I have a question to pose to this board. It is something I have wondered about for many years. Before I joined the LDS church at 17, I attended many different protestant churches and was a regular sunday school kid, thus I learned the basics of Christianity. I understood then that when one dies, you would be reunited with loved ones and family that had passed on before you. It would be a happy occasion to see you mother and father, grandparents and perhaps a spouse in the hereafter. I understood that we would "always be a family". What reason would there be to assume anything different? Then I met the Mormons and they tell me that you have to be a Mormon, pay tithing, go to the temple,learn secret handshakes, and be perfect in everyway to be able be with your family in the hereafter.

To those of you who belonged to a different church before you embraced Mormonism, did you hold similar beliefs?

Did you not think that after death you would be with your loved ones?

Please discuss.

Thx,

BB

The man with the eternal hard-on - Joseph Smith. With a little help from other religious groups at the time, that practiced spiritual wifery and and free love.

Just so this doesn't get passed over and taken lightly, this is really very likely the reason. The concept of eternal marriage is steeped deeply in D&C 132. JS used salvation as a "carrot" to entice women to marry him. Weird stuff, but apparently it worked.

I think that's a consistent folklore belief in Christianity. However, somewhere in the bible (I have no clue where) it says there will be no marriage in heaven.

I don't think there is anything in the bible about being with your loved ones in heaven, either. I think it's more "it won't be heaven w/o my loved ones there" kind of thing. So people just assume they will be with their family in heaven.

I think JS, Jr. co-opted that idea from Christianity and made it doctrine in LDS--along with all the attendant crap required for making it happen.

I was a bible-believing Christian throughout my childhood, and I definitely believed that I would, of course, see my family in heaven. It's often one of those comforting things that people tell others when faced with the death of a loved one. I can't imagine *not* thinking that, ever.

Traditional Christianity holds that you will meet the saved in Heaven. Whether this includes members of your family, your spouse, or friends depends upon their individual relationship with God. Now that is where orthodox Christians disagree: by what criterion is a person saved, or not (damned).

I believe if a person is born again, he is saved forever. Now some people may fake it, just as in LDS there are "hormonal conversions." Being born-again is an individual experience whereby a person makes a conscious decision to follow Christ and tread the life-long road of regeneration (also called sanctification).

Similarly an individual may have an inauthentic, but seemingly spiritual, experience, and be self-deceived. That is why we cannot really judge a person's salvation, but must leave it to that individual and God.

I believe it may be a comfort, but a false one, to just assume that a deceased love one is "in Heaven," "in a better place," "at peace," etc. and you'll see them there. If you do, it is not as spouse or parent or sibling--it is as saved souls.

But the spiritual reality may be quite the contrary.

My parents died as believing Christian Scientists. I cannot know anything as an absolutely certainty (I have faint hope for my father), but I rather doubt I will see them in Glory.

paying tithing so you can go to the Temple and be worthy to enter the presence of the Lord in the hereafter = indulgences.

Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish mystic of the 18th century, claimed that angels had told him that marriages made on earth would survive in heaven. Joseph Smith knew of Swedenborg (Bishop Hunter, the first Presiding Bishop of the church, had been a Swedenborgian).

Swedenborg also taught that there were three levels in heaven.

Familiar?

Thanks Richard. I was trying to remember the reference.

Yes, Eternal Marriage idea was just repackaged ideas that JS caught wind of from Swedenborg.

Very intertesting Richard. I knew I had heard about this somewhere. Thanks for refreshing my memory.

Somebody who knew that they'd make a ton of money by starting it!!??

It is the ultimate noose around someone's neck. The ultimate pressure to put on somebody, the ultimate tool to induce guilt and obedience.

To use the love you have for your child, your parent and your spouse to keep you praying, paying and obeying.


Imagine the heartbreak involved when someone you love leaves the church. You are then left to believe that that person has broken up your eternal family.

Joseph made this up, as an ultimate means of pressure to keep the members doing what he wanted them to do.