I was recently listening to comedian Deborah Frances-White on her podcast The Guilty Feminist. As a former Jehovah’s Witness, she sometimes refers to things from her religious upbringing that are amusing to her now. [1] One of these is the way heaven is portrayed in the Jehovah’s Witness religious pamphlets, The Watchtower.
As she describes it, the heaven envisioned by the Jehovah’s Witnesses apparently involves young people handing fruit to one another. It’s an entirely “fruit-based economy,” which was frightening to her as she didn’t know anything about farming or fruit. What if she didn’t like it? Even the carnivorous predatory animals were apparently eating fruit in this heaven as pictures show cheetahs playing with toddlers, and none of the adults in the pictures are at all concerned.
You can read more about her exit from the Jehovah’s Witnesses here. You can catch up on The Guilty Feminist podcast here.
When she described this version of heaven, it made me laugh, and there was a touch of the familiar to it as well. The hereafter is an interesting concept, one that we don’t get to verify while living, and different Christian sects have different ideas of what it constitutes.
For example, many protestant sects (and tropes from TV and movies) describe what I would call Boring Heaven. This is a Heaven in which nobody really does anything but sit on clouds, strumming harps. It’s really just a nod to the idea that we don’t know what to expect in Heaven as well as the idea of rest and worship being the bread and butter of Heaven. I’d like to hope we could at least get some intramural badminton going, and if the only music on offer is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, no thanks. I’d like to hope we at least get to listen to Queen and Frank Sinatra.
Mormon Heaven is one of the truly unique doctrines we have. It’s quite different from other sects in several regards, at least the way I was taught it: 1) three different kingdoms, 2) the highest one includes marriage and presumably sex and spirit procreation, and 3) people from higher kingdoms can preach to those in lower kingdoms (and those in spirit paradise can preach to those in spirit prison).
But that means that Mormon Heaven is work, not a reward. Well, the reward is work. The Doctrine & Covenants even says “This is my work and my glory.” Rather than a constant state of worship or singing praises to God (which presumably also happens–the glory part), it involves the following types of work:
- Missionary work
- Having lots of spirit babies
- Building worlds
- Furthering our education
There’s some question about #2 and #4, actually. The question is whether we are supposed to get “eternal increase”[2] or “eternal progress.” If the former, well, that sounds miserable for the ones who are supposed to relish being an eternal baby farm. If the latter, well, that sounds miserable for anyone who doesn’t like school. But then again, maybe it’s like an endless Netflix binge of interesting TED talks and Adam Ruins Everything. I suppose I could get behind that. The third one always sounded like it might be a drag because I never really liked physics. But terraforming could be cool, so IDK. As to endless missionary work, I think we’ve all had that nightmare of being called back on a mission. That doesn’t sound fantastic either.
And honestly, if the celestial kingdom feels at all like an average church meeting, NO THANKS. That holds no appeal at all. There at least need to be some outdoor activities, hiking or boating maybe, not just boring “council” meetings in which we discuss plans to do work, most of which is also boring. If we have to clean the toilets in Heaven on a forced rotation, I am so out of there.
That brings us to eternal families. It’s something that we are told we can have if we “qualify,” and that we will be sad if we don’t get everyone we’re related to to be Mormon enough to join us in exaltation. But what exactly are we doing there? Family game nights? Eating Sunday dinners together?Am I going to live with my husband or my parents? My in-laws? My kids? My ggggggggggrandparents? Is it just going to be couples? [3] It’s one of those things that sounds great in theory, like time travel, but just gives you a headache thinking about it when you try to figure out how it actually works.
- What were your early beliefs about Mormon Heaven?
- Have your notions of Mormon Heaven changed from when you were younger to now? In what ways?
- Are there things you don’t think sound appealing about Mormon Heaven? Are there things that don’t make sense to you about it?
- Do you believe we will be “sad” in Heaven because of family separations?
Discuss.
[1] Although she is very much in earnest that she considers that religion a cult, one that mandates shunning for those who leave. Her definition of cult is when church members are encouraged to avoid all outside information or criticism of the faith and to suborn their conscience to whatever the elders tell them.
[2] Brigham Young was a big fan of this one, natch, since he boasted he had so many kids from his wives that he didn’t know everyone’s names. Charming.
[3] If it’s polygamy, I’ll take the JW fruit-based economy over that for sure.
Wheat & Tares 
Great post. I just finished reading Paradise Lost with my students and I think it’s pretty clear that Milton tends to view heaven as a place of stasis: no progression, no activities except a bunch of angels singing god’s praises all the time. One of my students wondered aloud if god created both human beings and Lucifer just to inject some excitement into an otherwise boring universe.
I have no idea what heaven will be like. Others in the church seem to have very concrete ideas about it and since I’m so unsure about it, I feel no compulsion to argue. I don’t think there will be the sadness you mention because of family separations because I don’t believe a loving god would separate families in the first place. A fair amount of things don’t sound appealing, including producing millions of children in the eternities. Also, I’m a bit introverted and so I like a decent amount of alone time and the Mormon heaven feels like that wouldn’t be allowed, what with everyone hanging out with each other all of the time. And I don’t like the notion of becoming a god. Frankly, it sounds incredibly boring. If you have all knowledge and all power and already know everything that’s going to happen, that sounds much more like being imprisoned by your own limitless capacities than a recipe for “eternal progression” since you don’t have any chance to enlarge them or to grow/progress in anything else but “glory” and I don’t even know what that means.
