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!

Why God requires polygamy 2

So why? Why polygamy? The three new essays released on lds.org all make sure to bring up Jacob 2:30 right away.

The Book of Mormon identifies one reason for God to command it: to increase the number of children born in the gospel covenant in order to “raise up seed unto [the Lord].” (See here.)

God declared in the Book of Mormon that monogamy was the standard; at times, however, He commanded plural marriage so His people could “raise up seed unto [Him].” (See here.)

Church members viewed plural marriage as a commandment from God, an imperative that helped “raise up” a righteous posterity unto the Lord. (See here.)

So the answer is: BABIES FOR JESUS! I'm not sure why God needs babies so badly when there are plenty being born all the time. What makes children born "in the covenant" so much more valuable than all the others. Shit, why's he need children at all? They don't even make money to pay tithing. Are children the only people who believe in god stories anymore? No missionary work? Just baby-making sex? Can't God encourage some inter-tribal adoption? 

"Hold on a second, sugar, let's let the pregnant ones catch up."

If God needed babies so badly why didn't Adam get a few hundred wives instead of just little old Evie? Why didn't Noah's boys fill the Ark with God's most fertile? Why didn't Nephi and his brothers have a shit ton of sister wives? Why didn't Jesus' mighty twelve just hang around in harems all day instead of going out and preaching? Why didn't Joseph have any children with his 30 plus wives? Why did Brigham only have a couple more children than he had wives? Why do we see that polygamy fails to produce more children than monogamy?

Does God suck at math? Or was Jacob wrong about the divine purpose of polygamy?

At least Lot had two daughters to rape him instead of just one.

Exclusively for singles

I always hated singles wards. To me they felt as though a couple of grandparents got together for a chat, realized that they all had grandchildren who were single and possibly having a hard time dating, and decided to find a way to coral all these grandchildren together in good faith that all penises would eventually meet a vagina. Seriously, get enough young single adults together in a chapel bumping into each other and sooner or later they'll want to move things to the bedroom. It's a foolproof plan. And naturally (because they're all such wonderful kids) they'll make sure to stop by the temple for a quick sealing before they run off and make babies.

These singles wards are a real hit. The kids are so bonkers about the whole thing that they even organize gigantic summer vacations together so they can have more opportunities to bump into each other, only this time without being dressed for church. It's like EFY only better.

The only problem is that Mormons aren't marrying as early as they used to (but probably not because they don't want to) which means a lot of the penises finding vaginas are doing so out of wedlock. And that's very bad.

In effort to catch people at the new marrying age, the Church has created some very popular singles wards for people over 30. How's it all working out?, you might ask. Not great. The problem: the men. They're not hanging around. Instead they're flocking to their computers to play games and jerk off.

The plus side to all of this is that now those few older men who are hanging around can go back to marrying a handful of lovely young maidens. Polygamy, your time for open practice has returned!

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 #18 - Exemplary behavior

According to popular wisdom, a good father leads by example and stands true to set principles and values he would like his children to follow.

At face value this appears to be God's exact nature and attitude: He's perfect and requires us to try to be perfect like Him.

Then again Heavenly Father turns out to be a very mobile target.

Let's start with God's standard for the family if only because a couple of recent posts mention a husband's attitude and behavior toward his wife. His standards for the family are all over the place. Adam gets it on with his own rib, Abraham sires children through a servant, Lot had children with his daughters, David has a shitload of concubines, Jesus says divorce is adultery, Paul says marriage is for the weak, and Joseph says let me fuck your wife/sister/daughter/mother.... So what's the standard? What are we supposed to do exactly? Whatever it is, you won't figure it out from the scriptures. Or from semi-scripture either.

The easiest example of a broken standard is God's disobedience to the commandment to not kill people. He kills selectively at times and at others indiscriminately, sometimes with natural disasters, other times with is chosen people, like when he ordered the Israelites to kill all the Canaanites - men, women, children, and livestock - and then there was that one time he used bears. Children and livestock? These are beings who cannot think critically and don't know any better (it's not like the Canaanite children had any opportunities to learn about and worship the One True God of Israel), so why should they die? Where is God's understanding and mercy? Who cares? Fuck 'em all! He even orders the killing of unborn babies and their mothers. The only thing more vile would have been if he had ordered his murderers to defecate into the victims' mouths or something like that. Then again he once wanted to make children eat shit pies. Jesus didn't exactly set things straight either. He gave us a pretty weird example to live up to when he cursed that fig tree for not having figs out of season. Are we supposed to be like that?  

When it comes to owning slaves the Bible's pretty clear. You can have them! Hooray!

Marriage, killing, and slavery only make up three examples but they're pretty heavy issues, aren't they? Just think how confusing things get once you get down to the small stuff. 

*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. 

God in the bedroom

I've mused before about the sacredness and beauty of sex and asked a few questions about how God likes it.

It probably doesn't come as any surprise that The Man who has billions of children strongly prefered vaginal sex and isn't traditionally a fan of contraception at all. Thank God he's changed his mind in recent years about what husbands and wives can do to each other. Now whatever the married couple feels okay with is fair game (as long as it doesn't involve more participants, if I'm not mistaken)

and about birth control:

"Decisions about birth control and the consequences of those decisions rest solely with each married couple. Elective abortion as a method of birth control, however, is contrary to the commandments of God."

I wonder what changed God's mind.

Libido

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