Over a decade ago some discussion talked about Kolob as being not even known about for many Mormons.

"I think that statement is overstating the influence of Kolob. Many Mormons probably do not even know about it. It's biggest influence is the use in the hymn, "If You Could Hie to Kolob" using the word as symbol of the eternal expance of God. Other than this hymn, and the countless anti-Mormon parodies of the term, it isn't an infuence. In fact it is probably much more infuential on anti-Mormon mockery than anything within the church. Bytebear (talk) 19:05, 21 December 2007 (UTC) "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AThe_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints%2FArchive_13?oldformat=true#the_planet_Kolob

I knew about Kolob and believed it. It was a part of my testimony. Hell, if God existed and had a physical body then he must have a physical location.

So for Kolob being about as influential on Mormonism as say Warren Jeffs, I find it interesting that an LDS online magazine produced this article.

http://www.ldsliving.com/3-Fascinating-Things-Every-Mormon-Should-Know-About-Kolob/s/82249

Did you know about Kolob? Was it important to you? I think it was important to me as a believer. With hindsight it seems ridiculous but it was. I needed to bolster an ever failing faith and anything I could grab onto like a star or a planet was important. It is interesting to read in 2007 someone claiming Kolob has more influence in the anti-Mormon world than the Mormon one.

Is there any merit to this argument?

Sure, I knew too. Joseph taught it so it seemed perfectly normal. It wouldn’t surprise me if TSCC is trying to jettison kooky doctrine in order to mainstream itself. Baby steps are okay, but handling the BoM is like jumping the Grand Canyon.

I knew about it. It was discussed, just like all the other kooky doctrine, in seminary. Did I believe it? No. It made absolutely no sense to me.

But I didn't care. It was just like all the other nonsense. To me, the church was about being an obedient person. I believed that was the path to being a good person.

After I became fully adult, I no longer saw the need to do all their silly make work things, or follow all their silly rules that had almost nothing to do with being a good person, only an obedient one. That's when I left. And I was happy to walk away. Kolob was the least of it.

I asked my wife early in our marriage about Kolob. She of course believed it existed...where else would God reside since he doesn't actually live on Earth. She knew that time passes slower for God because Kolob is so much larger than Earth and has a longer rotation. She also knew that Sol gets it's light from Kolob. She couldn't remember whether it was a star, planet, or both..."it doesn't matter."

These were all things she was taught, she just never reflected on whether they were rational or even possible.

I learned about Kolob from Battlestar Gallactica.

Wait, that was Kobol. Or was it?

Never mind.

Yes. And every time I taught the Pearl of Great Price, where it was extolled as the planet nearest to the throne of gawd, along with the other really weird stuff (stolen from Thomas Dick and Josephus), I really got the creeps as time went along. Hence I am now writing this stuff on RFM.

I knew about Kolob. Eventually it became the cause of some of my first doubts. According to the Book of Abraham, God's throne is near Kolob, a star.

When I learned that the process of nuclear fusion inside all stars will eventually cease and all stars in the universe will have an end, that left me with questions that had no answers.

Where will God move his throne to when Kolob dies? For humans who become Gods, where will they then reside when the universe becomes lifeless? How will they create and people planets in a dead universe?

It got worse for me too. The Hubble Red Shift and the expansion of the universe means that God's throne is moving further and further away. So in time, the universe will end up spread out far beyond the boundaries of now, and everything will be cold and dead. And my shelf went "crack".

MikeMitchell wrote: When I learned that the process of nuclear fusion inside all stars will eventually cease and all stars in the universe will have an end, that left me with questions that had no answers."

Interestingly there is an answer for that. It does not make sense, but there is an answer. In the 1970's book 'Science and Mormonism' elemental hydrogen is apparently the light of Christ and it comes from around Kolob. This elemental hydrogen is fused to produce helium which is the nuclear reaction of the sun. Unfortunately the accretion model of the sun and stars has been discredited. If solar accretion were true, then the sun would never burn out assuming an infinite supply of hydrogen from Kolob, which is yet another problem.

I read about it here and was so shocked, I asked my ex about it. Then little memories I had suppressed came back. I don't remember the name Kolob, but I remember people living on the moon. I tend to suppress things I can't handle. I VERY MUCH DOUBT my TBM daughter knows about Kolob.

