What does it mean to be "good"?

I don’t know, honestly, if there is a universal answer for every person. In general, however, I would say that to be “good” requires that someone attempt to be as much like Jesus (whether or not they know of or care about him) as they can be.

In other words, I am totally fine with people being as good as they can be – and with the wide range that covers.

I think this is only really a problem when those with a TR think that they are set or that they are better off than those without a TR or non-members. For me this truly comes to a head regarding excommunication. For individuals that were excommunicated but later had those excommunications overturned due to changes in the political climate etc. – What was the status of their spirit during the time that they were excommunicated? Is it really reasonable to believe that our loving Father God would let John D. Lee sit in some sort of spiritual prison cell for roughly 100 years until we here on earth finally became comfortable with responsibility for MMM not resting on any one man?

Dovetailing with the “flawed poineers” thread – are our ancesters any more “good” because they died in the good graces of the church?

So in this context I would say that to be “good” is to be authentically ourselves to the best of our ability…at least that is the definition that I am going with.

What is the point of willing participation and attendance in the meetings, programs and social activities of the LDS Church if a dwelling in the Celestial Kingdom in the Eternal Presence of Our Father and Our Mother is not our ultimate aim?

So much of what is preached and publicized in the Church today consists of encouraging and sustaining a notion that we celebrate our membership by being anxiously engaged in the organizational busy-ness of performance-driven behavior.

Why would anyone invest all that emotional, physical and spiritual energy if not seeking and believing in the ultimate LDS Gold Medal symbol of victorious mortality?

If we move only a step or two away from the narrow vision we are given through that spiritual keyhole formal correlated dogma offers believers, might we then be able to ask ourselves if there is any other reason for being religious; for seeking positive personal piety and for desiring some sort of epiphany that gives a sense of belonging to and being loved by Heavenly Parents?

Why incorporate religious practice into one’s life at all if it is possible to figure out a way to be strongly compassionate and ethical in the way one lives without a crutch of organizationed religion?

The Golden Rule with it’s implied reciprocity of kind and sensitive interaction among human beings does not have the Bible or a specific religion as its source. Why would it not make sense to simplify one’s mode of being by merely relating to everyone else as you would like them to relate to you?

Why keep on showing up, singing the songs in community, bowing the heads in community prayer, sharing and bearing thoughts and testimonies in the communal manner? Is it not because such is the habitual way Mormons – particularly those Mormons with many years in harness – see themselves; religious children of a Creator who has actually revealed His existence and connection to humanity?

Do most Mormons know any other way to “be” a Christian believer than being Christian by striving to “be” a Christian Mormon in the “True-Church-iness” mindset of performance and worthiness?

Does the all-or-nothing way of being a Christian Mormon leave any room for something less than anxious engagement in earning promised rewards …

… because there is a law irrevocably decreed that confirms to Mormons that Heaven is a reward for a lifetime of planting and then harvesting crops of religious merit based on performance?

Why could we not learn to be Mormons who are content with trying to be honest, true, chaste, benevolent, giving, honorable and all those things that don’t require attendance, witnesses, the name of Jesus Christ and “by-the-power of the priesthood?”

As I stated previously, when we participated with members of our Episcopal Parish we were not even one time exposed to sermonizing, preaching, teaching or exhortation on how to be good Episcopals;

On how to satisfy and please God based on our performance as faithful Episcopals:

On how glorious the Episcopal faith is because no other creed has the total truth of Episcopalianism …

None of that

… just things like the Sermon on the Mount, personal struggles with moral dilemmas, forgiveness, faith, hope and charity with no eye single to any particular glory.

That is the way I plan to not be a Christian Mormon but rather, a Mormon Christian.

That is why I will take my wife to Church for as long as we both desire the give and take of communal and community participation with mutual regard and affection.

That is why in my own way, I have insisted to our leaders and to my pioneer-heritage family that I do want to participate with my spiritual brothers and sisters, but with no eye single to helping them and being helped by them to pass by after-life sentinels on some uniquely monopolized truth path that will leave me above and beyond all those who chose not to be faithful.

