Are you saying we all had a life before this life? And if so why is it that we cannot remember?
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Are you saying we all had a life before this life? And if so why is it that we cannot remember?
I don't know, can't remember why or the plan exactly. . . .
theoretically speaking, I imagine it may be the purpose to exercise other faculties than being a knowitall, and learn to develop say our heart, or capacity to love. . . . or to "walk by faith" as the Apostle Paul indicated. . .
I for one am glad everything is not objectively demonstrable, because then it would be too easy for tyrants to just force us to do all the good things, and unreasonable of us not to implicitly obey. Under those circumstances, we would likely be pretty monstrous creatures.
So also with a lot of life's circumstances that just make no sense, and with which we must cope at considerable hardship.
other values than smarts or perfection need to be addressed. . . .
Mormons generally won't consider "reincarnation" or repeated cycles of life a true picture of things.
It usually presents as a linear progression towards an improving condition overall. . . . .
Being an "intelligence" is a positive statement of identity. . . . something capable of cognition, perception, understanding, judgment, choice, etc etc, and maybe even love, and appreciation. . . virtues of all kinds.
Becoming a "spirit child of God" would be something like an adoption into the family of the King, into a situation where considerable improvement is augmented. . . . as well as being gifted with a sort of structure or shape, as well as a capacity to act on another level. . . . reasonably imagined to be something of tremendous import. . . . An "intelligence" might think such an attainment well-worth entering a covenantal relation with said "King".
In this line of progressive development, our birth into this world would represent another step forward of tremendous import. . . . . a gift of incalculable value. . . . with great opportunities.
I understand most of us are subject to musing about what possible purposes our lives can have, what the meaning of life is, and many similar questions. I observe that the line of development outlined above suggests that learning to manage a human body, and make good use of it, would be a considerable progressive development. . . .
Jazz Insider
Banned
in on historical thread. always wanted to be apart of history.
I dunno..
Let's say for example we all had spirits to begin with before this physical life that we have. Then God decides to send us all to earth as physical beings. We are not given any memory of what we were before. We are given intelligence, and the ability to follow logical thoughts. But then we are asked to believe in a being we cannot see, or feel or touch, and 2/3 of all of us ended up not believing/trusting in Jesus and 'perishing' after this physical life.
Questions I have
1. How do you justify a loving God sending all those souls/spirits to earth, just so that 2/3 would perish afterwards? (a conservative estimate I must say).
2. Why are we given the ability to use logic and reason, but then asked to throw it all away and have 'faith'?
3. Let's say one believe that all this is true, aren't we all just 'puppets' in this 'play'? We are told we are given a 'choice', but is it not really just an illusion? Do we really have a choice when only 1 option leads to a favourable outcome?
fair questions.
I dunno. The theory is sketchy, and I'm sure no one really knows, for sure. In the scenario of Mormons you could figure it that even our Heavenly Father is following someone else's plan, on faith.
Whether there is or is not a God becomes irrelevant in a sense, if you begin to assert your own responsibility for your actions and decisions. If you are concerned about how you are influencing and/or affecting others there are some things to consider.
I think the earliest Israelite traditions point to older moral codes. Some correspondence with, say the Code of Hammurabi and even the more ancient religious traditions in India, for example. But it was remarkable in the assertion of a caring, covenantal GOD with actual moral laws and principles the Israelites would be held accountable for. That is fine grist for any mill of human reason, the kernel concept of accountability in some absolute sense, to something greater than we are.
I'm a nobody, I can't justify anything in the entire cosmos, and likely it would be a bad idea for me to justify much of what I think, because likely I'll need to move along to some better understanding soon enough.
That said, however, under the scenario I was sketching, the "God" I'm speaking of is not the immediate Creator of everything, but an entity I presume to be human, a like kind of being with man, who has entered into a contractual arrangement designed to be helpful to us. If I were being disrespectful I might compare that with say a multigalaxy corporate enterprise promising career advancement and superior benefits, but I would prefer to think in terms of say a foster parent of less fortunate beings of like kind and like capacity, who only need a little help to become as advanced as He is. The program is one where you get to choose just how far you want to go with it, and you are welcome to the place you choose in that family. If you find you don't care to respect the family leadership, or the rules governing the associations within the family, you might be kicked out, into an outer darkness, but as I understand it, in this family a large, even a very large majority do end up eternally associated with it, and doing stuff they want to do which is generally going to be helpful to the whole family.