I felt privileged to "be in the know" about Kolob. I was trusted with this wacky doctrine and I loved being trusted and included in the tribe. The weirder the doctrine the better.

The "fact" that Kolob is a binary star system made the whole story even better. Kolob must have been like Tatooine with its two suns.

Isn't the song "Hie to Kolob" in the hymnbook still?

I knew about Kolob, but I didn't dwell on it or think much about it at all. Like so many other peculiar Mormon beliefs, I just pushed Kolob to the back of my mind. The day to day requirements of Mormonisn kept me so busy that the bizarre doctrine and tainted history never really registered with me. That is, until one day it did. I woke up from a Mormon coma and couldn't believe what I was associated with.

I think many Mormons are like that. Mormonism keeps you on autopilot. You're sort of sleepwalking through life. Members are so entrenched with the busyness of the church that they don't really have a chance to analyze it.

I didn’t have any issue with Kolob and I even swallowed the notion that the “speed of prayer” is instantaneous.

That means wherever ghawd or Wholly McGhost happen to be, they hear prayers and blessings the instant they’ve are uttered and can react as quickly. Einstein couldn’t figure this out, which is proof that humans are fallible.

Adding to mikemitchell’s comment about ‘red shift’, galaxies moving away from each other will eventually be doing so at a speed faster tham “C”, which means that based on what we know now, they will ‘disappear’ from view of each other and we’ll never be able to visit them, or they us.

The ultimate jail would be to strand someone on a planet in such a galaxy just before it red-shifted out of touch with the prisoner’s home galaxy.

Oh...let's see... Why would anyone think that Mormons ever really knew about or thought about Kolob?

Back in the 1970s, probably one of the most famous Mormon families in the world (famous for their pop music) was the OSMONDS. They built their own recording studio. It was quite famous. They named it "Kolob Studios". Pretty sure it was just a coincidence. Probably had no connection with their Mormon faith. ;o)

Of course there is the hymn that was in the standard hymn book used by everyone, everywhere throughout Mormondumb.

Then there's that weird little thing called the "Book of Abraham" where you can easily find all things Kolobian. But why would Mormons know anything about that. It's only one of the "Standard Works" of scripture that Mormons are exhorted/nagged to read regularly and repeatedly throughout their lives. No reason to think that any Mormon would have any familiarity with any of the contents of that book. ;o)

There is ZERO merit to the argument that Mormons are not familiar with it. Maybe nowadays, since lots of the inconvenient and embarrassing aspects of Mormonism have been studiously downplayed for about a generation. But throughout most of the history of the church it was a well-known topic. After the great dissembler, Gordon B. Finckley to his grand PR brush to white-out many of the embarrassing "flecks of history" (including even the doctrine of eternal progression), it is possible that the youngsters in today's church know nothing about it, I guess.

I knew about it. My father seemed serious when talking about it.

Some of it. Remarkably, a couple of my BYU roommates got excited by an Osmond record album on “Kolob” Records showing a hand with a planet in it—a not-so-subtle way of letting the right folks know the Osmonds were believers.

That was about the same time my Pearl of Great Price class introduced me to Egyptian mummies being circulated around the American Mid-West by Michael Chandler. Mummies, huh?

These were the mysteries—after all the Church was true—and I was special. I was too busy trying to control my hormonal impulses to worry about detail.

I think I was in college and married before I heard about a planet named Kolob.

I probably heard that God lived "somewhere" maybe a planet but I don't remember the name Kolob.

I thought it was weird and just put it on the shelf.

Finally that shelf broke.

I stopped believing and resigned 15 years ago.

Best thing I ever did was raise kids without the cult.

KJ/Tutu/
AnonyMs

I first heard the hymn "If you could hie to Kolob"...

... at a baptism. Of a convert. Seriously.

Now this was a sort of eternal investigator who, over the course of 2 or 3 years, had gotten a lot of info out of his mishies. Eventually he decided to take the plunge because "if so many people are willing to pay 10% of their income to the church, it must be true."

Fifty million Elvis fans can't be wrong I guess.

He was an investigator for longer than he was active. Which in Europe (Spain) was not uncommon.

Visitors Welcome Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I first heard the hymn "If you could hie to
> Kolob"...

