![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bladesparkRecent conversational events have left me... stunned, really. Shocked! Totally bewildered. I had no idea that Christianity was so divided on the issue of Christ himself. Of course I knew that we are spread out over a huge amount of doctrinal ground on all kinds of issues, but I thought those were all peripheral, and at the heart of things all Christians believed more or less the same. I had assumed that we all agreed that: 1.) Christ was the son of God. 2.) Christ suffered to pay for sin. Even the people who don't seem to get that Christ also taught some good stuff about love and tolerance at least agree on those two things, right?
But apparently neither of these things is actually agreed on in any way! And I just don't get it. I really don't! I thought that the Bible makes it crystal clear that you can't enter heaven as a sinner. That sins have to be paid for. That God is just and requires all accounts settled, and that it's the mercy of Christ that settles them. I... just thought that was obvious.
I guess not.
Apparently... sins don't matter? I don't know! I'm not sure! I can't wrap my head around this. You... read the Bible, believe in Christ, but he... didn't suffer for you? Gethsemane meant nothing, he just sweat blood on a lark? I don't know! I really don't. He was crucified because men are sinful, but that didn't accomplish anything, it just proved that men suck, and kill good people? What? That's the basis for a religion? Augh. I don't GET this at all!
I was just going around and around and around trying to figure it out, and then something dawned on me. I was trying to explain why I think that it's totally obvious that Christ paid for sins, and wasn't just some sort of divine example, he actually did something, and I went to look up a scripture I remembered, that said it without any possible ambiguity... and lo! Said scripture is in the Book of Mormon.
Ah.
Well.
There it is. There, really is the evidence that my seminary teacher was right when he said that the Book of Mormon was meant to make the Bible "plain." I still am kind of boggled that somebody could worship Christ and think he was nothing more than a great teacher, but I suddenly at least understood why I have such a different way of looking at things. My faith in Christ is based on the Bible, but it's the Bible as clarified by the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants. It's a Bible where if I'm not sure of a particular verse, I can go find a dozen or so other, related verses, and the combination tends to offer insight.
And this just kind of leaves me at a loss. I really can't debate with other Christians when I'm working from an entirely different basis, honestly. I still think the Bible is pretty clear on what Christ did, but as fundamentalists have proved, you can twist it around if you really try, and make it say what you want it to say. So... I don't quite know where to go from here. I think I'll have to just leave the conversation as it stands, because honestly if they're bound and determined to interpret things one way, they're not going to listen to me unless I can present something inarguable, and I can't do that without stepping outside the little box of the Bible, which is the only reference they'd accept. (Er... I hope this isn't offending anybody! I don't mean to put down Christians who only have the Bible, at all. I just can't quite think how to discuss this with them, because I know 90% or so of Christianity regards the Book of Mormon as heretical at best, Satanic at worst. So even bringing it up at all tends to instantly lose me any arguments I make, but trying to make the arguments without it is frustrating. I was raised on a four-book set of scriptures, and it's like trying to debate the Bible when you can only use selected chapters of the Old Testament. There's huge chunks missing, and sometimes they're not even where you expected them to be.)
Bleah.
But this also lead me to think of something else. You folks, reading this, probably have a lot of different ideas about Christianity, and what it consists of, and who Christ was, and all that. You probably also have a lot of varying ideas about Mormonism, and what we believe. And if I can be floored by finding out what some Christians believe, maybe there's some of you who have just as little idea of what Mormons actually believe.
So... I'm going to tell you. As concisely as I can while still not leaving anything important out, I hope. You're going to get the fourth discussion. (The discussions being the little lessons Mormon missionaries teach people if they let them in, the fourth one being what comes after we've explained where the Book of Mormon came from, our belief that Christ is the savior, and what Joseph Smith did and why we think that's important. Although I know they've changed it recently, so you wouldn't actually get this exactly. Plus the actual discussions tend to be shorter and less detailed than I'm going to get. Anyhow...) This way if we want to discuss religion, we can do it knowing where I'm coming from as far as both the weird stuff unique to Mormonism, and the stuff common (or that I still think should be common!) to all Christians. I'm going to not give all the scriptural references for this stuff, but if you're curious I can provide chapter and verse for most of it.
