(I'm typing this on my phone, so forgive the errors to come)

Last night I woke up from a dream about high school kids submitting to execution by beheading, with a paper cutter, for the usual petty stuff kids do in school -- not turning in assignments, tardiness, talking in class, smoking in the john...

I was in line, watching heads roll, everyone acting like it was fair. I said, "Wait, since when is any of this worthy of execution? Isn't there some appeal process?"

"Uh ,yeah, I guess so," said one of the executioners.

"Then let's get out of here!"

I thought about what the dream meant. Killing people over petty things, the condemned accepting it like sheep... One meaning that came to me was how Mormonism compresses the scale of sin. When perfection is the standard, then the moral gap disappears between petty things and the truly horrible. Not only does fornication become The Sin Next to Murder, but also a single cup of tea is crammed cheek-by-jowl with baby raping genocide. The eternal (and LDS social) consequences are pretty much the same.

This happens because most people aren't baby raping mass murders. Most people are pretty much okay, with a few habits and annoying personality traits. But you can't make much of a religion out of the doctrine of You're Pretty Much Okay. So petty things are turned into grievous sins with horrible consequences-- consequences far greater than their actual natural consequences. No, it's not that coffee might leave you jittery and unable to sleep, it must threaten your eternal well being. Oh my God! You'll never see your loved ones again!!!!! Yeah, now you've got something a religion can work with. Criminalize the petty and, bingo, EVERYONE is guilty of something. And once you're guilty of a little thing, well, you're just guilty--and you know what happens to the guilty. "Bring out the paper cutter!"

Even though kolobianism is morally bankrupt, it's much better at the whole punishment thing than other christian faiths.

Sure, in kolobianism having sex is next to murder, but you don't go to hell to be burned forever for doing it. you just don't get to be a god...

maybe i misunderstood the point of your post. my bad

I'm referring to the Paganism thread. What I read over the weekend, is that Pagans are generally a very accepting lot, that the divine is integrated within and throughout the material world which makes things acceptable as they are. The discussion was about how individuals as well as elements of the world are all part of the greater divine permeating it. This would seem to be the antithesis og what you describe with Mormonism in your dream.

I would agree that Mormonism and Christianity more generally emphasizes the separateness of the individual from the rest of the world. Salvation in the Christian tradition is through denial of this world in preference and preparation for the next. Amy infraction (sin) is enough to make an individual unworthy and in need of the church (or Jesus) to restore them to wholeness. But then I believe the church needs to create dependency in the individual to bind him into needing the church. So first the church creates the perception of "holeness" in the individual and creates a means to restore "wholeness" to him by means that keep him dependent on the church. This would seem to be a central feature of Middle Eastern religions - Judaism, Chrisitanity, and Islam. I', not aware if other religions are the same. Paganism - from my little bit of reading over the weekend - does not appear to have this same dynamic.

True. Pagans don't have this.

Even though there are always people who think they know better than anyone else... there is no 'punishment' system for doing wrong.

very interesting...

It seems to me that 'the church' creates a need in order to be able to fill it.

A young child feels perfectly fine about himself.. just the way he is.
It isn't until he is told that he's wrong/ugly/weird or sinful that he starts to doubt and starts needing to be rescued from this.

I see this all over the consumeristic world of advertising as well. We were never aware that washing our hands the way we have always done was a problem. We used soap and that was that.
Then... advertisers started telling us that a bar of soap was unsanitary and we should switch to using liquid soap in a pump-soap dispenser....
And so we did... we suddenly felt the need to use the soap dispensers!...

NOW... the advertisers tell us that bacteria live and grow on this pump-dispenser and that's unhealthy so we need their latest gadget... a liquid soap dispenser that detects hands held in front of it and dispenses the soap automatically....

And so we suddenly feel the need to have this automatic soap dispenser because the old one is 'dirty' ... 'unworthy'... etc...


I think that religion in general stems from the human need to explain and to hope. Humans feel like they need an explanation for things they don't understand, and in hard times they need hope of better things to come.
From this basic need, religion grew.

Then the churches as intitutions start to organise and see the power that they ultimately have on the masses... and they start creating more and more needs, to keep their members close and hooked...
TSCC keeps creating more and more 'sins' for us to feel bad over so that we will continue to feel worse and worse about ourselves, and dig ourselves deeper and deeper into the religion. ...

Were we not only made to feel bad about coffee, tea and cigs... now it's also about earrings, tattoo's, piercings and god knows what else they've come up with in the last few years...