Bible Uncommentary: Genesis 2 -- ... And Not a Man to Till the Ground

Title/Preface/TOC

Genesis 1: in the Beginning ...

Bible Uncommentary: Genesis 2

... And Not a Man to Till the Ground

 

Sometimes I think the entire known history of our race on this world is encompassed in the seventh day or phase of the creation, and I think maybe the Gods are now resting and mostly letting their plans play out.

Sometimes. Maybe.

No, there are problems with that idea, especially if taken too literally. But,

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

There are certain senses in which things were not finished, particularly if we insist on wrapping all the stuff in chapter 1 up in six distinct intervals that are all past and gone when we start chapter 2.

Anyway, we can say that the plans and preparation were mostly finished over the course of the six days or phases, and God rested. And God says rest after work is a good thing. 

How long that seventh phase lasted is another question, and whether Adam and Eve were created within the seventh phase or after, is also not really clear.

Oh, and verse 4 contains a case where a day is most definitely not a 24 hour period, or even a single rotation of any planet:

... in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, ...

If that were "in the days" it would fit more easily into an interpretation of six literal days, but day here is singular. 

I have heard that the word for day here in the original language -- or, rather in the language closest to original that we have -- is different from the word for the six days of chapter 1. But we're getting distracted.

(4) These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, (5) And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.

Look at verse 5:

And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: ...

Here it is.

What can that be that was done in the six days, but talking about laying out blueprints and such? 

Plans. The first six days were planning sessions.

Maybe. It sort-of works for me, although I do have the impression that primitive plants and animals were physically created during the planning sessions. 

Why?

... and there was not a man to till the ground.

I can interpret this to mean that what grew in chapter 1 was wild, and that the plants in chapter 2 are more of the class of plants that might benefit from human attention. 

Maybe.

I'm not sure what the

... for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, ...

is supposed to indicate. Whether the first six days were all 24 hours or not, it doesn't make sense that there had been no rains of any form during the process. Particularly, when the waters below the firmament were separated from the waters above, precipitation of some sort had to have occurred.

So this is a question I put on the shelf. If the time comes that I need to know, I'm going to trust God to reveal it to me. 

But God causes a mist to cover the ground, ...

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

This verse is one of the places were we can see the usage of the word soul to indicate the spirit and body of man as a single entity.

Dust of the ground?

Carbon, calcium, phosphorus, sulfur, potassium, sodium, chlorine, magnesium, iron, .... These are elements from which our bodies are made. They are also prominent among the elements found in the dust of the earth.

Water, air, and the dust of the earth. What else would we be made of, if we were going to live on the earth and have bodies? Plants grow out of the ground, animals eat the plants and grow bodies out of the elements of the dust of the earth. We eat some of the plants, too, and sometimes we eat some of the animals. Our bodies also are made of the dust of the earth -- indirectly, but of the dust of the ground.

It has been suggested by certain people that the Gods ate of the plants that were growing and then made Adam the same way we make children. I'm not sure I should believe that, but I'm not sure I should not.

We are not Golem, of course.

Consequent to making Adam, they planted a garden of less primitive plants, including plants that produce edible, nutritious, and delicious parts, put Adam in the garden, and let him tend it. Two of the trees mentioned in particular are the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life.

Adam was told not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, because doing so would make him subject to death.

Certain of our religious philosophers tend to talk about our coming from the presence of God to be born into this world, and they speak as if we were in some state of perfection before we were born. We also talk about the Garden of Eden as if it were a state of perfection.

Some people insist there is only one perfection. Is the absolute perfection of God the only perfection? Or are there lesser perfections?

A number of ancient philosophers and astronomers (astrologers, at the time) perfected a geocentric model that was perfectly self-consistent. It proved not to match the real solar system very well, but it was perfectly self-consistent. 

There are many things that are perfect in a limited sense, even though they do not match reality.

In a similar way, it is my understanding that we each attain a limited, self-consistent sort of perfection as spirits before we are born into this world. It's a limited sort of perfection precisely because we don't have a physical body that can experience the things that would push us past our limits.

As I understand it, the tree of knowledge of good and evil was both a real tree with real fruit, and a physical symbol of what experience does to our limited perfections.

After Adam is placed in the Garden, the less primitive animals are created and brought to Adam, and Adam gives them names. But animals don't provide the company that Adam needs, and the Gods borrow some genetic material from Adam, remove one of the genes (a "rib" in the genetic structure, as I see, but that may be just me) in Adams genetic makeup, and make Eve with the full set of genes. 

This was part of the plan in the first place, but it was also part of what Adam had to experience, perhaps so we could understand how united the spousal union should be -- not just "one flesh", but entirely one in purpose. 

Okay, I really can't justify the genetic theory about the rib business, but I'm pretty sure no one can prove me wrong. Heh.

Again, the record doesn't say how long this takes. For all we know, Adam and Eve might have been in the Garden of Eden for hundreds of millions of years, and plants from the Garden itself might have spread over much of the surface of the earth.

Wait. Can plants spread without dying? Does it matter, outside philosophies derived from the interpretations of mortal humans of limited perfection?

On the other hand, if death truly was not part of the world until after Adam and Eve were sent away from the garden, time in such a world would simply not have the same meaning it has in ours, and attempts to measure geological ages would result in meaningless measurements. 

More to the point, time measured without a mortal observer is still different from time measured by mortals such as we are.

Chapter 2 has something that looks like a discussion of geography, but it does not match any geography I know of, unless, perhaps, the rivers mentioned became oceans after the flood, when the continents split apart. If that were the case, Adam would have been in the Garden of Eden in geologically very ancient times. 

And why not? He was helping with the work of getting the earth ready for us to live on, too.

What Eden was eastward of is something I have not particularly figured out. Perhaps Moses was simply telling the Camp of Israel that Eden was not in Egypt, the wilderness, or Canaan. Someday, I will be able to ask God what the geography of the world before the flood was, and why it mattered to Moses and the people of Israel, and I suppose then I'll get better understanding.

There's something we might miss in the last verse, if we are not too distracted -- Adam and Eve were clearly in a state of innocence. That's important to remember.

Genesis 3:

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Bible Uncommentary: Genesis 1 -- In the Beginning ...

Title/Preface/TOC 

Bible Uncommentary: Genesis 1 

In the beginning ...

What beginning?

The beginning of the entire universe, including all the stars in the night sky? I suppose, just from this much, we might  think so.

But, let's think for a moment. This is the first chapter of

The First Book of Moses
Called
Genesis

that we are looking at. (That's the title, as given in the Bible.) 

Reading along with me will help keep track of what I'm talking about. It'll will also give you a chance to figure out where you might agree with me and where you might not, and why.

