- This topic is empty.
-
Posts
-
OK, I’m going to excerpt more of the statement and try to show more clearly what the paragraph I quoted says. This probably will be quite long, but I think it’s important. I’m going to do some of my commenting by using bracketed words within the actual text and by additional commentary along the way: Quote:Adam, our first progenitor, “the first man,” was, like Christ, a preexistent spirit, and like Christ he took upon him an appropriate body, the body of a man, and so became a “living soul.”
This sets the stage, placing “Adam” as a unique combination of mortal body and immortal spirit – the first “human” or living “soul”. Iow, he became this “soul” by gaining an “appropriate” body – “the body of a man” – by becoming “human”.
Quote:The doctrine of the preexistence—revealed so plainly, particularly in latter days—pours a wonderful flood of light upon the otherwise mysterious problem of man’s origin.
This is because it positions “man” as an evolutionary continuation of immortal existence, as mentioned at the end of the statement, quoted at the end of this comment.
Quote:It shows that man, as a spirit, was begotten and born of heavenly parents and reared to maturity in the eternal mansions of the Father, prior to coming upon the earth in a temporal body to undergo an experience in mortality. It teaches that all men existed in the spirit before any man existed in the flesh and that all who have inhabited the earth since Adam have taken bodies and become souls in like manner.
“In like manner” is an interesting choice of words, especially when applied to “all who have inhabited the earth since Adam”.
Quote:It is held by some that Adam was not the first man upon this earth and that the original human being was [nothing more than] a development from lower orders of the animal creation. These, however, are the theories of men.
This is in context of the entire statement that emphasizes over and over again that humans have spirits that are different than the animals. I added the bracketed phrase in order to shortcut – since I didn’t want to have to excerpt all of the other references that make that point.
Quote:The word of the Lord declared that Adam was “the first man of all men” (Moses 1:34), and we are therefore in duty bound to regard him as the primal parent of our race.
Note the use of “race” to mean nothing more than “species” – which bolsters Brian’s point about “race” being a cultural construct.
Quote:It was shown to the brother of Jared that all men were created in the beginning after the image of God;
whether we take this to mean the spirit or the body, or both, it commits us to the same conclusion: Man began life as a human being, in the likeness of our Heavenly Father. This fascinates me, since it says it doesn’t really matter if our being created in the image of God is a literal description of our mortal bodies, or if it refers only to our spiritual creation or if it refers to both. Try that one on for size with most members and see how they react. Actually, I would advise against that, since it probably won’t be pretty – but it’s what the statement says. Let me say it differently:
It doesn’t really matter what God’s “body” looks like compared to our mortal bodies. We could have been created “in the image of God” no matter how our mortal bodies compare to his immortal body, since, regardless of that detail, “it commits us to the same conclusion”.
Quote:True it is that the body of man enters upon its career as a tiny germ embryo, which becomes an infant, quickened at a certain stage by the spirit whose tabernacle it is, and the child, after being born, develops into a man.
This posits that “the body of a man” starts as a “tiny germ embryo”. A “germ embryo” simply means “an embryo that can develop and grow”. That embryo becomes an infant and, “at a certain [unrevealed] stage” is “quickened” by “the spirit”. That combined “soul” (whether joined before or after birth, in the case of Adam) then becomes a “[hu]man”.
Quote:There is nothing in this, however, to indicate that the original man, the first of our race, began life as anything less than a man, or less than the human germ or embryo that becomes a man.
Iow, in positing Adam as having been the first “man” (the first “soul” – the first combination of mortal body and immortal, spirit child of God), nothing is said that limits the creation of his mortal body to an extra-scientific process – that says Adam’s physical body couldn’t have been conceived as an embryo by “mortal” parents who weren’t “human” themselves, with his immortal spirit inserted into that evolutionarily created “shell” (my own word) – again, even if that “shell” doesn’t match God’s immortal body in exact form.
The final paragraph of the statement (after the multiple paragraphs I skipped for this comment) goes back to the paragraphs I dissected above. It says:
Quote:Man is the child of God, formed in the divine image and endowed with divine attributes, and even as the infant son of an earthly father and mother is capable in due time of becoming a man, so the undeveloped offspring of celestial parentage is capable, by experience through ages and aeons, of evolving into a God.
This takes the growth process of mortality and compares it directly to the growth process after mortality – and frames it explicitly in terms of “evolving”. Interestingly, it implies, as the final paragraph of the statement, that Adam might have “become” a man – and that, in that same light, we can “become” gods. Iow, according to the totality of the statement, “Adam” might have been conceived by non-human parents, had his pre-mortal spirit inserted into his mortal body either before or after birth (after would fit the visual representations we use, but I’m not going to make a real guess), eventually changed by that unique combination (“evolved”) into a “human” and, at that point as a fully “human being”, begun to create the “human race” as an independent, new species – one that was self-aware, could read and write and communicate in complex forms, envision God, self-select, etc. – and, eventually, begin to understand evolution itself and all its implications.