Anybody who's been raised Mormon will instantly recognize this little diagram. This is The Plan of Salvation, in the simplest form. (One of my missionary companions had a little set of laminated illustrations for this that included something like fifty pieces. There is a LOT going on here, but I hope this little visual will suffice.) I shall now explain it.
Let's begin at the beginning, the the Pre-Mortal Life.
God is eternal, right? Right. God has always been around. God is unchanging in nature, but is eternally progressing in glory. (I'm... not sure I can quite explain that one.) God was there before there was anything there, as far as the reality we know. So! We have God. There. What was also there was "intelligence." That's you and I, but not quite like we are now. We're eternal too, you see. We have no end, and no beginning. We have always been, and will always be, we just change from time to time. If we do things right we can eternally progress too. So, in the beginning was God, and God "organized" the intelligences. We don't get much explanation of this. It could have been a pretty workman-like thing, but given that it (probably) involved the not-much-mentioned Goddess, and that God is called our Heavenly Father, and she our Heavenly Mother, the process was apparently analogous to birth. It was something personal, which put the nature of God into each of us.
The first-born in the spirit was Christ. One of the other elder siblings was Lucifer. (Possibly second born, who knows?) Then along came the rest of us. So you, and me, and the guy next door were all born into spiritual forms. These spiritual forms were in the image of our parents, so they looked more or less like we look physically. I don't know if I actually looked like me, but I looked like a human being. Other things were made spiritually as well, including plants and animals. So we all hung around, being spirits, talking, learning, doing as much as one can do when one hasn't really got a proper body, until we'd gotten as far as we could with that.
I imagine we were starting to get bored with it, because apparently we shouted for joy when God told us there was going to be something new. God explained that he was going to make a physical world, and that we would get to go down to it, and get physical bodies, and learn things that we couldn't learn as spirits. We knew about physical bodies because God had one. Mormons don't do the trinity thing. God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit are individuals. With bodies. Well, except the Holy Spirit hasn't got a physical one, because he's a spirit, see? Anyhow, God told us that if we wanted to progress, to grow and develop and become more like him, we needed a body, like his.
God also explained that this physical thing was going to be dangerous. We might not all make it, because we'd be able to do things wrong down there. There'd be all these hormones, and glands, and urges. We'd want to do things we didn't want as spirits. But we shouldn't worry, because God had it all planned. If we messed up, there was going to be repentance, and somebody would be able to help us fix our mistakes, even the very worst ones. Christ, our older brother, the very best and wisest of all of us, would come down there to help us.
Most of us thought that this was a pretty good idea, but Lucifer didn't really like it. He spoke up and presented an alternate idea. What if God just made it impossible to mess up? He was God, he could do it, right? He could just force everybody to be good, all the time, and every single one of us would make it through mortal life unscathed. Wouldn't that be a lot better?
Well, God and Christ explained that the mistakes were important. That we all needed to make them so that we could grow and experience. And that free will was very important too, it wouldn't be right for God to take choice away from us and force us to do things. Why here in the spirit world God had never forced us to do anything. And he wouldn't force us now. If we really wanted, we could chose to not take part in the plan, and not go get a physical body. It was up to us. If we wanted Lucifer's plan, we could chose to go with him.
So we chose sides. I think it says something about how idyllic things were in the spirit world that an argument and a vote were called a "war." (Yep, this is the War in Heaven!) Some of us sided with Lucifer, but most of us stuch with God and Christ. And when everybody had picked, Lucifer pretty much refused to accept the vote wasn't in his favor. So God threw him, and everybody who sided with him, out. They opted out of the plan, out they were. They went to a place called "outer darkness" where there is no body or being, just spirit. Pretty miserable spirit too, as Lucifer was a poor loser. (This, by the way, is where demons come from. They are our spirit siblings who opted out of bodies. And they resent us for picking the right way, and are jealous of our bodies. Likewise angles are spirits too, that either haven't been born yet, or have already been born and passed on. Mormon mythology, so to speak, isn't really big on the supernatural. We tend to think that everything is in accordance with natural laws, God just knows those laws better than we do, so he's able to do things we can't do. Yet.)