For the longest time, I thought "genesis" meant "life". You know, genes, genealogy, ...

Okay, maybe I can't really give a good explanation where that interpretation came from (explain the genesis of my interpretation, hey?). But I had that impression.

All dictionary entries for genesis that I've seen talk about origins. Many talk about "coming into being".

What is the purpose of the book of Genesis?

Near as I can tell from reading the Bible a few times, Moses is trying to explain to the people of the Camp of Israel where they came from. And at least part of the purpose behind that is to try to convince them that the gods of the people in the lands around them were not worth worshiping, any more than the gods of the land they had just left.

Because, you know, it's easier to admire what you can see than what you can't, and people do like to admire things. I don't think we consider the world they were living in carefully enough. It was a harsh world, not nearly as much eye candy as we have in our world. And it's always really tempting to let admiration go beyond admiration as works of art.

So, where they came from.

Not so much where the universe came from, although that also is mentioned, somewhat ambiguously, but where they came from. 

The beginning relative to them, and us. 

I have to acknowledge, my opinions here are influenced by my having gone several times through the first several chapters of Genesis in parallel with the almost, but not quite identical texts in the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price. 

The Pearl of Great Price is one of the standard works of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I also acknowledge that there are people who raise controversies about it. It is enlightening to me, and that is enough for me.

So when the text in Genesis says

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

I don't feel any particular need to read that as that it was created all at the same time. 

Also, I don't see any reason not to see it as Moses retelling what was shown him, the creation as relevant to him in the world where he was living. 

This is about God (and us), not about the universe. It seems to me that Moses is saying

Israel, you have God who created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. Why do you need these gods that created nothing, that were instead created by mortal humans no better than yourselves?

As I understand it, Moses himself had seen the creation in vision, and he knew how impressive it was. He was trying to give the people of the Camp something of the vision he had. But the language he had available was just missing vocabulary and phrasing for a lot of important concepts. 

It helps to be concrete rather than abstract, so he walked the people through it as best he could, with words and language he thought they could understand.

In the Bible, we don't see it very clearly, but in the Pearl of Great Price, we see some discussion of the measurement of time in the world where God resides. I guess Peter does mention this to a certain extent when he says, in 2nd Peter 3 v. 8,

... one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

I don't think "as a thousand years" must be read as literally "equal to". What we can say is that a day for God, at any rate, is a long time in our reckoning of time.

Moreover, in the first day, the earth itself was without form, and the sun had not yet caught fire. Hard to see the kind of day and night we're familiar with in that kind of environment. It's kind of hard for me to say that first day must be a literal 24 hours or a thousand years, or even any specific time period. And if the first day was not exactly twenty-four hours or exactly one thousand years, what of the next five days?

Words for day are also used in most languages to mean some period of time, rather than some definite interval. For example, in English, we often say, "in my day" to refer to a time in the past relevant to ourselves.

With God, all things are possible. The earth and the solar system might have been made in a couple of 24 hour days, and the plants, animals, and man in a few more. Or it might have been several thousand years, six days plus a day of rest according to the planet on which God resides. 

Or the earth may have been initially tidally locked to the sun, like the moon is to the earth, developing an actual rotation period as it developed form, so that the first day was much longer than the second, and much longer than a thousand years.

Or the six phases of the creation might have taken four billion years, plus or minus, as scientists say nowadays, and Moses, not having the language to deal with such long intervals of time, might have just been using night and day as a metaphor for the passage of time, to delineate the phases of creation.

In the first day or phase, the Spirit of God moved upon the waters. 

Waters? 

The name of the element hydrogen comes from water in most of our languages. Hydrogen is the most prominent element in universe.  

Spirit?

God is the creator of the universe. The laws of physics are God's work. On the one hand, the Spirit of God is metaphor for physical principles like gravity and light. On the other hand, the physical principles are literal expressions of God's personality. 

This is something that I have found in scripture. Physical fact often becomes metaphor for physical fact when principles in one context act similarly toprinciples in another, especially when directly connected to them. The Spirit of God communicates with us through our conscience. The Spirit of God communicates with the planets and other celestial bodies through gravity, or, in other words, gravity is one expression of the Spirit of God. 

From a different point of view, the initial or pre-existing parameters that physicists speak of in the theory of the big bang creation are the mind of God, and the forces which derive therefrom are the way the Spirit of God works in the natural world.

So gravity and other physical principles work on the clouds of hydrogen mixed with other stuff (including frozen water and methane) and a huge bunch of it coalesces into one locus until gravity heats it enough and

Let there be light.

And finally we have day. Even though the earth is still not very well formed, probably not rotating very fast, there is also night, and one phase is delineated. 

Rocks clump together and gravity clumps more of them together, and gases and frozen water are pulled in towards the big clump of rocks and dirt and separates the hydrogen above the firmament of the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen from the ice mixed in with the rocks and dirt.

Firmament? 

What was the word for atmosphere back then? Did they have one?

The rocks at the center of the huge clump are heating up, and the ice melts, and water covers the rocks. And in the second day or phase, the waters (hydrogen) under the primitive atmosphere are separated from the waters (hydrogen) above by the primitive atmosphere, by the firmament or sky. 

And the primitive atmosphere is very dense, hardly letting light through at all.

Huge clump of dirt. Huge clump of earth. Bigger than the biggest mountain you've seen. Bigger than thousands of mountains. Bigger than Moses could describe in the language he had available to explain it to the members of the camp. 

So huge you can't explore the surface of it all in a single day, or a year, or, really, in a lifetime. Big enough to be so heavy that it holds you to the surface and makes the surface feel (relatively) flat.

And our pre-mortal spirits were all there watching, as I understand it, helping in various ways.

What could we do as spirits (since we hadn't yet been given bodies)? I don't know. We witnessed it. As Job notes (jumping way ahead in the Bible), we rejoiced because we were going to get a world to experience life in. (At least, when I read God asking Job where he was, I read it as God reminding Job that he was there, rejoicing, too.)

(And there are verses in the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants that seem to be best interpreted as that we were there, also.)

And time passed and day turned into night and then into day again. And the atmosphere changed in composition, and the land on the surface started emerging from under the seas, and the land (and the ocean) were being biochemically prepared for plant life. As I read it, there was primitive plant life (grass bearing seed, etc.) developing on the land, and therefore, I must assume, in the continental shelf area under the water, by the time the earth rotated again through night and back into day.

Now the content of the atmosphere changed more, becoming closer to the oxygen/nitrogen combination we know, and the stars became visible in the night sky, and the sun was visible in the day sky. The other planets in our solar system would be in the process of formation, and they would become visible, too. And I'm not sure whether we should understand that the moon was captured during the fourth phase, or whether it just became visible. I tend to think it was captured during the fourth phase, further driving the process we would call, in our modern language, terraforming. But maybe it just became visible.

