A collection of three memes posted to r/exmormon Reddit in May and June of this year. I hope these each inspire their own longer posts here at some point, but for now, here they are – three in a row:
High on the mountain top, our banner is unfurled, Ye nations now wake up, we’re taking o’er the world! With Deseret’s industrious brands, We’ve nearly spread throughout all lands, That no unhallowed hand may stop The fulfillment of God’s demands!
Search, ponder, and pray Are the things that I must do. But just for things that agree With The Church’s point of view.
You’re either humble or you’re not, But if you know it then your chance is shot. And if you say it, that doesn’t ring true, Or if you hear it when it’s said of you. The truly humble don’t know that they are – Just like the sun, our guiding star.
Here’s a little ditty I wrote and posted on r/exmormon reddit a couple months ago in the form of the meme-ish graphic above, and with the title “Does Russell Really Love Me?” I’d been having reoccurring thoughts about how both members and leaders in The Church can commonly be found telling people they don’t know that they love them.
Is it even possible to love someone if you don’t know them? No. You could say it depends on your definition of love and you could say it depends on context, but to that I could say that it doesn’t. It doesn’t depend, because not only can you not love someone if you do not know them, you cannot do anything to them at all which requires personal connection – in the real world, that is. In the completely subjective and imaginary world of ideas and thoughts and feelings however, you can do anything you want, and maybe that’s why it is such an attractive place for human beings to spend so much of their time.
But if it does depend on definition, then I would say the definition of love that I am talking about is one that defines love as actually acting in a way that shows you truly care as much or more for the welfare of who or what you love as you do for yourself. Talking is its own kind of action in a way, but just talking about it is never enough.
And if it does depend on context, then I would say the kind of context I am talking about is when a church leaders gets up in front of a large group of people and says that he loves them. This church leader does not know anything at all about most of the people in the audience – he does not know names, ages, faces, or anything about their life circumstances, except he knows they are members of the same church, of the same in-group as he is, and this gives him a warm feeling toward them, and therefore he declares that he loves them. And when he declares that he loves them, he feels he means it with every fiber of his being.
I will submit that in this context, the leader may in fact love the group if he acts in a way that shows he cares as much or more for the welfare of the group as he does for himself, even though he does not really love the individuals within that group individually. But the problem with this, in my opinion, is that some or all members of the group hear and feel the leader’s declaration of love as if it is a declaration of love for them personally, and not just for the group, leaving them vulnerable to emotional manipulation that can be harmful to their welfare if their leader leads them down the wrong path.
I also think that the leader himself probably really believes that he does in fact love everyone within the group individually and not just the group as a whole, and means his “I love you,” in that way, to each individual, as is evidenced most clearly in the Dallin H. Oaks quote from April 2022 General Conference in the picture above:’
“I love you, my brothers and sisters, I love all of God’s children.”
But what’s the big deal? Why do I care to comment in this way on the fact that leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, not to mention many members of The Church (as well as leaders and members of many churches and organizations of every kind), regularly declare an impossible kind of love for people that they do not know? I care because I feel that if every single one of us human beings is continually engaged in the act of sensing elements of our bodies and environment and then symbolizing those elements with labels, if that is the thing that most makes us human, at which we are the best and of which we are the only practitioners we know of, then let’s take pride in who and what we are. Let’s sense and symbolize accurately as often as possible, but particularly if and when we share our personal experience with others, and especially whenwe are using the personal truth of our private experience to exert influence and control on others who may or may not share our feelings.
People who love in theory but not in practice, but who have convinced themselves and others that they love both in theory and in practice, can be dangerous to society in ways very similar to those who do not love at all.
In the library of human experience, if we’re going to have sections at all, let’s have them and their contents be accurately labeled as often as possible. Let’s have the fiction in the fiction section and the non-fiction in the non-fiction section. Let’s not confuse fiction with history, or religion with science or politics, or biography with autobiography – at least not if we can help it. Why? Because in a system built on symbolic thinking, and in a system built on the ability to communicate via symbolic thinking, the more false symbols there are the more likely it is that the system itself will become false, in which case the system will eventually be cancelled and completely useless. Now there’s a certain point of view from which that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, but in the meantime, I’ll appeal to our selfish natures instead – don’t we all want things? And wouldn’t it eventually be impossible to know if we got what we wanted if we cannot trust it to be what we think it is?