Over on the winning side, it was time to get The Plan rolling! So God designed a planet, and Christ built it for him. We all helped! (I remember being a teenager, with younger siblings, helping my parents build a house. I imagine it was a little like that.) And when it was all built, and ready, God sent the first of us down to try it out.
So down went Adam, shortly followed by Eve, to see what this physical body stuff was all about.
When they went from the spirit world to this world, they passed through a "veil" which removed all memory of what had gone before. They were starting over with a blank slate, in a new world. And into that world snuck Lucifer, already bitter and angry at having lost the "war." He decided he was going to screw things up if he could. God, being God and being pretty darn smart though, knew about this before hand, and knew it was necessary. God had made a physical reality, but so far it was an ideal, a garden of ease. Not a building and growing experience. It was pretty much just like things above, and it needed to be harsher so that we children could actually get somewhere. So God let Lucifer in. God also, knowing what was needed, made the Tree of Knowledge and told Adam and Eve they shouldn't eat the fruit of it. Literal or metaphorical I'm not sure, though if it's a metaphor I really don't know for what. I do NOT buy the "the apple was sex" thing, because Adam and Eve were married by God. And sex between married people is not a sin. (I'm pretty sure the "apple was sex" bit was introduced by somebody who never got any, and was obsessive about the subject.) Maybe the apple itself didn't do anything, really, it was just the act of deliberately disobeying God that caused the change.
Whatever the technicalities of it were, the fact was that Adam and Eve ate the apple, and changed. They weren't innocents anymore, they could do wrong, and they could feel guilt for it. They could also die, and did eventually, passing from this mortal world into the spirit world.
Now on the little chart there you'll see that the spirit world has got two halves, paradise and prison. As far as I can tell these are not two separate places, but rather two mental states, essentially with and without regret. Paradise is those who finished out this life and feel they did the best they could, even if they screwed up. Prison is those who regret, who wish they'd done it all differently, those who got to the other side and said "Oh crap! I did it all wrong, didn't I?" It's not quite hell, but it's probably the closest thing to hell that Mormonism has. It's unpleasant. Anybody who's finished up something that cannot be done over, and then looked back and realized that they completely screwed it up, probably has some idea of what Spirit Prison is like.
Now, enter Christ. This is the important bit
Adam and Eve brought in death and sin. Death and sin were necessary, but they were also a problem. The end goal, if you recall, was to be more like God. So if we die and lose our bodies, we're not like him. And if we're filled with past mistakes and sins we're also not like him. Something had to be done to undo death and wipe away sin. And that something was Christ.
Christ was God's firstborn in the spirit. He was also God's child in the flesh. (And here I'll state that I do not buy the "God had sex with Mary" thing. Virgin birth = no sex involved. God probably knew about artificial insemination, he's God, after all. Some divine version of that is what I figure happened. Once again religious people are being way too obsessed with sex. Ahem.) So Christ, being half mortal, from his mother's side, could die. But being half divine on his father's side could also chose to ignore death in a way that nobody else ever could. Christ raised Lazarus, but he didn't raise him permanently, Lazarus was eventually going to die again anyhow. Christ though, when he raised himself did something different. He raised himself from death past mortality, and to immortality. Perfected (and apparently glowing, according to all the descriptions,) and never going to die again. That's what was needed. And that's what was done. Christ broke open death, so that after a person dies, they can go out through the door Christ made, and not just live again, but live again perfectly, without sickness, without age, without handicaps or flaws of any kind. So that's death all taken care of.
What about sin? Well, as half a God, and as the eldest of God's children, Christ was able to not sin at all. This means he had an infinite balance of goodness, so to speak. Anybody who knows math knows that if you take infinity, you can subtract any number you like from it, and still have infinity left.
This is what Christ did. On the cross he died so that he could rise again, and that's important, but the really important bit was the night before, in the Garden of Gethsemane. Some people think he went there just to pray, and prepare for dying. But his prayer meant a little more than that. The Bible tells us that he was in such agony that he sweat blood through his pores. What could cause such agony? Surely not the fear of death! He himself said long before this that if he laid his body down, he could take it up again. He KNEW that he had nothing to fear from death. So why the suffering? It was for us. There is where the cosmic math, of subtracting the price for all our wrongs from his infinite right took place. His infinite self felt, through time and across space, from the past, present, and future, the weight of guilt, the burden of sorrow of every sin ever committed by a human being. He felt them all, and that was why he sweat blood. Had he been mortal he would have died of it, but he wasn't, he could only die if he chose to die. And he could have chosen, to die and escape, but he didn't. He stuck it out, because he is our brother. Do any of you have younger siblings? To save their lives, how much suffering would you take? Thinking about my younger siblings I can understand, at least a little, the sacrifice of Christ.
