Mormonism has 'the' answers

Growing up in the LDS Church I was taught very early on that we had the answers to all the big questions. You know the ones I'm talking about - THE big ones:

1. Who am I?
2. Where do I come from?
3. Why am I here?
4. Where am I going?

For those of you who aren't LDS or have somehow forgotten the answers, they're simple:

1. You are a literal spirit child of the Everlasting God! who loves you and has a Plan for you!
2. You came from God's presence...
3. to be born into a physical body and prove your faithfulness to God by living according to His desires and commandments.
4. Sometime after your physical death your body will be made immortal and reunited with your spirit. Then you will be judged and assigned to your eternal kingdom - a brilliant and golden sun, silvery moon, a tiny wink of bronze or the cold obsolete of pure darkness.

I have no doubt that these answers have lifted the fog of existential confusion from your heart and mind and you're now ready to move forward in life with undaunted assurance of God's love and your place in the Universe. Please contact your local LDS missionaries for further light and knowledge.

Hang on. A big blond family? You guys have to be Mormon already.

No? That's strange, usually the Spirit confirms these words of truth in the hearts of the sincere. This is a bad sign. You might be a two-faced piece of shit destined for Outer Darkness. Believe me, the above answers all make perfect sense when you grow up hearing them every week in church.

Repeat it enough and hopefully it will become second nature.

So what seems to be the problem? Are you maybe wondering what a god is and how he procreates to produce literal spirit children? Maybe you don't quite understand what a spirit is. Or maybe you're skeptical of how this information came to our knowledge in the first place. If this is the case, we can tell you that God has a body of flesh and bone (but not blood for some reason); that he has sex (a lot) with a goddess (or two) that we're not allowed to speculate on or talk about; that a spirit is eternal (but only after conception or birth or something) and, believe it or not, physical somehow (but we don't know how and don't know any specifics); and that we got all of this from a very reliable source named Joseph Smith. It doesn't get any clearer or logical than that!

On to where we come from, you might be wondering where God is. That answer is easy: Kolob! Where's Kolob? Um... we don't need to know that, actually. Why should anyone believe God has a physically restricted presence? Because Joseph Smith said so, duh! Is this star or planet named Kolob found within our Universe? Probably. Why wouldn't God reside outside of Creation? Why is he summer homing on a planet he made? Um... It's nice there. Hm...

The important thing is the present though. What you do right now in this life is crucial! You've got to let God know you're on his side! Because he doesn't already know if we are or not? No, because, well, we can switch sides at any time, you know? Because... Satan! But doesn't God know the future already? Doesn't he know if we'll one day succumb to Satan and forsake him? ...Well, sure, probably, but we don't know that. We fricking fought a war with Satan and his followers while still in the presence of God about whether or not we'd follow God's Plan which was to let us live mortal lives in general ignorance. We chose the Plan, that's why we're here enjoying our bodies and all the rebellious spirits, like Satan, will never get a body. Wait! You're saying we already chose to follow God and helped him conquer Satan before we were born? Definitely! So how the hell does God not already know that we chose to follow him? Why are we taking a second fidelity test? Does God not trust those who fought for him? Hey, whoa! Not so fast! That wasn't a real test because it didn't involve faith! No? No, we were living with God, so we had a perfect knowledge of him, not faith in him. We had to be born on earth to learn to develop faith. Why? Because that's the way God likes it. Oh dear god.

Hey, man, how's God going to know whether or not you deserve gold? Because he knows everything already and because I helped him fight off Satan. No, but God has to judge your faith in Him! Which wasn't required when I chose to fight a war for him? Nope. So why did other spirits fight with Satan if they knew God would win? They were just stupid assholes, man. Ah, obviously. So tell me about this super-sunny, magically awesome kingdom. What's so great about it? Yes! Now we're talking! The Celestial Kingdom is the best! You get to live with God forever and YOUR WHOLE FAMILY! Why would I want that? Is God really funny or something? Does it matter that no one in my family would ever believe anything you're telling me here? Will my brother still be a wife-beating dick? You don't understand! Remember how we're all God's literal offspring? Well, the Celestial Kingdom is where we grow up to be full-blown gods! We will make worlds and universes and have billions or trillions or more babies (think how much sex that is!)! We'll have tons of power and glory and love and it'll be so great FOREVER! Uh, yeah, no thanks. Bye!

Rationalizing warnings

The second set of groupthink symptoms fall under "Closed-mindedness". This involves "rationalizing warnings that might challenge the group's assumptions". 

This entire blog is about how I and others rationalized warnings. For a time I rationalized every problem I encountered with LDS doctrine and tried to keep confrontation at bay for as long as possible. The Church just had to be true. Had to. 

The message was, and still is: don't worry about it now! All questions will be answered after death. All problems solved. All doubts resolved. Believe on.

Eternal progression

Like so many other aspects of Mormonism, eternal progression was one of those things that sounded great on the surface but got weird enough fast enough that I had to stop thinking about it. I've already brought up the conundrum of eternal learning in another post. We don't know how we're going to learn everything in the Universe, but we have faith that we will. And after we've become all-knowing beings, just like God, we'll be fully progressed and ready to build our own perfect universes, right? Who knows?

The real problem here is that once we've become like God, who is perfect (complete) in all things, what progression is left to be had?

