SeN: "Hope for immortality" is a Useful Salve for Childhood "rape and strangulation."

[Dr Moore]

Per LDS teachings, Bradford is most likely in the Celestial Kingdom right now, and he's an exalted being, wielding dominion over his own planet/universe. Maybe he's basking in the glory of the stratified society akin to the one depicted in Added Upon. Now, how does this constitute justice in Dr. Peterson's eyes?

In the generalized case, what a profound question. One man’s idea of justice may actually be 180 degrees from pure objective justice that weighs all relevant factors. Imagine, waiting your whole life for that sweet revenge at the bar of God, only to find out that “it” was your fault all along, and that the justice meted out is you having to apologize for the countless ways your self-unaware mortal offended others. Ouch.

[Moksha]

... but we still suffer an eternal penalty by not ever receiving of a fulness.

Whether we chose genocide, drinking a cup of coffee, or not taking a multitude of wives, we can still enjoy some level of comfort lower down in the Kingdom levels.

[Dr Exiled]

... but we still suffer an eternal penalty by not ever receiving of a fulness.

Whether we chose genocide, drinking a cup of coffee, or not taking a multitude of wives, we can still enjoy some level of comfort lower down in the Kingdom levels.

With a TK smoothie? What joy is there in that? Also, it harms the ladies in the lower kingdoms for no reason. Although, I heard there is a secret doctrine Joseph Smith revealed to a select few prior to going to Carthage: a righteous Celestial Kingdom male has the power to lift the ladies up to the highest kingdom to enjoy the love of their man. Yes, they will have to share him with the million or so other wives, but a one in a million night will be fantastic.

[Moksha]

With a TK smoothie? What joy is there in that? Also, it harms the ladies in the lower kingdoms for no reason. Although, I heard there is a secret doctrine Joseph Smith revealed to a select few prior to going to Carthage: a righteous Celestial Kingdom male has the power to lift the ladies up to the highest kingdom to enjoy the love of their man. Yes, they will have to share him with the million or so other wives, but a one in a million night will be fantastic.

Yes, the lower Kingdoms will be devoid of females because they will all become the Celestial Wives of righteous Mormon men. This will be especially needed to populate the larger planets. Less active Elders, given only a small asteroid, can make do with one wife. Super-exalted Elders like Joseph, Brigham, and Bruce R. McConkie will assume their place in the Ruling Council of Gods and will be awarded a huge multitude of wives.

For the remaining lower Kingdom males, think of the TK smoothie feature as handy protection in case you ever dropped a bar of soap in the Terrestrial or Telestial showers.

[Everybody Wang Chung]

I can't believe what I just read. Is DCP really that delusional?

I appreciate the comments in support of DCP from Don Bradley, but when it comes to DCP, the evidence sadly points to him clearly being a sociopath. Remember Don, sociopaths are frequently perceived as charismatic or charming.

DCP checks every box of a sociopath. DCP can’t understand others’ feelings, he often break rules and makes impulsive decisions and harms others without feeling guilty. If DCP's version of the afterlife is true, he should be very scared of the justice he will have to face.

It's clear DCP is a monster when one looks at his hundreds of examples of plagiarism, lies, slander, libel, attempts to destroy careers and reputations. I don't use this term lightly, but DCP is evil.

It's true that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Thankfully Dr. Scratch has done a great deal to expose DCP. On behalf of the Church, I would like to thank Dr. Scratch.

[Doctor Scratch]

An interesting comment from Dr. Peterson, who is still sore over the post I made about recent his stint of sluggishness:

Since Monday, I've been watching my Malevolent Stalker, who has been crusading against me online almost daily for something like fifteen years (and perhaps more), characterize my Monday blog entry (https://www.patheos.com/blo... as an expression of my all-consuming perpetual hatefulness, my lust for the suffering of my enemies, my deranged willingness to exploit even abused and murdered children as instruments of my viciousness, and so forth.