In the fifth phase, the seas were prepared for animal life, and primitive animal life began.

In the sixth phase, the earth was further prepared for animal life, and God and all of us were still helping get things prepared. 

Because, truly, even 4,000,000,000 years is not enough for life to come out of random reactions unless there is something influencing the randomness, something preventing at least a few of the random reactions from being followed by sequences of reactions that would completely destroy the "successes" to that point.

Besides, without an observer to give meaning to the reactions, there is no definition of success. Maybe watching actually was helping.

Why do I say it was being prepared? There are some verses in chapter 2 that talk about everything being created before it was all created. If we understand the first six phases of creation as preparatory, those verses make more sense.

Some people go as far as to think that the first six days were planning sessions, and the days and nights mentioned were on the planet where God and we were parked during the process. If so, I think that planet must have been some distance away, as we measure distance -- maybe about 8,300 parsecs away in what is normal space and time to us, perhaps brought effectively closer by means of something like what we call a wormhole. This is well beyond what I have confidence in asserting, however. I only mention it as another example of a possible reading of the days and nights of the creation.

And really, this is all quite a bit beyond anything the people of the Camp of Israel could have understood when Moses was trying to explain it. The point that they are supposed to understand is that God was actively involved in the natural processes (and we, with Him). 

God could not help but be involved, because God is the source of nature itself. And the naturalness of the processes is not a good reason to abandon the concept that the God of nature was behind it all, and try to worship the works of our own hands.

Nature is the expression of God in our universe.

No other God is worthy of our worship but the source of all truth. 

And if it is not true, we have to understand that it is not of God, that it is not God.

In the days of Moses, there were many idols of human invention which people tried to treat as if they were God. In many cases, mortal humans tried to pattern their idols after their understanding and misunderstandings of the real God, but in the end the invented gods are not God. 

In the time since then, humans have repeatedly tried to co-opt the real God and dress Him up and remake Him in the image of their limited ideals and philosophies. Same old thing.

Either way there are a lot of false ideas about God in circulation. One of our homework problems while we are here in this life is weeding through the false ideas and setting them aside, and seeking the true understanding of God. 

That's part of the reason that God has helped us preserve some of the records left behind by people like Moses who gained a fairly clear understanding of this sort of thing in the past.

In the latter verses of this chapter, God is creating the human race, male and female, and telling them -- us -- that we are to assume responsibility for the earth and the plants and animals on it. (The specific creation of Adam and Eve, the individuals, is described in chapter 2.)

Responsibility.

We have changed the meaning of dominion so that we can try to ignore responsibility and convince ourselves that dominion can be arbitrary -- can allow us to do what we please. 

But dominion, in the sense that God gave us dominion, comes with the responsibility to take care of things, along with the requirement that we report to God on our efforts at the end of the day, and at the end of our assignments in mortality, and receive and accept His judgement of what we did with what were were given. (This is also all made clear elsewhere, as are the justice and mercy of God that we can look forward to in the evaluation.) 

Dominion is responsibility, not privilege. (Not just privilege? In our present world, it may be better to deny privilege entirely. In a few years, because of changes in the general public dialog, we may need to recognize the privilege aspect again, as part of it, along with the responsibility. So much of communicating correctly depends on context.)

God is creating us, but, again, there are verses in chapter 2 that indicate that chapter 1 is describing some kind of preparatory creation -- including planning, perhaps including giving us our assignments of what we should do in mortality.

As potential support for the interpretation as six phases in planning, I offer that the last verse of the chapter talks about God seeing that everything was very good. Given that God is not subject to time the way we are as mortals, Moses could be telling us that He was seeing the future relative to us, that His plans would work out very well.

Oh, yeah. He.

He created us in His image. Male and female.

Male and female are also concepts that have been altered in our language; misinterpretations of what it means to be male or female have been woven into our language for millennia, and we have to weed through those, as well.

The name of God is sometimes given as (Latinized to) Jehovah -- or Yahweh. It is also sometimes given as Elohim. Elohim is a plural form. So is Adonai, another name for God found in the Bible. These plural forms are usually explained away as royal plural. This explanation is one of those traditions that we might ought to set aside. No. We really need to set it aside.

Until very recently, the neutral gender pronoun in English was formed by putting the masculine pronoun to double use. We have traditionally semantically overloaded the male forms.

The worship of Asherah and other female gods was often associated with a number of idolatrous practices that are best not to follow, and even now it is well to be careful when talking about a female God. 

But it would make sense that, if the text says "male and female after the image" of God, it is because there are principles of maleness and femaleness in the principle of Godliness.

Might we need to believe that God the Father is a true hermaphrodite? That was a possibility I considered when I was younger. 

I think I prefer to understand that God takes the singular form because neither Father nor Mother are subject to the egoism that would have them competing with each other for superiority and precedence. They would be in such perfect unity that, if one did something, it would be no different than if the other had done it. And it would be such perfect unity that the true worship of the one is identical to the true worship of the other. Thus, one united God.

-- which is quite clearly not the case in the ancient myths about Asherah and Baal, and their Greek and Roman counterparts, or other similar religions which claim both male and female gods but continually put them in competition with each other.

Again, there are other possible interpretations, and, before I forget, I should again point out that these are my interpretations. I don't have time to touch on all my beliefs in relation to Genesis 1, either, and I shouldn't. My understanding won't save you.

Scripture study is about developing your own understanding. It is when we understand the scriptures in our own context that they develop the power to help us, to take us to the next context in our several journeys.

The above is not binding on anyone, and I reserve the right to re-think my understanding. The above ideas should be understood to be personal opinions presented to provoke you to thought and study, and not considered doctrinal.

 Genesis 2 -- ... And Not a Man to Till the Ground

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 An earlier version of this can be found at https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/thoughts-on-bible-genesis-1.html.

Bible Uncommentary: Title/Preface/TOC

"Thou shalt not add to, nor take away ..."

 

Bible Uncommentary

Joel Matthew Rees

Copyright 2022 Joel Matthew Rees

Amagasaki, Japan

Preface

Marion G. Romney sometimes used a rather colorful analogy for scripture study, comparing the dependency on scripture commentary and other interpretive aids to drinking downstream from where the cows are wading. 

(He was not the only apostle to use the metaphor of drinking directly from the source, but others usually used less colorful terms. Oh. For what it might or might not be worth, Elder Romney was a cousin of Mitt Romney's father.)

Like Elder Romney, I recommend drinking from the source, that is, getting your knowledge of scripture from scriptures and prayer. It just makes more sense to prioritize what the scriptures themselves say over what mortal, fallible men and women say about them.

