It's the season for family gatherings and there have been threads here about family problems and traumas. There will probably be more as Christmas approaches.

Mormonism preaches our greatest goal is to be with our family again in the celestial kingdom. This idea must have been concocted by someone with a wonderful, loving family. But what about the rest of us, with messed up families, or just plain boring ones? What if we have no desire to reunite with them?

This reward that feels like a punishment is one of the things lessened by devotion to the church. I'm knocking myself out for something I don't want?

Remember, it's now families CAN BE forever...

ChurchCo REFUSES to back up its claims- even the core ones of Honesty, Kindness, Repentance & Forgiving - with consistent policies, decisions, & actions, so Everything they say is merely Lip Service.

end.of.story.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/01/2019 10:50PM by GNPE.

Oops, typo. That should be "lessened MY devotion..."

I think JS cooked the whole thing up because Lucy MackWhackadoodle Smith wouldn't quit yammering on about her precious lost Alvin. So what JS was conning people out of their money, adulation and chastity, had Alvin lived he could've charmed the wealth right out of the ground. Alvin was supposed to be the chosen one and I will bet my tinfoil hat that behind closed doors, Loopy Lucy never let JS forget it, so he found a way to give his mom her dead son back and make himself look one up on Alvin at the same time.

I don't know why I feel so strongly about that woman, maybe because I see shades of her woo woo spirituality echo in my MIL? Regardless, I have this deep intuition that much of the suffering caused by this cult can trace its origin back to the superstitious (schizotypal?) mind of Lucy Smith, including "forever families".

ptb:

that was an Excellent dose of original (?) thought that's welcome on this board; too bad it'll never be proven / substantiated!!

Thank you.:-) Alas, I know I can't prove an ounce, it's entirely speculation. I don't think it's entirely unfounded speculation and it's becoming my Mormon Bigfoot of sorts. I know I'll never catch an image of it it but I feeeeeeel something there, know what I mean?

to see the "Book of Abraham" mummies?

It was definitely a family business.

Ma Smith (Lucy) charging 25 cents a head for admission to see some dirty old mummies that had, according to her son, somehow been connected to Abraham's handwritten journal of wonders and amazements. (Cue the carnival barker and the calliope! Doo-doo-doodle doo-doo-doo-doo-doo!)

Pa Smith (Joe, Sr.) charging a dollar (or a bottle of booze) for a gen-yoooo-wine patriarchifical blessing. Better than a palm reading and a bargain compared to Madame Esmerelda, the Gypsie with the crystal ball over in the next county)

Sweet Emma running a hotel and part-time saloon over at the Nauvoo Mansion....and who knows what other side businesses she might've had going on.

Sam and Hy no doubt helped out with the real estate business, rent collections and such.

Did Briggy become envious and ambitious...and stage a hostile takeover? Only the shadow knows for sure.

Brigham died with more wives and more wealth than Joseph so Brigham won in the end.

It may have been one of those wives that killed him. https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1051678,1051678

That's the kind of thing that makes me think the way I do about the elder Smiths...that they were both morally sketchy and mentally kooky, maybe even by rural American cultural standards of the time. They seem to have been enabling each other's religious and superstitious fantasies and were quick to capitalize upon the magic priesthood mystique JS was busy cultivating.

Having been raised by two sketchy codependent weirdos myself, I can tell you that if they want something from their kids, they get it, especially if the kid becomes a team player inside the shared delusion. I think they were all simultaneously working their own hustles while drinking their own and each other's metaphorical Koolaid. I betcha it was one massive soap opera, especially when the polygamy started.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/02/2019 03:29AM by ptbarnum.

This may all well be true. Alvin was the favorite, there's no doubt about that. Even Joe told this to Martin Harris and Lucy wasn't even around. Martin said that when the old spirit was itching to loan out the plates he was expecting the strapping good looking fellow Alvin who had his letters from Dartmouth, well mannered, in the prime of life, and buff. And instead when little Joe showed up, who'd never been to school the salamander wasn't impressed and thought him too young and dumb. So he made him wait 4 years, and even struck him with his tail!

"Wouldn't quit yammering on about her precious lost Alvin"

I guess people were a lot more sensitive back then. I mean, it's become acceptable to berate mothers for mourning their dead children, right?

Y'know, I could've phrased that better, you're right. I'm not berating Lucy for mourning Alvin's loss. That's a universal and obvious grief none of us ever want to be made to feel. In families where there is high indication of mental instability, there's an overriding dysfunction that can twist already emotionally intense situations to a point where the natural distress that people are entitled to feel is amplified and used as a weapon to control and abuse others.

