Polygamy - difficult tasks

The LDS Church's recent explanation of polygamy in Nauvoo makes it clear that God's pretty much a horrible communicator and very much a dick.

Although the Lord commanded the adoption—and later the cessation—of plural marriage in the latter days, He did not give exact instructions on how to obey the commandment. [...] When God commands a difficult task, He sometimes sends additional messengers to encourage His people to obey. Consistent with this pattern, Joseph told associates that an angel appeared to him three times between 1834 and 1842 and commanded him to proceed with plural marriage when he hesitated to move forward. During the third and final appearance, the angel came with a drawn sword, threatening Joseph with destruction unless he went forward and obeyed the commandment fully.

Did you catch that? God couldn't be bothered to tell Joseph Smith what he was supposed to do exactly or why, but he was insistent enough that his prophet get with other women that he sent an angelic hit man to lean on him.

"Goddammit, Joe, you faithless fuckface, I'm gonna count the three!"

What kind of loving being would act like that? Why is that God's more than willing to lay out explicit instructions for communicating with him, ship building, tabernacle design, temple building, temple dealings and just about all aspects of our daily lives (including diet), but not for plural marriage and temple sealings?

Wait, what? He did give explicit instructions to Joseph on how to practice polygamy in 1843? Hm...

No, no, don't help me!

I didn't know what to think of ole Yahweh after he zapped Uzzah. OK, sure, he wasn't supposed to touch the Ark of the Covenant, I know, but this was seriously a split second decision sort of situation.

Take a moment to imagine the scene. You're trudging along, guarding the most holy object the world has hitherto seen - Yahweh's hand written law safe in a chest! - and you see one of the oxen pulling the box stumble and the chest starts to slide. "Oh my dear LORD God (Jehovah), no! If the tablets of stone hit the ground who knows what will happen! They might break! They might be defiled! Yahweh might get PISSED like he did back at Sinai! Heads will roll!" You can't let it happen so in that split fraction of a second you reach out to prevent the calamity and BAM! you're dead.

It's like Yahweh's a feisty, gun-welding old man who furiously insists on doing everything himself.

All you wanted to do was keep the holy holy, save and preserve the sacred, prove your vigilance in guarding the gifts of God (or maybe you didn't even have time to think about any of that, maybe you reached for the ark instinctively the same way you try to catch a glass that's about to topple), and now you're divinely smitten to death. Congratulations.

Was this killing of Uzzah really justifiable? Can I respect and worship a god who will kill for such a petty "offense"? Can I love a god who constantly threatens his people with death? Who does this god think he is, anyway?

The literal baptism of the earth

Growing up my favorite stories in the Bible were always the ones that had the most to do with animals. The more prominent role animals played in the story, the more I liked it. favorites included Daniel and the lion's den, Jonah and the whale, the plague of frogs in Egypt, Adam naming all things living in the Garden of Eden (duh!), and of course Noah's ark. The story of the ark is still hard to beat. I love the idea of saving and caring for all the animals in the entire world and being up close with so many exotic species in all their well-behaved glory. I would have given anything to be on that boat with essentially every kind of Earth’s land animals as my pets. 

My enthusiasm for the animals, however, did not deter me from posing the question of just how exactly Noah would have found them all (think of all the animals living near the poles or in Australia or the Americas), sexed them, brought them back to his ark (I liked to imagine a Divine hand guiding them all in a mysterious migration pointed in Noah’s direction), somehow fit them all in (maybe he knew Merlin’s song from Disney’s The Sword in the Stone), kept them fed (I remembered seeing a picture in my Zoo Books of how much food an elephant eats in a year and it was basically a small hill), kept their pens clean (cows on farms for example always seemed to be up to their knees in manure), and kept them from killing each other (because animals do that quite naturally). Then I couldn’t help but wonder how in the world they managed to get back to their respective habitats (imagine the box turtles hiking from the Middle East to the Eastern United States, for example). 

Even as a little kid I knew the story was fishy, to say the least, but I held on to it as best I could. Years later as a missionary I found myself reading the Student Manual to the Old Testament about how the earth had to be literallybaptized by immersion to eventually attain its celestial glory, and how maybe - just maybe! - the continents moved to their current locations during the year of total submersion. It was clear, just as it had been from my earliest memories of the story, that the contents of Genesis 6-9 were to be understood as literal, historical events.

It was all too staggeringly hopeful. The story of Noah's ark full of pairs of some ten million species and the supposed flood that covered every mountain top on planet earth pointed me to one single conclusion: THIS IS FICTION, NOT HISTORY. 

And yet I doubted my doubts and believed on.