That said, my initial (teenage) attempts to read the scriptures mostly burned out in sleepiness and cognitive dissony. (Let me use dissony here. Cognitive dissonance isn't quite explicit enough.)

I had heard at school, and in Sunday School, so many opinions, ideas, ideologies, traditions, and interpretations that conflicted with what I was reading, that reading sometimes gave me a headache, if it didn't put me to sleep first.

Sleep is a useful thing when studying anything. When you're awake, it's easy for your conscious mind to try to force meaning and interpretation into what is familiar and already understood. The sleeping state of the mind is often much more able to deal with conflicts between what you are studying and what you expect. Sometimes you even remember that dream state consciously when you wake up.

Which is to say, not all of the downstream pollution comes from commentary and scripture study guides, etc. Some of the misunderstanding comes from what you think you already understand.

I could compare this to, say, learning in first grade that you can't subtract large numbers from small. It makes sense, really, that you can't take away what isn't there. 

And then another teacher explains about extending the number line in the negative direction from zero, and then another explains about debt and promises to pay back.

And you learn early on that you can't take a square root of a negative number, and then later they mention imaginary numbers -- hopefully in context of a second number line at right angles to the one you've been used to using, so you can see that imaginary numbers are actually real.

Extending your knowledge into the range where the simpler rules you start with change in application can be a source of frustration, dissonance, and just plain getting tired.

I could theorize about education techniques and more careful wording when presenting simpler rules, but language itself is not perfect. Words have meaning, and so does grammar, but the meanings can change in new contexts. And sometimes, ...

When I was in middle school ...

I called it junior high school. In Japanese, it's 中学校 (chūgakkō). 中 (chū) is middle, so that's middle school. But, at the time I'm writing this, most English language materials for Japanese students still translate that to English as junior high school. 

The language changes.

Up until the time I was in middle school, most of the context in which I had heard the word "virgin" used referred to the virgin Mary, and generally in the context that she was pregnant with Jesus -- Christmas, you know. In my mind, virgin was a fancy, maybe polite, way of saying pregnant.

Then, in middle school, a friend and fellow (but disaffected) Christian asked me if I were a virgin. I treated the question with contempt, which I'm afraid led to misunderstanding.

(And that cute cheerleader I had that terrible crush just happened to be there and listening. チェッ。)

Then I went to the trouble of finding out what the word really means, and I was too embarrassed to correct the misunderstanding. I'm afraid I'm going to have to confess that mistake in the resurrection, since I've lost the opportunities to do so in this world.

We aren't perfect. We do not understand things perfectly. Learning comes line-upon-line, precept-upon-precept. And we need to give ourselves and others room to make mistakes -- not just room to make mistakes, but space to correct them.

It took me something like five years of regular scripture study after I had served two years as a missionary to get past the bulk of false assumptions that made it hard to study the scriptures. My first time through each book in our standard works (what some would call our canon) except the Pearl of Great Price was mostly a buzz of concepts that I just missed. Similar to the way listening to a Buddhist priest read お経 (o-kyō) can mostly go in one ear and out the other, the words seemed to go in one eye and out ...

I'm pushing a metaphor too far. But you get the idea. I had to have a fair amount of patience, a certain amount of willingness to let go of things I didn't understand, the first several times through. You might say, a lot of patience. The two years dedicated to missionary service helped establish that habit of patience.

And I still don't expect that I have to understand everything, now. I have a lot of living still to do.

Some people would find fault with me for putting up with the things I don't understand. Some would even call it "submitting to grooming". 

If that's the case, what excuse do we have for any attempts at any sort of education at all? If students shouldn't be patient with the learning processes because it's hard and requires changing the ways we think and do things, what point is there in education, and in life itself? But I don't have time to debate education methods here.

There is a choice to be made, and it may take an entire lifetime to make it:

Do we trust God? Or do we assume that the universe is out to get us?

I personally figure, even if destruction turns out to be our ultimate end, I'm going to look for meaning anyway. And the way I've chosen to look for meaning happens to involve studying the scriptures.

It's gotta be better than just deciding to seek destruction now.

With that apology, I have decided to share some of the things I have learned, and some of the things I have unlearned. 

For the record, Joseph Smith said (and I agree with him), 

We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.

(per the 11th Article of Faith of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). I'm laying out some of my beliefs. I do not intend to say anyone else must believe the way I believe.

There is a lot to share, so I'm going to take it a chapter at a time. 

(Yeah, this is going to be a huge project.)

Table of Contents

• Genesis
  
  • Ch. 1 (In the Beginning ...)
    
  • Ch. 2 (... And Not a Man to Till the Ground.)
  • Ch. 3 ()
    
• 
  

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False starts on this project:

• https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/in-beginning-gen-01-not-good-start-on.html
• https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/thoughts-on-bible-genesis-1.html 
  

Thoughts on the Bible: Genesis 1

[This also just is not working. 

(See https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/in-beginning-gen-01-not-good-start-on.html for a previous attempt that didn't work very well.)

(Better yet, see https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/bible-uncommentary-titleprefacetoc.html for what I hope is going to work.)]

In the beginning ...

What beginning?

The beginning of the entire universe, including all the stars in the night sky? I suppose, just from this much, we might  think so.

But, let's think for a moment. This is

The First Book of Moses
Called
Genesis

For the longest time, I thought "genesis" meant "life". You know, genes, genealogy, ...

Okay, maybe I can't really give a good explanation where that interpretation came from (the genesis of my interpretation, hey?). But I had that impression.

All dictionary entries for genesis that I've seen talk about origins. Many talk about "coming into being".

What is the purpose of the book of Genesis?

Near as I can tell from reading it a few times, Moses is trying to explain to the people of the Camp of Israel where they came from. And the purpose behind that is to try to convince them that the gods that of the people in the lands around them were not worth worshiping.

Because, you know, it's easier to admire what you can see than what you can't.

So, where they came from. 

Not so much where the universe came from, although that also is mentioned, somewhat ambiguously.

I have to acknowledge, my opinions here are somewhat influenced by my having gone several times through the first several chapters of Genesis in parallel with the nearly identical texts in the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price. 

The Pearl of Great Price is one of the standard works of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I also acknowledge that there are people who raise controversies about it. It is enlightening to me, and that is enough for me.

So when the text in Genesis says

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

I don't feel any particular need to read that as all at once. 

This is about God, not about the universe. Moses is saying

Israel, you have God who created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. Why do you need these gods that created nothing, that were rather created by mortal humans no better than yourselves?

But Moses himself had seen the creation in vision, and he knew how impressive it was, and how it helps to be concrete rather than abstract, so he walked the people through it.  