They should change it to "If you can get high on Kolob" given their stance on marijuana. If you can get high on their cosmological Mormon ziontology then you can be a worthy member of their space cult.

I wasn’t actually taught what it was until seminary in high school and even then, it wasn’t a terribly in-depth lesson. Before that, I had heard the name Kolob but didn’t really know what anyone meant by it. That lesson in seminary, brief as it was, was a real eye opener for me. It was completely nonsensical and ridiculous to me. It got added to my shelf and I started wondering what else I supposedly believed in as a good little Mormon girl. Fortunately, I turned to the internet to seek out that information and found a LOT more that went on the shelf until it finally broke at the end of my senior year. I half heartedly continued to participate in church activities until I turned 18, I had been dating my non Mormon future husband for a few months by then and between him and my broken shelf I decided to just leave the church for good. I can’t say that Kolob was the thing that caused me to leave the church, it wasn’t, but it led to much of the information that did.

I knew about it. I knew that God supposedly lived there and time was different and that one day I could maybe Hie there. But to be honest, from the moment I heard about it, I dismissed it as "deep doctrine," the kind of thing I shouldn't waste my time considering, being an unholy teenager who needed the milk before the meat.

It's fun watching people try to explain things they know nothing about. It's fun doing it too =)

Question: What is the difference, if any, between Kobol and the Celestial Kingdom?

Are these astronomically and/or spiritually differentiated, or one and the same?

Edit/PS: I know nobody here takes this seriously, so let's not bother with disproving it. I'm wondering what you were taught, and, perhaps, when you were taught that, as LDS doctrine and doctrinal emphases varies with time and locale. What a person in seminary learned in Utah 1970 is probably different from what another understood in Florida in 1999.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/13/2018 02:09PM by caffiend.

Good question. And is the "get your own world" not really part of the Mormon cosmology?

...and if we're going to go, as good and faithful mormons, to the "Celestial Kingdom" after we die, to spend eternity with our families, is that where we run our own planet as gods from?

To answer caffiend's question: I was taught all sorts of conflicting stuff growing up in the church. Some of it was "doctrine," some of it was the made-up beliefs of the particular teacher, some was a combination of both -- all of it had lots of contradictions, things "that will be sorted out in the afterlife," etc. Any time I raised a noted conflict and asked how it would be resolved, I either got "that's not doctrine" (usually said by someone other than the teacher who had passed it on AS doctrine), "we don't know, we'll find out when we get there," or "Why are you asking such questions? All they do is invite the spirit of Satan in!"

In other words, we don't know, stop noticing contradictions, and shut up.

My Orem High School Seminary principle kicked me out of seminary for asking questions like these. He told me that I was an anti-Christ which was weird because I had never questioned the divinity of Jesus.

I have posted this in a separate post, but I'll put it here also.

The #1 strangest teaching is Kolob in the Pearl of Great Price. (Parody)

My process leaving Mormonism has been sprinkled with a lot of writing, some of it is satire and parody. A few years ago, I decided to look at what is considered revealed, inspired truths specifically about the Book of Abraham and Kolob and see what kind of help Bruce R. McConkie added to the mix. This is a parody Sunday School lesson I wrote on the teachings about Kolob.

Judging from what has been said on the board and what I have heard others say, the average Mormon is likely uninformed and uneducated about Kolob and the revealed teachings. About all they know is that fun hymn: "If You Could Hie to Kolob," [hie- meaning hasten]. (Apparently the plane is leaving at any moment!:-)
Allrighty now: What did you learn in Sunday School about Kolob when studying the Book of Abraham? In case you've forgotten, The Pearl of Great Price is found at the back of The Book of Mormon behind the Doctrine and Covenants in a triple combination, which with the Bible, is considered part of their Standard Works.

I had a little fun with this whole idea of Kolob, the Book of Abraham in The Pearl of Great Price. It's a bit confusing so I decided to try to clear it up. So here are the real teachings from Joseph Smith Jr about Kolob with some help from Bruce R. McConkie in the book: "Mormon Doctrine."(As I understand them, of course!:-)

It is amazing what you can get from an Egyptian Funeral Scroll! :-) Just concentrate hard enough, pray hard enough, have enough faith, and.... here we go!

