LDS Articles of Faith: 3
We believe that through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.
I don't believe this.
I don't know if I believe in the Atonement. It is a concept I have a hard time understanding and contemplating.
I don't know if I believe in being saved. It is another concept I have a hard time grasping. I don't know if I believe in heaven or hell. I haven't figured out the afterlife yet, so I don't know how I feel about it.
I definitely don't think the "laws and ordinances of the Gospel" are the way to be saved though. I don't think a person can go down a checklist and say "Yep, I'm good, I did all this stuff so I'm going to be saved now." It doesn't work that way.
The ordinances of the Gospel are exclusionary. They include going to the temple, which isn't an option for everyone who ever lived. Granted, the catchall for this is the Mormon temple work for the dead, but this still doesn't apply to everyone who ever lived. And I strongly feel that the time spent on temple work and genealogy would be MUCH better spent on serving people who are living now and making those lives better.
The God I believe in doesn't love his Mormon children more than the rest, but saying someone has to be baptized and married in the temple sure does imply that Mormons are the only ones who get to be saved, and that everyone else is SOL. I think the most important thing for living a good life is how you treat others, not whether or not you were baptized or married properly.
1 comment:
Hi Kaycei. I think I can ID with this. I don't think anyone in Mormondom really believes that there is a checklist, of sorts, to be saved, but more of a "minimum requirement" to be even be considered for entrance to the celestial kingdom. (Kinda like prereqs is to a major in college). If we all thought that just having the ordinances would get us there, we all wouldn't struggle with the guilt complexes about XYZ and never being good enough. It is an interesting paradox that others have brought up, who do you serve more, the dead or the living? The answer seems to be actually both.I don't think the church has asked us to do less for the living, it expects us to do more for everyone, except ourselves! We've been told that we need to sacrifice some of our over abundant leisure time for temple work, but noone has said that we can take a break from doing for others. Lose yourself in the service of others. The problem with that is, sometimes while losing yourself, you really do lose yourself. My father in law is a temple NUT, a zealot. He's always trying to get all of us to feel as he does, and organize our whole lives around our dead. I often feel like he does this temple "hobby" (people with spiritual hobbies, you know) because he can't relate to people well in the first place, therefore, it's actually easier to do temple work for people who can't refuse anyway, who have no sticky questions and you don't even have to get to know or love them in any real sense, and he gets all the kudos and smug sense of self-righteousness at thinking how many of these people will fall down at his feet and kiss his toes because he "saved them" from their outerdarkness. They get a free pass over the gulf and into the happy part of the spirit world at that point. I can see the good that comes from searching out one's past, and drawing and linking us in some way to them, as a way of connecting w/ our identity. The concept of becoming saviors to them by doing temple work is consistent with Mormon theology of preparing us to become "GODS" in a sense. I think you're right, the actual paradox occurs because it is an artificial situation set up by our dogma (or paradigm)that says without these ordinances, people won't have a chance to get into the CK.
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