Lucifer, and the third of the hosts of heaven who went with him, are still around, and will still exist after this world is done, but just will not be in the realm. Those who decide to go out with him will still exist also. There are some obscure comments from say Brigham Young that suggest people who can't or won't love others, and do not choose to become positive beings will dwindle away in their capacities and maybe even devolve back to their primordial "intelligence" status. But a theory that claims "intelligences" are eternal does not have any way of destroying them. . . .
So this particular objection is pretty much just not true, at least so far as this view of things goes. . . .
In the scenario I'm speaking of, intelligences have always had the capacity to think, choose, act, exercise logic and reason, and are not required or even advised not to still use that capacity. This life does have a circumstance of "forgetfulness" of things gone before, but perhaps not absolute "forgetfulness", more like just intuitive senses of values, principles, or skills that were previously developed. I have no way of explaining why chemistry is just second nature to me, or why music is so much a gift to my daughters. Neither parent has any musical talent. . . .
I would suggest that it may just be a sort of situational exercise where we get to make fundamental choices without undue pressures. God certainly is not particularly emphasizing compliance to religion, at least not presently forcing the issue.
I consider that God may have given us the gift of life and opportunity in this world for our life here, and what we choose to return to God in terms of love, faith, and obedience to some principles ostensibly taught by God's servants. . . . is our gift to Him. It is also our judgment of ourselves.
As I understand it, the window of opportunity for accepting God's reality, and asking for the intervention of Jesus the Redeemer effecting the atonement, the way to come back to God's presence, lasts beyond this life to the time of a final judgment at the end of the Millennium.
Not that there is any advantage in delaying that forward step in accepting our Heavenly Father and serving Him and His children with our days. . . .
There may be some fundamental limits on our options here, but as I understand it, we are free to "go away" after the final judgment. Some scriptures indicate that at that point everyone will know the reality of God, and the place of Jesus the Redeemer. But under the terms of what I imagine the original contract to be, if you really don't like the program, you can go back to where you came from.
Meanwhile, as I consider it, human beings have greater fundamental rights that are theirs eternally and intrinsically than most human governments will allow, and I consider all these human governments to have a shortsightedness which I do not envision God really shares.
I have fun with religion. . . .
my daughters used to alternately go on Sundays with an aunt to a Catholic Church, or with a grandpa to a Baptist Church, or with another aunt to an LDS Church.
After a while, I asked them what the difference was between these churches.
"The Catholic Church is God's Church, the Baptist Church is Jesus' Church, and the LDS Church is Heavenly Father's Church".
my daughters used to alternately go on Sundays with an aunt to a Catholic Church, or with a grandpa to a Baptist Church, or with another aunt to an LDS Church.
After a while, I asked them what the difference was between these churches.
"The Catholic Church is God's Church, the Baptist Church is Jesus' Church, and the LDS Church is Heavenly Father's Church".
But that's the thing though, since you have no memory of where you were before this physical life, you're ultimately forced to choose between Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hindu, etc, with incomplete information.
You are 'free' to choose between those religions, but if you choose the wrong one, you 'die'. To me that's not much of a choice... Because if it was crystal clear from the get go that, say, the Christian God is the one true God, nobody in their right mind would be choosing Buddhism, Islam, etc.
My point is, with incomplete information, one cannot make an informed decision, and I don't think it is fair for someone to simply perish because they don't have complete information. Relying on historical proof of Jesus is difficult for most people with logic, since it requires you to believe something beyond logic, i.e., the resurrection. It's like being asked to look through a dirty window and make out what is outside with 100% certainty - get it right you live, get it wrong you die.
Are you saying that after we die we would have the opportunity to consider all the evidence again and a chance to choose to trust in Jesus? I've always thought the only chance you get to do that is before death?
It is amazing to me when I look at the huge doctrinal shifts that have historically taken place in the Judeo/Christian/Western tradition.
First, there was this little tribe of "chosen" people who were given a special law, and a place of honor as "God's People", though I note the Abrahamic covenant included both eventual unlimited posterity as well as the promise that the descendants of Abraham would be a blessing to all mankind. . . to the whole world, at least. And that modern Chrisrtians point to Jesus as the absolute fulfillment of that promise.
Then you have Jesus and the Christians come along and preach to the whole world. That's a radical shift, I'd say. With the teaching that whoever is baptized is adopted into the family of Abraham.
