Month: December 2022

D&C 124 and the Mask of The Lord

~ Mormon Mouse ~ Leave a comment

In Doctrine and Covenants Section 124, verse 144 it reads:

“And a commandment I give unto you, that you should fill all these offices and approve of those names which I have mentioned, or else disapprove of them at my general conference;”

It’s a very curious statement and one I will return to. It appears in the second to last verse in the longest section of Doctrine and Covenants, a section in which The Lord speaks and commands on a wide variety of things, including the following:

  • A calling to proclaim the gospel to every king in the world, the President of the United States, the governors of The United States, and every country in the world.
  • A commandment to the “kings of the earth” to give gold and silver to The Church so it can build a temple.
  • The Lord’s assignment to and endorsement of John C. Bennett (who later was discovered to be a fraud and a serious enemy of The Church).
  • A commandment to build a boarding house called “Nauvoo House” that Joseph Smith and his descendants can live in forever.
  • A commandment to build a new temple in Nauvoo.
  • A teaser about the great, hidden things the Lord wants to reveal in the new temple.
  • A warning that baptisms for the dead will not be acceptable outside of a temple after an unspecified “sufficient time” has been provided to build the temple.
  • An ominous declaration by the Lord in verse 32 that “if you do not these things at the end of the appointment ye shall be rejected as a church, with your dead, saith the Lord your God.”
  • A pardon for failing, due to persecution, to build a temple in Missouri.
  • The Lord’s will that various named individuals (including Joseph Smith) purchase between $50 and $15,000 of stock in Nauvoo House in order to fund its construction.
  • Messages from the Lord to various individuals instructing them in what they should do and promising them blessings for their obedience. Temple building, missionary work, family relocation, elements of a Nauvoo House business plan, and a new translation of The Bible are all mentioned by the Lord.
  • Offices and callings in the priesthood and who should fill them and what they should do.
  • Some particularly important and special counsel, commandments, and blessings for Hyrum Smith, William Law, and Sidney Rigdon, including giving the sealing power and the office of patriarch, prophet, seer, and revelator to Hyrum Smith, and giving the power to heal, cast out devils, and resist poison to William Law. Oh, and the Lord includes an extra, coy little aside for Law in verse 100, saying “And what if I will that he should raise the dead…”

God the Father seems to be the speaker throughout Section 124, due to the last phrase of verse 123, that reads “…which is after the order of mine Only Begotten Son.” However, at times it sounds like Jesus Christ is the speaker, due to references to “the day of my visitation” (verse 10), “Presidency of my Church” (verse 84), and ‘”my everlasting gospel” (verse 88) – all things typically named after or associated with The Son and not The Father. This fluidity with the Divine point of view occurs elsewhere in Doctrine and Covenants, such as in Section 109. verses 1-5 when Joseph Smith addresses God as if he were both Jesus Christ and God the Father, or Section 49 where The Father who speaks of “mine Only Begotten Son in verse 5 also says :”…I am Jesus Christ…” in verse 28.

The number of subjects and level of detail The Lord gets into (right down to the business details of stock purchases) is interesting and worthy of its own analysis and discussion. Some might say it’s a specificity of detail somewhat unbecoming for the Supreme Being, but of course there is precedent, and we find a similar fixation in The Old Testament, where The Holy One of Israel gets very specific about a whole spectrum of special rules pertaining to everything from animal sacrifice to monthly menstruation.

But the biggest curiosity almost seems to be hiding in plain sight from the more casual, or more faith-inclined reader. I myself never really noticed it or thought about it until now. Apart from the impressive list of subjects and details in this section, there is a record-scratch worthy moment in verse 144, the second to last of the section:

“And a commandment I give unto you, that you should fill all these offices and approve of those names which I have mentioned, or else disapprove of them at my general conference;” (emphasis added)

Say whaaat?

Is it just me, or did The Lord God just give a commandment to either approve or disapprove of his own revealed will?

If God gives the name of a person to serve in a specific role in His church, isn’t that a revelation from Him? Wouldn’t that make it his will that that person serve in that role? Or does God just give suggestions sometimes, take ’em or leave ’em? Even if he did, if you knew a name was from God, why in God’s name would you pick someone else?

If I counted correctly, between verses 123 and 142 God “mentions” forty-four names of individuals He wants to serve in specific roles in His church. While it’s very progressive of Him to be so democratic and teach the people to vote on things, wouldn’t commanding The Church to vote on these names in this case be a little like Einstein commanding some children to check his math? It’s almost as if God himself doesn’t know if the names he has given are the right names. And while a good argument could be made as to why The Lord might command His church to vote to approve revelation from Him, I don’t know why God would want His church to disapprove of revelation from Him, unless the revelation may not really be from Him after all, in which case He is not really the speaker in this section of Doctrine and Covenants.

But if God is not really speaking in Section 124 of Doctrine and Covenants, then who is? Well, it’s Joseph Smith, of course, dictating revelation in the first person singular voice as if he himself is God. It’s one of his personas. And it’s rather like the ancient Latin sense of that word, “persona,” which was a mask worn by an actor performing in an open-air theatre, a mask which was constructed in such a way as to amplify the sound of the actor’s voice so he could be better heard by the audience. When Joseph Smith is speaking as God, the mask of The Lord goes up, and often it’s such a convincing performance that one could be forgiven for forgetting that it’s just a mask. But once in a while, Joseph reminds us who is really speaking, by saying something completely out of character for an all-powerful master of the Universe.

Inside of the Body Inside of My Body

~ Mormon Mouse ~ Leave a comment

The philosopher Alan Watts once said:

“Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery — the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets — is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.”