In the Bible, we don't see it very clearly, but in the Pearl of Great Price, we see some discussion of the measurement of time in the world where God resides. Peter mentions this when he says, in 2nd Peter 3 v. 8, that a day for God is like a thousand years for us. Not equal, like. A day for God, at any rate, is a long time in our reckoning of time.

Moreover, in the first day, the earth itself was without form, and the sun had not yet caught fire. It's kind of hard to say that first day was a literal 24 hours, or even any specific time period. 

The Spirit of God moved upon the waters. 

Waters? 

The name of the element hydrogen comes from water. Hydrogen is the most prominent element in universe. 

God is the creator of the universe. The laws of physics are God's work. On the one hand, the Spirit of God is metaphor for physical principles like gravity and light. On the other hand, the physical principles are literal expressions of God's personality.

Gravity and other physical principles work on the clouds of hydrogen mixed with other stuff (including frozen water and methane) and a huge bunch of it coalesces into one locus until gravity heats it enough and

Let there be light.

And finally we have day. Even though the earth is still not very well formed, probably not rotating very fast, there is also night. 

Rocks clump together and gravity clumps more of them together, and gases and frozen water are pulled in towards the big clump of rocks and dirt and separates the hydrogen above the firmament of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen from the ice mixed in with the rocks and dirt.

But the rocks at the center of the clump are heating up, and the ice melts, and water covers the rocks. And in the second day, the waters under the primitive atmosphere are separated from the hydrogen above by the primitive atmosphere, the "sky".

And our pre-mortal spirits were all there watching, and, as I understand it, helping in various ways. What could we do as spirits (since we hadn't yet been given bodies)? I don't know. We witnessed it. We rejoiced because we were going to get a world to experience life in.

And a long time passed and day turned into night and then into day again. And the atmosphere changed in composition, and the land on the surface started appearing from under the seas, and the land (and the ocean) were being biochemically prepared for plant life. As I read it, there was primitive plant life (grass bearing seed, etc.) on the land, and therefore, we must assume, in continental shelf area under the water by the time the earth rotated again through night and back into day.

Now the content of the atmosphere changed more, becoming closer to the oxygen/nitrogen combination we know, and the stars appeared in the night sky, and the sun was visible in the day sky. And I'm not sure whether we should understand that the moon was captured during the fourth period, or whether it just became visible. I tend to think it was captured during the fourth period, further driving the process we would call in our modern language, terraforming.

In the fifth period, the seas were prepared for animal life, and primitive animal life began.

In the sixth period, the earth was further prepared for animal life, and God and all of us were still helping get things prepared. Because, truly, even 4,000,000,000 years is not enough for life to come out of random reactions unless there is something influencing the randomness, something preventing at least a few of the random reactions from being followed by reactions that would completely destroy the "successes" to that point.

Besides, without an observer to give meaning to the reactions, there is no definition of success.

Why do I way prepared? There are some verses in chapter 2 that talk about everything being created before it was all created.

Some people think that the first six days were planning sessions, and the days and nights were on the planet where God and we were parked during the process. If so, I think it must have been some distance away, as we measure distance -- about 8,300 parsecs away, perhaps brought effectively closer by means of a wormhole. This is well beyond what I have confidence in asserting, however.

And really, this is all quite a bit beyond anything the people of the Camp of Israel could have understood when Moses was trying to explain it. The point is that God was actively involved in the natural processes (and we, with Him). 

God could not help but be involved, because God is the source of nature itself. 

Nature is the expression of God in our universe.

No other God is worthy of our worship but the source of all truth. If it is not true, we have to understand that it is not God.

In the days of Moses, the idols were of human invention, and humans tried to pattern their idols after what they understood of the real God. 

In the time since then, humans have tried to co-opt the real God and dress Him up and remake Him in the image of their limited ideals and philosophies. 

Either way there are a lot of false ideas about God in circulation. One of our homework problems while we are here in this life is weeding through the false ideas and setting them aside, and seeking the true understanding of God. 

That's part of the reason that God has helped us preserve some of the records left behind by people like Moses who gained a fairly clear understanding in the past.

Why do I say that we were there?

In the latter verses of this chapter, God is creating man, male and female, and telling them -- us -- that we are to assume responsibility for the earth and the plants and animals on it. (The creation of Adam and Eve, the individuals, is described in chapter 2.)

(And there are verses in the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants that seem to be best interpreted as that we were there, also.)

We have changed the meaning of dominion to believe that dominion can be arbitrary. But dominion, in the sense that God gave us dominion, comes with the responsibility to take care of things, and the requirement that we will report to God on our efforts at the end of our assignments in mortality, and accept His judgement of what we did with what were were given. (This is also made clear elsewhere.)

Creating us, but, again, there are verses in chapter 2 that indicate that this was some kind of preparatory creation -- planning, maybe, maybe giving us our assignments. We still did not have physical bodies with which we could physically till the ground.

Before I forget, I should point out that these are my interpretations. They are not binding on anyone besides me, and I reserve the right to re-think things next time. These interpretations should be considered to be personal opinions and not considered doctrinal.

In the Beginning (Gen. 01) [Not a Good Start on This]

[This is just not working. I'm trying to take a layman's point of view, but my language just is coming out too formalesque, and I'm ending up trying to be too complete in a single rant.

See https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/bible-uncommentary-titleprefacetoc.html for what I hope is a better try.]

Certain critics of the concepts of God and scripture assert that Moses was trying to use esoteric (pseudo-)knowledge to scare the masses into docility when he gave the camp of Israel the first five books of the Bible. Sometimes I think many Bible scholars, religious philosophers, and such who attempt to explain the Bible might as well be in collusion with such critics, because of the mysteries, riddles, puzzles, and paradoxes without explanation that they like to focus on.

Someone I trust recommends drinking upstream from where the cows gather, rather than downstream. I think it's a good metaphor.

I blog a bit about what I believe, and the more I do so the less inclined I am to want to wade into the stream upstream from where others are going to drink. My language is not that great, and I seem to have a hard time making myself understood. It usually seems like it's going to be more effective and less of a bother to just let everybody believe what they are willing to believe and learn things on their own.

But I can also see that there is an influence that poisons the well as close to the source as it can get, using rumors, popular literature, mixed up education policies, advertising, politicking, just anything in the general domain of public discourse, to mutate the common use of important words and concepts used and referenced in the scriptures, so that the scriptures do become an opaque bundle of esoteric knowledge that can be manipulated into keeping the masses in line.

Which is my excuse for beginning a lay commentary on the Bible, in spite of not wanting to muddy the stream. So -- if you read what I write, don't take it for Gospel truth, just take it as something to maybe think about.

And let's dig in.

In the beginning ...

A lot of religious philosophizing and intellectual heat has been wasted on overloading that prepositional phrase. Was this the ultimate beginning, or was it just the beginning of things relative to this world?

