Reconstructed and delusional thought histories

I don’t know why I assume that everyone has had an experience of marveling at the peculiarly of where they are, who they are, and what they perceive their lives to be. I have had dozens of them. A sense of surprise and wonder around a momentary awareness of my world – a world built, decision by decision, by me but still almost foreign and strange. “How did I get to be here, doing this?” I assume everyone has had a similar experience entirely without any good justification for that assumption.

“I’m a nice guy, a good guy.”

“I’m a flawed but moral person, a disciple of Christ.”

“I want to be ethical.”

“I want to be an ethical advocate for informed compassion.”

I have thought of it in different ways over the years. I don’t know where this need comes from. If I am honest, it’s as much about being able to feel good about me as it is about empathy and compassion for others but, just as honestly, I feel that is shifting more and more to the space of real altruism.

This need has pushed and pulled me through different worlds and spheres in my life. Pushed and pulled against other urges and desires. The tempest of life – influences, desires, ideas spinning around us clutching at our ‘hearts’, minds, hungers. We are tossed and drawn, gently and violently, imperceptibly, joyfully, painfully from one understanding to another. We learn and we unlearn. We grow and we regress. Through it all, if we are thoughtful, we hope that we are making some sort of progress – whatever that can possibly mean.

As a boy I wanted to be nice and gentle and caring to the only people in this world that mattered to me, women, and I was. I was gentle and caring but insincere and inauthentic. I wanted their attraction and affection and eventually I learned how to get it. I sincerely wanted to be good to them, but I didn’t learn how to be sincere with them and so I hurt people and I hated myself and fled from myself and my world to the Navy.

I fled myself and went spiritually adrift. It wasn’t long before I found a fix for myself, in the form of a good woman and a world of simple moral absolutes. I took refuge on that island for a long, long time. Taking the calmness of the lagoon as all I needed. I wasn’t living; I was protected from living, from navigating the tempest that is life furiously churning just beyond the breakwaters made of religious dogma. Once I realized that, and I realized there was deep suffering that I was ignoring and contributing to by being on that island, I had to leave, and I had to leave alone.

I built a raft with sticks of my own budding ideas and twigs from Hitchens and Harris and I bound it all together with intellectual curiosity. My tiny sail was fashioned from offended sensibilities. Then I headed out, back into the storm, and waves. I think that I will make similar mistakes as those that sent me into the arms of the Navy and of religion but I am self aware in a way I never have been. I am world-aware in a way that I never have been. I have maps. I am adding to my vessel, slowly, and I hope that I will eventually find a good rudder, maybe even an anchor but for now I am content to know that I am sailing.

Why the LDS (Mormon) faith is a logical choice: Prophecy

This is the second to the last in my series about how the LDS faith (Mormonism) is a relatively logical choice among the Christian denominations. I am doing this series for two reasons.

1 – I think that it is good to understand this influential religion and some of the reasons why it is so tenacious in such an antagonistic social environment.

2 – So many of the arguments that skeptics/atheists use against the “standard” Christian dogma’s are often not applicable to the Mormon tenets. And if one might try making an argument about, say, the injustice of Hell to a Mormon - they might be in for some surprises.

Another aspect of “traditional” Christian doctrine that bothered me was the inconsistency between the Old and New Testament regarding the nature of divine communication. Throughout the Old Testament God does his own talking. God speaks to the prophets, to the people. God walks with them. The OT God goes out of His way to create situations (silly for a God to need to do?) where He could show off his power and prove to the Israelites, and their enemies, that He was their God. Divine chest pounding is rampant throughout the OT. Not so much, in the New Testament, and absolutely not now, unless you are Mormon. The claim that God is a constant being, the same now and forever is in complete contradiction with these ‘stylistic’ differences – especially if you believe that Adam and Eve are the first full humans. Why would the Israelites deserve/require so much more direct intervention?* The idea that we, in these troubled and doubtful times, are any less in need of prophet, of demonstrations of power is ridiculous. If you believe that all the secular influences are a threat to a spiritual connection to the true gospel then we are in a more treacherous time than we have ever been. How has Christ’s atonement, or his teaches, supposed to have eliminated the need for that more direct and demonstrative interaction with God?