So because of that suffering, he gained the ability to pay for all sins. No matter what it is we've done, it's smaller than infinity, so his goodness covers it. We have to give the sin to him though. We can't just say "Christ, I believe you can save me" and expect him to do all the work. He's done enough! We have to take all of our wrongs, the things we regret, and give them away. I know personally that I have a hard time sometimes with this. I obsess over things. I hang on to them and worry over them, and rehash them with a million "what ifs" and I wallow in guilt and misery, clinging to the wrongs I've done, but when I do finally manage to hand them over, it's wonderful. And it's not the same as when I've "handed" them to a fellow human. Talking to a shrink is great, having friends help with your burdens is awesome, but handing them to Christ is something else entirely. I feel the Spirit, I have a connection to Christ and to God. I feel that I have a father, a brother, who are infinite and amazing, and love me anyhow, even though I'm the merest embryo of what they are, further removed from them than a caterpillar is from a butterfly.
And there's where the end of the diagram comes in. Eventually the world will be over. And spirit paradise and prison, which are really just waiting places, will be done away with. And Christ will judge everybody, and give them the reward that they earned. There are a few (and they are VERY few) who committed the unforgivable sin, and will go join Lucifer in darkness. The unforgivable sin is to KNOW Christ, to have felt the Spirit, to know without doubt that Christ and God are real, to have accepted Christ's blood and his sacrifice, fully and with complete knowledge and understanding of the entire thing (something which I myself still do not have!) and then reject all that completely, and deny it. There's not many folks who have done that, mostly because not many folks get that close to God, and fewer still having come that close would reject it. As far as I know, they also loose the benefit of the "breaking open death" bit, and go off without bodies.
The rest of us get perfected, immortal bodies, and then get sent to a reward.
Those of us who were just not good in this life, the murderers and the rapists and the Fred Phelps, will end up in the Telestial Kingdom. Which as I understand it is a bit like spirit prison, but not so bad. You regret. You're not really pleased that you totally screwed it up, but there's no fire and no torment, and the Holy Spirit visits you there sometimes, so you're not alone. You're probably awfully bored though. Though on the other hand, Joseph Smith once said he'd been given a glimpse of the afterlife, and that the conditions in the Telestial Kingdom are better than conditions here on Earth by at least an order of magnitude. Which figures, really. Do away with physical suffering, and do away with man's inhumanity to man, and what's left? A pretty good life, really!
Those of us who were fairly good, but didn't really do anything great will be in the Terrestrial Kingdom. These are the people whose sins were mostly of omission, not commission. Who never did much bad, but never did much good either. Who didn't fulfill their potential. This kingdom is a lot like the usual idea of heaven. You get to be an angel, basically, and help and praise God forever. I don't know if you get harps and sit on clouds, I rather doubt it. Christ will visit this kingdom sometimes.
(Just think about that for a minute! Mormonism's idea of where horrible sinners go is better than Earth, their idea of where most everybody else goes is pretty much like heaven. Not a bad system, is it? And much more in line with a loving Father as God than the idea that God has Satan torture some of his children.)
Those of us who did the very best we could be, who put in the top effort, who really tried our hardest will end up in the Celestial Kingdom, and here's the good stuff, because here we (I hope it's "we"!) get to continue on the path we started back when God organized is into spirits. We get to keep growing and learning and building on the foundation we got in the spirit world and on Earth. We have the chance to progress and grow and become more and more like God until someday we are gods ourselves, and get to go out and make our own worlds, bring our own spirit children into being, and start the eternal cycle over again.
Whew! That was long. And has still left out all kinds of stuff, I didn't even get into covenants, baptism, temples, or any of that. And heaven knows what else I may have just plain forgotten... Heck, I still don't know all the details, and I've been studying this for my whole life! There's a lot of stuff in there.