Performance-driven religion is a score-keeping religion. Like tournament golfers, I suppose, individuals are encouraged to carry around mental personal scorecardds and make entries of their performance strokes and go to clubhouse meetings where on-going tournament results reflect the good strokes and bad strokes and where songs and lyrics are sung to the one true way to swing a golf club.

Mormons can be as performance-driven as the correlated Church exhorts them to be, but they do not have to do that if they don’t want to

… so long as they understand – or learn to understand – that literalness in belief is but one way … but not the One and Only True Way of being.

There is a caveat that comes with literalness in belief; a caveat perhaps that most non-critical-thinking believers have a hard time realizing. Whether based on critically studied and well-thought-out concepts or based on blind trust, believers to an astonishing degree live a religious life by pretending and then acting as if the myth and accompanying theology were true.

Having internalized – in many cases for decades going back to birth – it is precisely that pretension and activity that is part of an uncritical, almost mindless religiosity that rarely extends to other venues of 21st century living. In fact, other venues in which believers culturally and socially participate (think “Let’s go shopping!” “Who’s going to win?” “I’m going to vote for -.”) provide the basis for moralizing preaching and teaching week by week in LDS chapels.

Morality is not theology because it consists, as Alan Watts wrote, “of telling people how to behave.”

Focusing on morality – telling people how to behave – does not impact public or private thinking except as it relates to control of behavior and an inculcation of a belief in a merit-based gospel of performance. So long as the emphasis is on morality the emphasis is on control.

Preaching morality rather than the virtues of goodness – particularly the common good we all ought to be seeking – gives us mostly sermons and exhortations limited to issues that are defined entirely by judgmental thinking.

Judgmental thinking in a religious or spiritual context drags the positive and negative aspects of human behavior into moral areas where actions are governed out of a concern for reward or punishment and validation by our communal religious crowd.

Judgmental thinking has at its core the idea of worthiness based on reward and punishment. Reward-or-punishment teachings are tools of fear, shame and guilt and if ever used successfully, always result in the right things being done for the wrong reasons.

In our Church often do we not feel like one must lean toward if not actually feel one’s self as being righteously inclined, but unworthy? Do we not feel like were need the external hand up offered by the Church’s social participation program as a means of personal on-going atonement for our human frailty?

Does not such a felt need make it exceedingly difficult to attend and participate in a literal-minded mindset without feeling inadequate, guilty and to a degree unworthy of the perfection modeled by Heavenly Father, His Kept-Hidden Heavenly Wife and their totally perfect Son?

I might try to remind everyone I encounter in my non-Celestial-minded church participation that none of the doctrine, theology, performance-based judgmental standards are real or based on anything spiritual except the unsubstantiated testimonies of others.

However, in a culture that seems to insist that if a single soul testifies in public, a rigid and inflexible truth has been declared, a truth by which all those who hear the testimony will be judged, my reminder tends to be ignored out of ignorance, fear of apostasy or literal-minded convictions whose roots run deep within a psyche.

I believe that I share my own spiritual with emancipated and thinking cultural Mormons – and that includes the venerables and the not-so-venerable who have stopped the literal-thinking for the most part. Our self-conscious and suppressed pain and anger in meetings is among other things based on a fear, shame or guilt at being wrong, on offending a myriad of friends, family and acquaintances who might then be disappointed or condemning of our broken hearts.

It is that struggle that is much more important for our well being than worrying about the falsehood connected to that which we are exhorted to mindlessly conform.

But I am not going anywhere. As Bishop Wooley told Brigham Young, “If it were your church I might [leave it] but it is my church as much as it is yours.”

I am a cultural and heritage-based Mormon. I am also an heir to the religious-minded psyche that was nurtured out of my childhood and that served and informed a spiritual-mindedness that accompanied me out of the protected valleys of Rocky Mountain religion.

It seems that my Mormon way of seeing things – which is not a correlated Utah Church-based Mormonism – is part of my spiritual psyche. Even though none of the fantasy theology and cosmology is true for me, it is not that theology and cosmology that draws out my spiritual hunger and prompts me to go be with my own beloved kind of people.

