I am of the opinion that if it was possible and desirable for everything to be made better for everybody in this world, then God would have done it already - indeed divine creation would never have had evil, entropy and death in the first place.
As it is - people have innate evil. As well as having positively sinful impulses; people have a tendency to behave in order to seek short-term gratification and avoidance of suffering or misery instead of doing what they know to be virtuous.
Furthermore, people are made worse, often much worse, by their environment; by other people; and the many and pervasive negative, sin-encouraging influences, indoctrinations, distractions, lies, manipulations, value-inversions and so forth - which have become worse in recent decades, and are still getting worse.
Since I believe that nothing positively good can be done forcibly, by compulsion (not by God, nor anyone else); what is a way out from this situation of too-bad people in a too-bad world?
The way out must be wanted and chosen by each individual person, and it must be an active choice since people cannot be coercively "made better" without their active cooperation.
And since the way out much be chosen and active, then this entails that those who do not choose, or who not cooperate in the process, will be "left behind". The way out is not for those who don't want and/or don't want voluntarily to collaborate in their self-remaking.
Such was (and is) the situation confronted by Jesus Christ in devising a plan for our salvation - that is a plan for us to escape from the intrinsic problems of our lives in this world.
The plan must work for innately evil people who live in a sin-inducing environment, people who are prone to prefer the expedient and short term and are constantly tempted by a worsening environment - and who are (I think observably) themselves getting worse...
By my understanding, properly understood; Christianity is exactly a religion for such people as we actually are, in a world as it actually is...
Providing a hopeful future and a way out to something better; that is available and attainable by anyone who wants it - and who is prepared (when the time comes, after death) to cooperate with being made fit for it.
Salvation transcends our-selves and the world; no matter how bad these have become.
It is all in The Wanting.
2 comments:
Central to the LDS temple ritual is the repeated question, "What is wanted?"
@Wm - I didn't know that.
I regard it as unfortunate that the clarity of that kind of LDS theology continues to be obscured by atavistic thinking and institutional needs; such as an afterlife stratified by church membership, temple eligibility and participation in particular rituals.
I regard it as simply un-believable that God would create a system of salvation for Men dependent on the contingencies of this-world institutions and groupings. It makes no sense - assuming God is good, the creator, our Heavenly Parents.
But I acknowledge that in the past, apparently in most times and places, Mankind could *only* conceive of salvation in a groupish (eg tribal) way - and I think Joseph Smith had a large element of this residual (but already disappearing from The West, especially) mode of consciousness in his makeup.
This he was sometimes speaking from a modern alienated consciousness, in terms of a personal relationship with God who was loving parents (eg the emphasis on personal revelation); and at other times was trying to re-make a version of Ancient Hebrew tribalism - with salvation of "a people" by covenants with a King-Judge type God, who demanded rituals and propitiations.
Indeed, I find this not just unbelievable but, from a cosmic perspective, actually absurd.
In other words, in the past we naturally believed that symbols were also literal, and rituals just-were spontaneously effectual (regardless of whatever was going on in people's minds during them) - Now symbols and rituals do not have any automatic effect on our consciousness or spiritual state - such intermediaries have been hollowed out and made superficial and arbitrary, by the changes in our consciousness.
For instance, we do not Really believe that there is a priesthood, in the old sense, with special powers conferred by the processes of ordination etc. We do not Really believe that priests are a different kind of person - no matter how strenuously do people protest they are qualitatively distinct from not-priests, no matter how much we want them to be. The false note in such verbal claims is more and more evident.
This split in Mormon theology was never really coherent; and (as with other new religions, including anthroposophy) it was the group and institutional elements that won primacy - and the individual was secondarily fitted-into a circumscribed place in a general scheme of faith and living; prescribed and administered by the church.
This worked for a few generations, but with incrementally diminishing effectiveness - until now it does Not work. And as all institutions are compelled (and covertly desire to) assimilate to totalitarian and materialist atheism, so do all churches.
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