It's an exceptionally disingenuous and nasty misreading even by his standards. He's not as stupid as he's pretending to be; I cannot believe that he really believes what he's posting.

But what's most sad and shameful, I think, is that other people at the place where he holds forth -- some of whom are quite capable of reading and thinking -- haven't called him on this latest malignant distortion. They've yet again remained silent. A few of the folks there have even chimed in to agree with him, it's true, but they're people from whom I expect nothing better. The cowardly silence of the others, though, is disappointing. I shouldn't be disappointed, I suppose. After all, I've had many years of experience with this sort of thing. But, still . . . One does sometimes hope for better.

(I should mention that Don Bradley has spoken up in dissent there. I'm grateful for his honesty and his courage. But he's only an occasional poster there, and very much an ideological and ethical outlier.)

Well, hey: if you want to wax philosophical/theological, why should it bother you so much of the framework you're laying out is applied to more specific, and more personal, situations? Seriously: take that post and filter it through the example of Jerry Bradford. I'm sure that DCP, Greg Smith, John Gee, and all the rest of them view Bradford as this horrible, evil man to dealt them this great injury. So, go ahead and follow the logic of DCP's post: is there going to be vindication in the next life? Was Bradford made to "suffer" somehow due to the butthurt that the Mopologists were forced to endure?

[Doctor Scratch]

I can certainly sympathize with an atheistic perspective on questions like this, and even specifically on Dan Peterson's arguments. In fact, I approached these very arguments quite skeptically when I first heard them from Dan about 15 years ago, as an ex-Mormon atheist.

Don:

Thanks for this thoughtful post. Yes: you are not the only one who's said that Dr. Peterson comes across differently in person. Sadly, for many people, all they know of him is his online persona.

In any event, I found your reading interesting:

I offered the problem of evil and suffering as the primary reason for my disbelief in God, giving the example of the Holocaust. Dan commented along the lines that if death is the end, then Hitler wins - he truly succeeded in exterminating much of the Jewish people: they are forever gone. I couldn't argue with that, but at the time I didn't understand the argument he was building on it. Whether or not Hitler won was, so far as I could see, irrelevant to whether people really continue beyond their deaths.

Dan's presentation of his reasoning in writing now actually clarifies his reasoning a good deal, indicating that he's not arguing that victims of violence must survive their deaths because otherwise the perpetrators win, but rather that our sense of justice gives us reason to hope that such victims survive their deaths. I think this point is difficult to disagree with, and that is the case regardless of whether one thinks of it in terms of the need for punishment or repentance on the part of the perpetrators. Forget accountability for the perpetrators for now and just think of fairness for the victims. If a child murderer and all his victims both suffer the same fate (extinction at death), then they are actually dealt with quite unequally and unjustly by life: the murderer got to live life into adulthood while the children had their lives brutally, and permanently, cut short. Our sense of justice should, and does, recoil at murderers having such absolute and final power over their victims. Justice demands not only some accountability for the perpetrator but also some setting right of things for the victims.

Back to my conversation with Dan, I had expressed that I did see death as the end, since I saw consciousness as entirely dependent on brain function--hence, when the brain stops functioning, consciousness would cease. Dan brought up near-death experiences. I had studied those years earlier and had once put stock in them, but explained that I now saw them as events in the brain. Dan described specific near-death experiences with which I was unfamiliar but in which the experiencer appeared to have veridically observed surrounding events while brain activity was entirely flat. I was skeptical about these, but open, and later read more about one of these cases.

As I described my belief that death was the end, I told Dan that I wished it weren't so--that I would love to see lost loved ones again. Without missing a beat, he told me confidently, and with reassurance, "You will." I remember feeling surprised at his degree of confidence in this, and wishing I could at all share it.

I didn't leave this conversation believing in God or an afterlife. But the experience was positive enough that it became a turning point in the dynamic of our online interactions--we tangled far less after this.

While it had seemed to me from Dan's writing that he cast atheists in a needlessly negative light, when it came to how he treated this particular atheist in real life, I found him reasonable, generous, and kind.