I won’t share my secret rejection of the Celestial Kingdom notion with most of my beloved fellow Saints. That of course would not be appropriate as I have even less a mandate to proselyte or evangelize regarding error without being able to replace error with a worthwhile truth.

This is an almost irrevocable truth in life. If a way of being is working satisfactorily for a human being who has a conviction basis to that way, it is not ethical for me to say

“Although I cannot replace what you believe with the right stuff, what you are believing and doing is not only false, but wrong for you.”

To do so makes me as guilty of mindless and judgmental criticism as are those friends and loved ones who frustrate me most.

Christian Mormonism may be the natal language of my nurturing but I now through experience have learned to speak Mormon Christian … and there is a marked difference.

Mormon Christian is my language of spirit.

It is the language best suited for me even thought that suit must exclude a costume of conformity that I cannot wear.

First I want to say that I really enjoyed your post and your way of writing. Though I have time to respond to only the tiniest part.

Why incorporate religious practice into one’s life at all if it is possible to figure out a way to be strongly compassionate and ethical in the way one lives without a crutch of organizationed religion?

The most recent edition of the Ensign referred to the Church as scaffolding for life building. I like the metaphor choice for multiple reasons: 1) Scaffolding provides structure, boundaries, and security. 2) Scaffolding is developmentally appropriate at various stages of construction also for various personalities, stages, and life experience paradigms. 3) Scaffolding is designed to eventually be removed without the collapse of the building…

Along with all the symbolism I love, I absolutely love the idea of literally being gods, children of the Most High God in some way, heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ – even if the way I see it literally is not the way most people see it literally. That “end result” is absent in the rest of Christianity, and it is the core of what I love so much about Mormon theology – again, even as I believe we complicate it in practical terms way too much.

Traditional Christianity is framed in man’s inadequacy – that man has nothing in and of himself that can be good or merit special notice from God. Richard Bushman talked about how Mormons believe in the fundamental worth, goodness, and value of humans (divine spark, Gods in embryo, etc.). I (through my own spiritual lens and journey) have landed somewhere in the middle. I am inadequate in so many ways, yet amidst my inadequacy is also unique value of great worth. I am adequate to fulfill the measure of MY creation. In that way I am uniquely adequate in a way that nobody else can substitute. This is not to say that our creator is indifferent to our actions. I believe that he cares very keenly for how our actions might affect ourselves and others – but the focus is on us and our relationship to God and each other – not on the actions themselves. In this concept, I am also indebted to the Mormon concept of the weeping God.

So I am able to see these different approaches as 2 sides of the same coin of human expression, human yearning towards the divine. They are both simultaneously true in the degree that they stir the heart and mind to soar. They are also both limited in many ways – limited but worthy and beautiful- just like me!

Performance-driven religion is a score-keeping religion. …

Mormons can be as performance-driven as the correlated Church exhorts them to be, but they do not have to do that if they don’t want to … so long as they understand – or learn to understand – that literalness in belief is but one way … but not the One and Only True Way of being.

There is a caveat that comes with literalness in belief; a caveat perhaps that most non-critical-thinking believers have a hard time realizing. Whether based on critically studied and well-thought-out concepts or based on blind trust, believers to an astonishing degree live a religious life by pretending and then acting as if the myth and accompanying theology were true.

…

I might try to remind everyone I encounter in my non-Celestial-minded church participation that none of the doctrine, theology, performance-based judgmental standards are real or based on anything spiritual except the unsubstantiated testimonies of others.

However, in a culture that seems to insist that if a single soul testifies in public, a rigid and inflexible truth has been declared, a truth by which all those who hear the testimony will be judged, my reminder tends to be ignored out of ignorance, fear of apostasy or literal-minded convictions whose roots run deep within a psyche.

I believe that I share my own spiritual with emancipated and thinking cultural Mormons – and that includes the venerables and the not-so-venerable who have stopped the literal-thinking for the most part. Our self-conscious and suppressed pain and anger in meetings is among other things based on a fear, shame or guilt at being wrong, on offending a myriad of friends, family and acquaintances who might then be disappointed or condemning of our broken hearts.