It is true that there has been a lot of doctrinal teaching that unless you get baptized while in this life you will perish or live forever in an ungodly torment. The medieval Christian Church took that doctrine pretty much to the max, so much so with other abusive doctrines like the sale of indulgences for mere coin, that some actual Bible readers like Martin Luther just couldn't go along with it anymore.
In the Book of Mormon, the doctrine of repentance still says this life is the time granted for us to choose, and repent, with some dire warning that the same spirit we are actuated by before we die will still be the spirit controlling us afterwards.
However, Mormonism also has the teaching that Jesus, during his two plus days gone while his body lay in the tomb, went to the world of spirits, and preached the Gospel to those who were there, including those who had never heard the Gospel in this life, and even the people who were destroyed by the Great Flood in Noah's age. Further, the Book of Mormon preaches strongly that those who imagine a babe who dies before being baptized will be lost forever, or even tormented, are subjects of an evil false doctrine. Little babies who die will go without sin to God. Personally, I don't think it's a shortcut to glory. I think such people still have a course of learning in whatever world they are in, and many personal choices and differing states of accomplishment. It's just that this world isn't all we crank it up to be, and while it's good for those of us who live and learn here, it's more of a side show.
So yes indeed, the judgment day is at the end of the Millennium for all of us.
The evidence is always there. The power to choose is always there. The time is passing day by day, and the opportunity is gone.
Jesus told a story about a rich man and a cripple who lived at his gate, begging. Jesus said the time came when the beggar died and went to Heaven, and rested in Abraham's bosom, and that the rich man also died, and went to Hell, a place of torment that was those smoldering sulfur smudge-pots so many have conjured with as torment beyond imagination. Jesus said the rich man wanted to come back from the dead just enough to warn his brethren. I consider such an impulse of caring for the brethren almost godly, it speaks of putting others ahead of himself. Even accepting his own punishment, he hoped he could make a difference for others.
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But Jesus said that his brethren had Moses and the Prophets, and that if anyone would not believe them, neither would they believe though someone came from the dead to warn them.
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So, I take it as an example for emphasis, along with other scriptural references to the consequences of disbelief and sin. Consequences.
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That is the main point of the Gospel.
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It's all about the consequences of our choices.
I can look back on some times in my life and torment myself pretty good. The Book of Mormon describes the torment of Hell, the consuming fire and anguish, as being the realization of what the consequences of our actions have been.
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I like an outfit named "The Pacific Garden Mission", an operation of the Moody Church in Chicago. They have a little series of dramatic re-enactments of the life stories of converts to fundamentalist Christianity, you know, the kind where if you confess faith in Jesus, and invite Lord Jesus to come into your life and heal you, and save you from the living torment of a hellish life, the consequence is that you will be saved.
The question we all face is just this.
>>.......
The question is why would we hesitate to accept this gift.
I think I have spent some time in a worse hell than this.
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but first, it seems to me that your logic is skiwampus. What is the down side of believing in Jesus? Is there any God you know of that will punish you for that? Allah? Mohammad claimed Jesus was a holy man, a prophet or something. Yah, I've heard rumors about point-of-the-sword declarations of faith. Some ideological zealots probably have killed others for every God we have imagined. That's more of a mental illness thing, conveniently described as evil. I still bear the stamp of Ambrose Bierce, a humorist who noted how one man's God is another man's devil. But the Gods we imagine might be one thing, just like the righteousness we imagine, or the "science" we imagine, or the "progress" we imagine. . . . . Whatever God is, we cannot really change it. And who among us, by taking thought, can add an inch to our stature? Imagination cannot directly change things. Well, if we can imagine a better way, and devise a way to work on it somehow, we can effect change. We just cannot make that choice have the consequences we want. Facts, the fundamental realities of existence, will determine that. If God is the ultimate Fact, we live in His hands, so to speak. We are in a sense subject to a set of realities selected for, and/or applied on, our circumstances.
If as some theorize, we live in this world under conditions intended to test us, or give us some opportunity to demonstrate ourselves, we cannot really escape the consequences of our choices.
. . . . . . .
but I digress. . . . .
I used to be locked up in a sort of hell, believing absolutely in a particular authoritative tradition, and had this sort of dilemma. When the evidence presented that God did not hold Himself accountable to those authorities, I wondered about everything I had ever believed. I wondered if God was "true", and even postulated that perhaps He has just gone to a party and gotten drunk or something, and didn't care anymore. What if that ultimate "authority" failed????