The Mormon answer to this is pretty simple. There is no difference. We have always needed a prophet as much now as ever and there is one. Currently his name is Thomas S. Monson. Elder Monson receives direct communications from God, as did Gordon B. Hinkley before him and so on back to Joseph Smith. The clear line of communication between God and his people, through a prophet, is the same today as it was in OT times. While this seemed a real strength at first to me it was ultimately this doctrine above all others that proved to be the undoing of my faith.
Here is why:

1. First and foremost a prophet must be a prophet. If they are the prophet and speak for the church, even if there wasn’t a biblical requirement of infallibility (Deuteronomy 18:20-22), there would be a logical one. We have too much information and history on all the modern LDS prophets to ignore how terribly fallible they were. Not fallible as people**, that wouldn’t be a problem, but fallible as prophets, seers and revelators. They are invariably products of the thinking of their eras with no evidence to a higher, more eternal understanding of truth (moral or physical). The minute you hang your hat on a doctrine of prophetic (or papal) authority then the validity of your entire doctrine is contingent on the validity of that single claim and it will invariable prove to be the easiest claim of all to disprove. There are more reasons below why this doctrine of modern day revelation fails but this one refuses any attempt to be reconciled by any other means but blind faith, and dismissal of the preponderance of evidence so completely that you don’t really need anything else. This is the one that forced me to start pulling at the foundation of my house of cards.
Other reasons it fails…

2. Even with the LDS reinstating the prophets on earth, there is still a vast difference between the God of the OT and the one most Mormons 'know' now. There are no more miracles; there are no more overt demonstrations of destructive and genocidal power. The only similarity is that there is a prophet who speaks to God. Some Mormon lore maintains that there is a chair for the prophet AND a chair for God in a special temple room where the prophet and He converse, and that both chairs are equally worn. So the contention is that at least some of the communications are physical face to physical face.

3. If the divine design calls for a prophet to lead his people, what than of the great apostasy, the time between the death of the last of Jesus’ apostles and the revelation to Joseph Smith? How can the wickedness of the Dark Ages be a reason for God to remove his presence instead of a reason for greater intervention? Are we supposed to accept that there was not one single person throughout all those centuries worthy of the “true” gospel? Were all the prophets of this dispensation so much more virtuous then everyone that lived for almost 1800 years? If the contention really is going to be that Joseph Smith was the most worthy individual, the only one able to receive the fullness of the Gospel throughout all that time, well that is a hard case to make considering the true (untarnished, and unembellished, unimproved) history of this character.

4. The Mormon Church’s attempt to reconcile the modern dogma with the OT is just as problematic as any attempt to align the OT and the NT, because they don’t work together. You can align your dogma with one but not the other. Most modern Christians align themselves (sort of) primarily with the NT ignoring most of the old, under the blanket idea that Christ made the OT essentially irrelevant, somehow knowing which few little bits like the 10 commandments, are still relevant. The Mormon Church makes a valiant attempt at bridging the gap, more fully embracing both. This bit about prophecy shows how much folly there is in that idea. Christ was not a prophet, at least not as those that came before. He didn’t receive revelations, he shared that which as innate knowledge. He preached from a totally different kind of authority, and the apostles continued in the same vein thereafter. A place of personal spiritual awareness and authority, much less so the walk and talk and negotiate with God prophets like Noah, Abraham and Moses. So to align themselves more so with the OT the Mormon Church has to distance itself more from the NT in some crucial ways. This is inevitable because they are fundamentally different representations of a fundamentally different God.

* They were not so primitive as to lack the ability to understand the more subtle concepts of modern Christianity. They were not so crude that they couldn’t understand forgiveness, it may not have been as valued culturally, but it wasn’t beyond them. God was not a respecter of cultural justifications for immorality anyway. If loving thy neighbor as thyself is so central a theme to the message from God why was it a new concept in the NT? Why were the Israelites the only people of consequence before the NT, if all the people were God’s creation?

