I was considering the implications of the idea of the Mormon god when it struck me, “What would eternity be like as a god based on Mormon theology?” Okay, so you’d have a lot of (spiritual) sex with all of your wives. As a man, I have to admit lots of sex sounds at least somewhat appealing. But I’d get bored with sex if that’s all there was. Luckily, I’d have two additional hobbies – spending time listening to my billions of children and making planets and such.
No one really knows how this god is supposed to actually listen to the millions and millions of simultaneous prayers from just this one planet every day, but if you think about it from the perspective of a dad, it would be really annoying. That’s quite a family-share plan – 6 billion lines for this planet alone (1 billion of which are wasted on the atheists, who are the kids who never call). Can you imagine the cellular bill? Insane!
And all for what? Think about it… When you were a Mormon (most of my readers aren’t anymore, so think back), how often did you actually pray sincerely for something you needed? Or was it mostly perfunctory prayers that had no real meaning. This would be the equivalent of calling your dad every day to tell him you’re thankful for him, your mom, your spouse, your belongings, your talents, and your health and then asking him to bless you that you keep all of those things, even though you know you will eventually lose every one of them. Then, without waiting for a response, you hang up on the mother fucker (I don’t mean that pejoratively; quite literally he is fucking your mother).
Now, multiply that by several million and that’s what you’re dealing with at any one time. Multiply that by several billion and that’s what you get every day (from just this planet). And that’s just if the prayers are somewhat novel. Think about the rote prayers of Catholics? If you seriously had to listen to those (let alone answer them) every single day, how long until you went insane and decided to send a tsunami to Indonesia or a hurricane to New Orleans to wipe a few hundred thousand out, just to shut them up!?!
We need to start an anti-prayer campaign. Here’s the slogan, “God’s busy, shut the fuck up!” Unless you have a pressing need, leave the old man alone. He has better things to do, like creating dinosaurs and screwing your mom, your sister-mom, your other sister-mom, your other sister-mom, your other sister-mom, repeat ad infinitum…
Or, of course, you could just realize this whole notion is patently absurd and live a good, moral life, taking responsibility for what you can and trying to be a good person. There’s one less make believe person to talk to with this approach, but at least you can rest assured you aren’t annoying the shit out of someone.
Bloody brilliant . . . God’s Busy, Shut the Fuck Up. I think that’s a far more viable strategy than living a good, moral life and having responsibility. Because, as any good Mormon will tell you, once you leave the church you’re going to drown yourself in an alcoholic stupor, become a drug addict and rob liquor stores to support your habits.
My mother told me that she sat under the table as a three year old, trying to figure out how God could possibly answer her prayer to protect her father at the eastern front when Russian children were praying that God protect their dads at the same time.
Well, another possibility is to realize that if there is a God, it probably isn’t really much like a person at all. So analogies to phone lines are misleading at best.
But I’m straying from Mormonism now, and Mormonism’s corporeal perfected-man God.
From what I can tell, God doesn’t actually answer any prayers. He does what he does regardless of what prayers we pray. He’s perfectly good, right? So he wouldn’t answer an immoral or bad prayer. He only answers good prayers, the stuff he was going to do anyway.
If we fail to ask for something, would a perfectly good God fail to act in our best interest? If my child didn’t ask me for protection in the morning, I wouldn’t let her get hit by a car and say “She didn’t ask for my help.”
Couldn’t I say just one prayer and have it count forever? Why do I need to keep asking for things over and over?
If I pray about something that may have happened in the past, will God foresee my prayer and act on it? If my family is due home at 9:00 and it’s already 10:00, can I pray “Please protect my family and help them get home safely” and have it still count?
The more questions you ask about prayer and how it works, the more absurd it becomes.
Prayer really is amazing, isn’t it? It makes absolutely no sense when you step outside it and think about it for a second. But it makes people feel like they have power or influence over something that they would not otherwise have power or influence over (e.g., praying for your father to be safe during a war). And since we really do not have that much power as individual “mostly bags of water”, prayer is an attractive alternative (the other being to recognize you just don’t have a say in the matter).
For me, one of the first signs of my apostasy was realizing that prayer was stupid and meaningless. I kept saying the same damn things over and over. By the time I left I rarely if ever prayed, usually only when I had something novel to say. Otherwise, I figured I’d said it a gazillion times before and I didn’t want to bother anyone.
Intriguingly, I couldn’t find the list of “signs of apostasy” of McConkie (any leads, anyone?), but I found this little quote from Mormon Doctrine under “apostasy”:
“It follows that if members of the Church believe false doctrines; if they accept false educational theories; if they fall into the practices and abominations of the sectarians; if they use tea, coffee, tobacco or liquor; if they fail to pay an honest tithing; if they find fault with the Lord’s anointed; if they play cards; if they do anything contrary to the standards of personal righteousness required by the gospel — then to that extent they are in personal apostasy and need to repent.”
I know a lot of TBMs who are in personal apostasy and need to repent 😉