I lost my faith in a perfect church and a perfect Church at seven or so, and I was trying to rebel against God for making such an imperfect Church and an imperfect world -- all that stuff about the problem of evil.
Dad pointed out to me that fighting from the inside was a better proposition than fighting from the outside.
Mom suggested, if I didn't like God's plan, I should try to work up a better one, but it had to be workable.
When trying to work out how a better plan could really work -- not just mash this ideal and that ideal and the other ideal all jumbled together, but actually work out something that would be functional, I found myself recreating the world we have -- including much of the stuff I didn't like -- arguments, wars, laws, poverty, crime, etc.
Concerning the "black" races and the priesthood --
Yeah. God allowed His Church to backslide on that --
For several reasons, some of which can be summarized as simply, the best
people He had available to make His church/Church with weren't ready for what
would have been required to pull that much of a social revolution off among
the whites in the US, or in any other culture in any other country or group of
countries. The assumption of national/cultural superiority was too much a part
of pretty much every country's culture identity.
Any church that
contradicted that would have face persecution that would make the persecution
the Mormons faced because of polygamy look like a friendly debate.
Consider also the internal conflict the Church had over the issue, delayed as it was.
We are our own worst enemy.
Even those of us who understand that God's actual power looks nothing like the posturing of vain men, we tend to lean too much on the stuff that is easy to see.
I have mentioned this to others, and they have complained that an all-powerful God could have made it so that He would have had the necessary caliber of people. But that begs the question of whether we ourselves would be there or not.
I don't think it would have left us ordinary creatures the means to be included -- means to be saved.
If the Pearl of Great Price can be trusted, think about how Enoch drew all the people of faith of his day except for Noah's grandparents away into the Zion of that time, so that there really were no people interested in being good people left, for Noah's preaching to have any effect.
If I were to find fault with God, it would be to wonder why He would let Enoch draw all the good people away, but, then again, if He hadn't, this world would not be what we have now.
God is an engineer of the best sort. Because He makes stuff that seems imperfect to us, we have opportunities to learn and grow and change our natures to become more like Him, or less like Him, as we choose.
For the record, many who think they are saved in the church will be surprised at who they find waiting for them when they finally get into kingdoms of glory.
Why do I find it so easy to accept the existence of God?
At the age of seven, I still remembered bits and pieces of things from before I was born. In particular, I remembered my irritation at God for always being right, and for, as I saw it back then, using His power to make all the rules.
This was something like the first time since I was about four that I had considered that maybe God was right for a reason, and that He wasn't just making up rules to show how much more powerful He was than everyone else.
So, yeah, I have a problem with eliminating God from my worldviews. Short version of the story is I've been carrying a running argument with Him since I was pretty young.
I am aware that many people cannot accept the internal discussions they have with themselves to include a Holy Spirit. But we all have some semblance of a conscience, and that is precisely the beginning of how the Holy Spirit manifests (Him/Her/It)self to us.
The fact that there are unholy spirits that influence us as well should not surprise us, nor should we conflate unholy spirits with holy. Unholy spirits will definitely claim to be holy in attempt to confuse us. But if we are honest with ourselves, we can tell a difference.
One of the differences is that unholy spirits will try to convince us to impose our own vanities on others. The Holy Spirit encourages us to be patient, instead.
Yeah, even that can become confusing when we let false humility become our
vanity. I've been there, done that, it's hard to untangle. But if we believe
and are patient with ourselves and God, we can even untangle that one. Takes a
lot of talking things out with God, which is not an evil thing.
Mind you, I have been surprised at a number of things the church/Church teaches about God. Too many of us drag in strange ideas from the places we and our family, ancestors, and friends come from.
Let me propose a thought experiment.
For context, up until about twenty years ago, it was still sort-of current, both in religious and non-religious contexts, to talk about this world as unique in the universe, and about the human race as the only intelligent life in the known universe, and how precious our world and civilization was.
The James Webb telescope is finding lots of planetary companions to stellar objects close to us, and from the data it gives, we should expect practically every stellar-class object in the universe have planetary companions, many of them in what we call the habitable belt for their stellar primary.
Given what we think we know of the age of the universe, it is becoming more and more accepted that Fermi was correct in proposing his paradox:
Where is everyone else?
If we as a society survive the next hundred years without a total reset of the scale and type that scriptures assert in Noah's time, what directions should we expect our society to take? Is stagnation possible for us as a race?
What about technology? Should we not expect technology in the next thousand years to advance so far that it would be as indistinguishable from magic (See Clarke, et. al.) to us as much of what we have would have been indistinguishable from magic to people on our world living just a thousand years ago?
Breakover in Hydrogen fusion? Death? Poverty? The causes of war?
Extend that to ten thousand years -- a million years.
Where is everyone else? They have to be there somewhere. They have to be doing something to keep themselves occupied. What would that be?
Where are they? What are they doing?
This was from a couple of replies I made to a FB friend's nicely done poem about some problems within the church.