The idea that had been conveyed to me was that because saving human beings is God's work and glory, the more people get saved the more glory God gets. So, in a sense, God, despite his perfection-completion, is somehow becoming ever more glorious by making us, his children, like him, and when we, in our perfect, completed state, make and populate our own worlds, and save the human inhabitants of those worlds, we will be not just adding glory to our own perfect selves but also to God's glory because we wouldn't be saving anyone had he not saved us first, so really everyone we saved was saved by God. Then when the humans we save become like us (and God) and start saving their own human children the glory still goes straight back to God to glorify him all the more.

In other words, eternal progression is equivalent to the endless perpetuation of God's salvation scheme. The more people you bring into the club the more respected you'll be. The more obedient children you have the more impressive you look to your neighbors.

Pyramid scheme? No way! This is a sacred law of the Universe.

Heavenly fatherliness #36 - Compassion

According to popular wisdom, a good father shows compassion.

Though I seriously doubt a perfect being has the ability to feel what we feel, Heavenly Father is all about compassion, the Bible says so in more than one place. Proof in the pudding when it comes to God's compassion is, once again, Jesus' sacrifice for humanity as the greatest sign of compassion the Universe will ever know. (Yeah, I know, we run into the whole issue of Heavenly Father delegating responsibilities.)

I'm reminded of a father who recently did his best to put himself in his son's shoes. That father made a real effort to understand and to feel. To share in his son's suffering, if only from a distance (impossible as that is). Does God do that at all? How would he?

The thing about compassion is that it's about the hear and now (the Afterlife is about justice). So where is God here and now? Why is he leaving suffering people with nothing more than a promise that he'll fix all our problems later?

*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.

Heavenly fatherliness #27 - Tough but fair

According to popular wisdom, a good father is tough, yet always fair.

We like to think that God is perfectly just and everyone will receive his or her just reward in the Hereafter. We're obsessed with the idea that everyone will be getting what they deserve one day. I'm not sure why anyone believes this, though. God has given no indication throughout scriptural history of ever being fair. In this life God is totally unpredictable, if that were not the case people would have learned that the benefits of living righteously outweighed the benefits of evil doing. Instead we see that being a backstabbing fuck often pays and that climbing the ladder of success means stomping on the fingers of the people on the rungs below.

And God? He's no better than the rest of us, is he? He'll mess anyone up in order to keep his place at the top.

If God's willing to stoop to racism, genocide, war, murder, theft, petty, controlling rules, etc. here and now, why should we believe he's going to sort everything out at the Final Judgement? Because he said so? Are we really going to trust this lying, sadistic megalomaniac? 

"Don't run! I am your fair and loving Father-God!"

*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.

Presendia Lanthrop Huntington Buell (Smith) Kimball - wife #6

Zina's older sister, Presendia Huntington (September 7, 1810 - February 1, 1892), also married Joseph Smith about two months later. Like Zina, Presendia was already married. She and her husband Norman, with whom she would have seven children, had been following Joseph Smith since joining the Church together in 1836.

Again, Joseph deserves a little credit for being upfront with Presendia about plural marriage (even if he was going behind Emma's back). To his discredit, it seems as though this marriage was likely part of a salvation bargain with Dimick Huntington, the brother of Zina and Presendia who officiated the marriage. That's right, Dimick gave off his sister in exchange for a place with Joseph and the Smith family in the Afterlife.

Dimick Baker Huntington, brother.

After the marriage Presendia continued to live with her first husband, Norman, until 1846 when he couldn't handle the Mormons anymore. She left him and one of her two surviving children, 16-year-old George, and took the other child, six-year-old Oliver, to go live as Heber C. Kimball's plural wife (his sixteenth at that point).

"I think no more of taking another wife than I do of buying a cow." (actual quote!)

Heber Chase Kimball, good man

Unaware that she had already married Heber, Norman tried to get back with Presendia only to be denied. Presendia and Heber had two children together: Presendia Celestia Kimball and Joseph Smith Kimball.

Presendia is yet another example of someone who according to the rules of polygamy should never have taken on a second husband. In the case of her marriage to Joseph Smith, she was not a virgin and the two never produced children; in the case of her marriage to Heber Kimball, she still wasn't a virgin and she was definitely sealed to another man.

But you don't need the rules to get a sense of how messed up the marriage game was in Nauvoo. If there is any righteousness in Presendia's story, you'll have to help me find it.

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.

The temple - baptisms for the dead

I had a doubt or two when I first did baptisms for the dead. I doubted I was worthy enough considering how much I thought about not thinking about how badly I wanted to see boobs, for example, but my main doubts came during or after the experience of being baptized "for and in behalf of" a deceased person. I had heard countless stories of people seeing the spirits of the dead hanging around waiting for you to get dunked only to scamper off like a puppy to play outside finally freed from Spirit Prison. Other's had said that you would maybe just feel the presence of the spirits, or maybe just the joy of relief that the spirits were feeling as they witnessed and accepted their baptism. Then again, maybe all you'd feel is the Joy of the Holy Ghost witnessing to you the truthfulness of "the work". I didn't feel any of it. 

So how did I feel? I felt worried that a temple worker would discern through the Spirit that I was unworthy to be there because I wanted to see boobs. I felt uncomfortable about my wet clothes clinging too tightly to my crotch and revealing my white Hanes briefs. I felt weird about the being essentially alone in a room with two men I didn't know as they conferred the Gift of the Holy Ghost on me on behalf of the people I had been baptized for. It wasn't a very spiritual experience for me (nor would it ever be despite fasting and praying and preparing each time I went), and I wasn't anxious to go back and do it again.

Despite all of that discomfort and doubt, I stuck it out for years. I went back various times throughout my teenage years to be baptized and confirmed for the dead. I doubted my doubts, but that didn't improve anything for me.