Book of Abraham Chapter 3
2: "And I saw the STARS that they were very great and that one of them was nearest unto the throne of God; and there were many great ones which were near unto it:

3: And the Lord said unto me: These are the governing ones; and the name of the great one is Kolob, because it is near unto me, for I am the Lord thy God: I have set this one to govern all those which belong to the same order as that upon which thou standest."

Verse 9 says:
"And thus there shall be the reckoning of the time of one planet above another until thou comes nigh unto Kolob, which Kolob is after the reckoning of the Lord's time, which Kolob is set night unto the throne of God, to govern all those planets which belong to the same order as that upon which thou standest."

NOTE it is called a STAR (caps are mine) or is it?

Now note what Bruce R. McConkie says in "Mormon Doctrine" pg. 428. Ya gotta luv this guy! He says:

"Kolob means "the first creation.,"
It is the name of the PLANET (caps mine) "nearest to the celestial, or the residence of God." it is "first in government, the last pertaining to the measurement of time.One day in Kolob is equal to a thousands years according to the measurement of this earth."

Is it my imagination or does Joseph Smith Jr. not know the difference between a STAR and a PLANET and think they are interchangeable? The whole thing is about astronomy ?
Is this Science and Religion of the 1800's merging?
So an Egyptian Funeral Scroll has hidden knowledge from Abraham! That is amazing!

Then it says; Verse 13:
"And he said unto me: This is Shinehah, which is the sun. And he said unto me: Kokob which is STAR, then he said unto me Olea, which is the moon. And he said unto me : Kokaubeam, which signifies stars, or all the great lights, which were in the firmament of heaven."

TEACHER TO CLASS:
OK, boys and girls, from now on, in class we will call the really big STAR, Kolob, the MOON - Olea and the really big flashy STARS: Kokaubeam and the SUN, Shinehah.

Now to help you remember, I have some sound-alike words for you. Remember that that the big STARS sound like: Cocoa-Beans,
and the SUN is very easy because the sun does indeed Shinehah a lota, and the MOON'S name,Olea sounds like "ole" in Spanish which means bravo, and the biggest STAR, Kolob sounds like go - lob. Now here is where it gets tricky. Lob means: to droop heavily (but we won't be going there) or it can mean lout: dull heavy person.

Always remember, boys and girls, that Joseph Smith Jr. was translating this document from what Abraham said to him face to face - or something like that.
Naturally, the prophet Joseph would use words that he knew which would help us understand the special things Abraham wanted us to know.
So if the words sound a little funny, that is why. And, remember to pray to Heavenly Father tonight before go to bed and thank Him for this wonderful special teaching and ask Him to increase your faith to help you understand it.

Verse 16 says:
"if two things exist, and there be one above the other, there shall be greater things above them; therefore Kolob is the greatest of all the Kokaubeam that thou has seen, because it is nearest unto me."

TRANSLATION:
The really big lout, Kolob is the greatest of all the Cocoa Beans.
Okay, lets give Joseph an award for some esoteric hidden teachings here like all kinds of other "teachers" of enlightenment.

You have to admit, this is clever stuff for the times. He managed to throw in, what some would classify now days as "New Age" teachings right into the Book of Abraham!
Time to move the Book of Abraham to the NEW AGE section of the book shelf at the book stores!

Incidentally: Kolob spelled backward is: bolock -- or bollocks in England. I think Joseph Smith JR had the last laugh.

The Official Info is still here: https://www.lds.org/topics/translation-and-historicity-of-the-book-of-abraham?lang=eng


******It's my view that few members know much about their teaching on Kolob which is one of the biggest divides in Christian type theology. Kolob is considered the place where the Mormon God - Heavenly Father - lives and where all the big stuff happens.

Mormon theology takes a huge step outside the norm of beliefs centered on the need for a Savior, and the teachings of Jesus The Christ, with this kind of teaching. I'm not sure Mormons even know what this is all about.

It's one more reason why Mormonism gets into the bizarre and not something I could accept anymore.

I remember Kolob! I also remember men living on the moon (Brigham Young I believe?) and one of the tribes of Israel living in the middle of the earth. At the time it all made good sense, but then I was 8 and thought baptism and getting a spirit put in me sounded good too.

Ah the good old days of less obedience and more bat-sh%t crazy.

I knew about it mainly from the song, which we actually never used. I looked it up or asked someone and had a general idea of what it was. However, I dont remember it being discussed in church ever.