It's reminiscent of what parents say when their child discovers that the department store Santa is wearing a fake beard: "Don't worry, honey--it's not the real Santa; it's one of his helpers!" Seriously, though: what a slap in the face to these believers! They merely encountered "fake" Jesus? And the new material that Tom quoted is priceless:'Gadianton wrote: ↑Sun May 28, 2023 7:53 pm
It's quite revealing about his psychology, though. I mean, we can't just have everybody meeting Jesus. People need to learn something about Mormon organizational bureaucracy before sharing their visions. Even Joseph Smith originally claimed only to have seen an angel and not God himself. People need to understand that they just aren't that important. If you have a perplexing gospel question, you can write to the Brethren but expect an answer back from the secretary of a secretary directing you to your bishop. And if you die, expect to be met by a low-ranking regional authority from the Spirit World. Believe it or not, the Church leaders actually endorse the Proprietor's vision of eternity as I've heard things similar straight from Henry Eyring not very long ago.
LOL! So that's the ticket, eh? He *has to say* "I'm Jesus" in order for this to be legitimate? Or the "Jesus Figure" only identifies himself if he's speaking to, e.g., a General Authority?DCP's edit wrote:There are vanishingly few cases in which the personage identifies himself as Jesus. (There may well be some but, off hand, I can’t think of any.)
There is literally nothing--nothing--in the way that DCP depicts the afterlife that is in any way appealing. In fact, it's the opposite--it's repellent. Who wants to give up 10% of their income for life, along with a host of other things, and basically be a public laughingstock for life in exchange for some barren, completely boring bureaucracy? The late novelist David Foster Wallace famously set a challenge for himself to write a great book about boredom, and the novel that resulted was the posthumously published The Pale King. That book is about people trying to *transcend* the crushing boredom imposed by the IRS bureaucracy, though: it's not about scoring Mopologetic brownie points in the hopes of making it there.
If you can get access to whatever these folks are seeing in their NDEs without following Church teachings, then why bother? What is the bonus that you get? We've explored this question before and the answer is really quite morally repugnant: it's that you get to sit atop a new hierarchy, where all the people who didn't listen get consigned to the role of "servant." That is one of the disquieting truths at the core of LDS theology, and it seems clear that the Mopologists have fully embraced this idea--hence DCP's fawning over Added Upon. How sick--how morally bankrupt do you have to be to hope that you can go to an afterlife where you'll get to lord over all the people who didn't subscribe to your specific faith practices? Further, how messed up do you have to be to not only *want* that, but then to go off attacking and smearing other people in order to *ensure* that you get it? That's how deranged Mopologetics is.