Today I went to church

Today I went to church….

…or should I say, today I went back to church. Way back, more than 30 years ago, I was baptised into the mormon church. That experience I have already recorded here in another post. I decided, after some years of being a true believing mormon, that the life was really not something that I was prepared to continue with, and so I fell away and have lived a mostly non-religious but certainly questioning life since that time.

In the last year or so, I have started to follow up on all the questions that I have had in the area of religion. Given that so many people are so preoccupied with their faith, this one and that one, I am sure that there has to be something more in there than I have ever known or experienced. Now I am fascinated by cults, mythology, and religions in general. I have studied the origins and basic beliefs of many of the major religions, where they came from, and a general look at what they are doing in the world right now. Today was not so much about that kind of general enquiry and searching.

Particularly because of my previous experience in the mormon church, and because my older brother has been a true believing mormon for about 40 years, I have done a lot of research into that particular church. I received an email from my brother just recently explaining how he was now working away from our home town, and so he was living there for the next few months. He said that he was so happy there because he had found a great representation from the church there, and also mentioned that there was a church where I was now and that would be so good for me to go there too. I wondered about this, but then found why he would bother to mention that to me at this time. Recently, there has been a change of the presidency of the church following the passing of Gordon B. Hinckley, and now President Thomas S. Monson, in his opening address to all the members of the church since taking office, said members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are ready to welcome “the less active, the offended, the critical, the transgressor” into fellowship.Without being too cynical, but it had passed my mind that there had to have been some church instigated motivation to get my brother to send me the call to go back to the church. I wondered which category my brother now thinks that I fall into. “Less active” doesn’t cover it as I have been totally inactive for more than 25 years. No, I had not been “offended” nor had I been “critical”. So, that only leaves me as a “transgressor”. Now, in the study and reading that I have done on the church attitude to those who “fall away” we are all transgressors. If not, then why would we ever want to fall away, right? After all, the church is perfect so that can only mean that we find that we are simply not able to live up to the standards of the church and so we simply have to give it up and go our transgressing way.

However, I put that aside, and decided not to make any kind of judgements on things a long time ago, and also not to take to heart personally any clumsy language that this new “prophet” used in his invitation for me to return to the fold, and go along there and see what was going on.

I ventured into the very impressive building that has just been acquired by the church here, a massive structure and while not new, certainly does fit the profile of the kind of buildings that the church likes to inhabit and call the house of god. Lots of people were milling about, all in their sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, and I was a little under dressed for the occasion, but figured that they should be so happy for the transgressor’s return that the attire should not count for that much.

Pretty soon I was called into a group of people and they were interested in knowing all the usual things, and of course, they knew right away that this was not my first time in a mormon group nor was it any accident that i happened to stumble into their midst. I think that they became a little guarded about me when my responses to some of their questioning about me did not receive the normal TBM (true believing mormon) responses. Not that I was negative, just that I certainly could not pretend that I was one of them in heart and mind and had no intention of doing so. I was there to see for myself if there were any changes, and in particular, I was interested to find out if any of the normal membership were being affected in any way by the rapid dissemination of the full history, warts and all, of the church. All the study that I find can only lead one to believe without any doubt whatsoever that the church is not at all what it claims to be, that the history has been beautifully rewritten in the way that they like it best regardless of the actual facts, and that the mormon story, literature and “scripture” is not true and cannot possibly be true.

After lots of very enjoyable discussion with many of the very good people there, and I do believe that regular member mormons are probably the most sincere and genuine people that I have ever met, it came time for the Sacrament meeting, the normal church service for the mormons on the sabbath. In this meeting, there are the normal hymns, opening and closing prayers, and talks by members appointed to give them on that day. There was today though, one special guest speaker, an american guy (I did not get his name) but they said that he came from the high council of the church for this region, so I guess, a real authority figure.

All during the service, I was having flash backs to my happy days as a TBM convert and happy in the service. I used to listen attentively to all the talks and said a hearty “amen” when there was ever mentioned a particular principle of the church expounded very eloquently from the pulpit. The problem as I now see it was that through the eyes of a TBM you cannot do any other thing other than say a hearty amen because such is the conditioning. Once you have made that leap of faith to say that you accept the teachings of the church, you are told that it is an all-or-nothing kind of arrangement – no sitting on the fence with any doctrine whatsoever. Either it was all true and you accepted it, or you did not! Of course, you were warned that now that you have heard the message, and you should choose to ignore it or worse still, reject it, then you were in all sorts of strife, and that your troubles would go on for all eternity. That is how it was handed to me in those days, and so I accepted it and so went along. This now sounds quite incredibly naive for me even now as I write this that it is about myself that I would have gone along so easily with often difficult to swallow doctrine.