My own hopes for the afterlife are really quite simple. I hope that nature is as beautiful/more beautiful than it is here and that I get a chance to hike and fish. I hope that I can joyful inhabit my body and that my senses are sharpened so that I can enjoy music, food, art, running, etc. even more than I do now. I hope I can still read and learn and write and play the guitar (hopefully in a less crappy manner than I do now). And I hope there is just a lot of relaxed and stimulating discussions taking place among good friends. I really don’t want anything more than that.
Well, I’m still trying to figure out this from the link: “She was born in Australia after being adopted…” Most adopted children are adopted after they are born. Deborah may be remarkable in more ways than ditching JW for comedy.
As a child I wasn’t sure I wanted to be part of my “forever family.” Some Mormon men seem to think that their progeny (through ultimate generations in mortality and spirit children in their exalted state hereafter) exist primarily to bring those men glory and obedience. Some of them grow out of that. I think there are a lot of versions of Mormon heaven. There sure will be a lot of unhappiness if there are not. I remember being told that the only music there is by Evan Stephens. No thanks. I’ll need a bit more variety.
“2) the highest one includes marriage and presumably sex and spirit procreation,”
Presumably sex? Mormon heaven is EXPLICIT and like having your own Heavenly playboy mansion (sorry ladies). Not a popular topic in sacrament meetings today, but turn back the clock to polygamy and, chicka, chicka, boom boom, sex was what it was all about.
TK Smoothies are going to be popular among the less righteous.
“What were your early beliefs about Mormon Heaven?”
Everything I liked about Earth, but more of it. Lots more. Sort of a science fiction rendering; planets, life forms, alien animals.
“Have your notions of Mormon Heaven changed from when you were younger to now? In what ways?”
Nope. I still see it that way. More of the good that I already have. Evil does not cease to exist, one must learn to work around it, over it, compartmentalize it. My understanding of confining evil in the “Millenium” is simply the aggregate action of people choosing not to be evil.
“Are there things you don’t think sound appealing about Mormon Heaven? Are there things that don’t make sense to you about it?”
Eternal families seems to have some logical problems but on the other hand nothing appears to be actually said about how that relationship will be manifest. It appears to be administrative, in other words, a chain of ordinations and so on but whether your children wan to live under your roof for the next 300 million years seems unlikely.
“Do you believe we will be sad in Heaven because of family separations?”
Possibly, but on that return, we become siblings as we were before coming to Earth. They aren’t yours and never were! Just brothers and sisters that made other choices, as they do here on Earth. Being sealed seems to have some power of dragging-along-the-less-worthy spouse but he or she still has free agency and can certainly refuse the ride.
I was going to add that all people are presumably going to be resurrected with anatomically complete bodies. That means men and women will still have men and women reproductive parts. I suspect that what will be missing will be the irresistible urge to do a thing that apart from that urge probably would not be done and they won’t miss it in the slightest.
Scripture does not say there will be no sex (verb), holding hands, or visiting whoever you want to visit, talk about whatever you want to talk about. The verse is a continuation of the “seeds”, which presumes (1) continuation of desire and (2) reproductive behavior will actually reproduce something. There is no indication of a loss of free agency particularly in the Celestial Kingdom, so if you get there and decide not to be a heavenly father or heavenly mother, nobody is going to force that on you. But being filled with love and charity it seems likely that you will not keep all that to yourself for the next 300 million years.
C.S. Lewis wisely said that:
“We are afraid that heaven is a bribe, and that if we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives.”
Long story short — there are many people who simply don’t want what Heaven has to offer. In fact, in one way or another, we all don’t want what Heaven has to offer (even though what it has to offer is greater joy than anything we can imagine). The good news is that we can be changed to become people who really do want what Heaven has to offer. The question is whether we want to get a heaven that we want in our imperfect minds now or whether we will allow ourselves to be changed into people who want what the perfect Heaven has to give. Service, family, work, charity — I’ll admit that it doesn’t sound like an eternity of joy to me but I trust the Lord enough that I recognize the need to give Him room to change me rather than demanding He conform to what I want.
Ever since I started reading Mormon blogs, I’ve been bemused by people who conjecture about what heaven will be like and then conclude that they won’t like it.
For us to take our twenty or thirty or fifty years of experience on Earth and draw conclusions about what we do and do not wish to be doing for the next million years is really rather silly. We in the here and now do not, I think, understand life in the millenium any better than a four-year-old understands life in high school – and the aeons after that are even further beyond our knowledge.
Suffice it to say that heaven won’t be boring, and that whatever sort of work we do (and there will be lots of work) will be closer and closer to the kind of work that God does – and nobody who manages to get to heaven in the first place will find God’s work to be irksome.
Also, learning and continuing to grow in our intellectual capacities will be an essential part of all this. Incuriosity – the lack of a desire to always be learning – is a vice that will keep people out if heaven, unless they repent and change their ways.