**So much of the stuff that the LDS prophets have established as official doctrine in the past but is unpopular now (Blood atonement, Adam-god theory, spiritual inferiority of blacks, etc.) is disavowed by saying that those were the statements of true prophets but that they we not speaking from divine inspiration when the said them. If you read the statements, it’s pretty clear they were absolutely confident of the divine authority from which they were speaking. So if THEY didn’t know, shouldn’t they have? Who are we to say they were mistaken – except it is current prophets that are saying it.

Why the LDS faith (Mormon) is a logical choice: Original Sin

One of the traditional Christian doctrines that bothered me in my initial investigations was the tenet of Original Sin. The idea that we are “created sick and commanded to be well.”* The assertion that the fall of one man, Adam has doomed all of mankind to the burden of a sinful nature. The very idea that Infant baptism is required lest the poor innocents be damned is antithetical to the idea of a just and loving God. This comes from the Catholic cannon, but there are equivalents in all the Christian religions.** We are all base and sinful creatures, due to the fall of Adam, or just because God made us that way – it doesn’t matter. It is unjust either way. If you believe in Hell, if you believe that we are a sinful people, if you believe that “wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction” ( Matthew 7:13, 14) than how cruel is God to create so many doomed creatures. Better He had left us unmade then to make us such that the vast majority of us will endure eternal torment. Even if He was powerless to control our nature He would have known we would have ended up this way.

The Mormon version of this still establishes us as a sinful and imperfect people. It still says most of us are headed for “destruction” – they have to, they use the KJ Bible. The key differences are these:

1. The Mormon version of “destruction” isn’t so much eternal torture, but eternal life without spiritual advancement.
2. The specific doctrine of “Original Sin” is addressed by the 2nd Article of Faith. (2nd of 13 published in a letter from Joseph Smith, 1842): We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam's transgression.
3. Mormon doctrine is that it wasn’t God that created our spirits. It was God who created the bodies and the earth our spirits would inhabit.

Point 1: So God is not cruel but a spiritual facilitator, a Heavenly Father, with limited power. This is a much easier way to imagine God. It seems to even be supported by some scripture. Great! Unfortunately it only works if you leave it at that.

The problem is that it really isn’t supported by much scripture. Most discussions of Hell and the utter destruction that faces the unbelieving and the sinful sound nothing like an eternity spent on a new earth, in a perfectly resurrected body. They barely even sound like “outer darkness”. The LDS teaching is that these passages refers to either a lesser exultation or to Outer Darkness but neither work with the idea that the majority of humanity will suffering and punished eternally as these verses suggest. Unfortunately this IS the hell of the bible and if we are going to accept the bible as scripture then we cannot disavow this hell and no amount of clever re-branding can change that.

Point 2: “We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam's transgression.”This is a great sentiment, and a necessary one because the idea of inherited sin had been losing popularity for some time. The problem is that Brigham Young and subsequent prophets taught that blacks were black because they were under the mark Cain and the Curse of Ham, ineligible for the priesthood. Is this not an inherited unworthiness no different than the idea of Original Sin?

Point 3: As much as the idea of eternal spirits uncreated by God helps with some troublesome bits of Christian theology once again there isn’t any support for the concept in the Pre-Joseph Smith scriptures. The majority of Christian dogmas established the beginning of life and of the spirit is at conception. Adam came into existence (flesh AND spirit) when God created him.

Even if it was true and the scriptures support it, as I’ve already noted in my previous post (LINK) there is no more justice in an eternity of spiritually blocked souls. The doctrine seems to assert either that these people are incapable of learning, growing and improving themselves, or they deserve to be disqualified from the opportunity – forever.

