William Schryver wrote:Yes, the predictable reactions, respectively, from the agnostic former Christian and the atheist former Mormon. Both consumed with repulsion towards the concept of exalted flesh, each in his own peculiar fashion; each as bereft of faith in the divine as the other; neither able to reconcile the desire for meaning with the seeming reality of meaninglessness.
Actually, Will, I'm not repelled by the concept of exalted flesh. I wish it were true that I could become a resurrected, glorified mammal God someday. It's not a repulsion that elicits such responses as the one you quoted in your post. It's simply that I don't believe that's it's true. There is no glorified mammal God out there in the universe somewhere, procreating homo sapiens spirits with his harem of glorified homo sapiens wives. This is simply not a credible belief. I don't hate the doctrine of pre-existing homo sapiens spirits with the potential to become mammal Gods someday, Will. It's simply not true. It's a belief invented by human beings.
What I
do hate, is the way people condition each others' minds to actually believe this mythology as fact. Look at Gazelam. He's obviously a smart guy, and yet he really believes that Noah saved humanity from extinction on a giant wooden ship four or five thousand years ago. He just said that the Australian aborigines must have been descendants of Ham. He doesn't believe that evolution is responsible for the diversity of species on Earth. He believes that Adam and Eve, 6000 or so years ago, were literally, and in fact the first homo sapiens on the Earth.
And he believes all of this because he has been conditioned, and chosen, to accept the "revelations" of a charlatan and a collection of bronze age goatherders, above mountains of physical evidence. And this is just the Mormon version of the same process by which Scientologists come to really believe that Xenu ruled the galaxy 75 million years ago, or Hindu true believers really believe that Rama's army of monkeys built the Ram Setu limestone and sand formation between India and Sri Lanka. Or true-believing Incas really believed that sacrificing a young virgin girl somehow appeased some god who controlled conditions that affected them as a people, or whatever.
Sad.
What's really sad is that you, who are also a smart guy, believe at least some of this stuff too, because you have to or else your beloved Prophets, Seers, and Revelators are conclusively demonstrated to have been completely clueless about the "truths" they taught in the past. What's really sad is that you, a smart guy, love and honor Joseph Smith for being such a great guy, when in fact he was a liar and a serial philanderer who broke his wife's heart over and over, and then f**ked her best friends for good measure. It's sad how you make so many excuses and so many allowances for Joseph Smith, so he can continue being the great guy to you that you've decided to believe he is, when if it were some other church's leader with the exact same history, it would be pretty obvious to you that the guy wasn't what he claimed to be.
Joseph Smith is your L. Ron Hubbard, Will. He's your Charles Taze Russell and Joseph Franklin Rutherford. He's your Ann Lee. He's your Mary Baker Eddy. He's your Pat Robertson. He's your Jerry Falwell. He's your Joseph Ratzinger, your Rowan Williams. He's your Warren Jeffs, your Marshall Applewhite, and your David Koresh. He's your Jim Jones.
Will, it must be excrutiatingly obvious to you that all of these people I mentioned above are man-made frauds. They are all people who represented themselves in one way or another as God's representative on Earth. And all were believed in by people, some by the millions, some by the thousands, some by the hundreds, and some only by the dozens. Every one of those people I mentioned have, or had people who believed in their divine mission every bit as much as you believe in Joseph Smith, and yet you, Will Schryver, know they were not who they claimed to be. You can look around and see how easily so many other people have been fooled by their faith and belief in people whom they took for representatives of God, and yet for some reason or other you cannot allow yourself to see that
you are just like all the believers in these other false prophets. You are not an exception to the rule, Will. You're every bit as deceived in your faith and belief in the divine appointment of Joseph Smith as these other people's believers are or were. Every single bit.
But you'll just dismiss this with a wave of the hand and go on thinking it may be so with all these others, but
you're different. You're different because Joseph Smith
really was what he claimed to be. And you'd know it if he weren't, right? You'd know it because somehow your insight into your own credulousness and ability to believe is somehow so much more fine-tuned than the insight billions of other false believers have in the world. They just don't get it, but you do.
That, will, is what is truly sad.
In my judgment, the concept of God as the literal father of Jesus is inextricably connected to the concept of his universal fatherhood. If God is not the father of Jesus, in the only way he possibly could be, then (as I stated previously) there is no such thing as God.
So, as a product of organisms which reproduce sexually, as a result of evolution, you naturally envision a God who reproduces sexually too. I guess if you were a potato you'd be singing "I am an eye of God", or if you were a bamboo you'd be singing "I am a extension of the Prime Root System", or if you were a bacterium you'd be singing "I am the Googleplexth subdivision of God".
On the planet Zork there are the octopus people who reproduce by ovulating and ejaculating into a quiet pool of water and then go on their merry way, letting their tadpole people to fend for themselves. Their God, naturally, doesn't actually have a harem of eternal wives. Their God is just some anonymous Prime Ejaculator who created their universe and then went off to create a new one - naturally there are a lot more Deists than Theists on Zork, but don't blame them - they're just creating a God after their own image too, and unfortunately their model of parenthood simply lends itself more to the Absentee God framework than ours. Hey, don't judge them - that's speciesist.
Mormonism ceased being a compelling topic for me when I finally came to terms with its transformation from a personality cult into a combination of a real estate company, a SuperPac, and Westboro Baptist Church. - Kishkumen