What was my first concept of Mormon heaven? Probably a typical Protestant heaven where life is like on Earth but without the unpleasant parts – which to a small child meant all forms of work.
How do I see heaven now? Well, it will be whatever kind of civilization is to be built by people who are immortal, lack all disposition to do evil to one another, and have Jesus as their King. Perhaps we can speculate on what that civilization will look like for the first century or so, but after that it will grow into something quite beyond our powers of imagination.
As a young child I envisioned heaven as living with my spouse, visiting my grandparents, being visited by my children, and perhaps spending as little time as possible with my parents, no offense to them, since the had such much time with me on Earth already.
As a teen I felt like heaven would be making lots of worlds SimCity / Simearth style. Perhaps I played too many video games.
These days, there are many different types of heaven preached from the pulpit, and many more that people believe in. It seems like people believe as much as they can in the heaven that they want for themselves.
Sad heaven is not something I believe in (which isn’t saying much), but it is taught at church and many homes. “We don’t want empty chairs at the dinner table in heaven.”
My 91 yr old mother-in-law is all worried that her youngest son (my husband) won’t be with the family in heaven because a Stake audit showed an irregularity with his sealing to his parents.
Frankly, I can’t believe in a heaven where good and decent people are separated from their families simply because they didn’t become Mormons.
At this point in my life, I’ve become more agnostic.
I have no idea what heaven will be like, but I know what I would like for it to be like: creative.
I want to paint and write and draw and sing and sculpt. And grow things. And maybe even cook. I have zero desire for more babies though.
Since the highest degree of the celestial kingdom is the only place for married couples, I assumed it was the only place we will legally have sex. Therefore I’ve always thought for the vast majority of resurrected souls they’d be not only in sad, work-filled heaven, but also eternal sexual frustration. Not kidding – I think this is one logical conclusion given DC 131.
Toad and Michael 2 may have missed out on JFS’ version of some Mormon heavens, dubbed the TK Smoothie doctrine by others:
“I take it that men and women will, in these [terrestrial, telestial] kingdoms, be just what the so-called Christian world expects us all to be — neither man nor woman, merely immortal beings having received the resurrection.” Joseph Fielding Smith, “Doctrines of Salvation”. vol. 2, p. 288)
Of course, Alma seems to have missed it also:
“Now, this restoration shall come to all, both old and young, both bond and free, both male and female, both the wicked and the righteous; and even there shall not so much as a hair of their heads be lost; but every thing shall be restored to its perfect frame, as it is now, or in the body…” Alma 11:44
I’m not impressed with the TK Smoothie doctrine, but at my age at least, I don’t like Alma’s “every thing…as it is now” either. But I’ll take recreated in “perfect frame” rather than restored to “as it is now,” thank you very much.
I often like to think of what we personally believe to be the truth about the gospel and the actual truth of the gospel as represented by a Venn diagram with a rather small intersection. In regards to heaven, that intersection is the narrowest sliver.
It’s not heaven without dinosaurs. All dinosaurs go to heaven or Jurassic Park heaven.
I actually prefer the description of heaven from Lewis’ Narnia. This life he describes is a shadow of heaven. The good things of this life are amplified and brightened in their true form. In this view the good things of this world are there, but better including relationships and nature. Work, but not the drudgery of most earthly jobs. Maybe creative endeavors are a shadow of what we do in heaven. Will there be sex, I don’t see why not. But will it really be just the select polygamous chosen? I don’t know and I hope not. There is a lot of the world from all of time to explore and good people from all those times and places.
If there are dinosaurs in heaven the 8 year old in me will be super thrilled. If there will not, it would be sad and thus not heaven. So watch out for the celestial T. Rex and keep an eye out for herds of duck billed dinosaurs and oceans full of trilobites.
I’m not keen on hanging out with my parents. I hope my kids will want to do their own thing but visit periodically. Now, I’d really love to spend a decade with my ggggggggggrandparents and catch up. Of course, I will personally be in Outer Darkness so this is all conjecture anyway.
Also I wonder whether we’ll have to make peace with everyone (and every thing) we’ve wronged in life: https://pbfcomics.com/comics/amends/ [note: that particular link is safe but other comics on that site can be wildly NSFW and offensive]
A few years ago, I got thinking about the conundrum of a perpetually peaceful heaven, so I wrote a short story about a guy who figures out after 5,000 years and change in the terrestrial kingdom that he’s bored. And that’s where the fun starts. Anyway, I think I explored some rather important questions about our LDS assumptions regarding the hereafter. You can search for the story under my name and the title, “Eternal Misfit.” It was published by Dialogue. Sorry for the shameless self-promotion, but it’s way easier (and more entertaining) than trying to rehash all those ideas in a blog comment.
TK smoothies?!? Dear God. I thought the Book of Mormon musical song about spooky Mormon hell was weird. Can’t wait for the sequel where they sing about TK smoothies.
One of my kids came home a bit shell shocked after their Sunday school teacher spent an entire lesson telling them to work very hard to get into the celestial kingdom or there would be NO SEX for them in the afterlife. So clearly this is what heaven is ALL ABOUT.
