Month: November 2022

A Message from God

~ Mormon Mouse ~ Leave a comment

If God has access to all of our minds, and he wants everyone to receive the same message about him, why doesn’t he just deliver it to us directly?  Wouldn’t that be more effective than relying on fallible human messengers to deliver it, especially when there always seem to be plenty of competing messengers around who are delivering contradictory messages about God which appear to be equally well meaning and sincere?

Why would it be so important to God that we get our information about Him and His will for us from someone other than Him, especially if you believe, as in Mormonism, that God will speak to us through the Holy Ghost to confirm the truth of all things?  If God has the time and means to tell us if a message from Him through a messenger is true or not (as well as to monitor everything we think and do), why doesn’t He just give us the message from Him directly in the first place?

Imagine that God has an email address and that you regularly email Him and He emails back.  

Then from time to time you get emails from various prophets, ministers, and missionaries with a message they claim is from God, for you and for the world.  You email God to ask Him if any of the messages you’ve received from these various messengers are really true and from Him, and eventually you get an email back letting you know that yes, indeed, one of the messages is the truest and best and is the one you should listen to.  So you do.  

But at some point you realize that millions of other people have been emailing God for years asking the same question but getting a different answer in reply. 

 If your understanding was that it’s extremely important to God that all of his children receive the same message about him, at some point wouldn’t you wonder why He doesn’t just email His message to everyone directly, especially since He is already emailing with everyone directly about so many other things?

Does The Lord really want everyone to get the same message about Him, or does he want everyone to try and figure out which is the true message and who are the true messengers and then ask Him what he thinks so He can answer everyone differently ?

If you have to go to the original source of a message to find out if the message is originally from that source, why not simply get the message from the original source in the first place, especially if you are already connected to that source in such a way that it knows everything about you?

And if God is all-powerful, has one consistent message for the world, and already has full access to our minds, why would He need messengers at all?

In Nothing Doth Man Offend God, Except…

~ Mormon Mouse ~ Leave a comment

As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we learn in Doctrine and Covenants 59:21:

“And in nothing doth man offend God, or against none is his wrath kindled, save those who confess not his hand in all things, and obey not his commandments.”

But I wonder…

If God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and supremely good, why is he ever offended by mere mortals, who are by contrast so small and weak? Considering the differences in knowledge, power, and goodness between ourselves and God, wouldn’t his offense to our behavior be something like our offense to the behavior of babies? Or ants? Or atoms?

If God is offended by our sins, and he knows about our specific sins long before we do, wouldn’t he start feeling offended when he first finds out about them, so that he can get over it by the time we actually commit them?

And wouldn’t God’s foreknowledge of my sins condemn me to them?

How can I choose not to sin in a moment in which God has already known that I would sin? It seems God must know less than I thought he did, or else he has cemented my sins into existence by knowing all about them before I do.

After all, how can I, mere mortal that I am, contradict the foreknowledge of God?

And what’s so troubling to God about things playing out exactly the way he knew that they would? After all, if he is the expert on everything in the universe, especially his children, I would think it would be impossible for us to offend him. When have you ever come across an expert of any kind who was offended by the very nature of the subject on which they were an expert?

It seems like God, as he has traditionally been known in not only the Mormon church but in the entire Judeo-Christian tradition, is quite the sensitive guy for a Supreme Being. Super-sensitivity is fine with me if he’s getting choked up over a sunset or the end of The Notebook, but maybe it’s not such a good look when he’s micromanaging a person’s feelings, finances, or underwear, or destroying entire civilizations in puritanical disgust.

Families Can Be Separated Forever

~ Mormon Mouse ~ Leave a comment

Any time that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints attempts to obtain or maintain converts with its trademark doctrine that “families can be together forever,” we should be aware and remember that this seemingly marvelous news comes with a dark and depressing implication – that families can be separated forever as well.  Both things must be true in order for either one to be true, but we rarely find The Church focusing on the latter, and last I checked we never find them teaching it explicitly to its curious investigators.  We would do well to wonder whether any organization which habitually accentuates the positive truth and eliminates the negative truth that goes with it is really trying to spread the truth at all or whether it is simply trying to sell us something like everyone and everything else.