When Moses told this to the people of Israel, what do you think was his intent for them to understand? 

Was he really talking about the beginning, or was he talking about God? 

This book is called Genesis. Genesis means origins. Of course he's talking about the beginning. Except,

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.

Maybe Moses is talking as much about God as about beginnings. Maybe talking about origins is talking about God.

And if he isn't talking strictly about beginnings, maybe there isn't all that much of a case for that phrase requiring the heavens and the earth to have begun at the exact same time -- or, especially, for the creation of the earth to have preceded the heavens, as has often been argued.

Now, if you are not willing to consider, for the sake of argument, that there might be a core of truth in what the Bible records, you might as well not consider the Bible at all. And you might as well not be reading this.

But if you are willing to consider the Bible, even if just for the sake of argument, think about Moses standing in front of a crowd of the leaders among the descendants of a guy named Jacob and those who had thrown their lot in with the descendants of Jacob -- the camp of Israel. They have picked up a lot of mistaken ideas and bad habits from living in Egypt, and Moses wants to motivate them to examine what they understand about the world. (Borrowing from, and paraphrasing, passages in, for example, Deuteronomy,)

Hear me, oh Israel! You have worshiped idols in Egypt. You have been distracted by the idols of the people we have wandered among.

In particular, most of the idolatrous religions had their own stories of beginnings to justify worship of their made-up deities, and those origin stories tended to contain details that justified such bad practices as temple prostitution, human sacrifice (including child sacrifice), three-fold or n-fold revenge, power being a privilege instead of a responsibility, ultimate power residing with the priests, etc. 

Considering passages from other books of the Bible, I hear Moses starting like this:

I present unto you that being, entity, and set of principles which actually created all these things whose images you have been prone to worship, and even created the humans who imagined them.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and all that in them is. Any creature, being, entity, force, or principle not capable of doing this is not worthy of your worship; neither is any invention of human imagination.

But what survives in Genesis of the presentation he gave was 

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. 

What he presents from there does not seem to exactly match our current scientific theories about the origins of the solar system and the earth, but there is some correlation.

The earth was without form, and void, and it was dark everywhere in the depths of space.

Go out to your garden and dig up a garden scoop full of earth -- dirt, clods, rocks. This was what was floating out there in space, along with hydrogen and hydrogen compounds at very low temperatures. No form. Not a disk, not even a sphere. Loose dirt, a few larger clods and rocks here and there, frozen water, frozen methane, lots of stuff out there floating in space, just spread way out, thin.

We don't know if Moses himself had a word for outer space, much less whether the people he was talking to would have understood had he used it. In fact, we don't know how much relevant vocabulary, much less the relevant concepts, the people he was talking to would have understood. (How much of the physics do you and your friends really understand, even now?)

Relating deep space to the ocean may have been the best he could do.

... darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the power and influence of God moved things around among the clouds of hydrogen, frozen ammonia, methane, water ice and dust, gathering the stuff in the void into clumps.

So these waters are not the oceans of earth. The oceans come later.

What is this power and influence of God that was moving things around? 

If God created the heavens and the world, God-ness includes the physical principles by which the universe was created. In this case, gravity comes to mind quickly. (But it would not have been the only thing.)

The etymological root of "hydrogen" is "water" in most languages that I am aware of. I tend to read water here as indicating hydrogen and its compounds, thus ammonia, methane, and so forth.

The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters ...

and hydrogen gas gathered into clumps, with heavier stuff being swing outward as things tended to form rotating clouds, and the hydrogen gas being the most prominent component anyway. But the people he was talking to probably wouldn't have understood that, either. But over aeons of time, hydrogen conglomerated into a huge, huge, huge ball of gas, bigger than hundreds of thousands of earths,

And God said, Let there be light ...

Gravity heated things up, the sun ignited, and we had a basic solar system in the process of forming. 

I'm not putting everything in. Read along in your copy, to see if you can tolerate my reasoning.

And God saw the light, that it was good.

Stable hydrogen fusion, but, again, it's hard to believe that many of the people Moses was talking to would have understood the concept of fusion.

And God divided the light from the darkness.

I'm not going to be offended if I'm wrong about this; I'm not sure if it's the correct place to interpolate it. But it seems to me that this is roughly where the earth takes enough shape to have parts of it in shadow. But it would not have been rotating fast at this point, especially not once every 24 hours, or the operation of gravity would have been overcome, and the earth could not have formed. It would have remained stretched out in streams and clumps as another asteroid belt.

So that first day would have been a really, really long day, like millions of years in terms of time as we know it. And much of that time, the earth would have been more like a pile of slush, a huge, mushy comet-like soft mass slowing compacting and slowly hardening. 

I'm going to guess that the mass was so mushy it really didn't have a regular period of rotation for the first two days, at bare minimum.

During the second day, the earth's form improves, and the core becomes solid and heats up, and the slush remaining on the surface melts, and we get actual atmosphere of some sort. 

Are the waters above the firmament clouds? Or is it a reference to methane boiling away and escaping out into space? I'm not sure. Could be both. Anyway, the sky isn't very clear during the second day. 

Interpreting the firmament as the sky is not a great stretch, since the Bible itself says the firmament is heaven, and sky is among the meanings which the word heaven can be used to indicate.

And it's still a very long day.

On the third day, the continents finally begin to emerge from the waters beneath the firmament. The Bible doesn't seem to mention sea plants specifically, but it's not a huge interpolation to include them in the mention of things we would call plants emerging during the third day.

The fourth day take a little extra interpolation, perhaps, but I think not that much. Oxygen is being released into the atmosphere and the skies are clearing up. The sun and then the stars become distinctly visible in the sky. I'm inclined to think that the moon does not just become visible, but is captured by the earth along in this period. 

Perhaps the collision that some scientists theorize is what precipitated the atmosphere clearing up. But if that's the case, the rotation of the earth might have suddenly changed to close to the 24-hour period we now know, and the description of the fifth and sixth days doesn't seem really compatible with that. I'm inclined to lean towards a near-miss, in which the gravitational influence of the moon starts the rotation of the earth gradually speeding up. Or perhaps a multi-body collision that leaves the earth speeding up a bit and the moon in close proximity. 

But the moon changes lots of things.

Animal life begins in the oceans and sky during the fifth day, and on land during the sixth day. And humans were made during the sixth day, as well.

The wording of the Bible gets a little weird here, if you insist on certain ideas that are usually accepted among the religious philosophers who deal with the Bible. 

In one place, the Bible says

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.

That is very definitely the first person plural possessive pronoun that God uses here.

Some have proposed that this is an Old Testament example of members of the Trinity discussing things among themselves, which sort-of contradicts the usual interpretations of the Trinity. 