Well, I had seen the consequences of my first wife turning away from everything I had counted on. Oh, not that she was not still pretty good at bamboozling other fools besides me, in fact she had apparently made a life choice of making her way with those skills. Church authorities believed everything she said, everyone believed everything she said, even my own family. I didn't believe in arguing, I guess. Or I decided the only relevant argument was the one with God. It was by some reasonable stretch of the facts my own fault, because it was my questions that might have disturbed her pretenses of good wifeliness towards me, or perhaps revealed them for what they were. . . . Anyway, she told me Mormons didn't believe what I did, and she could speak more authoritatively to that because of her direct observations 'inside the Church", in her employment in trusted positions in the Church offices. She left the job, took up with a "Christian", moved to Texas, and with the inside track provided by an uncle, became a frequent hanger-on around the Governor's house, some dude named Bush.
So anyway, my argument was with God. It appeared, if all the claims people make about being God's people are true, or even one little claim of that sort, I could only conclude God didn't care to be "true" to those claims. I imagine it's sort of like a man who is driven crazy by his woman, and goes on a drunken binge. If God had to live up to everything the LDS Church claims, I wouldn't blame Him for going AWOL. So, let's suppose that is the case, the true story about God, and you just can't count on anything anymore. . .. where does that leave us?
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I chose to believe I still had to respect myself. That I still had to make better choices. . . . . . that I still had to try to understand "truth" of what exists in the universe, in my circumstances. If you have a runaround wife, you still have to be a man, and the better if you are a man with principles. If religion is a groundless farce, a scam, a fraud. . . . it is no excuse for a man being less responsible, or less prudent, or less in any character of virtue. I went to a place in my mind where I decided to reconstruct myself on positive things not dependent on any theory or representation about "God".
My little story about the LDS Church is not the experience or perception of most Mormons, and I prefer not to generally disturb people in their beliefs, if they have any. It's just my little story.
Some folks like Siro might think my story vindicates some of their own choices. I don't think so. The story of Job in the Bible is a well-laid-out exposition of the concerns we can have about our beliefs, and on how we stand with God when things don't go well. I find the philosophical conclusions of Job fairly sound, for coming from nearly five thousand years ago. God is what He is. We are dealing with fundamental choices about what we will be.
Long story short, eventually I came around to realize that God is everything I believed Him to be. It's just the people who fail, me and some others.
I think you do not yet understand God very well, and that, like me, the concepts you are struggling with have some deficits, falling short of actual understanding. There's no way you can move through these issues without turning to God. He's heard it all, believe me. He's got answers, and if you will just talk through it all with Him, you will come to realize His teaching skills are pretty good. You are not disrespected, you are not forced. You have the time it takes to learn.
>>........
I thought you were practically management in here, but now you're "banned"? With rep adjustment power 0? What happened.
Good sense of humor, though, the bit about how you "wanted to be apart of history". Hope you'll come back and track along in history with the rest of us. . . .
Yeah I'm definitely still a believer, just now and again I like to play devil's advocate (I know I shouldn't). But at times I do get those curve ball questions from friends and family who are mostly Buddhists and/or atheists.
As an example, Babe, when you said "What is the down side of believing in Jesus?". To that, my brother would say something like "Well, imagine that this world was created by a God unknown to us whose rule simply states that "If you believe in Jesus (or any known God), you would go straight to Hell after death". In such case there is a down side to believing in Jesus (or any known God). It's an unlikely scenario for sure (and a stupid one at that), but even I could not rule out that possibility (at least not in an abstract sense).
As an example, Babe, when you said "What is the down side of believing in Jesus?". To that, my brother would say something like "Well, imagine that this world was created by a God unknown to us whose rule simply states that "If you believe in Jesus (or any known God), you would go straight to Hell after death". In such case there is a down side to believing in Jesus (or any known God). It's an unlikely scenario for sure (and a stupid one at that), but even I could not rule out that possibility (at least not in an abstract sense).
Brigham Young had the wit it takes to deal with disbelievers. When folks tried to tell him that the Mormons were all going to Hell, he said:
"Well, if that's true, we're going to run the Devil out and irrigate the place, and turn it into Heaven."
Sounds like a real character.... LOL... (oops I shouldn't laugh should I?)