Believing Joseph: “Ever since I started reading Mormon blogs, I’ve been bemused by people who conjecture about what heaven will be like and then conclude that they won’t like it.” Lately I’ve been bemused by people who say bemused when I think they mean amused. But maybe you do mean bemused. I’m not sure. I’m bemused.
JR: “”Well, I’m still trying to figure out this from the link: “She was born in Australia after being adopted…” Most adopted children are adopted after they are born. Deborah may be remarkable in more ways than ditching JW for comedy.” I was confused by that statement in the linked article as well, but I wondered if they meant she was adopted prior to her birth, meaning that her adoptive parents paid for the medical care for her birth mother. Either that or the person who wrote the linked article made a mistake. I should also clarify that she didn’t give up being JW for comedy. She is a comedian and she was raised JW, but it wasn’t a trade.
Mormon Heaven seems like a sad place to me. Nelson spoke recently about how sad it will be to get there and ask, “Where is my family?” What are the chances that we will all make it? Most likely, all of us will be looking around for someone we love, but whom we cannot find.
A lot of Mormon parents are really comforted that they’ll get to be with their children forever. But don’t they realize that their kids are actually part of Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother’s eternal increase? We don’t start getting our eternal increase until AFTER we are exalted. Until then, we just serve as vehicles to get Elohim’s kids down here to earth.
What would it really look like for me to be my daughter’s father in the next life? Why does the father/daughter relationship in this temporal plane trump the brother/sister relationship we shared in Heavenly Father’s family in the eternal world? And why does she need two eternal fathers in the next life? I will step aside. God can take over from that point onward.
It doesn’t make sense.
The truth is this: Mormon Heaven, per D&C 132, is about men amassing large herds of women to their side to fill the cosmos with a “continuation of the seed.” If the wife doesn’t accept the principle, she’ll be destroyed. That is the only scriptural definition of eternal marriage in the Standard Works today.
But now, Mormon Heaven and the doctrine of eternal marriage (nicely divorced from its true origins in polygamy) are convenient tools to keep people in the church.
It is a doctrine that makes no sense, yet appeals to our sentimental concept of family. I can’t be sentimental about family. I don’t have a squeaky clean genealogy. It is full of lies and deceit and incest. It is a disgusting crime that we force the primary kids to sing, “I’m so glad when daddy comes home,…” when for many kids, Daddy’s homecoming is celebrated with violence and abuse.
The Mormon God is FAMILY. It is a false god.
This post reminds me of an old joke. A newly dead guy gets to heaven and Peter offers to give him a tour. One area reminded the man of New Orleans, with jazz playing loudly and lots of laughter as people, dressed in bright colors and varied styles, hung out in bars. In another area there were dance halls and restaurants, each teeming with people. Then, as they entered one great and spacious building, Peter shushed the man who thought perhaps this was a celestial library. They opened a door labeled, “Observation Deck—Absolutely No Talking”. Once inside, they overlooked a room full of people dressed all in white, smiling but not laughing, whispering instead of talking.
When they left the observation deck, the newly dead man, who was quite perplexed by what he’d just seen, asked Peter, “What the hell was that?”
“Oh that?” Peter responded. “That was the Mormons. They think they’re alone up here. We don’t want to spoil it for them so we keep them sheltered from the rest of heaven.”
Toad, In an early discussion of JFS’ speculation (TK smoothies) I was asked why he proposed resurrection without genitalia rather than just infertility in those two heavenly kingdoms. Heck, the comment went, if it were just infertility and no “continuation of seed” or spirit children or eternal family units to worry about, why shouldn’t consenting adults in the terrestrial and telestial kingdoms have whatever sexual intimacy they mutually desire. That is, why should a mortal law of chastity and marriage have anything to do with the matter in those kingdoms. I didn’t have a good answer. Could that be another version of those Mormon heavens? What would Dot’s kid’s Sunday School teacher have made of that?
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
Jorge Luis Borges
I have be hoping for this kind of heaven but I just changed my mind this week. I went to see the rock band The 1975 on Monday with my 17 year old. Seeing the whole place full of kids jumpjng screaming lights blaring music rocking I have changed my mind. Heaven will a rock concert, daily doses of new music from John Paul Ringo and Bach. They will blow our minds and rock our ressurected bones. Jesus with his long hair and beard as we portray him fits in as a rock star and will show up from time to time doing a duo with the Buddha, songs as sermons.
I’ve concluded that we know very little about the afterlife and that spending time and energy in this life doing things for a heavenly reward is a poor use of my personal resources (time, money, energy, etc.). As others have pointed out, our ideas about heaven have changed dramatically since the founding of the Church and even changed recently. Growing up, I always heard that heaven would be like the temple and we would be so busy doing work and we could do even more work because we wouldn’t have to eat or sleep. Didn’t sound all that great to me then and sounds terrible to me now. I’ve heard a lot of older people talk about “no empty chairs” which was the rallying cry in another era, making sure everyone in the family made it there (and making those with ‘astray’ children feel horribly guilty). At this point, I kind of like that it is life’s great last mystery, no one really knows what will happen and what it will be like.