There is no way to reconcile the pain of life, and threat of Hell, with the reputed love of a perfect God.
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* Mustapha; Fulke Greville (1609)
**Few assertions are more ridiculous as the one I have heard made by many a “true Christian” (See ‘True Scotsman’) regarding Catholics. Apparently modern “Christians” are increasingly inclined to disavow themselves from their Catholic roots. While I can understand the desire to separate from such a beleaguered organization, it is more than hubris to accuse the Catholic church of corrupting the “word of God”. So many of the modern interpretations of the message of Christ, so many of the apologetic arguments that are still used by “true Christians” today are the result of centuries of Catholic theology. The very existence of Christianity is due to the perseverance of the early Catholics until Constantine. Thomas Aquinas formalized many of the still used proofs of God (The Quinque viae, Five Ways, or Five Proofs are five arguments regarding the existence of God summarized in his book, Summa Theologica. - LINK). Martin Luther and the Reformation may have challenged the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church, the idea of free will, Papal authority, etc. but much of Christianity’s understanding about the fundamental nature of God, and Jesus Christ, creation, heaven, come from centuries of Catholic apologetics and theology. If you want to say the Catholic Church isn’t a “true” church you had best do some homework on how much of your beliefs are rooted in Catholic theology and traditions.

Why the LDS (Mormon) faith is a logical choice but it’s still wrong: Purpose and heaven.

I mentioned in my first post in this series, that I came to the Mormon Church initially as a result of that faith’s ability to provide the best logical answers to the existential questions I was wrapped up in throughout my young adulthood. Once I was able to consider those very same questions in more depth and free of the constraints that faith put on me, I left the church and discarded religious beliefs altogether due to the failure of the church, (and all religions I knew of) to answer them after all.

The question that plagued me most, that wouldn’t leave me alone here I think, was the classic “What is the purpose of life?” or “Why are we here?” I think it’s a question that, for various reasons, confronts many people in that young adult stage of life, that is if they don’t just adopt a pre-packaged worldview provided by their parents.

It was the church’s answer to this question more than anything else the opened me to the idea that it was the “right” one. Ironically it’s the same answer that gets the LDS church in more trouble with mainstream Christians than any other.
First a little background on what answers my inquires had uncovered so far. “We were created to worship God.” Really? Good created an entire universe so that he could create a single planet so he could populate it with people that would praise him for their creation? What a vain being, not to mention an illogical one. Considering so much of the experience of life involves so much misery and pain it’s not really the best gift to inspire abject worship. There is a reason even those of us in privileged comfort understand and can empathize with the phase “I wish I’d never been born.” I never bought the “free will” argument for why there is pain in the world. There are natural disasters that drown toddlers ripped from the arms of their hysterical mothers, there are “acts of God that destroy lives and break hearts. Besides that, “free will” is a component of God’s creation. If God created all that is, than He/She is responsible for all of it, joy and sorrow. If our purpose is to worship, why the pain? Why the trial of faith? If God simply needs to be worshiped, or somehow it is for our benefit to worship him, what need is there for all the obstacles to that worship?

There was also the idea “We are here to be tested and to live a righteous life so we can go to heaven.” This speaks to God of a better character, if less powerful, than the first contention but isn’t much better logically. How is that a justification for our existence? Did this divine being decide how nice it would be for some folks to go to a heaven, and therefore create them? If so, once again, why the trial? If the goal was to go to heaven, why not just create us in heaven? Why create so many people that won’t make it into heaven? Why create a hell? Why create so many people that will go there? Are we to believe that God doesn’t have control over how He/She makes us? Are we the result of a production process with poor quality control? Considering how few are reported to be able to qualify for heaven, how much of “the product” is destined for the defect heap? It seems like His/Her production process could be bettered, percentage-wise, by almost every system us meager humans have managed. Perhaps that’s deliberate? Perhaps God intentionally created a heaven and then intentionally created a lot of people that wouldn’t be able to go there? Are we not at the same logical incongruity in the omnipotent/omniscient paradox and the problem of evil? It is no different to assert that there is pain and suffering in the afterlife. To say that the purpose of life is to allow a small minority of people to go to heaven is the same as saying the purpose of life it to ensure a large amount of people go to hell, which, of course, means God must be either incompetent or cruel or both.