Disclaimer - this is the Gospel According to SPark. This may or may not actually line up perfectly with official LDS doctrine. There is at least some scriptural and doctrinal basis for every bit of it though.
But apparently neither of these things is actually agreed on in any way! And I just don't get it. I really don't! I thought that the Bible makes it crystal clear that you can't enter heaven as a sinner. That sins have to be paid for. That God is just and requires all accounts settled, and that it's the mercy of Christ that settles them. I... just thought that was obvious.
I guess not.
Apparently... sins don't matter? I don't know! I'm not sure! I can't wrap my head around this. You... read the Bible, believe in Christ, but he... didn't suffer for you? Gethsemane meant nothing, he just sweat blood on a lark? I don't know! I really don't. He was crucified because men are sinful, but that didn't accomplish anything, it just proved that men suck, and kill good people? What? That's the basis for a religion? Augh. I don't GET this at all!
I was just going around and around and around trying to figure it out, and then something dawned on me. I was trying to explain why I think that it's totally obvious that Christ paid for sins, and wasn't just some sort of divine example, he actually did something, and I went to look up a scripture I remembered, that said it without any possible ambiguity... and lo! Said scripture is in the Book of Mormon.
Ah.
Well.
There it is. There, really is the evidence that my seminary teacher was right when he said that the Book of Mormon was meant to make the Bible "plain." I still am kind of boggled that somebody could worship Christ and think he was nothing more than a great teacher, but I suddenly at least understood why I have such a different way of looking at things. My faith in Christ is based on the Bible, but it's the Bible as clarified by the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants. It's a Bible where if I'm not sure of a particular verse, I can go find a dozen or so other, related verses, and the combination tends to offer insight.
And this just kind of leaves me at a loss. I really can't debate with other Christians when I'm working from an entirely different basis, honestly. I still think the Bible is pretty clear on what Christ did, but as fundamentalists have proved, you can twist it around if you really try, and make it say what you want it to say. So... I don't quite know where to go from here. I think I'll have to just leave the conversation as it stands, because honestly if they're bound and determined to interpret things one way, they're not going to listen to me unless I can present something inarguable, and I can't do that without stepping outside the little box of the Bible, which is the only reference they'd accept. (Er... I hope this isn't offending anybody! I don't mean to put down Christians who only have the Bible, at all. I just can't quite think how to discuss this with them, because I know 90% or so of Christianity regards the Book of Mormon as heretical at best, Satanic at worst. So even bringing it up at all tends to instantly lose me any arguments I make, but trying to make the arguments without it is frustrating. I was raised on a four-book set of scriptures, and it's like trying to debate the Bible when you can only use selected chapters of the Old Testament. There's huge chunks missing, and sometimes they're not even where you expected them to be.)
Bleah.
But this also lead me to think of something else. You folks, reading this, probably have a lot of different ideas about Christianity, and what it consists of, and who Christ was, and all that. You probably also have a lot of varying ideas about Mormonism, and what we believe. And if I can be floored by finding out what some Christians believe, maybe there's some of you who have just as little idea of what Mormons actually believe.
So... I'm going to tell you. As concisely as I can while still not leaving anything important out, I hope. You're going to get the fourth discussion. (The discussions being the little lessons Mormon missionaries teach people if they let them in, the fourth one being what comes after we've explained where the Book of Mormon came from, our belief that Christ is the savior, and what Joseph Smith did and why we think that's important. Although I know they've changed it recently, so you wouldn't actually get this exactly. Plus the actual discussions tend to be shorter and less detailed than I'm going to get. Anyhow...) This way if we want to discuss religion, we can do it knowing where I'm coming from as far as both the weird stuff unique to Mormonism, and the stuff common (or that I still think should be common!) to all Christians. I'm going to not give all the scriptural references for this stuff, but if you're curious I can provide chapter and verse for most of it.
Anybody who's been raised Mormon will instantly recognize this little diagram. This is The Plan of Salvation, in the simplest form. (One of my missionary companions had a little set of laminated illustrations for this that included something like fifty pieces. There is a LOT going on here, but I hope this little visual will suffice.) I shall now explain it.