I’ll admit I also am somewhat amused by expressions of reservations as to scenarios of Heaven. Regardless of what I have been taught about it, the pervading idea in the back of my mind has been that it is a place where all parties are happy and satisfied. Whether that comes about by having certain aspects of my personality burned out of me, being presented with information and understanding I didn’t have before, or a combination of the two I’m not sure. I lean toward increased understanding. Regardless, I think everyone will find Heaven fully enjoyable.
As a child my idea of Heaven was somewhat close to the Protestant view. Now I tend to think of it much more closely to our own Earth life, but without the pains and sorrows.
As far as eternal families, I can’t see there being a ton sorrow no matter how people have used their agency. I did have one Institute Teacher, generally quite conservative even by CES standards, make a pretty compelling case that the three kingdoms were more a state of being than actual places. Not sure how I feel about that, but it definitely jives more with keeping families together.
As exalted beings, I’m one who tends to think our own omniscience will be limited to our own creations. As such, I would look forward to learning from and enjoying other worlds my Heavenly Parents created. Who was the “Will Shakespeare” on this planet, or the “Van Gogh” on that one? What natural wonders grace or graced some of these other worlds for me to enjoy. Mostly just a thought. I’m sure we’ll find the work we do–as perfectly as we may do it–perfectly satisfying as well. I think boredom will be non-existent.
Hawk, I agree with your comments about our very limited perceptions as to what an eternal family looks like. Most of us are very self-centric as we try to imagine this. So there’s me and my wife and our kids, also our parents and siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, and grandchildren. All our family gathered around us; a heart warming picture.. But of course, these people all have a similar set of extended family, so pretty soon it becomes a huge undifferentiated mass of humanity and not the Norman Rockwell image we’ve built up in our imaginations..
I’ve always appreciated this Marlin K Jensen quote:
“Sometimes after an enjoyable family home evening, or during a fervent family prayer, or when our entire family is at the dinner table on Sunday evening eating waffles and engaging in a session of lively, good-natured conversation, I quietly say to myself: ‘If heaven is nothing more than this, it will be good enough for me!’”
I hope that heaven has waffles with my family there to enjoy them.
Paradise Lost, Book VIII, lines 618 sqq.:
“To whom the Angel, with a smile that glowed/Celestial rosy-red, Love’s proper hue,/Answered: ‘Let it suffice thee that thou know’st/Us happy, and without Love no happiness./Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy’st/(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy/In eminence, and obstacle find none/Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars;/Easier than air with air, if Spirits embrace,/Total they mix, union of pure with pure/Desiring, nor restrained conveyance need/As flesh to mix with flesh, or soul with soul.”
So Milton thinks angels have sex, apparently, and it’s better than it is for men. (The late Isaac Asimov says he unconsciously borrowed from this passage in “Paradise Lost” for the alien sex in one of his novels.)
For Dante, Heaven is an eternity contemplating God and His glory, but the people there are so suffused with God’s love that it’s something wonderful.
The Simpsons says that there is air hockey in heaven for what that’s worth.
Personally, I tend to follow Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:11: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put away childish things.” (Wayment’s translation) The kinds of things I enjoyed when I was a child are different from what I enjoy now. I could not have imagined as a kindergartener what adulthood is really like.
Yes, John Jenkins. And with less high-falutin’ language there is also Letter II of Mark Twain’s “Letters from the Earth” (from Satan back to his friends St. Michael and St. Gabriel about the strange heaven man has imagined for himself).
Going back to the illustration in the OP, there was a time several years ago when I was sure that the editors of the Friend magazine were subcontracting the covers out to the artists who did the Watchtower. My kids are older now so I rarely see the Friend, I don’t know if we’re doing the covers in house now or not.
I also find that those in Jehovah’s Witness heaven wear sweaters a lot as well, which is odd in such a tropical fruitful climate.
Sex is about love, not just reproduction. If resurrected beings , who will be male and female again, can eat food and love, which they can, then I don’t know why they wouldn’t also be able to have sex . It just wouldn’t produce a child.
If that’s not the case, then just to be safe, I imagine all LDS boys would have an incentive to stay in active in the Church and never leave! lol
p.s. Maybe that’s why missionary work is so successful in the hereafter. We tell people if they want to do it again, they need to join our Church!lol
And TK Smoothie doctrine—nah, we’re told our gender is eternal.
mez,
Today we are told TK Smoothies aren’t on the program, but what will tomorrow bring? Who should we be listening to at all?
The Playboy Mansion heaven filled with women (who were taken from less valiant men) in the hereafter has fallen out of favor. Does that bother you? What do we believe today that the next generation will discard as junk theology, like TK smoothies?
When I was a young man, we were told more than once, if you cant stop your masturbation in this life, you will lose all sexual privileges in the hereafter. Seriously!
Given our theology, I’ve come to think that “heaven” isn’t really a thing for us. Instead, we just have continued existence, in several (perhaps infinite) possible modes. I get the general sense that the “best” one is what we call exaltation – that is, godhood. I think that sounds. . . complicated. On one hand, it must be interesting and fulfilling (education, progression, power, love, creation). But it also sounds terrifying (responsibility, loss, evil, constraints, genuine risk).