Throughout the diversity of Christianity and other religions there are variations on these themes but most that assert the existence of a God place Him/Her as the central focus of creation. The central theme is the glory, edification, exultation of God. Sure we might get something out of it too. If we work hard, and prove ourselves worthy, we get to enjoy an eternal, spiritual, morphine drip administered by the ultimate drug dealer. This is heaven? If the purpose or even just the end result of life on earth is that we go to heaven (again if we are good enough.) What is the purpose of this heaven? What is the purpose of life if all we do is go on to this utopian holding tank for spirits forever and ever without end. This may appeal as an alternative to death but not as a justification for existence.

Now let’s look at the Mormon answer to this question. Firstly, according to Mormon doctrine, our spirits are eternal. They have always been. They existed before the world did. God created the world so that he could create a place where these spirits could grow and learn to become more, and where they could gain physical bodies (it’s never made clear why that part is important.) Already we are significantly apart from the common narrative. We are who we are – not because it is how God created us (individually) but because it’s how and more to the point - WHO we are, period. It’s outside of God’s control. Secondly we aren’t here to do anything for God. We are here for ourselves; God is facilitating our progression, with creation and the plan of salvation. Finally, “Heaven”. “Heaven” in Mormon doctrine isn’t a just static happy place. “Heaven” or “Exultation” is progression onto the next stage. It is the opportunity to be with God and to learn and grow further because, and this is where many “Christians” really start losing their minds, ultimately we can continue to grow until we ourselves could become God’s. Like the God of this earth, we participate in the eternal cycle as we create new worlds and facilitate the progression of the next “generation” of spirits. This seems unsettlingly bizarre to a lot of people, but to me it made the most sense. There is a constant, ongoing, progression. No cosmological argument needed to explain the origin of the universe. No problem establishing a first cause, or irreducible complexity (at least at first, superficial glance) because the logical extension of the concept is valid (watch out for yet another top popper for mainstream religious) meaning that the God of this world once was a frail fallible mortal like us. The LDS religion simultaneously aspires to place man on the throne of God, and pull God down to earth.

I eventually managed to see the fundamental flaws in these doctrines. There are plenty of issues with these doctrines that I don’t address here, I am just touching on the ones that stand out to me the most.

1. The world was created as a school and proving ground for us spirits, because it is an intrinsic requirement for spiritual progression, facilitated by God. While there are better arguments against this, the one I keep coming back to is how this concept is so revolutionary. If this was the plan from the beginning, as the church asserts, and all the prophets knew this (from Adam, to Noah, to Jesus, to Pres. Monson) why was it first understood when Joseph Smith introduced it in the 1800’s? If you get the argument that it was introduced further, carefully examine anything that is produced as evidence. The Book of Mormon can’t be considered here anymore than the Bible can be considered proof of the great flood. There has to be something else that demonstrates that this understanding was widely held, as it must have been had it been held as true by the populations the church claims it was.

2. The idea that God would create us out of some vain desire to be worshiped is so distasteful to me that the idea of a facilitator God that has created this world to facilitate something we needed to accomplish for ourselves seemed revolutionary and beautiful. The initial assumption of creation was never questioned. Regardless of how much better it seems as a reason for the creation of the earth, there is a still the idea that the prophets of the latter dispensation (Joseph Smith and after) have gotten HOW the earth was created, and man – Wrong. Very, very emphatically wrong. They have asserted with the full authority of a prophets, seers and revelators (these priesthood titles apply to the prophet and to the 12 apostles so the idea that some of the quotes of prophets from when they were “only apostles” is hard to swallow.) that the sciences of evolution and cosmology are not only categorically wrong, it is heretical and spiritually destructive to accept them. You might say that these spiritual authorities were confused about the science but how can we say that they misinterpreted the narrative directly revealed to them from God, or whether they received revelation or not? So while this doesn’t specially address any logical fallacies associated directly with the specific doctrine of the purpose of creation I think that the assertion of prophetic infallibility combined with young earth theory = they aren’t/weren’t really prophets, which is foundational to EVERYTHING in the church.

