward statement in the Doctrine & Covenants about how the U.S. Constitution "should be maintained for the rights and protection of all flesh" and how slavery (in the U.S.) is bad. Even if we want to believe the Second Mindfulness Training and the verses in D&C say the same thing, the truth is Thich Nhat Hanh says it way better.

So I'd like to bear my testimony that Thich Nhat Hanh is a partial prophet who should change his ways and be baptized by true authority and be saved, and that Buddhism can sort of be right sometimes but never as right as the Church I was born into. Nham oh Jheses Christh, ahmen!

Aliens - other worlds

Did you know that you have long lost spiritual brothers and sisters living out on other planets? Well Joseph Smith did!
 
I remember being taught as a little kid that Earth is just one of the many populated planets that Jehovah (Jesus) had made under the direction of Elohim (Heavenly Father). Do Mormons believe in aliens? You had better fuckin' believe it! But not the weird Star Trek kind, just normal, Homo sapiens kind.

In fact you don't have to go too far to find some of these brothers and sisters. Joseph Smith found tall Quakers on the Moon

and Brigham Young found that the Sun is inhabited.

Science has shown that they were totally right, right? No? Well it will! For now all you need to know is that Jesus died for all aliens, not just for us.

Alien gods

Joseph Smith, Jr. revealed a great many amazing things about God. For example, he taught that

1. God is a physical being
2. named Elohim

3. who lives on or near a planet or star called Kolob;
4. he has billions and billions of offspring (the spirits of all mankind)

5. that he implanted on an empty planet (Earth),

6. where they would have to face the wrath of natural disasters, disease, hunger, doubt and mutual violence

7. all in an effort to determine which of these billions of offspring would worship him enough to become the next generation of ultra-intelligent gods.

A later prophet named Lorenzo Snow put it this way: "As man now is, God once was; as God is now, man may be."

Lorenzo, confident enough to sport the godbeard early on in the program.

In other worlds, for Mormons, God is a super-powerful, mega-smart alien who colonized a planet with his larvae and turned the world into a kind of jungle boot camp as a sort of test. He's currently out there in the Universe somewhere watching us and waiting, waiting to see which of us will qualify to join the ranks of the GODS! It's called the Plan of Happiness, guys!

"HA!" "HA HA HA!" "HA HA!

I can't wait to meet God's god, our Grangod, and all the rest, all the way back to the Very First Colonizer, Alpha. Or did he have a heavenly father as well?

It's all fun stuff to think about!

Babies and the Veil

It's often said in the LDS Church, as it is in others, that newborns and very small children are very close to God and enjoy greater spiritual perception than adults, teens and older children. In Mormon speak we say the Veil of Forgetfulness that keeps us from remembering our pre-Earth life is very thin for new arrivals here on Earth. I don't think it's official doctrine or anything, but it is a widely held belief. I always thought this special sensitivity was an awesome baby power that deserved our admiration and respect. Babies were closer to God than the rest of us. They didn't have to doubt about God and his plan. They remembered things. Special things.
 
But I also couldn't help but wonder why the hell they didn't seem to have a clue about what we were doing when we prayed as a family. It seems like they would at least show some excitement about our attempts to commune with God and even more excitement for God's attentive listening in. Instead of smiling up at Heavenly Father's loving face and basking in the window of spiritual bliss we've just opened, babies act like total heathens during prayers. In church too. They cry, they scream, they play, they eat, they shit, they hit, they sleep, and many other non-spiritual things. It was enough to make me doubt they had any connection to pre-Earth memory at all.

Heavenly fatherliness #39 - Protection

According to popular wisdom, a good father protects his family at all costs.

As the story goes, God cursed us with pain and disease and death. That's the opposite of protection. But that's because Heavenly Father's concerned mostly about protecting our ability to make choices and less concerned about protecting us physically. That's why he was willing to permanently exile a third of his spirit children - because they were anti-choice. That's why God placed us in a crazy, mixed up world, so we can try to navigate it by making righteous choices. Righteousness will then protect us from sin and pain.