Of all the reading I’ve done, William James’s thought experiment is most striking: suppose the Creator said to you: “I am going to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent does its own ‘level best.’ I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world. Its safety, you see, is unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win through. It is a social scheme of co-operative work genuinely to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust the other agents enough to face the risk?”
The devil of it is, though, that we don’t have the chance to opt out. We are made out of essential stuff that is, philosophically, necessary and not contingent. We can’t cease to exist, and we can’t abdicate responsibility. We’re stuck with being. Best to make the best of it, I guess.
Do you believe we will be “sad” in Heaven because of family separations?
No. I’m not convinced there will be family separations that are not desired by or simply natural to so-called “separated” family members. I’m not convinced “separation” means lack of contact/communication/whatever. The version of Mormon theology I think I’ve seen in the D&C doesn’t prevent such contact or communication between heavenly “kingdoms” any more than it would prevent the contact and communication of the First Vision. I’d like to think that those who matriculate to the hypothesized highest degree of the celestial kingdom have such love of others including mortal-family members that they would be happy that such family members have matriculated to a place/condition that suits them and makes them happy.
I’ve sometimes worried about the apparent use of the “eternal family” concept as a scare tactic in an attempt to control behavior, when it seems its intention may have been instead to encourage familial love out of which appropriate behavior should grow. The “no empty chair” talk sometimes seems to be focused on the desires of those complaining about a possible “empty chair” rather than a loving focus on the nature/needs/desires of the person they wish would occupy such “an empty chair.” If that appearance is accurate, maybe the fretting about it is evidence of disqualification to even be concerned about it.
Then there is also Mark 3:35 “Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.” Maybe we should be more concerned about being sealed to the family of God, whatever that may ultimately mean, than to specific spiritual siblings familiar in a mortal family context. Maybe we should be learning love from a mortal family context, though it seems unlikely in the context of too many mortal families.
Maybe my rambling speculations are nonsense.
Incidentally, I was amused at The Atlantic reporting “Givens said. ‘The point that is nonnegotiable for Latter-day Saints is that gender is eternal.'” That may be true for adherents of the Proclamation on the Family, but it clearly wasn’t for Joseph Fielding Smith. It wasn’t for those who speculated that spirit children were created from some stuff called “intelligence.” And it’s not clear at all as to what it means for various hermaphrodites or others whose biological status (including brain) does not fall neatly and wholly within one of two very distinct categories. Gregggg asks “what will tomorrow bring?” Good question — kind of like “what will heaven be?” Why isn’t it enough to think of heaven as a realm or realms (I despise some implications of the word kingdom; they are at least somewhat more disguised with the word “realm”) of glory (another very problematic word with no clear meaning in this context) suited to the happiness of those who inhabit it? Who thinks Ken and Barbie aren’t happy, anyway?
Maybe it would be more useful to focus less on what do I get in the hereafter for my conforming behavior now and more on what can I do to become the kind of person who is happy and loving or to be open to God making such a “new creature” out of me, and “let the consequence follow.”
End of rambling speculation. Counter speculations appreciated (to the extent permitted by blog moderators).
Thanks for bringing this up, Hawkgrrrl. I, for one, will be deeply disappointed if my (surely non-heavenly) afterlife doesn’t include periodic visits from Russell M. Nelson to scold me and my fellow damnation recipients for not having been more faithful on earth. Also, I’m hoping that Ezra Taft Benson drops by to call us communists, and (dare I hope it?) Bruce R. McConkie strolls through with a giant sign that celebrates the list of all the people he was sure would be damned, and now what do you know, they all are!
Also, unrelated, but I have a solution for the “no empty chairs” problem in heaven. What if it were just turned into musical chairs? You could play some nice, sedate tune by the TabCATS and have everyone walk around and pull a chair out every time the music stops and everyone tries to sit. Pretty soon all the empty chairs would be removed, and the process of the heaven-worthy forgetting that they ever knew us heathens will begin in earnest!
In order to get into this life, one has to be born. In order to get into the next, one must die. This is the key to understanding heaven and the power of the Christian message, or the basic gospel.
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For some death is instantaneous. For others it includes a long, painful, embarrassing downhill course, like dementia. Or a short gruesome one like pancreatic cancer. Historically death was much worse; when war, cannibalism, violence, risky occupations, infectious disease epidemics (plague killed 2/3 of Europe), natural childbirth (>10% mortality in the past), high childhood mortality and disasters were common.
After death strange things happen to the body. The study of this process is called taphonomy. For most, discussion of these details is unacceptable in polite company, worse than sexual exploitations. Here is a favorite book on the topic.
Forensic Taphonomy:The Postmortem Fate of human Remains. by William Haglund.( Key investigator of the Green river killer (Ridgway) and also early Bundy victims.)
Within seconds of death, or the cessation of circulation (heart beating), major metabolic disasters start to unfold on the cellular level. Then rigor and bloating and so forth. The bugs crawl in, the bugs crawl out…Embalming delays some of this until most anyone who cares also dies. But it doesn’t last forever. This is not the story of some discarded item of clothing like a glove, or plastic floating in the ocean. This is us, the only part of us science can prove even exists. Every discussion on this topic beyond taphonomy is pure speculation.
Deterioration of our bodies begins much earlier than death. Usually in the third decade. Look at top level athletes, few remain at their peak performance past this age. We accumulate more and more medical problems and they mostly tend to get worse.
