here is kind of a random post about Mormons

I am a weird nerd. The normal, run-of-the-mill nerd knows a lot of things about say, Star Trek. Now, I’m not saying that I don’t know a lot of things about Star Trek, but in addition to that, I also know a lot of things about religions that started in the United States in the 19th century. This is not really any more useful to know about than say, Star Trek, and has the additional handicap of lacking interesting conventions where people get together to wear funny ears.

Harith is aware of my proclivities, so when he read this Daily Intel post about Barack’s mom being posthumously baptised into the Mormon faith, he wrote to me saying, “Okay, I have done a bunch of reading but I can’t get my head around it, and I know you’re obsessed with Mormons- how can they do this??”

I responded with the long block of text that you will find below, and Harith suggested that I post it here. I do not know why he suggested that. But here is a kind of random post about Mormons, who are more properly called “Latter Day Saints”.

Harith, you’ve stumbled across a truly fascinating bit of Mormon theology here. And you’ve also caught me in a writing mood..

Joseph Smith, the founder and prophet of the Latter-Day Saints continually received revelations from God throughout his life, laying out new doctrines and occasionally refining or even contradicting (and superseding) old ones.

For example, every adult male (12+) Mormon is a priest in the church, and for a while, Joseph taught that God had revealed to him that He would make revelations to every priest. For obvious reasons, this became problematic quickly and Joseph soon thereafter received a new revelation from God, saying that only the Prophet (that is, Joseph) could receive valid revelations. God is quirky like that.

Joseph was not an educated man (though he was certainly not an illiterate as was often claimed, in order that the miracle of his receiving the last Testament of the Bible – the Book of Mormon – seem more divine) but he read throughout his life, and often applied insights from his readings and conversations. For a man of the 19th century, Joseph was exceptionally well-traveled: he was born in Vermont, raised in Elmyra, New York, and the Mormon movement was based in New York State, then in Ohio, then Missouri and finally Illinois, where Joseph was shot and killed by a mob and his followers driven westward to Utah Territory.

As Joseph was exposed to more ideas, he refined Mormon theology through revelation. One flaw in Christian orthodoxy was the question of what happened to the countless people who had lived before the arrival of Christ and his New Covenant. Since the recognition and acceptance of Christ as the saviour of man was the only avenue into Heaven, many Christian theologians had concluded that those born before the time of Jesus were sadly condemned to purgatory, limbo, or hell – along with unbaptised stillborn babies, uncontacted pygmies, and Raffi.

Joseph neatly solved this problem by receiving a revelation from God commanding the Latter-Day Saints to ritually baptise all of their family members who had either passed on before God revealed the Book of Mormon to Joseph, or who had not accepted the new teachings at all. Conveniently, these baptisms were entirely ritualistic, with participating Saints standing in for those being baptized, saving everyone from the unpleasant tasks of digging up dead Grandma Esther or making a long and potentially fatal cross-country trip to bring non-believing sister Margaret over to the Nauvoo Temple.

In recent decades, Saints have gotten huge into genealogy, compiling the world’s most complete genealogical records for the sole purpose of baptising as many non-believers as possible. Because being a Mormon is the only way to eternal life, the Mormons have very generously decided to baptise everyone who ever lived in absentia. For serious. They got into deep shit when people found out that they had been baptising every Jew who died in the Holocaust. Suffice to say, Jewish groups weren’t pleased. That’s why they’re supposed to ask for permission now.

Cool, huh?

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And that is it people, that is a kind of random post about Mormons. If you found this post interesting and would like to see more like, then holy crap maybe we should rethink the whole mission of this blog maybe.

Tags: barack obama, mormons, raffi, star trek