On the other hand, interpretations of the Trinity are usually rather hard to pin down. 

Some have proposed that God is speaking to the angels, but that requires the angels to also be "in the image of God", and the Bible doesn't come right out and say that anywhere. Only we humans are created in the image of God. 

On the other hand, there are a few instances in the Bible of post-mortal humans acting as angels. And there are also hints of some of the angels being pre-mortal humans. Strong hints.

For example, God asks Job, 

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?

This is usually considered to be a rhetorical question, with the assumed answer that Job wasn't there, but God continues, 

... when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Job would be a son of God, so it sounds more like Job was being reminded that he was, in fact, there, rejoicing with the rest.

Very strong hints.

I understand that one of the names of God used in the Bible, Elohim, is plural in form.

I have reason to lean towards the idea that the Father and the pre-mortal Jesus and a number of pre-mortal humans were there, including Job and you and me, when the creation of our world began. But we, including Jesus, if I understand this right, were pre-mortal, with mortality and resurrection still between us and the state of being which could have included us in the plural reference of "Let us create man in our own image."

It gets a little stranger. 

So God created man in his (own) image, in his image created he him, male and female created he them.

If we remember that at the time the Bible was translated to English the masculine pronouns did double duty as neutral pronouns, we can partially untangle that, and, indeed, translations into languages other than English do usually opt for gender neutral grammar when referring to God in this verse. But God is still singular in languages that count nouns in the subject position, and the Bible doubles the emphasis on our being created in his image, and then says male and female.

Is God the Father both male and female? 

Thinking about the possibility that God might be hermaphrodite is entertaining, but we would then be in partial images of God as males and females, looking forward to, perhaps after the resurrection, attaining the characteristics of the other sex.

But there would then be no real need of becoming "one flesh" with our spouse. Marriage would not be necessary. We would have lost our best means of understanding how we can be different but still be united in our purposes and plans.

Marriage

Sometimes I have wondered whether the Holy Spirit might be the female component, but that really doesn't fit well.

 

Another example is that directly following the use of the first-person plural pronoun humans are given "dominion" over the earth and pretty much every thing in it. 

Dominion is usually used to indicate the right to determine what happens with no reference to responsibility. But other places do talk about our responsibilities towards those things which we are given dominion over. Dominion is clearly about responsibility, not a right to behave arbitrarily.

Vegetables and fruits are given to be our meat in yet another place, but that's actually fairly straightforward. Meat in this case is

Among many members of my church, the prevailing thought is that, at first, the days of the earth are a thousand years according to our present time, and the first through sixth days were primarily planning rather than implementation.

If the firmament is the atmosphere, the earth must have obtained its form by this point. If the firmament is heaven, or outer space, then we don't know for sure whether the earth has form at this point.

But in the third day, waters under the heavens are drawn off the surface of the continents, so the form of the earth must be stable by this point. In fact, it must be stable enough to allow plant life to develop. Even if God has seed from some other source and doesn't have to use energy from the storms that raged over the

 

 

 

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not Damnation

Somebody on Twitter asked a question that showed up in my feed that misunderstood the "Mormon" concept of damnation as binary. It was essentially, 

Mormon damnation is being prevented from progressing. Why would a just God force us into a situation where we would have to be impossibly perfect to avoid damnation?

Some of my friends have expressed similar questions.

Digging deep into these kinds of questions means you have to choose between abandoning the hope of finding meaning in life -- or abandoning binary interpretation. I think it's wiser to abandon binary interpretations.

The following is what I understand about this. It works for me, but it may not work for other people.

Before I dig into what I understand about damnation, I want to point out a couple of things Joseph Smith reported revelation on.  One, the pre-mortal Jesus said this to Moses,

For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. (Pearl of Great Price -- Moses 1: 39)

The other, Abraham explained why he broke away from the idolatry around him:

... finding there was greater happiness and peace and rest for me, I sought for the blessings of the fathers, ... (Pearl of Great Price -- Abraham 1: 2)

And we have this familiar verse in which Jesus taught this about what is the most fundamental commandment:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

This is the first and great commandment.

And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
(Matthew 22: 35 - 40.)

Given the parable of the Good Samaritan, neighbor basically includes everyone, regardless of race, religion, ideology, creed, or whatever.

More background, Joseph Smith described the fundamental Gospel of Jesus Christ as follows:

1. We believe in God, the Eternal Father, His Son Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost.
2. We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam's transgression.
3. We believe that through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.
4. We believe that the first principles and ordinances of the Gospel are: first, Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; second, Repentance; third, Baptism by immersion for the remission of sins; fourth, Laying on of hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost.

These are the first four of what we call the Articles of Faith. When they were written about 190 years ago, they were fairly easy to understand. But the common use of English, and the common semantics about religion and Christianity have changed so much that they seem to mean things that they do not.

My interpretations of these four articles goes something like this:

(1) The Parent/Progenitor is the principle of creation and procreation, but, because of limits in human language, we have usually called the Progenitor principle the Father. The principle is both abstract and tangible, and there are individual beings who take on the role of Father/Progenitor. Relative to our world (and maybe the solar system) there is a specific Individual who generally assumes the role of Father/Progenitor. 

(We sometimes refer to that Being as "Elohim", but that name is also used for certain idolatrous gods, so I won't use it here.)

The Child is the principle of being created. Again, because of limits in our language, we usually refer to the principle of the Child as the Son here. The role of the Son, for our world, is filled by Jesus Christ. (But, being perfect, He can also fill the role of Father for us, and He often does.) Being, as it were, our Elder Brother, he can stand as mediator between us and God when we need it.

The Holy Spirit is the influence of God throughout the universe. It is the medium by which information flows. It is also the origin and core of the human conscience. 

(Emphasis on core. We get a lot of false traditions and stuff layered on top of that core as we grow up in this world.) 

The physical interpretation the Holy Spirit is also valid. Without the Holy Spirit, there would be no exchange particles and no thermodynamics, among other things. (This should not be seen as a threat, because, quite clearly, God makes the rain to fall and the sun to shine on both believers and non-believers.)

On the reasonableness of believing that there could be beings who could fully embody the principles which underlie the creation and operation of the universe, in other words, embody all principles of truth, I suggest that, if we can conceive of extraterrestrial intelligent species, we have to consider that our own species is at a point where we are either going to destroy ourselves or evolve past the mad competitive nature that now consumes most of our energies. If we are not alone in the universe, surely other worlds have preceded us well beyond the decision point we now face, and it may well be that some of them evolve so far as to find no meaning except in helping new worlds evolve, and that they would probably stay as much behind the scenes as possible.

(2) There is a difference between punishment and consequence. We all take on damage as a result of the sins of our parents and the sins of society around us. But that is collateral damage, not the punishment of God.