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The other process I see looming over life is the opposite of the Mormon concept of perfection. It is not physical (except maybe brain chemicals). It is social and psychological. I see all people get damaged repeatedly. Sometimes they heal or find healing. Often they do not. A girl is raped and experiences sexual dysfunction for the rest of her life. An obnoxious math teacher turns many students into perpetual haters of the subject limiting their future career choices. Beer swilling as a youth develops into full-blown alcoholism, divorce, disgrace and death alone on the streets. Sexual abuse develops into drug addiction and prostitution and strangulation. People fight wars and suffer shell shock for the rest of their lives. People kill themselves every day, they experience such psychological pain. Divorce makes some men and many women really high-maintenance spouses in the future, if they ever marry at all. More men than women are mentally unfit for marriage in the first place, mostly from childhood damage in the home. Children can be so vicious.
If we were able to see the parade of broken humanity that is marching into heaven’s gates at this moment (and any other), it would be a deplorable sight indeed. The obituaries are a pack of lies and sugar-coating, hiding the awful truth. The crime blotter is the tip of the iceberg.
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For me, heaven is first and foremost a place of HEALING!
Because in the end we are broken individuals- physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.
The body is restored by the resurrection. Call it reverse taphonomy. Everything in that horrible book above goes the other direction. Every malady disappears. The soul is healed. Every unfairness and misery suffered in life is made more than right. That is incomprehensible to me. Everything else pales in comparison.
I think all theology on this subject is only a very gross approximation. Celestial playboy mansions were mere wishful thinking by Joseph Smith, telling us more about him than heaven. I do see in original Mormonism, in comparison to other contemporary religions, more universalism, more forgiveness and grace. More of a personal, loving God. I think this might be because Joseph Smith thought he was going to heaven and he knew what a scoundrel and reprobate he was. I hope he was right about this, not the mansions.
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But maybe I am wrong. An evil god/demon created us to be tortured and to suffer for his amusement. We might crave annihilation and never find it.
Mike: I really like your idea of a Heaven that is a place of healing. As someone wise once observed about mortality, none of us is getting out of here alive! And to your point, not unscathed either.
There was a short story I read in the book A Thoughtful Faith (I think that’s what it was called–no longer in print) a story about a man who had an NDE. In the afterlife, he tried to justify his actions on earth, but no matter what he said, the truth came out instead. He had no need to hide his real thoughts any more, and it was futile to attempt it anyway. When he came back to life, he determined to try to live in such a way that he no longer hid his motives and thoughts, that his actions were consistent with them. I like the idea of that level of connection. I mean, it would be horrifying on earth (I’m thinking The Invention of Lying), but if we are dead, why not?
I’m late to this discussion but this post got me thinking about what type of theoretical heaven I would want. And honestly, I can’t think of anything that would be satisfying for eternity. An eternity of anything seems like it would become dull and mundane at some point. After a billion years? After a trillion? Eventually I would bore, and then I’d still have to endure another trillion trillion, forever number of years. Even hanging out with family, having awesome celestial sex, making planets… doing all these things for trillions and trillions and googleplex numbers of years. How would it not become routine or dull? Being omnipotent and omniscient would make it worse. If I already knew everything that would happen – what’s the fun in that?
Fortunately for me, I don’t believe any of the above. But, I really enjoy existence. Part of my enjoyment of this earthly sojourn is knowing it’s fleeting. We appreciate more what we know won’t last forever. I think the best idea of an afterlife is being reincarnated and getting to experience the majesty of earth life all over again. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that will be the case either.
Some of my thoughts on the “Mormon Heaven” expressed by hawkgrrrl:
“Mormon Heaven” is work. (I really kind of hate that term, as there really is only Heaven and if this is God’s church then we may have a leg up on what Heaven will be like) That is most likely a good description of it. Existence has no real meaning or possibility, without work. Example, if I want to go hiking, and I love too go hiking, that is work,, everything I see on that hike is also working, the trees and animals, they are working. What most people, I believe, mean when the say work in Heaven is responsibility. Having a lack off responsibility for anything but their own pleasure is what most people really want. And I believe that there is plenty of opportunity for that in Heaven. But I also believe there is more to existence than self center pleasure.
Second hawkgrrl had 4 items listed as work in Heaven, missionary work, having lots of spirit babies, building worlds, and furthering our education. I would like to briefly go over my thoughts on these four things.
First missionary work. As I understand it the only missionary work that will be done will be in the paradise phase of our future existence. After the resurrection there will be know need for it, everyone will know with a perfect knowledge that Jesus is the Christ and what will be out fate as we transition out of the paradise phase for our lives. There is no missionary work in Heaven.
Second, having lots of spirit babies. I don’t want people to take this wrong, but the idea that women with be carrying and giving birth to spirits (babies otherwise) with there resurrected bodies has got to be one of the dumbest ideas that people have fixated on. It might have been an idea that primitive people and people a couple hundred year might have though, lacking the knowledge or background to think or understand what other possibilities could exist. But in this day and age we know better or just we are plain trying to make it sound bad. We can at this point clone things and people from cells of our bodies, we can create new bodies from mixing DNA, and we are on the cusp of gestation of such people outside of a women body. What makes people think we need to do that crude way of bring live into existence in Heaven. I believe that beings progress through stages of existence, passing through “vails” from one stage to the next. As I understand and believe, women have primary responsibility for helping spirits pass through these different “vails”. But they most certainly don’t do it with a gestation period within their bodies.