What I meant by yammering on about her precious lost Alvin is that I imagine that no matter what the accomplishments JS brought home, they were probably never acknowledged without the token reminder of, well, that's great, but had Alvin been here... he could've done even better. Alvin wouldn't have been tarred and feathered, he'd have preached and converted the mob. Alvin wouldn't have given the lost pages to Martin, he'd have never given in to such vanity. Alvin would've been the Grand Master at the Lodge, not just an initiate. Alvin would've made the bank work, Alvin's temple would've been shinier, Alvin could've dowsed gold right up from the earth. You get my drift?

It strikes me that JS might have felt like Jan on The Brady Bunch, when she wailed, "Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!" And then went out, founded a sex cult and went down in a hail of bullets.

Also contributing to my line of thought, there was heavy emphasis on rank assignments in the founding period, both within the community and in the Celestial hierarchy they were dreaming up. Different "keys" of priesthood power, all the different titles and names Great Gazelam was being showered with from heaven and passing out to Brigham and Oliver. I can imagine Lucy asking, well, Joseph Jr., if you're Prophet, Seer, Revelator and President All That and a Bag of Chips, what about Alvin, whom everyone knew was twice the man you are? How can you rule heaven aside YHWH and JC when one has already gone ahead who is better than you?

No decent parent would say this. Perhaps she didn't and I'm vilifying her, but I have read "History of Joseph Smith" and I do not find her to come across as either sane or particularly decent. I also know that there are certain parents who will praise their children to the moon and back in public, yet destroy them in private.

I can see such a conversation leading to a great new revelation coming through the peepstone: sure, Mom, you can be with Alvin again and he will have his exaltation...but the only way now is through me. Me. ME.

This is, as I said before, all conjecture. I have minimal historical sources and have had to read between the lines of a lot of sanitized stuff about old Lucy. But I know narcissists very, very well. I know what it's like inside a dysfunctional and mentally non-typical family. I know the roles kids play and how the emotional fault lines strike and slip against each other as the kids get older. I know the thousand petty vicious quips of parents who skillfully play one child off of another. And how do you win against the hallowed memory of the Golden boy who died? You don't, unless you find yourself the head of a new and imaginative religious movement.

Of course I can't say with real certainly that family sealing came about this way, but I know JS did not get to be the deviant he was without help. There isn't a whole lot more damaging to the psyche than being the Scapegoat child. I am absolutely convinced that the idea that the family was somehow chosen, that they were singular because of the prophetic dreams and visions that came to them, and their exploration of folk magic and the deep belief in personal magical aptitude that permeated the Smith household while JS was growing up are the bedrock upon which the cult was built. More than a century of immeasurable suffering has been unleashed on thousands of people just by one backwoods American household.

should be all that anyone really needs in the afterlife.

They're really horrible on the details of the whole eternal sealing program, even though they've been selling that product for about 175 years now.

So many questions. So few answers. The basic message is that if you're sealed, you got somewhere to go. And it's probably good. If you're not sealed, you're eternally alone. You can't be with anyone you want to be with. Maybe it's like being in military boot camp. You don't choose who you will be with. God and his angels give you assignments. "For the next two centuries, your bunkmate is Bitchina Buttfart. She barely made it into the Telestial and is still on a kind of probation, so watch your back. The two of you will be responsible for busing tables after special meetings and events in the Telestial Kingdom Conference Center."

So many unanswered questions:

When a woman leaves her birth family behind and is sealed into her husband's "eternal" family, what's that all about?

Is she essentially unsealed from her birth family?

Does the sealing to her birth family (her parents, her siblings, etc.) just give her a right of passage to go visit and be visited?

Is she equally sealed into both families and can live with either for as long as she wants?

If someone in the records department spilled slurpee on her brother Roscoe's name before it was submitted for proxy ordinances and he was called "Boscoe" throughout the entire set of ordinances and his sealing was therefore invalid, is he totally cut off from everyone? Is Roscoe screwed forever? Or does he get to join his forever family if he agrees to change his name to Boscoe?

What happens to all the plural wives of Brigham Young, John Taylor and Wilford Woodruff who were completely omitted from all of the "Teachings of the Presidents" lesson manuals? In the afterlife, do they get equally disrespected, ignored and treated as second-class or third-class members of the "eternal family" that they were sealed into? When one of the lesser wives starts complaining, can Big Priesthood Briggy slap her down? "Quit yer complainin' you got into the CK, didn't you? Just be happy about that and quit showing up around here. I prefer to hang out with Amelia. She's my precious!"

+++++++

I guess we have to remember that back in the 19th century, family was everything. There were no public "safety nets". If you had a big family, you had some degree of social security.

