I have been restructuring how I think about Mormonism and the divine for about a year now.
Last year I had an entheogenic experience. I had traditionally thought of the divine in an exclusively human context. However, my experience helped me understand it in more of a non-human context. It was a sort of Pantheistic/Panentheistic/Brahmanistic sort of divinity. It is difficult to convey unless you’ve had similar experiences.
I love talking to people about religion. A couple of months ago my friend group had a brunch over at my house. One by one I asked them how they would describe their religious beliefs. Most of them said agnostic leaning atheistic. I then asked how psychedelics had influenced their beliefs, and every one of them said that it was the reason why they’re Agnostic and not Atheistic. Most of them agreed that they believe that there is something, but a dude in the clouds with a long white beard isn’t it.
So is there any usefulness in that traditional conception of God? I believe there is. That version of the divine is humanity’s best attempt to conceptualize and humanize something that is extremely difficult or impossible to conceptualize and/or humanize. Its nothing other than a place holder, a mask, or a story. If we allow ourselves to see that it is just a story that serves as a placeholder, why not modify it a bit to make it more palatable?
I have been thinking, what else would I change about the traditional view of the divine? How would I use the mask as a mirror and use it to reflect the divine as I understand it? There are a couple things that I have thought of that would be important to me.
1 Heavenly Mother
EDIT 04/22/20: I’m not as keen on this belief anymore. The beauty of the mask is that you can change how you understand it.
I LOVE that Mormonism allows space for a Heavenly Mother. I think its a unique revisioning of the placeholder. There is a huge swatch of humanity that feels displaced because they feel the aren’t reflected in the divine, and having a Heavenly Mother allows them to feel like they have a place.
However, I think it needs to be expounded upon. Heavenly mother is rarely mentioned in traditional Mormonism. She is often viewed as someone you’re not to have contact with or only under the condition of her husband’s/you father’s consent. That’s straight up abusive, and not something that I feel we really want to reflect in this placeholder.
There is a simple and elegant solution that I like to employ: Heavenly Mother is the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost is a being that is seen as giving comfort in times of need and loves to teach us. These are things that mothers do for their children. This retooling allows for Heavenly Mother to take on a huge role, and changes very little.
2 Morality
The God of the Old Testament is pretty fucking terrible. Rape, genocide, slavery, and murder are all condoned. People shutter when they read about some of the stuff in there. When we examine these things from the viewpoint that it is a reflection of the divine from a people in a certain time, we see that this reflection is woefully out of date.
This gives us 2 options: Get rid of them are retool them. I am in favor of the latter.
Last year I studied Gnosticism, and found that there is even an ancient precedent for not caring for the god of the Old Testament. The Gnostics retooled the Old Testament to make it more palatable. The story is a bit different from sect to sect, but let me give you a basic understanding:
God is split into many different parts. Each part had a companion. Each part needed the consent of their partner to act. God was in perfect unity. However, one of the parts, named Sophia, created without the consent of her partner and the rest of God. What she created was the “Demiurge”. A horrific and evil creation. She tried to kill it, but was unable to do so, so instead she hid it from the rest of God. The Demiurge was left alone, not knowing who created it. It thought that it alone was the most powerful thing and there was nothing before him. He was endowed with some of the powers of God, and so created the material world. Eventually the Demiurge couldn’t be hid and God confronted Sophia, and Sophia confessed. God apologized and they tried to re-integrate the Demiurge so that the Demiurge wouldn’t wreck havoc. They attacked the Demiurge, but he was able to repel the attack with a firmament. The attack reflected on the firmament in the shape of the human body. The Demiurge was awestruck and thought that it was essentially a weapon of mass destruction, and sought to create one for himself. He created humanity. In doing so, he used up nearly all of his Godly powers. Humanity ended up being more compassionate, and was seen by God as a part of itself. The Demiurge hated that humanity had become so powerful and wasn’t subservient to him, and so tried to keep humanity in line through fear and death. In the Gnostic version of Noah, humanity was actually very righteous, and the Demiurge tried to wipe humanity out so it could reclaim humanity’s power for itself, but Sophia warned Noah. Jesus eventually cam to Earth. Jesus was the companion part of Sophia.
Its all a little complicated, but interesting to see how the stories have been tweaked by other Abrahamic descended lines of thought.
So, what does this have to do with a Mormon context? I like the idea that much of the Old Testament was a vengeful and bitter Satan, who just lost the War In Heaven, masquerading around as the source of divinity. Mormonism has a precedent for believing that “Some revelations are of God: some revelations are of men: and some revelations are of the devil.”
Why not tweak the traditional stories? Have the immoral parts of the Bible simply be a continuation of The War In Heaven, just on a new battlefield and with new tactics.
Its been interesting and rewarding for me to think of these stories as nothing other than a placeholder, a story, or a mask of the divine that reflects whats is important to us.
What do you think?