Third Building worlds. We are said to have helped build this and other world before we came to this mortal experience. I can’t see why would not continue to do that after we leave this mortal experience and enter Heaven. We knew how to do it then and we will know how to do it when we return to Heaven.
Fourth, Furthering our Education. Who would want to stop learning about things around them, never experience anything new, or be stagnate for eternity. I am not even sure you could stop people form learning more, it maybe at different rates but we as people and as spirits always want to know more.
I’m in favor of a fruit-filled heaven, as the illustration suggests. Fruit is a result of the natural reproductive process of plants. If plants have full reproductive function in heaven as they do on earth, then it follows that humans do as well. Everyone wins.
Years ago, my now-deceased grandmother (very devout LDS) once declared that there will be no food at all in the spirit world, since we would lack physical bodies and have no need for sustenance. She also said there is no water in the spirit world, which is why baptisms (living or dead) can only be done on earth. Even then I thought these ideas were a bit strange, but I think they were fairly common among her generation.
My wife has a masters degree in theology. She taught me a new word:
Eschatology- the branch of theology that explores life after death and the destiny of the soul.
As a foundation, I found this article and the links to the eschatology of the major religions of the world enlightening and recommend all to receive it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology.
Apparently there is an enormous amount of thought recorded in this field. We Mormons, as usual, think we have all the answers and ignore any other ideas as less useful or less true. Hence we have a very narrow view and easily get stuck in the weeds and our discussions are childish. Like squabbling over who gets which cookie mommy baked when we might be considering the cuisine delights in a library of 1000+ page cook books from 100+ different cultures around the world and then understanding how to invent new recipes. We really do need to broaden our thinking.
Most Western religious traditions see eschatology as progressive, going from one stage to the next. Many Eastern religious traditions see eschatology as cyclic. There was a beginning and there will be an end and from there a new beginning. Protestant Christianity is firmly rooted in a progressive and not very complex eschatology. The Book of Revelations is considered foundational, Yet it has at least 4 methods of interpretation (hermeneutics). Mormonism with its idea of becoming Gods or like the Gods and the even more nebulous idea of generations of Gods seems to hint at a cyclic aspect as well. And this raises the question, what is God or a God anyway? I doubt our answers are close to those of traditional Christianity
Since there is really no way to test and verify any eschatological concept in consistent physical reality, they are easily subject to change. And we are no different. For instance, it is currently taught that once we are assigned to a kingdom (celestial, terrestrial, telestial, etc.) there will be no movement to other kingdoms, either upward or downward. Yet we also teach the idea of eternal progression. Of interest, over a century ago the Mormon leaders debated this and settled on the current version. But before that it was thought possible by some apostles to progress from degree to degree, from kingdom to kingdom. Not addressed is the possibility of degression back down the ladder.
Another subtle difference I am not certain I understand is the confusion in some pioneer ideas between the millennium and the celestial kingdom. This comes out in some of our less often sung songs. Today we have these well defined and are in agreement, most of us. What I don’t understand is the basis of their confusion.
We can consider the changes in our eschatology as it speaks to gender roles and race. Another change is the fading of the ideas of future sentinel events prophesied to happen in Missouri.
One of the big tuna eschatological concepts in Mormonism is plural marriage. Even though we are not sanctioning it in this life, it is pretty obvious that the two birds on the top perch of the Mormon hierarchy today, even Presidents Nelson and Oaks, both intend to be with both of their wives in the next life. That opens wide the entire can of worms. Does Joseph Smith get to be with at least 30 wives including Fanny Algiers? Does Brigham Young get to be with his legendary 5 and 40 wives, except the ones who were jerks, like Ann Eliza Webb? Does my gggrandfather get to be with his 3 wives buried next to him in the cemetery? What about that unmarked sunken plot next to them that old rumor claims is the grave of a fourth wife written out of the family tree? Talk to the sexton of any cemetery in a small pioneer Utah town and he will tell you he doesn’t really know who all is buried up there on the hill.
What is the definition of work? A gander at a wiki article on work as a concept in physics, force x distance etc., is interesting, actually overwhelming. Thinking about work in these terms might influence our eschatology.
What is the definition of education and how is it different than missionary work?
I suggest that reading science fiction and expecting it to conform to the events in a BYU football game is about like speculation in eschatology and expecting it to be accurate. But that is not why people read science fiction, to win football games.
Worth pointing out that Adam Miller’s treatment of salvation ends up being very wrapped up in echatology or how we are reborn through a reconception of our life and death. I did a post on eschatology a few years ago too. “ Eschatology or How it’s Always the End of Days” I make use of one of Nibley’s better writings on the notion.
“Celestial playboy mansions were mere wishful thinking by Joseph Smith, telling us more about him than heaven.”
Maybe it says more about people that characterize it as such, than about JS.