If you were all on your own, you could easily wind up as a beggar seeking help from strangers. So the "eternal family" thing may have had some fear component to it too. (They seemed to be expecting that the afterlife could be as cold, harsh and frightening as earthly life, particularly if you weren't a valued member of God's Club and Joe's Club.

Then there was also a high infant mortality rate, childhood mortality rate and mothers dying while giving birth. A lot of grieving people around who would have been prime targets for Joe's medicine.

He had to first invent the disease, so that he could sell the cure. IOW, he first had to tell them that they definitely would NOT be reunited with their departed loved ones in the ordinary course of events. Death was an ETERNAL separation. That was the default setting of the universe. Then if they became convinced he could tell them that this was their lucky day. Joseph Smith just so happened to have received the rare and extremely valuable "keys" of sealing. He may have gotten them from old Elijah himself. As in the prophet Elijah of Old Testament fame. Thank God! Thank Joe!

The answer they give for having no answers "we will know all this in the millenium". They hope this answer shuts everyone up and keeps the money flow coming in.

Inventing the disease to sell the cure...yes, I think you are on to something there.

"No one comes to the Father, except through Me." Right? Except oh dear, it's not just the Father. No one comes to see anyone else again, except through me, Joseph Smith Jr. And there's only a modest fee. Or you can upgrade and get your 2A at the same time...I'll just need some spiritual wifery from your underage daughter.

Family is great unless they are a bunch of assholes. Some people don’t have good families. You can’t choose your family but you can choose your friends and you can make friends. Sometimes good friends are better than family.

Yikes! Does this mean that, in the afterlife, the arrogant CK gasbags can come down and visit us, and preach at us for eternity, whenever they feel like it--and there is no escape? We can't flee into the mountains or to another kingdom and change our address and phone number?

I have had to be very clever and conniving to sift through both sides of my TBM family--to discard the bad seeds without losing my relationships with the good ones. Mormons make this very hard to do. For example, you can't go by the old adage of "Love her, hate him" with Mormon couples. Most are inseparable. I lost a beloved brother, when he married a narcissistic, abusive, domineering TBM cult fanatic. Well, we all lost him. I have not been able to tolerate going to some family parties, because the family pedophile was there to grope me in the hallway, or because I couldn't stand to be accosted and hit-up for money by a few relatives who were con-men and MLM pushers. It was exhausting to try to determine who was lying and who was telling the truth. Was cousin Emily a sex addict, or was her sister just spreading that lie, because of jealousy? Not that it mattered one way or another--it was the fact that I was being lied to that mattered.

It was easier, and lazier, for me to just assume all the Mormons were lying to me about something. People pretend at parties. I would pretend, too. I would pretend to be enjoying myself, and would glance longingly out a window, and think, "If I leave now, there's still enough daylight for a hike with my dog."

The Mormon hereafter would be like being stuck at that family party, but it would be at my house, and the visitors could stay forever, and there would be no place I could go, no hike with my dog, no freedom, and they would demand to be taken care of. Come to think of it, my childhood, and being raised in a strict, abusive TBM household was like that. I spent a lot of time climbing our trees and reading to escape, because I wasn't allowed to leave home. No wonder I'm an introvert!

They are all MLM pushers i have noticed. They are all exhausting to even think about. My sanity i think is based on not being around family or religion. If i stay away i feel way more sane.

I don't want to see my family for the rest of this lifetime if i can manage it. Being around them was my hell. They only saw me as a piece of their property, as did the religion. The key to my recovery is to get as far away from them as possible. I heal faster when they can't get near me i have noticed.

Only in my heart...and I'm referring to my Catholic wife and Lutheran kids...and it would not break mine to never see the Mormon cousins who singled me out as being less than them because I was adopted...they can rot in whatever celestial shithole they believe they're going too. Good riddance.

Happiness and family begins at 300 miles or more, with no "spare" bedrooms.

Amen!

Double Amen!

In my not so humble opinion that is almost the ultimate mind control scam. According to them to have your family forever you have to be 100% TBM! Otherwise, shame on you you are out!!

And since TBM means "tithe-bearing" as well as true believing/true blue, I am inclined to believe the whole thing is just old-fashioned ransomware.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/04/2019 02:39PM by ptbarnum.

That is a divine ransom racket.

Stephen Fry gave the perfect answer to the idea of spending eternity with your family; "What do (Mormons) believe happens if you've been good?"

And as the Dropkick Murphys put it in "The Season's Upon Us*,"
"With family like this I would have to confess
I'd be better off lonely, distraught, and depressed."






*Most accurate Christmas song ever, BTW



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/05/2019 08:45PM by ookami.