Someone might say, who cares if we actually get what we want, as long as we truly think we get what we want, and to that I would say – well, what would I say? I guess if we truly think we have what we want, then that is good enough, isn’t it? Yes – until or unless it’s not…
For the Love of Strangers Never trust I love yous From those you do not know. You must know someone to love them, For the Bible tells me so.
If someone says “I love you” And they do not know your name, They’re loving an idea, In a goody-good mind game.
“I love you” should be special, Not for those you’ve never met. And saying it to strangers, Means you really want to get.
You want to get salvation And you want to get ahead, To do this life one better, And win a big prize when you’re dead.
There is a wee bit of a problem with the whole concept of the Atonement of Jesus Christ that the faithful don’t seem to have a good answer for, other than to have more faith and not worry about it . If Jesus was all-good and “perfect,” as is commonly taught in the LDS church, then that makes him innocent, which makes his crucifixion and suffering for sin unjust, assuming, that is, that you agree that punishing an innocent person for something he didn’t do is unjust. Yet, in The Church of J.C.o.L.d.S. at least, the Atonement of Jesus Christ is often described as “answering the ends of the law,” or, “satisfying the demands of justice.” But an unjust act (Christ’s suffering, torture, and death for sins he did not commit), cannot satisfy the demands of justice any more than a handful of dirt can satisfy your appetite.
In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints we are taught that before the Earth was created we all lived with Heavenly Father and Jesus and Satan somewhere else, in a “premortal” existence. As part of the Father’s “Plan of Salvation” for us, the Earth and everything on it was created so that He could have somewhere to send us off to, where we could be placed inside of mortal bodies and be tested, to see if we will do what He wants us to do, and if we will prove ourselves worthy to return home to live with Him in Heaven after we die. And, if we are extra, extra good, we are promised that we will become like Him and inherit all that He has. It sounds nice and makes some kind of logical sense on the surface. It can also be comfortably familiar, like the idea of children leaving home to go off to college and find their own way in the wider world, so they can return home someday, wiser and well-seasoned, ready to take over the family business.
But you cannot arrive from elsewhere into a world that you have always been connected to any more than an apple can arrive from elsewhere onto its own apple tree. In other words, in the same way that apples aren’t grown elsewhere and then placed onto their tree, people aren’t grown elsewhere and then placed into this world. Thank you to the late philosopher Alan Watts for this idea and for the metaphor of the apple tree. As Watts once said in his 1965 talk “Myth of Myself:”
Look: here is a tree in the garden, and every summer it produces apples. And we call it an “apple tree” because the tree apples; that’s what it does. Alright, now here is a solar system inside a galaxy, and one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that—at least on the planet Earth—the thing peoples, in just the same way that an apple tree apples…Because, you see, we grow out of this world in exactly the same way that the apples grow on the apple tree.
Have you ever had an experience that was not connected to this world in some way? If you have, congratulations, but you are presumably reading this right now from your point of view in this one, so you decided to come back? It seems you can’t get away into other worlds without your body remaining in this one, not counting astronauts in space. Even in the case of space exploration though, you must take your Earth-grown body with you and you must reproduce certain Earth-like conditions in order to keep it alive and continue having an experience as whatever “you,” that you feel yourself to be. If anyone is reading this from their location in any world other than planet Earth, please let me know. And if you are, are you a human being, and did you grow your body on Earth?
In thinking about how we have always been connected in some way to our home-grown bodies, consider the following five points. Let’s give them a name just for fun. How about the FIVE POINTS OF FOREVER?