3. Heaven, vastly improved, yet still untenably eternal, still an illogically recent revelation. My issue with this doctrine is addressed better in the first post Mormon Logic #1 discussing hell. I would only add one thing to the points I made there. The thing that appealed to me within this doctrine is it’s inclusiveness, in comparison to the hard line so many Christian religions take this seemed to allow for “some degree of exultation” for almost everyone. It took me years to realize how it wrong that was. Just like “separate, but equal” was better than slavery, but still absolutely racist and cruel, so too is the eternal relegation to these different levels of exultation. To be assigned a place of spiritual captivity, however pleasant, while others are allowed to continue on and progress establishes an eternal punishment. It denies to idea that these less valiant (inside Mormon joke there) spirits will never deserve to progress. That we cannot learn and grow anymore. That no matter how much time passes some people are inherently, fundamentally unable to achieve the same level spiritual progress as others. We are talking about the vast majority of the spirits that have ever lived on earth. Most of us are stored like so much spiritual flotsam. The Telestrial and Terrestrial worlds are no different from the heaven that I rejected in mainstream Christianity. These spirits are left to pass eternity, happily or not, in stasis. This is so clearly a response to the fear of death, but not a functional one. There are none of those. This same irreconcilability (knowledge of death and the will to live) is one of the primary motivators for religious belief in the first place but ironically it is the complete failure of all religions to create purpose in death, that also works with our primitive ideas of justice, that fails every time. Heaven, hell, reincarnation, all these doctrines are expose, by their very tenets, their true source: Human fears and desires, not divine plans. The Mormon idea of the afterlife is no different.

The LDS faith (Mormon) is a logical choice: Hell

If any religion has it right, the Mormons do. This is a short series on why I think that statement is true, as well as few reasons for why I still am a firm disbeliever.

13 years ago, last September, I joined the LDS church (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, aka – Mormons). My conversion started with a very logical consideration, which might come as a surprise to some of you, but it shouldn’t. I had studied religions for some time prior to my conversion. My “research” was very haphazard, casual and very shallowly done, comprised mostly of asking friends about what they believed and why. Even in my very poorly developed understanding I had uncovered some things that I really didn’t like which tended to keep me and religion at arm’s length up until I learned more about the LDS faith.
I think that if you are a critic of the more mainstream Christian religions you might be surprised to learn, if you didn’t know already, how cleverly the LDS doctrine side-steps some of the more problematic and insidious aspects of traditional Catholic/Protestant doctrines. In this post I will discuss one of the points, other will come later.

Hell - Eternal torture for those that do “bad things” and don’t repent, or by some doctrines for those that simply make the mistake of believing the wrong thing regardless of how, or when. they were raised. This is about as immoral a doctrine as exists, anywhere. I had friends that seemed like normal, friendly, caring people who could, with a smile on their face, tell me about how African tribes that never heard the name Jesus were doomed to hell which is why they hoped to go on a mission to help them some day. How cruel is this idea of God? How unjust? How illogical? Only recently has mainstream Christianity started to let go of this terrible doctrine, and not without some painful adjustments. (see controversy regarding the new book: Love Wins by Rob Bell)



If you don't look too deeply into it, the Mormon faith addresses this in a way that seems to be in harmony with both the bible, and the idea of a just and merciful God. Here’s how. Hell or “outer darkness” is very hard to get banished to - only truly horrible people, unrepentant, malicious murderers, and apostates (like me) go there. It isn’t a lake of fire like is said in so many passages of the bible, but a complete removal from the presence of God and the torment of knowing the full weight of your transgressions. The key point here is that the vast majority of people that are living or have lived on earth aren’t going there. How could this coincide with biblical accounts of how hard it is to get into heaven? Simple. With the Mormon’s it’s not binary. It’s not heaven or hell. It’s Hell (outer darkness)and then there is not-hell, not heaven, which is “Telestrial Exultation”. This is a lesser degree of “heaven” which still involves eternal life and resurrection with a perfect body but it’s not “heaven-heaven”. One level above that is “Terrestrial Exultation" which is like in between heaven-heaven and the Telestrial world. It’s got more God in it but it doesn’t get you to the ultimate goal. Finally is the Celestial world. This is the place (tee hee - inside joke). This is where families can be together forever, (all earthly bonds are broken in the lower worlds) This is where one can live fully with God, and this is where one can reach their full spiritual potential (more on that later.)