Let's begin at the beginning, the the Pre-Mortal Life.
God is eternal, right? Right. God has always been around. God is unchanging in nature, but is eternally progressing in glory. (I'm... not sure I can quite explain that one.) God was there before there was anything there, as far as the reality we know. So! We have God. There. What was also there was "intelligence." That's you and I, but not quite like we are now. We're eternal too, you see. We have no end, and no beginning. We have always been, and will always be, we just change from time to time. If we do things right we can eternally progress too. So, in the beginning was God, and God "organized" the intelligences. We don't get much explanation of this. It could have been a pretty workman-like thing, but given that it (probably) involved the not-much-mentioned Goddess, and that God is called our Heavenly Father, and she our Heavenly Mother, the process was apparently analogous to birth. It was something personal, which put the nature of God into each of us.
The first-born in the spirit was Christ. One of the other elder siblings was Lucifer. (Possibly second born, who knows?) Then along came the rest of us. So you, and me, and the guy next door were all born into spiritual forms. These spiritual forms were in the image of our parents, so they looked more or less like we look physically. I don't know if I actually looked like me, but I looked like a human being. Other things were made spiritually as well, including plants and animals. So we all hung around, being spirits, talking, learning, doing as much as one can do when one hasn't really got a proper body, until we'd gotten as far as we could with that.
I imagine we were starting to get bored with it, because apparently we shouted for joy when God told us there was going to be something new. God explained that he was going to make a physical world, and that we would get to go down to it, and get physical bodies, and learn things that we couldn't learn as spirits. We knew about physical bodies because God had one. Mormons don't do the trinity thing. God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit are individuals. With bodies. Well, except the Holy Spirit hasn't got a physical one, because he's a spirit, see? Anyhow, God told us that if we wanted to progress, to grow and develop and become more like him, we needed a body, like his.
God also explained that this physical thing was going to be dangerous. We might not all make it, because we'd be able to do things wrong down there. There'd be all these hormones, and glands, and urges. We'd want to do things we didn't want as spirits. But we shouldn't worry, because God had it all planned. If we messed up, there was going to be repentance, and somebody would be able to help us fix our mistakes, even the very worst ones. Christ, our older brother, the very best and wisest of all of us, would come down there to help us.
Most of us thought that this was a pretty good idea, but Lucifer didn't really like it. He spoke up and presented an alternate idea. What if God just made it impossible to mess up? He was God, he could do it, right? He could just force everybody to be good, all the time, and every single one of us would make it through mortal life unscathed. Wouldn't that be a lot better?
Well, God and Christ explained that the mistakes were important. That we all needed to make them so that we could grow and experience. And that free will was very important too, it wouldn't be right for God to take choice away from us and force us to do things. Why here in the spirit world God had never forced us to do anything. And he wouldn't force us now. If we really wanted, we could chose to not take part in the plan, and not go get a physical body. It was up to us. If we wanted Lucifer's plan, we could chose to go with him.
So we chose sides. I think it says something about how idyllic things were in the spirit world that an argument and a vote were called a "war." (Yep, this is the War in Heaven!) Some of us sided with Lucifer, but most of us stuch with God and Christ. And when everybody had picked, Lucifer pretty much refused to accept the vote wasn't in his favor. So God threw him, and everybody who sided with him, out. They opted out of the plan, out they were. They went to a place called "outer darkness" where there is no body or being, just spirit. Pretty miserable spirit too, as Lucifer was a poor loser. (This, by the way, is where demons come from. They are our spirit siblings who opted out of bodies. And they resent us for picking the right way, and are jealous of our bodies. Likewise angles are spirits too, that either haven't been born yet, or have already been born and passed on. Mormon mythology, so to speak, isn't really big on the supernatural. We tend to think that everything is in accordance with natural laws, God just knows those laws better than we do, so he's able to do things we can't do. Yet.)
Over on the winning side, it was time to get The Plan rolling! So God designed a planet, and Christ built it for him. We all helped! (I remember being a teenager, with younger siblings, helping my parents build a house. I imagine it was a little like that.) And when it was all built, and ready, God sent the first of us down to try it out.
So down went Adam, shortly followed by Eve, to see what this physical body stuff was all about.