Now I do understand it a lot better though. I am older, have read a lot more, have learned to question and not take anything as a given unless there were some substantial reasons why it should be reasonable to accept as a part of a person’s faith. But for the general newbie entering this church, it is very easy to see why they do accept at face value so many teachings just as I did. So now I am in this service watching the proceedings, listening intently to the talk, reading critically the words of the hymns, and getting a whole new picture of what is going on here. I am seeing all the ways in which the indoctrination is being achieved, and then cemented over and over again – sometimes in quite overt statements but much more of it in very subtle ways that I never even thought about or was aware of before.

The final speaker for the day was our american special guest from the high council. This guy was clearly very comfortable standing up to the pulpit in front of the converted and seemed like he quite enjoyed the opportunity once again to really press home some teachings about god’s word and how we all needed to live up to it. He started by holding up a large book and stated that here he was holding the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Dotrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. For those who don’t know, these four books are the combined word of god for man as revealed through the prophets all throughout history and right down to the present day. TBMs accept all of these works without question.

He then held up a piece of normal paper that looked like a standard print out from a computer document and it would have been about three pages long. He then boldly stated that just as the previously mentioned books are unquestionably scripture, then so also is this document scripture by the same definition. This was the “Proclamation for Families” as issued by the prophet of the mormon church.

Not only did it come from the prophet, but he was assisted in this revelation by his two councillors, and it was fully endorsed by the 12 apostles of the church. With such lofty verification of this piece of paper, those of us listening were now to be left in absolutely no doubt that the words printed on this piece of paper came directly from god and were to be held in the same degree of reverence and obedience as any passage in the Bible or any of their other scriptures.

He then started to go through it point by point and embellished points along the way. Briefly, it says some fairly predictable stuff and if you really want to go through it, you can find it here:
http://www.lds.org/library/display/0,4945,161-1-11-1,00.html
Some of the embellishment was that god has a wife, that is how he creates all these spirit children like us. However, because she is so special, and so sacred, her name nor any mention of her have ever been included in any scripture! I guess that makes her more sacred than god, coz his name gets bandied around all over the place.
Another embellishment was that he mentioned (not in the script) that marriage was never ordained between man and man nor between woman and woman. This brought up the point that California has passed a law which recognises such marriages. Our speaker then mentioned the very strong likelihood of a major earthquake and that we can expect to see most of California slide into the sea very soon now because of the way that this offends god.

He then moved on to the three worst possible sins. To be a son of perdition is the one unforgivable sin (to know Christ and then to deny him). Second was murder and the third was adultery, although you can be forgiven for these if you repent. That would mean that you would have to confess your sins to the church and fall upon their mercy not to throw you out and hope that forgiveness would be allowed on your occasion.

He then went on to state that there are actually some good points in other religions. Now this was quite interesting, since at every meeting ever of any mormon group they are telling you that all other churches, religions, faiths, creeds, belief systems, whatever, are ALL wrong. He managed to concede that there are some good people in those other religions, even mentioning Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam (just to show that he is not at all biased, and possibly to win a point with any muslim that may just have been listening and he did not know). Upon recognising that they have “some” good points, which he did not bother to elaborate on any further, he then invited them all to come in to the church, bring in their good points, and the church would welcome them and help them to build on what they had.

When I first entered the church today, I held an open mind and I respected that the membership are almost entirely really good hearted people. I did not go there to try to convince any of them about any view that I held, but purely went there on a fact finding mission to get a picture of the current state of the church and its teachings and attitudes.

FINDINGS:
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is just as close minded as ever. The invitation to bring in your good points and we can build on them as an arrogant and bigoted a statement as ever I have heard. The services are designed entirely to reinforce in the membership that they are in the only true church, as this was mentioned at least 20 times throughout this one normal service. Subtle mention continuously about how fortunate they all were to be members was very obvious to me.

As soon as the service was completed, I got up and felt a real need to run away. If they truly wanted this transgressor back, they had a very strange way to show it. I guess that, in their own totally conditioned state of mind they cannot even see how arrogant and bigoted they really are. I know full well that the call from the president for me to return was predicated on the fact that I would crawl back and ask forgiveness for my transgressions and start to live a totally subservient lifestyle according to the dictates of the church leaders.

Sorry, the mission would at first seem a failure, but actually, it was a huge success. I now know that such social orders that claim that salvation can only be attained through membership and service to the order, are false. Such teachings are a fraud, and such church leaders who seek to subjugate their memberships in this insidious way should be ashamed of themselves.

That said, I can see that the church structure does facilitate many great things in the way of service to the community. It arranges help for needy people, promotes charity among the membership, and gives people a sense of belonging that they clearly need. If it were possible to strip away all this mumbo jumbo of doctrine, there would be a place for me for sure in the organization. As it is now, it is a cult, founded on falsified information, has a shameful history that they really should face up to and stop covering up, and needs to recognize that people outside their church are not necessarily damned and would be worth talking to in other ways than purely with the intent to convert.