NB: Be prepared to wade through a fair bit of Mormon stuff; hopefully this will be worth your time. At the very least, you might end up with some questions to ask of any missionaries who might cross your path in real life or (these days) online. And TW, by the way: this is not a jolly post.
I grew up Mormon — a word that is out of favor with the current church president, and too bad for that — and I remained an active participant until I was around 40 (some… well, a couple of decades ago). When I say I was “active,” I mean the whole nine yards: I started serving in the church around age 12 as a pianist for the younger children’s auxiliary programs, I was a scripture chase champion, I sang with the So. Calif. Mormon Choir for years (an experience I loved, loved, loved), I graduated from Brigham Young University, I served a full-time French-speaking mission in NE France / southern Belgium, I got married in the Los Angeles temple, and I served in many different positions in my Pittsburgh ward (congregation) and as a Sunday School teacher in one of Boston’s western suburban wards. (I was also one of the earliest Mormon feminists on the listservs of the late 1980s through the early 2000s, though I would have considered myself “orthodox” probably until we moved to Boston in the mid-1990s.)
Such are my bona fides.
During the tenure of church president Gordon B. Hinckley (1995-2008), the church began backing away from one of the teachings I grew up with, a doctrine based on a “couplet” that had been “revealed” to Lorenzo Snow long before he became the church’s third president (serving briefly from 1898 to 1901, after decades of service as an apostle). The couplet (slightly paraphrased here) goes, “As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.” Founder Joseph Smith also taught the same doctrine — that if worthy, if they pass the various tests and challenges of mortality, men (as in maybe just males, given the unyieldingly patriarchal language) are destined to become gods.
(What happens to women? Sounds like they get to be glorified servants to their god-husbands. But for purposes of this piece, I’m going to assume that women get to fully participate in all the same god-like activities as men.)
Mormons have extra-biblical scripture in addition to the Book of Mormon (the 19th-century tome that purports to be a history of a lost people who came to the Americas in 600 BCE, and whom the resurrected Jesus visited, and whence the nickname cometh). The Doctrine & Covenants contain the official revelations that founder Joseph Smith received from God. The Pearl of Great Price, in addition to Joseph Smith’s personal account of seeing God, receiving and translating the “golden plates” into the Book of Mormon, contains writings that Smith supposedly translated from Egyptian papyri that came into his possession. Although modern scholars have translated these same (rather low-quality) items and found that they are simply copies of very standard Book of the Dead funeral texts, the Smith “translation” resulted in the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham (yes, purported writings from two of the biggest stars in the Old Testament).
The Book of Abraham has some pretty strange cosmology. The Book of Moses, however, contains God’s raison d’être right in the first chapter, with God telling Moses, “This is my work and my glory — to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39), and later on, an account of Enoch’s conversation with God (chapters 6 and especially 7).
I always thought the idea of becoming like God — learning to become a god myself, creating and peopling worlds and universes — was ultra-cool and made sense as an “eternal destination” for self-aware, conscious entities. It didn’t hurt that there are biblical proof-texts suggesting such a destiny, and that even non-Mormon religious folk (C.S. Lewis, for one) seem on board with the general idea. By contrast, the kind of heaven my evangelical (read: Bob Jones University) relatives believe in apparently involves singing praises to Jesus throughout all eternity, which sounds to me like a pre-frontal lobotomy would be a necessary prerequisite. (I still think that about my cousins’ ideas of heaven.)
Even after many years of disaffection toward and self-exile from the Mormon church (for many reasons), and a mounting degree of agnosticism over the years, for a long time I still found the idea of becoming like God an attractive premise for life after death. But here is where Enoch’s conversation with God, along with various life experiences, and a better understanding of my own temperament, give me pause. Here are the relevant verses (Moses 7:28-29, 32-33, 36-37, 40-41):
28 And it came to pass that the God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept; and Enoch bore record of it, saying: How is it that the heavens weep, and shed forth their tears as the rain upon the mountains?
29 And Enoch said unto the Lord: How is it that thou canst weep, seeing thou art holy, and from all eternity to all eternity?
32 The Lord said unto Enoch: Behold these thy brethren; they are the workmanship of mine own hands, and I gave unto them their knowledge, in the day I created them; and in the Garden of Eden, gave I unto man his agency;
33 And unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood;
36 Wherefore, I can stretch forth mine hands and hold all the creations which I have made; and mine eye can pierce them also, and among all the workmanship of mine hands there has not been so great wickedness as among thy brethren.
37 But behold, their sins shall be upon the heads of their fathers; Satan shall be their father, and misery shall be their doom; and the whole heavens shall weep over them, even all the workmanship of mine hands; wherefore should not the heavens weep, seeing these shall suffer?
40 Wherefore, for this shall the heavens weep, yea, and all the workmanship of mine hands.
41 And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto Enoch, and told Enoch all the doings of the children of men; wherefore Enoch knew, and looked upon their wickedness, and their misery, and wept and stretched forth his arms, and his heart swelled wide as eternity; and his bowels yearned; and all eternity shook.
That sounds fun. Not. Couple this with what I think of as the Divine Prime Directive — where the same God whom I implored to help me find a friend’s missing contact lens (success!) ignores or at least says no to so many people’s far more serious and urgent requests for help (finding food for their starving children, not getting raped, preventing war, stemming the tide of lies and deception, etc.). I haven’t figured out the rules for when divine intervention is OK and when it isn’t, and why some people’s prayers seem to produce miracles while the prayers of other people — who may be far more deserving of help — yield no relief.
I cannot help but wonder how much and what kind of joy God must experience that can offset all the pain and misery that an omniscient being would be privy to. As for me, even at a young age, I had a hard time navigating my own empathic tendencies. For example, I died with embarrassment right along with a friend who was asked to sing, hit a false note and broke down. I have historically (and frequently wrongly) projected my own ideas of how I would feel in certain circumstances onto other people’s lives and suffered (with or without them). Learning to handle such “misplaced empathy” (or if not misplaced, arguably useless) has been tough, even when applied to one or just a handful of people at a time; and of course, keeping abreast of the news can be and often is emotionally frazzling.
The thought of dealing with entire worlds of people’s feelings and suffering makes godhood far less appealing now. The idea was a lot easier when I simply thought of it (as so many Mormons seem to — when they admit to the teaching at all) as world-building, as building on top of God’s glory, without any in-depth consideration of the “human” aspects.
Maybe it’s true that this world is the most wicked of God’s creations (per verse 36 above), and other worlds — of God’s, of God’s posterity — are spared the worst of the bloodshed, the sociopathy, the cruelty, the suffering. I wonder. Even if there is less suffering in the universe at large, I wonder what kind of eternally thick skin one has to develop to continue such “work and glory” in the face of any such suffering, even that which is supposedly for someone’s good. How thick must the skin of a glorified body be to justify helping mortals with little things while turning down pleas for help with bigger things? I don’t find “God’s ways are not [human] ways” (cf Isaiah 55:8-9) particularly comforting.
It will be interesting to see how things shake out in the hereafter, if hereafter there be.
PS: Given my disaffection, most Mormons would not think me at all eligible to attain the Celestial kingdom — the highest heaven in a multi-layered heaven, and the only one where “gods in embryo” get to be. Hmm.