But wait, there’s more! Remember those poor unenlightened African tribes? What about them? Are they denied the option of the full exultation because they died never meeting a boy in a stiff white shirt? No! The will have an opportunity to hear the gospel in the afterlife, in the spirit world. The spirit world is a place where less righteous spirits will await the second coming. In the spirit world, missionary work continues. If someone in the spirit world accepts the gospel they are eligible to receive full exultation provided they participate in all the required ceremonies and make all the required covenants. Which is the doctrinal reason for Baptism for the Dead, by proxy and other ordinances for the dead by proxy that are performed in the temple. This is also the reason that Mormons are so engaged in genealogy. They are attempting to identify all the ancestors they may have that haven’t received these saving ordinances.

So there we go. No one is tortured unjustifiably. No one suffers for something beyond their control. No one is ever denied the opportunity to really make the choice. That makes much more sense, doesn’t it? That is undeniably just, is it not?
It took a long time for me to realize that this didn’t really fix much of anything. Here’s why.

Eternity is too long. Eternity is inescapable. If I am denied an opportunity to grow, progress, learn, change, be with my family without end., it is unfair. It is unjust. No matter how misguided I may have been prior to the Judgment. Just as the idea of anyone, no matter their offense, enduring endless torture is unjust, so is anyone being denied the opportunity to change their fate, to earn respite – no matter their offense. The idea of eternal consequences is a brutish social deterrent that is still rooted in our social infancy, and is only slightly improved in the LDS version.

Secondly. It’s not in line with the bible after all. It’s amazing to me now how few members are unbothered by all the passages that discuss hell and torment, for all the same offenses that have been there the whole time without wondering why it doesn’t contradict the teachings of the church. The introduction of more than two options totally works in some cases. Take Matt 18:3 “And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” For someone that believes that there is Heaven and Hell only “Not-Heaven” is the same as Hell but an LDS member can read this and say that has nothing to do with Hell it’s only saying that that a contrite spirit is required to enter the highest degree of “Heaven”, not that without one you’re going to “Hell”. That’s fine but what about passages like: Matthew 7:13 “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.” Or “Matt 25:44-46 “Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.” Mark 9:47 “And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell,” How can an eye participate in murder or apostasy?

I’ll take time for one more. Not that anyone is likely to have made it this far anyway. Inconsistencies: There have been changes in this modern dispensation regarding the conditions for exultation, and what will earn you a one way ticket into outer darkness. This shouldn't be possible with an unbroken line of "true prophets, seers and revelators" at the helm. I speak of, among other things, the abandoned doctrine of Blood Atonement. This doctrine stated that in the case of0 egregious transgressions (apostasy and malicious murder) the atonement of Jesus was insufficient to fully atone and that the shedding of the sinner’s blood was also required. This has been disavowed to some degree, there seems to be a caveat about when the church and the state are one. If you don’t know of this old doctrine you can find text of the 1954 edition (before it got cleaned up) Doctrines of Salvation online or you can try to find a hard copy of the old printing. They are around, I know know that much for sure.

These strengths and weakness come from the same place, Joesph Smith and modern day revelation. The church grew out the revival era and much of the distasteful, and illogical stuff in the Old and New Testaments had been mulled over for centuries by theologians and apologetics prior to and contemporary to, Joesph's time. In the "Burned-over District" these issues were being discussed passionately and constantly. This exposed him the everything he needed to start Christianity over, reinvent it, and do it in a way that resolved much of the problems that plagued traditional Christianity for so long.