Faiths and Beliefs

How can anyone feel so comfortable when they talk about “god” when that word is used simply to reference all things transcendent? You put a face on god so that you can conjure him up in your imagination and this then lets you feel comfortable to talk about him. It gives you a “personal god” that you can then put your faith in and a “someone” that you can take your troubles and fears to, “someone” that you can dump it all on and walk away feeling better about yourself. Nice story if you want to believe it, but fact is, you are personally and singularly responsible for your own life and there is no way that you are going to escape that.

 

You join a church because they make a promise to you that they are the ones with the “way” to find god. Or even more absurd is the story that you need to “find your way back” to god. This taps into the very basic human instinct to want to believe in something that is greater than you find in your own life – something that is “out there” somewhere that you can rely on, be able to put your faith in and feel comfort with because of your own fear or your own perceived inadequacies. These inadequacies are only those that have been ingrained in you by the programming you have received from your society, your social group, from the day that you were born.

 

Your mother told you “Don’t do that because god is watching” reinforcing the concept that god is “up there” watching everything you do and will punish you for doing the wrong thing. Everyone is talking about god, and this is the issue, but the word god is only a reference – a reference to that which is in the transcendent realm.

 

People join a group of true believers and then feed on each others faith in their beliefs. The wants and needs, insecurities, fears, hopes and dreams, are all hungering for sustenance, for help, for someone to tell them that they don’t have to feel afraid any more. What you are doing is “right”. You will be okay, just keep the faith, believe what we tell you and you all those bad things will go away. If you feel some doubts, then you just need to exercise your faith, even if that means having blind faith, then so much the better, and you will be even more blessed in the next life if you do so.

 

Fear – the ultimate fear for all humans is death. The human species is the only species in existence that knows that they are going to die. With that being a certainty, leading only to a void of uncertainty, what would you cling to the most? Answer: anyone who tells you that they have the keys to conquer death. Hallelujah, that is what I want – where do I sign up.

 

I want you to know that I just love the LDS Church. It is populated with the most loving, kind, caring, gentle people that I have ever met. The feeling of love and caring within the company of the latter day saints is just wonderful and it is impossible not to feel secure and get that really warm feeling of belonging that is very seductive.

 

I was baptized in 1972 and lived the life of a true believing Mormon for many years. I went through two years in the army as a mormon and proud to be called that in spite of the attitude shown to me from those who thought I was some kind of religious fanatic. In the army in those days, you either conformed totally with the group, or you were an outcast. I was happy to be different and something of a loner. Difficult days, but I felt uplifted every time I endured through the tough times and then was able to get back in the company of LDS people because I was given the reward of their approval and respect for having been able to do so. They taught me about how right I was and that I had to pity anyone who could not believe as I did. Poor lost souls they will be in the next life and how I can be so smug in my celestial glory because I was smart enough to follow the LDS teachings to the letter without faltering even unto the end. After all, I was a member of the ONLY church on earth that god would ever accept someone from to enter into that glory. Wow, what a hot prospect that was. God will love and reward me, and he will punish all those people who spoke harsh words to me in this mortal life.

 

Let me say though, that I never had a testimony of the church – not a real one. I craved the feeling of belonging and love that I got when I was at church, did all the things that I was asked to do in the name of the “lord” and got my reward for doing a job well. Approval and promotion in the ranks, being asked to give talks, being a teacher, working for the “lord” and laying up my treasures in heaven.

 

I still crave that feeling. I watch videos of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and feel that really wonderful spiritual uplifting that they give. And the close ups of the singers in the choir….. what great people! True people of faith and just the kind of people that you do feel like you would want to be near, be proud to think of them as your friends. When they sing Come, Come ye Saints, it is undeniably very powerful. It makes you think that these people must be near god, that god is with them, and you have to be near them too so that you can have that same power in your life.

 

The LDS Church and the programs that they have are fantastic. Their basic teachings about family, morality, trust, stewardship, responsibility and so on, are truly great precepts that any right thinking person would want to live by and have ingrained in your children before they leave home.

 

However, now I have studied a little deeper, gone past the surface and found the real history, the underlying doctrines that are the real basis for this church. It is just so tragic that the LDS Church is so demonstrably false. Their doctrines are so utterly unbelievable when you really study them that it is truly a shock to think that such could be the building blocks of this the “true” church of god. As the church itself preaches – if Joseph Smith was not a prophet, if the first vision was a lie, then the whole thing is a sham. So, when you study their history, find out the facts, how are you to proceed? Joseph Smith is proven, without a shadow of a doubt, to be a liar, fraud, womanizer, con man, and that the things that he wrote under “divine guidance” are total fabrications. The truth makes him despicable. And so, to see him painted as a man of god to be revered, is something that makes me sick to my stomach. What a wonderful, perhaps total recall, memory he had. And what other wonderful gifts he had! Just imagine what he could have achieved if he had not used these gifts for his own personal gratification. And gratification he certainly did then, and even more so now, get.

 

I have been through all that stuff, seen all the evidence, read all the material about how it all came about. Quite incredible to think that I was actually accepting the teachings so readily. I guess that I wanted to believe, just like they all do even now. So wonderful that we now have this thing called the internet which of course, I did not have then and why they were selling their “gospel” so well in those days. Now there is nowhere to hide the lies, the deceit, the obvious fabrications. One of the main reasons why I joined the church was because I met so many people who were (in my opinion at the time) a lot better read, better educated, and better informed than I was, and these people were telling me with such conviction that these things are absolutely true. Who was I to doubt? And certainly, who was I to call them to question or explain?