When they went from the spirit world to this world, they passed through a "veil" which removed all memory of what had gone before. They were starting over with a blank slate, in a new world. And into that world snuck Lucifer, already bitter and angry at having lost the "war." He decided he was going to screw things up if he could. God, being God and being pretty darn smart though, knew about this before hand, and knew it was necessary. God had made a physical reality, but so far it was an ideal, a garden of ease. Not a building and growing experience. It was pretty much just like things above, and it needed to be harsher so that we children could actually get somewhere. So God let Lucifer in. God also, knowing what was needed, made the Tree of Knowledge and told Adam and Eve they shouldn't eat the fruit of it. Literal or metaphorical I'm not sure, though if it's a metaphor I really don't know for what. I do NOT buy the "the apple was sex" thing, because Adam and Eve were married by God. And sex between married people is not a sin. (I'm pretty sure the "apple was sex" bit was introduced by somebody who never got any, and was obsessive about the subject.) Maybe the apple itself didn't do anything, really, it was just the act of deliberately disobeying God that caused the change.
Whatever the technicalities of it were, the fact was that Adam and Eve ate the apple, and changed. They weren't innocents anymore, they could do wrong, and they could feel guilt for it. They could also die, and did eventually, passing from this mortal world into the spirit world.
Now on the little chart there you'll see that the spirit world has got two halves, paradise and prison. As far as I can tell these are not two separate places, but rather two mental states, essentially with and without regret. Paradise is those who finished out this life and feel they did the best they could, even if they screwed up. Prison is those who regret, who wish they'd done it all differently, those who got to the other side and said "Oh crap! I did it all wrong, didn't I?" It's not quite hell, but it's probably the closest thing to hell that Mormonism has. It's unpleasant. Anybody who's finished up something that cannot be done over, and then looked back and realized that they completely screwed it up, probably has some idea of what Spirit Prison is like.
Now, enter Christ. This is the important bit
Adam and Eve brought in death and sin. Death and sin were necessary, but they were also a problem. The end goal, if you recall, was to be more like God. So if we die and lose our bodies, we're not like him. And if we're filled with past mistakes and sins we're also not like him. Something had to be done to undo death and wipe away sin. And that something was Christ.
Christ was God's firstborn in the spirit. He was also God's child in the flesh. (And here I'll state that I do not buy the "God had sex with Mary" thing. Virgin birth = no sex involved. God probably knew about artificial insemination, he's God, after all. Some divine version of that is what I figure happened. Once again religious people are being way too obsessed with sex. Ahem.) So Christ, being half mortal, from his mother's side, could die. But being half divine on his father's side could also chose to ignore death in a way that nobody else ever could. Christ raised Lazarus, but he didn't raise him permanently, Lazarus was eventually going to die again anyhow. Christ though, when he raised himself did something different. He raised himself from death past mortality, and to immortality. Perfected (and apparently glowing, according to all the descriptions,) and never going to die again. That's what was needed. And that's what was done. Christ broke open death, so that after a person dies, they can go out through the door Christ made, and not just live again, but live again perfectly, without sickness, without age, without handicaps or flaws of any kind. So that's death all taken care of.
What about sin? Well, as half a God, and as the eldest of God's children, Christ was able to not sin at all. This means he had an infinite balance of goodness, so to speak. Anybody who knows math knows that if you take infinity, you can subtract any number you like from it, and still have infinity left.
This is what Christ did. On the cross he died so that he could rise again, and that's important, but the really important bit was the night before, in the Garden of Gethsemane. Some people think he went there just to pray, and prepare for dying. But his prayer meant a little more than that. The Bible tells us that he was in such agony that he sweat blood through his pores. What could cause such agony? Surely not the fear of death! He himself said long before this that if he laid his body down, he could take it up again. He KNEW that he had nothing to fear from death. So why the suffering? It was for us. There is where the cosmic math, of subtracting the price for all our wrongs from his infinite right took place. His infinite self felt, through time and across space, from the past, present, and future, the weight of guilt, the burden of sorrow of every sin ever committed by a human being. He felt them all, and that was why he sweat blood. Had he been mortal he would have died of it, but he wasn't, he could only die if he chose to die. And he could have chosen, to die and escape, but he didn't. He stuck it out, because he is our brother. Do any of you have younger siblings? To save their lives, how much suffering would you take? Thinking about my younger siblings I can understand, at least a little, the sacrifice of Christ.