Every part of every thing is connected to some part of some other thing, in some way. This is true because something cannot be connected to nothing, and nothing cannot be connected to nothing either. And why can’t something be connected to nothing? Because there is nothing there to connect it to. But not only is there nothing there to connect it to there is also nothing there to not connect it to. True nothing is nothing at all and cannot be represented in our minds and language without making it something in some way. True nothing is an idea and not an experience. Because true nothing does not exist on its own in objective reality (or if it does it cannot perceived), everything just goes on forever, or at least it does as far as we can know, because we cannot experience non-experience. Space will continue to open before us, and we will never get to the fence at end of the Universe, because we cannot perceive a final boundary if there is truly nothing beyond it.
There are no gaps in objective reality. Even if there were, we could never detect them because we cannot detect nothing in objective reality, because there is nothing there to detect and there is nothing there not to detect. We can only detect nothing (or a lack of something) in relation to other things, and we cannot detect it on its own or in relation to nothing. A black hole, for example, is not a gap in reality, it is a feature of reality, even if it looks like a gap in reality. Darkness is something, light is something, “empty” space is something, even if it doesn’t have anything “in” it. Every thing is some thing and no thing is no thing. To say there are no gaps in reality is to say there are no gaps in space.
Everything goes on forever in all directions, in a sort of endless, all-ways, ocean of the universe. Imagine you are floating underwater, in the center of an ocean of transparent water, an ocean with no bottom and no top, an ocean that seems to both hold you where you are and stretch away from you in all directions, forever. Now replace the water with “empty” space and populate it with everything else in the universe. Hopefully this helps create some visual sense in your mind of how everything can be connected and go on forever. In the same way that water connects everything in the ocean, space connects everything in the universe. Everything that exists in the ocean is touching water, and water is touching everything that exists in the ocean. Everything that exists in the universe is touching space, and space is touching everything that exists in the universe. The ocean and its contents go together in the same way that space and its contents go together. And if a container and its contents always go together then there is a sense in which the container and its contents are connected and are simply different aspects of the same thing (another Alan Watts idea). With this metaphor we also can find an interesting difference between an ocean of water and an endless all-ways ocean of space, and that is that things can be dropped in or pulled out of water, but things cannot be dropped in or pulled out of space. No thing can be dropped into space from outside of space because there would be no space to hold it in before it is dropped in. In the same way, no thing can be pulled out of space, because there would be no space to place it in after it is pulled out. It could only be moved from one location in space to another.
God exists and everything (and everyone) is connected to and a part of God already. And if everything is a part of God already, and there are no gaps in reality, then there is a real sense in which everything IS God already. As an added benefit, if everything that exists is God, then God definitely exists, because everything that exists definitely exists. If that is the case, then God could truly be all-powerful, for the only way to possess all power is to be everything that possesses power. That is, if each thing that exists is the only thing that possesses the power to be itself, which is the same as the power to do what it does.
God is that which is common to all that exists. The only thing that is common to all that exists is the space in which it exists. We can say that God is space. More specifically, God is space and its ever moving contents, since space always come with its contents, its contents always come with their space, and everything is always moving on some level. God is that which brings all things into existence by allowing all things to come into existence. And how does God do this? Simply by being the space in which everything comes into existence on its own. In stark contrast with the God of Christianity, the one all-powerful God of objective reality does not hold all power by creating all things and then trying to control them, but by being one and the same with all things, and not trying to control them at all. God is all-powerful not by interfering but by not interfering. That which does not interfere at all is always welcome at the party. Or better yet, that which does not interfere at all IS the party, because it is the space that makes all things possible and in which anything can happen, forever and in all directions. The never-ending, formless form of God is what gives rise to all possible forms, and it does so without any judgement, other than that judgement which its many forms may conceive of for themselves.
Maybe the only God that is really real is the ALLTHING that is thus no thing in particular.
Okay, it’s time for me to stop twirling around in this topic for now and move on. I’ve probably plagiarized Alan Watts more than enough for one post here. So, until next time, keep doing what you’re doing at your particular place in space, and enjoy being God, the true master of your own little domain of the Universe. After all, you so rarely get to enjoy it as your true self, instead of as the self you’re so often busy pretending to be.
Mormon Mouse 