As Above, So Below - the religion thread (formerly: People of California, beware)

Thanks Peter!



But what does that mean exactly? Are you saying its authors were actually aware of evolution and decided to write in metaphor, or that you interpret the authors' lack of evolutionary knowledge to suit the facts of reality? (In which case I could interpret a set of cooking instructions as a metaphor for how to live my life, or a weather forecast as a metaphor for the fickleness of human emotion.)

The latter. The Bible is almost never to be taken literally, because if you do, creationism isn't the worst possible result. There are *loads* of metaphors there, not as poetic as what I saw of Qu'ran, but still they're talking parables, not the real story. Unless we want to think that a few trumpets could tear down a wall!

Only because years of secularist and scientific progress has put pressure on literalism. (And of course there are still many people who do take it literally.) Though I feel like we've tread this ground a few times in this thread already!

You could have a lot of fun going through the Bible and coming up with ridiculous metaphors for mundane things :D Recently I had the hilarious (at least to me) and entirely unserious thought that maybe all the genealogies, which seem utterly boring and pointless to the modern reader, were actually an archaic form of erotica...the readers would take all the "x begot y" and fill in the blanks by imagining their ancestors doing it. It works except for the ancestors part, lol. Yes, I know there was an actual purpose for the genealogies :P

Anyway, I promise I'm not secretly a Mormon. I just happen to agree with them on that particular point. I am curious though, do Mormons believe that planets are conscious/sentient beings?

It’s hard for me to answer your question without a lot of context. So, while this is a crazy long post, I’m not sure how to answer you in any other way. So come back to this post when you have a while, grab a snack to munch, and see what you think.

(By the way, I could have started every sentence of this explanation with “I believe that…” Instead I’ve just written this as if it’s just facts. Please understand I’m not trying to force what I think on anyone else or that I expect anyone else to accept it as reality. All of this is what I believe to be true.)

There is a spirit in every person that is eternal. We will exist forever after death, and we existed before this life. We believe that our premortal existence was in the presence of God, who is the father of our spirits. God was different than us in two major ways: He had a perfect and glorified physical body, and He possessed a perfect, all-knowing, and all-powerful character. Our great desire to be like Him led Him to create this world for us as a place where we could obtain a physical body and have experiences that would help us become like our Father in Heaven.

And so here we are, our memories of this pre-mortal life necessarily removed so that this life becomes something of a grand test designed to form us into eternal beings like our Father. Now to your question. I think there are a few reasons for suffering in general. Sometimes we suffer because of the wrong or foolish choices of others. Sometimes we suffer because accidents happen (God knows these accidents will happen, but allows some or most of them to happen). Sometimes we suffer because it's a natural and normal effect of having a mortal body. These bodies are designed to mature and eventually expire, and suffering is a big part of that. Another reason for suffering is that Satan, another of our spirit siblings who was cast out of God's presence for rebellion and who therefore will be denied the privilege of receiving a body, wants to stop as many of us as possible from returning to God's presence and eventually becoming like Him. A scripture in the Book of Mormon (an ancient text comparable to the Bible, though it took place on the American continent) says the following about the devil: "He seeketh that all men may become miserable like unto himself" (2 Nephi 2:27). He has no power over us unless we permit it, but he has succeeded in convincing a great many people to do and believe things that will make them and others unhappy. There are probably other reasons for suffering that I'm not thinking of right now.

Now, none of these reasons for general suffering are of much consolation when someone goes through a truly terrible experience. And the question of why God would allow that particular thing to happen is frequently asked by those who experience it. My answer to that is a gigantic "I don't know." Through Isaiah, God said "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways... for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:8-9). I know that must sound like a huge copout to many, but that doesn't make it untrue. To me that scripture is saying "I know this doesn't make sense right now, and I don't expect it to. I know exactly what I'm doing. Trust me. You'll understand why someday, but for now, be still, and know that I am God." Another scripture from the Book of Mormon explains this: "He doeth not anything save it be for the benefit of the world..." (2 Nephi 26:24). It's easy to point to a tragedy or atrocity and ask "How on earth is that for the benefit of the world?" I don't blame anyone for asking that, but I believe that everything God does is perfectly calculated to bless the greatest number of His children in the greatest way possible. I think that our sufferings here cannot be understood unless viewed in His eternal perspective. Because of our limited view of things, death seems like the ultimate bad that can happen to anyone. God wouldn’t think about death this way at all. Death is a natural and necessary part of every life – another step in our eternal progression. Similarly, our mortality is little more than a blip on the eternal radar. If we lived for eons before this life and will live forever after it, then in the grand scheme, this life so so short. This comes as small consolation to those who suffer! But it is still true. This eternal perspective would lead God to feel very differently about suffering than we do. Whatever suffering we endure here, however long, is still a “brief moment” to God.