If that is true then it would spell trouble for one of the most fundamental parts of Mormon doctrine – the idea that we are all eternal spirit bodies sent from our Heavenly home to be born into and tested inside of our physical bodies here on Earth. The Church would have us believe that we are spirit bodies in the same form as our physical bodies (Ether 3:16), residing in and controlling our physical bodies from within.

But if every outside has an inside, then there are at least two main problems with this idea.

First, the outside of our physical bodies implies that there is an inside to them as well, and we all know that there is. So, if on the inside of our bodies we find only the inside of our bodies, where is the spirit body? Take a look inside anyone’s body and all you will ever find is the inside of their body and nothing else – no separate spirit body is ever anywhere to be found (but please let me know if you find one). But whether it can be detected or not, even if we do have a spirit body that is separate from and inside of our physical bodies, then that spirit body would also have an outside and an inside. But what’s on the inside of our spirit bodies? As far as I know The Church doesn’t say.

If I have a body inside of my body that is controlling my body to some degree, what’s inside of the body inside of my body? Another body controlling that body? And if I have a body inside of my body that is controlled by a body inside of it, what’s inside of the body inside of my body inside of my body? Another body controlling that body? And so on and so forth, ad infinitum. And which one am I, or am I all of them? Or am I none of them, but something else entirely?

To postulate that a human body has a controlling body in the same form inside of it, like some kind of Russian nesting doll, only answers a question by creating another question. And either we get caught in an infinite regression of an outside found inside of an inside which implies an inside inside of that, or one of these bodies doesn’t have a matching body nested inside of it. Maybe one of these bodies has only its own inside inside of it, and not the outside of another body. I pick the first body.

The bodies we already have, our physical bodies, have an outside and an inside. On the inside we already find plenty of inside systems of parts that make us tick, taking up space and telling us, that although we may still want to believe it for various reasons, we don’t really need another body inside of our body to control us or to explain anything about us at all.

If the outside of another body such as a spirit body is not detectable on the inside of a human body by an outside observer, then the human body is only one human form, with its own inside, and not two human forms with one, spiritual, placed inside of the other, physical, as in the traditional Mormon belief. The human body does contain elements of itself inside of itself which have their own outsides and insides and outsides inside of that, but they are there in the body to be found and studied as far as the methods of scientific inquiry permit, as opposed to the Mormon spirit body which supposedly is there but can only be discerned by “purer eyes” (see Doctrine and Covenants 131:7-8), which is probably just a fancy way of excusing why it’s invisible. And 179 years after Joseph Smith instructed the world as to why it’s invisible, even with all of our advanced science and technology, it’s still invisible.

Not only is the Mormon spirit body invisible, it is undetectable in any way, except when we believe that it is detectable. Some might say that it is detectable because they believe or even know that they feel it, and to that I would say, that may be true for you, but it is not true for me, at least not anymore, because I now have other explanations for the spiritual feelings I had before. And if it’s not true for both of us, then it may be true for one of us, but it’s probably not true on its own.

Humans bodies are living organisms, and, true to their nature, they grow from the inside out, from a single cell into trillions, and they do so on their own as part of and in relationship to their environment, because that is what organisms do. Self-organizing, self-replicating, self-maintaining – living organisms. They do not rely on an outside agent to inhabit them in order to do what they do. The agent is not inside the organism, the agent IS the organism, because the organism has grown into the agent.

By teaching that each of us is really an immortal spirit body inside of a mortal physical body, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints separates and hides us from our true selves. Rather than fully understanding and appreciating what our bodies are already doing naturally on their own, The Church stubbornly clings to the archaic idea that the experience of human life is too important, too complex, and too sacred to allow it to explain itself as it is on its own, rather than as The Church thinks it should be. Ironically, as the church that places the most emphasis on living prophets and continuing revelation, it is the one best poised to evolve in the direction of science and philosophy on this issue of the spiritual vs. the physical, what they really are, and which one really makes the other move.

If anything, it would make more sense to say that the physical human body itself is a spirit body. If it can’t experience itself before its own birth or after its own death, then its experience of itself is eternal to itself. If at the subatomic level the body is mostly made up of “empty space” or something more like electron clouds, then it is ghost-like at some level. And as far as we know from our own direct experience, we need our physical human bodies in order to even experience the spiritual. Even with a near death experience, although the experiencer may feel they have had an out of body experience, they never would have had it, and they never could have told anyone about it, without their physical body.

If we cannot know the spiritual without the physical, then isn’t a physical which controls the spiritual far more likely than a spiritual which controls the physical? And if the physical body is eternal in some way, ghost-like in some way, and always there in some way during a spiritual experience, what more do we need to call it spiritual? Do we need it to do any other tricks for us? How about healing itself? Or healing others like it? And what about its brain, widely considered the most complex object in the known universe?

In thinking about the human brain, the control center of the body, we can come back to the problem of outsides and insides. Does The Church’s spirit body include a spirit brain inside of it? If so, does that mean my physical brain has a spiritual brain inside of it? If it does, what is on the inside of my spiritual brain? I could outside/inside my brain for a few steps or for forever to try to get to the brain that has only its own brain matter inside of it, or I coud just admit that the physical, human brain inside my head is the only one I have. And there is a very real sense in which I don’t actually have it at all. The one body with one brain that I feel myself to be stirs my soul with a mystery, wonder, and appreciation that I’ve realized is far more spiritual to me than to pass the buck to a spirit body.

As I’ve heard the late Christopher Hitchens observe, “I don’t have a body, I am a body.” And if I am one body, then I cannot be another at the same time. Whether I am physical or spiritual, although I will not last forever in this form to others, I will last forever in this form to me…and how could I ask for anything more?