“Everyone Else Makes Such Lonely Heavens”

Two items for your already-bulging “The Church doesn’t care about non-Mormons and it’s a malign, harmful influence in the world” file:

“Faith Key to Rebounding from Refugee Status, Apostle Says”

“While Irma raged, 11,000 Mormon volunteers worked to save Texas homes”

As the late great Christopher Hitchens loved to point out, “religion poisons everything.”

***

I came across an amusing item today.  Posting about a week ago, an apostate on a mostly atheist board lamented the fact that it would be really difficult to sue the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for its (allegedly) fraudulent teachings.

Of course, he or she is right:  Few American courts, I imagine, are itching to get into the business of adjudicating religious claims and issuing theological judgments.

The complainant, though, didn’t seem to recognize the constitutional problems that would be entailed by involving federal, state, or local judges in doctrinal and church-historical issues, or by seeking effectively to criminalize theological disagreements.  Instead, s/he lamented the wealth and power of the Church, which would permit it to retain an entire team of lawyers for its defense who could issue “endless injunctions,” and the like.

So, looking for a more vulnerable target and some other way to “stop” the “fraud,” the poster suggested going after one of the Church’s “representatives.”

And who might that representative be?

Yes, indeed, when contemplating legal action to destroy the fraud of Mormonism, this person thought of none other than “Daniel C. Peterson.”

I suppose that’s flattering, in an odd sort of way.

***

Back in 2005, I was invited to write a little mini-essay for the Church’s official website.  Here it is:

“Everyone Else Makes Such Lonely Heavens”

I thought of it because of a complaint against the Church that I saw today, and that I’ve come across several times over the past few years.

I find it exceedingly odd.

Roughly, it goes like this:  The Mormon Church is to be condemned because it cruelly threatens people that their marriages and families will be broken up at death if they don’t become Latter-day Saints, fork over at least ten percent of their incomes for the enriching of the Brethren, and get themselves sealed in a temple owned and operated by LD$ Inc.

The complaint seems to presume that every other church teaches and has always taught that families will be together forever without temple sealings,  and that it’s a heartless Mormon innovation to come along and say that that’s not true.

But traditional Christianity has long taught that marriage and family relationships will be terminated at the grave.

Read Dante’s “Divina Commedia,” for example, to get a glimpse of historic Christian orthodoxy on this matter:  To the best of my recollection — and I’ve read it several times, though not, now, for at least a couple of years — there isn’t a single intact married couple or family group anywhere in that great, long compendium of medieval Catholic doctrine and commentary.  Not in the Inferno.  Not in the Purgatorio.  And not even in the Paradiso.  Nowhere.  Everybody in it, whether damned or saved or in between, is a lone individual.

Here’s a sampling of the relevant phrases from mainstream Christian wedding services:

“as long as you both shall live” (Episcopal, Methodist)

“so long as you both shall live”  (Unitarian)

“until we are parted by death”  (Episcopal, Methodist)

“as long as we both shall live”  (Presbyterian)

“so long as we both shall live”  (Quaker)

“until death parts us”  (Lutheran)

“as long as we live”  (Lutheran)

“until death do us part”  (Catholic, Eastern Orthodox)

“till death us do part”  (Anglican [Book of Common Prayer])

“all the days of my life”  (Catholic)

And, needless to say, atheism doesn’t exactly promise an eternal companionship for spouses and families, either.

This weird objection, that, somehow, we Mormons have come along and threatened people with divorce in the next life unless they surrender to us, strikes me as rather like a situation in which someone is drowning in a swiftly moving river.  A huge waterfall looms.  A benevolent onlooker grabs a life preserver and throws it out to the drowning person, who shows no interest in it whatever.  The hopeful rescuer reels it in and tosses it out again.  However, the drowning person,  rapidly moving toward the roaring cataract, ignores it a second time.  Increasingly worried, the would-be benefactor runs along the river bank, pulls the life preserver in a third time, and throws it out once more to the drowning person.  “Grab it!” he admonishes.  “If you don’t take hold of it, you’re going to die!”  “How immoral of you!” responds the soon-to-be-dead person in the river.  “Now you’re threatening me with death unless I accept your precious little flotation device!”