So because of that suffering, he gained the ability to pay for all sins. No matter what it is we've done, it's smaller than infinity, so his goodness covers it. We have to give the sin to him though. We can't just say "Christ, I believe you can save me" and expect him to do all the work. He's done enough! We have to take all of our wrongs, the things we regret, and give them away. I know personally that I have a hard time sometimes with this. I obsess over things. I hang on to them and worry over them, and rehash them with a million "what ifs" and I wallow in guilt and misery, clinging to the wrongs I've done, but when I do finally manage to hand them over, it's wonderful. And it's not the same as when I've "handed" them to a fellow human. Talking to a shrink is great, having friends help with your burdens is awesome, but handing them to Christ is something else entirely. I feel the Spirit, I have a connection to Christ and to God. I feel that I have a father, a brother, who are infinite and amazing, and love me anyhow, even though I'm the merest embryo of what they are, further removed from them than a caterpillar is from a butterfly.
And there's where the end of the diagram comes in. Eventually the world will be over. And spirit paradise and prison, which are really just waiting places, will be done away with. And Christ will judge everybody, and give them the reward that they earned. There are a few (and they are VERY few) who committed the unforgivable sin, and will go join Lucifer in darkness. The unforgivable sin is to KNOW Christ, to have felt the Spirit, to know without doubt that Christ and God are real, to have accepted Christ's blood and his sacrifice, fully and with complete knowledge and understanding of the entire thing (something which I myself still do not have!) and then reject all that completely, and deny it. There's not many folks who have done that, mostly because not many folks get that close to God, and fewer still having come that close would reject it. As far as I know, they also loose the benefit of the "breaking open death" bit, and go off without bodies.
The rest of us get perfected, immortal bodies, and then get sent to a reward.
Those of us who were just not good in this life, the murderers and the rapists and the Fred Phelps, will end up in the Telestial Kingdom. Which as I understand it is a bit like spirit prison, but not so bad. You regret. You're not really pleased that you totally screwed it up, but there's no fire and no torment, and the Holy Spirit visits you there sometimes, so you're not alone. You're probably awfully bored though. Though on the other hand, Joseph Smith once said he'd been given a glimpse of the afterlife, and that the conditions in the Telestial Kingdom are better than conditions here on Earth by at least an order of magnitude. Which figures, really. Do away with physical suffering, and do away with man's inhumanity to man, and what's left? A pretty good life, really!
Those of us who were fairly good, but didn't really do anything great will be in the Terrestrial Kingdom. These are the people whose sins were mostly of omission, not commission. Who never did much bad, but never did much good either. Who didn't fulfill their potential. This kingdom is a lot like the usual idea of heaven. You get to be an angel, basically, and help and praise God forever. I don't know if you get harps and sit on clouds, I rather doubt it. Christ will visit this kingdom sometimes.
(Just think about that for a minute! Mormonism's idea of where horrible sinners go is better than Earth, their idea of where most everybody else goes is pretty much like heaven. Not a bad system, is it? And much more in line with a loving Father as God than the idea that God has Satan torture some of his children.)
Those of us who did the very best we could be, who put in the top effort, who really tried our hardest will end up in the Celestial Kingdom, and here's the good stuff, because here we (I hope it's "we"!) get to continue on the path we started back when God organized is into spirits. We get to keep growing and learning and building on the foundation we got in the spirit world and on Earth. We have the chance to progress and grow and become more and more like God until someday we are gods ourselves, and get to go out and make our own worlds, bring our own spirit children into being, and start the eternal cycle over again.
Whew! That was long. And has still left out all kinds of stuff, I didn't even get into covenants, baptism, temples, or any of that. And heaven knows what else I may have just plain forgotten... Heck, I still don't know all the details, and I've been studying this for my whole life! There's a lot of stuff in there.
Disclaimer - this is the Gospel According to SPark. This may or may not actually line up perfectly with official LDS doctrine. There is at least some scriptural and doctrinal basis for every bit of it though.