 

Now, it is a much more enlightened world and I will continue to search. But please don’t tell me more about the salvation in the faith in Jesus Christ. I have also read the bible and I am sorry that this might be a problem for christians, but I find very little comfort in there. There certainly is comfort in the bible but only provided you read isolated passages. But read the whole thing, and it is not like that at all. It is contradictory, full of violence, threats, immorality, and written by people either motivated by fear, or wanting to motivate others by fear. The absurdities of the old testament make it such that the whole thing should cease, in this modern time, to be regarded as scripture. It simply does not apply. How can you read the words of people who lived in the era of flat-earth scientific knowledge and agree with all that clap-trap that they wrote?

 

However, I do now start to see some light showing. The main problem is that I have been, like many other people, reading the bible and other “sacred” texts as if they are newspaper stories – as if they are eye witness accounts of actual events of the time. Now we know as a certainty that the events described in there did not and could not have happened in the way that they are described. We know that there never was a universal flood. How could you believe that Noah actually went out and collected two (or more depending on which biblical account you want to read) of every species on the planet and delivered them all to salvation aboard a wooden boat that he and his family (none of whom had any experience in such endeavors) put together by hand in a very short space of time? How could you believe that Jonah was actually within the belly of the whale and then delivered by his faith? We know that the pharaoh was not drowned in the red sea by the hand of god because they have found his tomb. How about a god who tells his faithful to go out and stone to death a man because he was found picking up sticks on the Sabbath? But picking up stones to kill another human being is okay because god said so, but picking up sticks is not?? What rubbish is this?

 

When it comes to miracles, or things totally unexplainable, then we are told to simply insert god, and everything comes right. Someone is cured of some deadly disease, a child is saved from an accident by some freak occurrence, a man was delayed so did not get on a flight that crashed, someone did something totally out of character that seems to have averted a disaster, and so on. We are taught that there is no need to think about this too much, because it was god’s will, and his hand in the events that have miraculously saved the day, or the life, or whatever. Insert god and everything is fine so that we can forget about it and move on comfortably. Even when it is bad news…. a man loses his home and family in a fire… well it was god’s will so he can just accept it and move on. A special one here for latter day saints – how did Joseph Smith pick up the gold plates, now proven to have weighed 50kg at the very minimum, and run at the top of his speed for three miles successful beating off three separate attackers? Easy, god was helping, it is the only explanation. Alternative belief – none of it happened at all except in the imagination of Joseph Smith. God moves in mysterious ways. All I can say is that he sure does – so mysterious that it simply is not possible to accept unless you do so with blind faith. And blind faith is not so easy to come by in an enlightened world that is rapidly coming out of the darkness of superstition and fear based beliefs.

 

But start to read the biblical and other ancient texts as poetry, as an illustration, as a metaphor, as symbols of experiences gained and lessons to be learned, and what is the interpretation of the metaphor and its meaning in your life, and it starts to really teach you something. God is not “out there” and that if you follow some church teaching, some outside group’s teaching of what you need to be doing, you will be allowed to get back to him. Man is not in exile and never was. Man was not put on the earth to fight against nature. Man came out of the earth, out of nature, and needs to seek how to live in harmony with the nature, not fight against it. God is within you. He was and is here all the time if you really need to define your god as “he” – remember the word god is only a reference to that which is transcendent. You cannot go searching somewhere else to find the christ – the divinity is right here within you all the time, but you have to turn inward to find it in your life. Your conscience is the “christ” within you trying to guide you – to show you the way to be in harmony with your fellow man and with nature. Way back, when those writings were given, it was called the holy ghost, because that is how the people of that age could understand it and a way of teaching this concept to them. To teach them of the divinity within them was simply a concept that they had no hope of grasping.

 

Everyone has to find it for themselves, but such diversions as the argument about polygamy, the trinity, the need for atonement, the requirement to be forgiven for original sin, the story that man is born into sin and needs salvation, and so on and on, these are not fundamental to a person living in the world and coming to terms with their own fears and inadequacies. If we learn that we are all together in this thing, and without each other none of us can survive, then we start going somewhere. We are all part of the web, not just here to suck an existence from it. What we do to the web we do to ourselves. No more is there an “us” and a “them”. It is all about the family of mankind, and when we understand that, we will all start to progress. It is time to forget this fable about christ coming again to fix the mess that we have made. Start to listen to the divinity within you, and recognize the divinity within every person on the planet and there will start to be hope for mankind. This is what it really means when it says “Love the lord your god with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself.” Read the scriptures for what they really can teach you, and you truly come to terms with living in the world and the fact that pretty soon you are going to move on to another plane of existence. Only knowledge and experience are indelible and all else falls away soon enough.

 

Life is wonderful, exciting, each day an adventure, and the destination actually does not exist – the journey is what we are here for. Every day, we write our own eternal moments and that is where your eternal life is. Your eternal moments you will carry with you forever and cannot ever change. The expression “even god cannot change yesterday” is a truism that is worth pondering. Today is all you have, and tomorrow is your creation. Your heaven or hell will be the compilation of your eternal moments. So, how do we proceed…… well….. that is what we have to figure out, but I think that I am starting to see passed all the smoke and mirrors of people like Joseph Smith and the thousands like him who use god and people’s faith in him like a weapon to get followers. They seek adulation for themselves only. Joseph Smith is the classic example of this, but there are plenty of others. Delusions of godhood for themselves and gain power by having people place faith in them to intercede on their behalf with god, with whom the “prophets” claim they have exclusive access.

 

[Throughout this text, god is spelled with a small g. This is deliberate as that word is only a reference for that which is transcendent, and should not be capitalized because doing so only serves to distort the viewpoint of the reader for that very reference.]