I've since, as you know, changed my views on God, but if I stopped believing in a God and an afterlife again, I would still hope for some kind of ultimate justice. How can we not?

Don

First: in the model that "SeN" is proposing, *both* the murderer and the victim get to live in the afterlife. How is that "justice"? How is that "accountability"? Would this be settled via placement into the different kingdoms? I.e., victim goes to Terrestrial and killer goes to Telestial? Or what? Dr. Peterson proposes that the perpetrators might be forced to watch a "playback" of their lives:

I take comfort in reports from near-death experiencers of the “life review” that they undergo, during which they witness a three-dimensional “playback” of the actions of their lives in the presence of a loving guide who seeks to encourage their learning from it. They recount that they could feel the pain that they had caused others. (Imagine how horrible such a “life review” would be for a Hitler or a Genghis Khan or an Attila the Hun! You want them to experience Hell? That would be Hell.) But they also say that the purpose of the exercise was to help them to understand and to grow. I like to think that even the worst might someday have a shot — perhaps, it’s true, after untold eons — of finding wholeness and forgiveness and of moving forward.

So, the child murderer got to watch a "three-dimensional 'playback'" of their deeds? *That* is supposed to be justice? Ghengis Khan would probably be slapping his knee in delight over such a film.

And in any case, as someone else pointed out, there is something schizophrenic about Dr. Peterson's argument. In the passage I just cited, he's claiming that he wants Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, etc. to "have a shot...of finding wholeness and forgiveness." But contrast that with what he says earlier in the post:

I want to concentrate here, though, on the desire for cosmic justice. This shouldn’t be confused with a lust for vengeance or retribution. It may overlap with that, but it’s quite distinct. (More on that later.)

There are, simply, or so it seems to me, certain humanly-committed evils that are so egregious, so awful in their scope, that no earthly punishment really suffices to satisfy our sense of justice. Consider serial killers, for example. Many of them have tortured and killed dozens, even scores, of victims. One is believed to have murdered as many as 250 people. Several others are in that vicinity. No number of years in prison, no single death (whether by painless lethal injection or hydrogen cyanide in a gas chamber or by firing squad or hanging) seems really commensurate with what such criminals have done. Even those who approve of capital punishment, hearing of their deaths, must inevitably shrug their shoulders, unsatisfied. Something seems lacking. Justice has perhaps been done. But, in another sense, justice has not been done, and cannot have been done. Not fully.

Prison. The gas chamber. Lethal injection. Firing squad--none of this is good enough. Justice hasn’t "fully" been done, and DCP goes on to quote from Peter Berger:

Berger contended that there are cases “in which our sense of what is humanly permissible is so fundamentally outraged that the only adequate response to the offense as well as to the offender seems to be a curse of supernatural dimensions” (65).

He continues:

In other words, Berger seems to be saying, our hearts cry out for transcendent, supermundane, even divine justice.

“Deeds that cry out to heaven,” he writes, “also cry out for hell. . . . [T]he doer [of evil] not only puts himself outside the community of men; he also separates himself in a final way from a moral order that transcends the human community, and thus invokes a retribution that is more than human.” (67-68).

That sounds more like Spirit Prison, no? I.e., completely cut off from God and the afterlife. So, which is it? Watching a 3D movie about your life and feeling bummed out over the heinous things you did, or Spirit Prison? Which of these outcomes seems to fit better with LDS theology? And which would more legitimately constitute actual justice?

And, when both possibilities--3D movie and apologizing vs. totally cut off from God--are applied in a more mundane and personalized way, how does this work out? E.g., if we press Dr. Peterson on the matter of Jerry Bradford or Grant Palmer, what would he say? My guess is that he likely wants it both ways: getting to watch Bradford squirm and apologize and getting denied any "cheap grace" would probably be pretty satisfying. Then again, if the likes of Hitler and John Wayne Gacy get to watch 3D movies, then that sort of means that Bradford has to go through the same "repentance" process as serial killers and murderous dictators.

