#mormon thoughts

The difference between “sin” and “transgression”, as I was taught it, is the difference between “wrong” and “forbidden”. That is, to use secular analogies, there are certain things that are simply wrong, like intentionally running a random passerby down with your car. Whereas other things are not wrong in themselves, but are forbidden for other reasons (which may or may not be known), like driving without a license. So too in divine commandments: “thou shalt not steal” because it’s wrong, whereas (in my own church’s teachings) we are specifically enjoined against drinking “wine or strong drink”, because it isn’t “meet in the sight of your Father”.

I saw a post around Easter that said “Easter is the best holiday, because you can be as anti deathist as you want and Christians will agree with you” (or something along those lines).

I’ve been thinking a lot a about the premises of that quote: that Christians are normally against anti-deathism, meaning that they are all for people dying, but that somehow Easter makes them remember that it’s all about living after all. I know the quote was meant to be tongue in cheek, but I want to address some of those premises. Note: this will be from a Mormon-slanted version of Christianity, and I can’t speak to the “mainstream Christian” view, since I don’t know it that well. Also, I’m working with the understanding that anti-deathism means the desire that people should not have to die if they don’t want to.

Now, on the one hand, Christians and anti-deathists are on the same side. 1 Corinthians 15:26 says “the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” Death has always been an enemy, THE enemy. The whole point of Christ is that because of what he did, EVERYONE gets resurrected, and death is not permanent. Mormons are very big on the fact that resurrection means that you not only get your body back, but that it’s a perfect body, free of all diseases, ailments, disabilities, disorders, and malfunctions, transformed into a higher order of matter. It sounds remarkably close to the dream of anti-deathists with a small amount of transhumanism mixed in. The important thing is that resurrection is free for everyone, believers and non believers alike. Now, if you’re religious, the other big bonus is the ability to come back from “spiritual death”, or sin, but that’s not important to this current point.

Another thing is that several people throughout the ages have not had to taste of death, but have been changed so that they will never taste of death. John the Beloved was one. In the book of Mormon, three of Christ’s apostles in the New World were also granted this, becoming known in Mormon folklore as “the three Nephites”. Still others were taken up into heaven and changed directly to a resurrected state, including Enoch, Elijah, and a Book of Mormon prophet named Alma. Furthermore, in the Millennium, one of the blessings that will happen while Christ reigns on the earth is that people will no longer die, but when their mortal life is finished, they will be transformed “in the blink of an eye” to the resurrected state. So it would seem that in God’s eyes, the actual physical death part is not strictly necessary to achieving perfection. (This does beg the larger question of, if death isn’t strictly necessary, why have it at all, but I have no answer to that)

So, on the one hand, you could argue that Mormons and anti-deathists share their hatred of death and want to eliminate it.

However, there is a key disconnect, and it is essentially this: anti-deathists wish to preserve and extend human life as it now is, but to Mormons, the point is to get out of this mortality and into the next step. The goal is perfection, and these bodies and this existence are fundamentally flawed, a sort of sandbox where things like pain and sicknesses and evil are allowed to exist so that they can be learned from, and then transcended. To stop here would be to miss the point, to spend forever in a less than ideal state. It’s the reason that the angel with the flaming sword was put to protect the tree of eternal life, because for Adam and Eve to have made themselves mortal (here meaning, changed their bodies into ones that are inferior and susceptible to disease and pain) and then eaten of the fruit that would make them live forever in that state, would be dooming them to an eternal hell, trapped forever in the beginning stage, never able to progress further.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I completely agree with anti-deathists in the idea that death is a horrific, awful thing, and I can’t wait for the day when it no longer exists. But I fundamentally disagree that because death is bad, we should be trying to preserve life as it is now as long as possible.