The punishments and rewards of God are usually simply the natural consequences of our own choices, actions, and words. In some cases, God does alter the natural consequences to help us change our behavior.

Ultimately, though, when we stand before God to be judged, the judgement we receive is based on what we ourselves have done with what we have been given. God is both just and fair, even though it sometimes seems He is asking way too much of us.

Sometimes way too much. Well, we have to trust Him, particularly in this idea that there is a next life where the injustices of this life will be taken care of. 

(Why do we have to trust Him? I've noticed that many who refuse to trust God begin to believe that the universe itself is out to get them. But that is not the real reason. No God who is not the embodiment of all truth is worth being called God. I'd personally prefer to trust the truths I don't yet understand long before I'd want to trust something that I know is not true.)

(3) Obedience is a hard thing to understand, because we tend (again, because of things we get taught in this world) to believe that obedience is about doing what someone else tells us to do -- some mortal human no better than ourselves.

God put us here and commanded us to figure out what is right and wrong. It is a commandment to use our own judgement. Listening to others is a good idea, but being obedient to people who are not God may or may not end up being obedient to God.

How can we be obedient to God? 

It often requires us, for example, to dig through lots of layers of false understanding that have been wrapped around our conscience by this imperfect society in which we live. 

It requires that we learn truth, and that we follow the truths we learn.

(4) In some ways, you could say that the fourth article is the summary of the Gospel. It does make a good summary if you understand it right, not so much if you don't.

Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ --

The name "Jesus" can be interpreted in several ways. Some interpret it as "God is our help.", with emphasis on "our", believing that God helps no one else but them. This is not correct. God helps anyone willing to be helped, although He doesn't just solve our problems for us magically. (Have you ever seen magical solutions actually help anyone?) He helps us when we have done what we can.

And sometimes the help isn't what we thought we wanted, but if we are patient, we eventually see what He has done for us, and the faith we have to have is that it will lead us to better things. Some people talk about trials that help us be stronger. Some people talk about the world not being to supposed to meet the limited ideals that we humans invent. Life can be really, really hard, but that doesn't mean God isn't there. Again, it's a matter of trust, and of willingness to believe that this world is not all there is.

The name "Christ", as I understand it, is indication of the requirement that we ultimately choose for ourselves to follow Him or not.

Repentance --

We get all sorts of false ideas about repentance from misled and misleading religious teachers and philosophers (and irreligious teachers and philosophers, as well). 

Repentance is not about suffering and punishment. Repentance is changing our minds, turning our hearts towards God, and letting the change in our thoughts and hopes change what we do. 

Yeah, change can be brutal. But suffering is not really the point. 

Suffering now because we hope for something better can be good. But the real point is the change, even if the change seems to portend worse suffering until we can see the results of the changes.

This is the purpose of faith. It's the faith that makes us willing to change.

Jesus taught us the way to turn ourselves towards God, both in word and example, and he said, "Come unto me." and "Follow thou me."

Baptism -- 

Baptism is a covenant and an ordinance. It is the way we make a formal commitment to God, committing to faith and repentance and following Jesus's teachings. In exchange for our commitment, God is better able to help us.

And the pattern of baptism is symbolic. It is not just about washing away our sins. We have to understand what is actually sinful about our sins before we can put our sins away. When we put them away, we can rise out of the water, either literally or symbolically, with new hope and the will to actually change, one step at a time.

The gift of the Holy Ghost --

The better help that God can give us when we accept baptism is essentially given through the gift of the Holy Spirit.

The written scriptures are useful to help us get an idea of whether we are on the right track or not. They can be very useful when we take the time to understand them.

But, ultimately, what has been written before by others in situations that were often similar, but were never exactly the same as ours, is not sufficient guidance for our day-to-day needs. The Holy Ghost can give us guidance through our conscience. 

The general principles as I have given them above are rather abstract -- the love of God and neighbor, faith in a God that helps us, turning our hearts and actions towards God, committing to continue, and being guided by the Holy Spirit. It is the guidance of the Holy Spirit that enables us to apply these principles in our individual situations, in the details of our own lives.

The gift of the Holy Ghost is more constant than just occasional guidance. 

We eventually to learn to distinguish between what we wish were true and what really is true, but it takes experience.

As we try to change, to live according to our best understanding, the Holy Spirit can help us peel back false expectations and understandings that have built up over our conscience and our minds, that have prevented us from fully understanding and correctly following the teachings of God. This is an important part of the gift of the Holy Ghost.

The gift of the Holy Ghost can help us to set aside the commandments of men -- the limited and false ideals and ideologies that mortal men and women have taught us, so that we can follow God.

We don't have to assume that these ideals and ideologies were all taught in bad intent. Many of those who have taught us have simply passed on to us what they learned for their situations, but their situations are not ours.

We don't have to judge intent. We can simply say, maybe those ideals and ideologies will help me and maybe they won't. And we can seek the better way through the Holy Spirit.

The gift of the holy Ghost is that God can help us better when we have really decided we want to be helped.

Yes. I know that doesn't sound like a sure bet. But, in spite of what the slick sales approaches of other philosophies say, there really isn't anything else that is secure. Nothing else can take you beyond the limits of what you understand today.

If I seem to be disparaging other religions, I'll repeat, we don't have to assume bad intent. 

Also, our 11th article of faith is this:

We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.

If what other people believe helps them, I don't want to try to force them not to believe it, any more than I want them to try to force me not to believe what I believe. The purpose of faith is to help us move forward from where we are, not from where we aren't. Maybe it will help if I mention this:

... he that will harden his heart, the same receiveth the lesser portion of the word; and he that will not harden his heart, to him is given the greater portion of the word, until it is given unto him to know the mysteries of God until he know them in full. (Book of Mormon -- Alma 12: 10)

If we accept what we have been given, God will give us more.

Incidentally, the following verse sort-of explains that damnation can  be seen as something that we do to ourselves:

And they that will harden their hearts, to them is given the lesser portion of the word until they know nothing concerning his mysteries; and then they are taken captive by the devil, and led by his will down to destruction. Now this is what is meant by the chains of hell. (Book of Mormon -- Alma 12: 11)

So the trick -- no, not the trick -- the path to salvation is to accept what you are given, and keep your heart open for when God wants to give you more.

Damnation is being stuck in the limits of what you understand today, with no way out, because you refuse, or perhaps because you don't know how, to reach out to God for help. Hanging on to old, limited, and false ideals and ideologies is definitely one pattern of damnation.

The Gospel is not about being absolutely perfect immediately, now. That would damn us all.

The Gospel is about believing that God will help us to find better happiness in being better people, if we just try to do what we understand today and keep believing that God can help us understand how to be better as we go.