Interesting to think about, in any case. I hope that Dr. Peterson applies his thoughts to the case of, e.g., Jerry Bradford or somebody else in that same vein.

[Shulem]

Yes, the lower Kingdoms will be devoid of females because they will all become the Celestial Wives of righteous Mormon men. This will be especially needed to populate the larger planets. Less active Elders, given only a small asteroid, can make do with one wife. Super-exalted Elders like Joseph, Brigham, and Bruce R. McConkie will assume their place in the Ruling Council of Gods and will be awarded a huge multitude of wives.

For the remaining lower Kingdom males, think of the TK smoothie feature as handy protection in case you ever dropped a bar of soap in the Terrestrial or Telestial showers.

Woe, and wow. You sure can be nasty when you want to be!

Just for that, I'm going over to the old board and rescue the ANUS thread and (cut and paste) stick it down in the Telestial Forum of this board and dedicate it to Daniel C Peterson.

I wonder if Daniel believes Heavenly Father has an anus?

Oh, don't even get me started. Man God Heavenly Father has all kinds of passions.

Hi Dan! It's me, Shulem -- and I got something for ya.

[Dr Moore]

It’s odd that Dr. P believes it’s the responsibility of various of us to nanny this board, when his own blog board has two highly aggressive nanny-cops on duty at all hours. Double standard much?

[Doctor Scratch]

Per LDS teachings, Bradford is most likely in the Celestial Kingdom right now, and he's an exalted being, wielding dominion over his own planet/universe. Maybe he's basking in the glory of the stratified society akin to the one depicted in Added Upon. Now, how does this constitute justice in Dr. Peterson's eyes?

In the generalized case, what a profound question. One man’s idea of justice may actually be 180 degrees from pure objective justice that weighs all relevant factors. Imagine, waiting your whole life for that sweet revenge at the bar of God, only to find out that “it” was your fault all along, and that the justice meted out is you having to apologize for the countless ways your self-unaware mortal offended others. Ouch.

A great point, Dr. Moore. Here is another counterpoint I will offer up in response to "SeN": there are millions of ex-Mormons who claim that they've been wounded by the LDS Church. They feel that they were lied to; they feel that they were "repressed" or "betrayed" or "offended" in one way or another. There are even people--hundreds of them, I daresay--who say that they've been "hurt" by Dan Peterson himself, in the course of him doing his Mopologetics.

So, how does "divine justice" work out in instances like this? Do you remember that old bromide, "The Church is perfect, even if the people aren't"? So, all the ex-Mormons, shocked at the fact that there is actually an afterlife after all, then get to face the bitter disappointment that they were "stupid"? And so the Mopologists hold a monopoly on that particular brand of justice? (Remember: Dr. Peterson talks frequently about his hopes that Christopher Hitchens and other atheists are "surprised" at the fact that they're now hanging out in an afterlife of some kind. Who is enjoying the "justice" in that scenario? Remember: Dr. Peterson has always relished the idea that the people he's arguing with are stupid.) Is the idea here that ex-Mormon atheists are doubly screwed over: i.e., first they were wounded by the Church, over the sense of having been lied to, and then they have to endure the double indignity of having to face the fact that they were wrong in their assumptions about an afterlife?

And is Dr. Peterson--per his own musings--going to have to face a multiyear "Hell" where he gets to experience the 3D movie pain of the many people he's treated badly? Is he going to at last be forced to understand what it was like to be on the receiving end of the emails he sent to James White? Will he be made to see how Blair Hodges felt when he said, "You go to hell!"?

I mean, seriously, how do Mopologists respond to that idea? For many ex-Mormons, one of the worst, most hurtful and evil things that has ever happened to them was the sense of betrayal from the Church--the idea that the Church was telling lies about any number of things: the Book of Abraham; the Book of Mormon as real history; Joseph Smith's polygamy, and so on. Do you just blow off their sense of having been hurt? Or is there room for "divine justice" even for this in the Mopologists' theology?