OK, that's not really true. No mortal man can be righteous enough to avoid sin, and even the most righteous are still vulnerable to the all sorts of painful experiences, like accidents, sicknesses, natural disasters, deaths of loved ones, ugly breakups, disappointment, and all the rest. All righteous choices can do is make you a prime candidate for the Celestial Kingdom. It's the kind of protection you might expect from a shady insurance company, but with even foggier details.

When it comes to the cost of all of this, apparently it was enormous: the blood sacrifice of one perfectly righteous demi-god. Never mind that that God got a full return on his investment within a few hours. Which one of your children would you give up to die horribly if you knew you could get him or her right back?

*These attributes represent the popular thoughts of Ask Men’s Jullian Marcus, examiner.com’s Tanya Tringali, and Open Talk Magazine’s Glenn Silvestre as per their respective articles on what makes a good father.

Environmentalism and conservationism

Despite Mormonism teaching that we humans are the stewards of the Earth, most Mormons (especially leaders*) say fuck all about being more responsible when it comes to the environment. Mormons are about growth, they're about big houses with big yards (in the middle of the desert) for big families, they're about big profits to pay for big houses and big families who can pay the Church with big tithing checks. Utah Mormons especially tend to be politically conservative and extremely critical of troublemakers like hippies and tree-huggers and just about any environmentalist type.

I remember having numerous arguments with fellow Mormons about how members should be much more concerned about the environment than they are and each time the Mormon argument came down to something like this:

"Well the world has to get worse before it gets better and besides Jesus will set things straight at the Second Coming." In other words, let's not worry about it.

Setting the tone for less-than-environmentally-conscious landscaping.

I knew it was coming every time, and it only made me more and more pissed off. How could I be part of a group that thinks like this? How could the Creator of the world be leading these people? I have to confess it made me doubt.

*Only this year, after some asshole youth leaders from Highland, Utah toppled a rock formation in Goblin Valley State Park, did the Church finally make a statement in favor of conservationism.

Where is Heaven?

Learning a second language opens up your eyes and gives you a fresh perspective on the world. It also gives you an older, even ancient perspective, a glimpse into the past.

I was a bit startled to learn that in my new language I would literally be praying to "our father who is in the sky" or "our sky dad". Mormons don't believe Heavenly Father's in sky! Where does the word "heaven" come from anyway? Oh, it means the clouds? Shit. So "heavenly father" means "cloud dad" or "dad obscured by clouds"? No shit? That makes it sound like we're part of some ancient tribe who worships the sun or something...

I remember as a child wondering about all the depictions of angels living in clouds and Jesus coming down from the clouds and God laying across the clouds and stuff like that and wondering what it would be like to hang out on top of clouds, but to my recollection I always had the presence of mind to not let my thoughts wander too far down that path. We Mormons knew God was in Outer-space on a planet in the Kolob system! We weren't delusionally looking to the sky for God!

The people at the Tower of Babel were naive enough to try to get to heaven by building a tower, though. And our dad in the sky was mad enough he changed all their languages (and apparently no one was insistent enough to get back together to sit down and learn each other's new language). Not like that's the only time the Scriptures indicate that God's in the sky or clouds somewhere. The references are many and often strictly literal.

I couldn't help but doubt. For all I could tell human beings once believed the gods lived in the clouds beyond our vision, but as science and logic expanded our understanding of the universe God has continually been pushed to the edges of human vision and understanding. We've chased God out of the sky with telescopes, airplanes, and satellites; we've chased him from our solar system; now God hides out in a galaxy far far away where we can never find him. He's an alien and space traveler with a taste for Earth clouds. Or is he? I mean Abraham 3 sounds pretty authentic, doesn't it? Nothing about it sounds like 19th century bullshit, right? 

I'm no fan of this movie but it gets some things right.