This is really great writing, and absolutely reflects my point of view as well. I told my daughter some time back that it is best to consider that none of what the LDS church teaches should be taken literally. This simple statement caused quite a rift in the family, and I’m not sure we’ve all recovered.

I don’t agree that our pain and anger has anything to do with fear, shame, or guilt at being wrong — I don’t think the enlightened, critically thinking mind is the wrong state at all — if nothing else, we acknowledge our wrongness, and therefore are not as likely to be wrong. Instead, I think we see the complete non-viability of sharing our insight with our myriad of friends, family, and acquaintances who rely upon the literalness as a crutch.

You state a difference between being a “Mormon Christian” and a “Christian Mormon”. I’m not sure I see the distinction. Sure, I know what you say, but being “Christian” also means adopting a set of untenable literal beliefs as well. The fundamentals of Christianity are as absurd to me as the 14 fundamentals of mormon prophetic infallibility. Yes, there are positives to the Christian message in terms of charity and love, but there are also positives in the Mormon message in terms of open canon and truth-seeking (albeit routinely ignored today).

Since you invoke Alan Watts, then may I invoke one of his favorite texts, the Lao Tzu? To say, “The name (Label, identity) we can name is by no means the constant name” in chapter one describes a lack of fidelity to the unchangeable reality in declaring any given identifying attribute (a name). Adi Shankara (the teacher of Advaita Vedanta) and his greatest 20th century sannyasin Ramana Marharshi taught the quest of identity: that the eternal question is “Who am I”, and a meditative praxis on this seeks to eschew labels and false identities entirely. Not that ShankaraCharya or the Bhagawan (Ramana) were ideal — they, too, preached that theirs was the “one true path,” at least to some extent. But there is something to set aside the labels “Christian” or “Mormon” as identifying attributes.

I appreciate both responses (wayfarer and SamBee) and your perspectives.

I’m not fully conscious … I suspect … of the particulars of my personal spiritual ax that I’ve been grinding on for years and how that attitude helped my escape velocity when my request for membership termination was granted and now after having been rebaptized for a year and a half, my ax remains in place but feels somehow different in my willingness to “lighten up.”

Along with issues about literal-minded religiousness I also feel that there is a less-than-mature level when that religiousness is focused almost entirely on obedience as the ultimate virtue.

Would “growth and maturity” be the right or wrong by-products of christian development?

With acceptance of a God who is Master and Commander and for whom obedience is the highest from of mortal behavior to which God responds and gives recognition. In that regard perhaps security and justification are those most sought after. Anything else is cosmetic and an attempt to lower the common denominator to a less-than-mature level focused almost entirely on obedience as the ultimate virtue.

Ask many literalist-informed Christians to define their belief system. More than likely you’ll get some sort of descriptive formula that describes a supposed plan that was figured out from scripture. You might also hear that God has revealed such a plan to man for his eternal salvation … and that conformity to that plan is the hinge that connects eternal happiness in God to man’s highest aspirations.

Ask a mystical Christian to define his religion and most easily the answer will be that the kingdom of God is within you, “the Father and I are one, … and so are you.”

Like trying to grasp and hold onto pudding, formula-based religious Christians do not seem to understand the impossibility of possessing God. For such believers, possessing God is not distinguished from any sense of God as the source of how we experience the mystery of life. Through the mechanics of living by creeds, religious Christians are focused on fixed forms of thought rather than any state of mind. For these humans God is a concept made real only by somehow grasping God; or believing imaginatively that you can and are grasping a connection to God as a function of something called “faith.”

As Watts wrote,

…man is frightened of this living, ungraspable mystery, and is always trying to have it securely boxed up in some philosophical, ethical, theological, or psychological formula, where its vitality is destroyed …

In trying to hold God in one fixed form, we exclude him from all others, and, so far as our apprehension of him is concerned, “devitalize” him in the one that we hold. We lose his immanence because we try to grasp and draw down his transcendence.

To both greater and lesser degrees, do not formula-based Christians tend to form and commit themselves to performance-based theologies and does not such thinking then become the basis of congregations founded as a means of establishing communities in which conformity is equated to spirituality?