{"id":167,"date":"2007-12-17T10:09:21","date_gmt":"2007-12-17T14:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geneveith.com\/what-mormons-believe\/_167\/"},"modified":"2007-12-17T10:09:21","modified_gmt":"2007-12-17T14:09:21","slug":"what-mormons-believe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2007\/12\/what-mormons-believe\/","title":{"rendered":"What Mormons believe"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Mike Huckabee is getting hammered, ridiculed, and condemned for asking a reporter if Mormons<\/a> really believe that Jesus and Satan are brothers<\/a>. But, according to the official Latter-Day Saints website, Mormons DO believe that. Read it yourself here<\/a>. A sampling:<\/p>\n

On first hearing, the doctrine that Lucifer and our Lord, Jesus Christ, are brothers may seem surprising to some\u2014especially to those unacquainted with latter-day revelations. But both the scriptures and the prophets affirm that Jesus Christ and Lucifer are indeed offspring of our Heavenly Father and, therefore, spirit brothers. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

See, Mormons believe that God has a body (\u201cof flesh and bones<\/a>\u201c) and sexually engenders us all with his wife, our \u201cHeavenly Mother<\/a>.\u201d She gives birth to us all as spirit children<\/a>,\u201d who pre-exist until we are born into this world. Furthermore, a man who has reached the highest level of salvation (the Celestial Kingdom<\/a>) and who has that special marriage ceremony in a Temple will, upon death, become the god of his own universe. He and his wife will then populate that universe with spirit children of their own. Our God, therefore, is a perfected human being who got his universe. As a Mormon slogan puts it, \u201cAs man is, God once was; as God is, man may be<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n(The links are to official Mormon sites. For more on the Heavenly Mother, which officials try to play down though the teaching is in official documents and Mormon piety, see this<\/a> and this<\/a>. I don\u2019t want to mischaracterize the religion. If I have any of this wrong, please correct me.) \n

I will hand this to the Mormons: They have succeeded in filling in the gaps of our knowledge with a vision of the afterlife that is very appealing: getting to be a god; sexual relations for all eternity; the ultimate fantasies of sex and power. This, by the way, underlies the Mormons\u2019 famed \u201cfamily values.\u201d The Mormon religion involves the apotheosis of family, turning family into a religion, or, a Christian might say, turning family into an idol.<\/p>\n

But it sounds like Mormonism is just a few modernizing revelations away from being the ultimate postmodernist religion: a Heavenly Mother for the feminists; self-deification; a universe of your own.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mike Huckabee is getting hammered, ridiculed, and condemned for asking a reporter if Mormons really believe that Jesus and Satan are brothers. But, according to the official Latter-Day Saints website, Mormons DO believe that. Read it yourself here. A sampling: On first hearing, the doctrine that Lucifer and our Lord, Jesus Christ, are brothers may […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-theology"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Mormons believe<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Mike Huckabee is getting hammered, ridiculed, and condemned for asking a reporter if Mormons really believe that Jesus and Satan are brothers. 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