This does support the pull out your metaphorical muskets and end many of our members idea that a dear prophet, seer, and revelator has advocated. So surely in the context of Mormonism it makes sense. But you'd hope religions had more of a desire to accommodate people.I have a friend up in Seattle who left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints back in the 1980s. My friend has a lot of bizarre ideas, and in many ways his life has gone to pot since he left the Church. I really think the Church is better off without him. Similarly, if people feel so strongly that vaccinations are dangerous that they're willing to ignore Russell Nelson's advice over them, and are concluding that because of that advice Nelson must be a fallen prophet, then again the Church is better off without them.
I thought "bizarre ideas" would have to include things like defending polygamy, but apparently there is something more bizarre. You would think if Mormonism were true it should learn to make room for many to all people--not try and find excuses to refuse people and push people out. But perhaps Holland, KevinSim and many others have taken some good notes from the larger Christian environment which has for centuries played the game of excluding people for not being real Christians or murdering them for not believing right.
In an ideal world if a religion were true, you'd think it'd open up its net wide capturing all so as they got involved they'd clearly see the bright hope and goodness of the religion. Bu religion tends to be too insecure for my tastes. That insecurity often gets magnified if one asks questions or offers challenges to dogma. I don't want to carry on too much down this road because this is what turns me off most about religion, or maybe second most. This idea that questions are settled and questions raised with the understanding ultimately we can't know are treated as if they are answered magically and then its claimed we do know. Religion is just so boring in that sense.
But what comes to my mind every so often is the question of what if Mormonism were true? I don't see how it could be in the sense of everything it teaches or preaches as worthy belief is true...but generally or loosely. What if there are in our vast universe other planets inhabited by life, and it just so happens God is on one of them? That doesn't' necessarily make Mormonism true, but if that were the case, its a something. It's a prediction made by Mormonism that would be true(?).
Let's say in this framework of things, the Holy Ghost is a personage of spirit and as such can zoom or as far as our imagination can take it, transport from place to place. He moves so quickly time slows down, so he's able to visit each person multiple times a day, gathering data and sending it back to God's grand database of love, to be filtered and queried for inspection.
Let's say our bodies do have a spirit inside them, or tied to them, and when our bodies die our material spirits continue our consciousness, and we are given new bodies fashioned after our mortal ones. It may be that we cease to exist in billions of years, but for all intents and purposes that's pretty much eternity to our mortal minds anyway.
So we have God, who is one of billions of other gods, who are all gods of many billions of others. Some relatively few of us get our own planets, perhaps in this ever-expanding universe. others are housed on God's or Jesus' planets, while most others get sent to the satan planets to suffer, toil, gnash teeth and pout for, you know, "eternity".
None of these assumptions would suggest things like Mormonism's racism or homphobia, the Book of Abraham, and polygamy are true, I guess. The Book of Mormon may have no legit historicity to it. My own favorite, Jesus may never have really lived. So in a sense, Mormonism still wouldn't be true. But, you know, vaguely, loosely, the religion had some truth to it...as much as can be expected in this limited realm we find outselves in.
I suppose in this conception I'm denying that many of the religion's truth claims are true, becaue, I mean, they're dumb. But I suppose loosely the religion, as could be the case for any of them, does present something conceptually loosely true.
If true, it sure makes what would be reality a bit lame. Maybe boring or mechanical too. Many billions upon billions upon billions getting sorted as one would sort beans, at some point...and we just continue on.