Yet I do not believe that He is indifferent about it. Nor do I believe that He cannot understand how we feel about it. Quite the opposite, I think our suffering saddens Him greatly, and I think He comprehends it perfectly. There’s a book of scripture unique to the LDS church called the Book of Moses that contains an account of the creation of the world to the great flood told through the frame of a vision given to Moses sometime after his burning bush experience. In this book a prophet named Enoch has a vision of the future flood of the world, during which the Lord begins to weep over the suffering of His children. Surprised to see this, Enoch asked, “How is it that thou canst weep, seeing thou art holy, and from all eternity to all eternity?” God answers, “Behold these thy brethren; they are the workmanship of mine own hands, and I gave unto them their knowledge, in the day I created them; and in the Garden of Eden gave I unto man his agency. And unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood….wherefore should not the heavens weep, seeing these shall suffer?” (Moses 7:29, 32-33, 37)

There is something about the Atonement of Jesus Christ that also provides comfort through suffering. We believe that Jesus volunteered for His role in the premortal life, that He came to earth the son of God and a mortal mother, and that He lived a sinless life, suffered and died for sin, and then was resurrected. We believe that His sufferings were more than for sin. Isaiah hints at this when he wrote “Surely he has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4). A scripture in the Book of Mormon explains this further: “And he shall go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind: and this that the word might be fulfilled which saith he will take upon him the pains and the sicknesses of his people. And he will take upon him death, that he may loose the bands of death which bind his people; and he will take upon him their infirmities, that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities” (Alma 7:11-12). So we believe that Jesus experienced firsthand every pain, sickness, sadness, and every other emotional, physical, or mental distress. Jesus does not allow us to suffer anything that He himself did not also suffer for. This He did so that He knows exactly what we go through, and how to comfort us if we come to Him.

This has been a massively long post, so I apologize for continuing, but allow me one that thing. One of our apostles has compare our eternal existence to a grand three-act play. Act I is our premortal life, Act II is mortality, and Act III is life after death. Because none of us remember act I and we’ve been dropped into the middle of Act II, there are many things happening on this stage that don’t make sense to us. There is a script for this play, and studying that will help us make some sense of what’s going on, but it’s also important to understand that happy endings don’t happen in the middle act. Everything will be resolved in the final act. Life is unfair, but eternity will be perfectly fair to every person. I don’t see how anyone that believes in a perfectly loving God could believe anything else.

Well, that’s about all I want to say about this for now. If you’ve made it all the way through this post I award you 10 points! Thanks for reading.

-Chris

Quoting this point because I think it's brilliant, one that I've never thought of before. Martijn, you might as well get the ball rolling on free will!

Well, I don't think that any sensible theologist would say that people get cancer as punishment by God for bad deeds (though actually some might say that it's a test of faith, much in the vein of the Book of Job) and/or we get cancer/tuberculosis/flu (to cover every possible etiology of an illness) because we just feel like it!

I thought of this a few years ago and it was one of the biggest pieces of artillery in my personal battle against fundamentalism...as Christians love to use the free will argument to justify hell, which was my single biggest problem with Christianity.

BTW, I should thank Steven for getting me to read Dawkins a few years ago...while it didn't convert me to atheism proper, it definitely helped me start breaking out of the box I had been locked into since childhood...

I need to borrow The God's Delusion from a friend, I have to read some Dawkins. I don't expect to be converted to atheism, I expect to start thinking more about certain elements of my life. With all my reading about philosophy and all, I realized recently that I have no views at all in some regards.

I want to read The God's Delusion, THEN some Soeren Kierkegaard (called a Christian pre-existentialist), preferrably Either/Or.

I've promised myself more Kierkegaard for way too long

I know, many Christians do. The reason that I wrote Adam and Eve and a piece of fruit (btw, indeed, the Bible talks about a fruit, not an apple), was to make it clear that I was talking about Christians who do take it literally, in that they actually believe those two individuals existed in the Garden of Eden and that they angered God by eaten the fruit, causing all the problems observed in the world.

While the non-literal approach is the more reasonable one of the two, I think a vastly more reasonable position to take is that the authors probably didn't mean these stories in a fancy allegorical way, but that they really believed it; the story is an example of a primitive culture trying to make sense of the world by coming up with an explanation that made sense to them. I see big problems with people looking back at such ancient texts and interpreting them allegorically through their modern glasses. It reminds me of people who read Nostradamus and retroactively force-fit modern interpretations into it.

Anyway, for Christians who accept the concept of original sin, but not the literal belief of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, I wonder what they consider this original sin to be. Anyone know?

Peter

I lol'ed.

I don't know if any of you have seen this 3 part documentary with Richard Dawkins

Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VV3vjNSG10

It's about the questions people have about life, death, ... and how science and reason offers an answer to what usually is addressed by religion. Souls, sin, death, life, ...

Especially episode two is fascinating. Dawkins is the first British public person to let his genome researched. When he gets the results at the end of the episode, it's absolutely fantastic and creepy at the same time. It's a wonderful thought that this research will do wonders in the future (it took several months for it to be decoded!). Essentially, what he says (and what his book Selfish Gene is about), is that genes life forever. We are a product of the genes. Death is triggered by genes. Fucking fascinating!

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, anyone?
Any Pastafaries around?