Finally, “Adam” means “man” and “Eve” means “mother” – so, as the temple depicts, what is said of Adam and Eve can be said of all of their descendants. Thus, the possibility is left open explicitly that we are the physical descendants of a pre-human species which was transformed into the human species by the insertion of God’s spirit children – and that “The Fall” (at least in part) was the natural result of spirits being subject to the genetic “animal tendencies” of their mortal bodies.
There’s a lot more I could say about various implications, but they aren’t all that important in the grand scheme of things right now. The core point is that “pure Mormonism” isn’t automatically at odds with science with regard to evolution – and that the official statement of the Church is much more nuanced and carefully worded than most members realize.
I don’t fault the Church at all for not publicizing this ambiguity more openly, since, as the 1909 FP said, in their minds, no matter the details of the physical creation of our mortal bodies, our scriptures and theology “commit us to the same conclusion” – that Adam and Eve were our first parents. I don’t talk about this very much, frankly, and certainly not publicly – since it is way to emotional a topic and far too easily misunderstood. I’m cool with that – but I do raise my hand every now and then, so to speak, when someone says the LDS Church says evolution is wrong. It doesn’t; it just says that “Godless evolution” is wrong.
That’s an important difference.
and, fwiw, that’s not how I would answer the question from most 13-year-olds — and I don’t blame anyone who reads this if you think I’m nuts or just don’t want to consider this possibility. It’s not something I try to explain to my wife, because, everything else aside, I do want her to think I’m sane. 😆 😆 😆 Clear as MUD to me. Literally.
I sometimes forget that our church is ran by a bunch of lawyers —-
Literally,
and I’m not being cynical when I say that.
🙂 After getting over the initial shock that some believe this question isn’t really a religous one (and realizing that religion DOES have its own posits on this one), and reading everything here, I think I’m satisfied with the answer I gave my daughter originally, and its follow-up. She decided to put it on the shelf as NONE of the answers given satisfied her, not even the evolutionary one, simply explained. When she encounters the harder religion-sourced reasons, she will remember “Dad said he didn’t think any of the Church reasons were necessarily satisfactory…so I must keep searching or put it on the shelf for now”. At least I didn’t perpetuate any questionable ideas about race — which I greedily assimilated when I was a 20 year old and have since reversed.
I also think it’s healthy to realize that not all Church answers are good answers to questions, that there are gaps, provided the “hearer” is capable of it. My daughter is 13 going on 133, and I expect more questions like these now that she has matured. What a pickle these faith/commitment issues provide!!
Old-Timer wrote:I don’t blame anyone who reads this if you think I’m nuts or just don’t want to consider this possibility.
Thanks for explaining it to me (for the third time).
🙂 You readily admit that this is not the only interpretation of the text and I have doubts that this was the original intent, but I do grant you that this is a valid and spirited perspective. For my part, I think the tent of Mormonism just got a little bigger to make room for believers in some forms of evolution. I plan to join you in gently reminding people that the LDS creation story is not mutually exclusive with evolution.:clap: SilentDawning wrote:How would you answer the questions to a 13 year old:
Quote:Why are there people of different races??”.
And the follow-up:
Quote:Why are people so negative about certain races??
The greatest commandment given to us is to love God and to love others as ourselves.
As we love others, we love God. This is more important for us to learn than anything else.
Think about your friends at school… they are your friends because they have something in common with you, right?
It’s easy to love people who are like us, or who are familiar to us in some way. Those who look, talk or act differently can challenge us and give us extra love muscles… which are the most important muscles to have!
🙂 Some people are so happy and positive about different races, that they will adopt children of all kinds of different races into their own family – & love them no matter what!
Some people struggle when they are only exposed to bad images or teachings of a certain race. For example, if all of the Middle Easterners they ever saw were criminals on the news, when they see one in real life, they may have some prejudice. Or, when Jesus is potrayed as a white guy, (despite the commandments to not have graven images & to not have other gods before God)… along with racially prejudice scriptures… some may equate light skin color to righteousness, when that is false.
In reality, Jesus, or a typical Jewish-Israeli man during the time of Jesus is considered by forensic archealogists to look more like this:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/forensics/1282186 Just wondering, if God made us in his image, what race is he? White anglo-saxon seems to be the predominant thought based on works of art, but white anglo-saxon is a minority on this planet. Would God make the majority of humans be a different race from him? I’ve often thought that as we advance and become a global society, eventually all the races will interbreed until we are all just a big light-brown mix of everything.
The basic answer is that in the early part of our history, humans were few in number and after spreading across the Earth, they were isolated from one another, and mutations in their genes were kept within small tribes. As recently as two hundred years ago, most people in the world married within their home district. As a general rule, some of the people in colder climates grew short and those in hotter countries became taller – this is all to do with body temperature.
There are other less obvious adaptations – white skin helps create vitamin D, essential in high latitudes; frizzy hair is good for disapating heat; Polynesians tend to fatness, because they have genes to survive long sea voyages etc etc
Quote:Why are people so negative about certain races??
Because they are perceived to be connected with crime, poverty or low levels of civilisation or culture. Or to be less intelligent.
And humans hate that what is different. That’s a universal prejudice.
Featherina wrote:In reality, Jesus, or a typical Jewish-Israeli man during the time of Jesus is considered by forensic archeologists to look more like this:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science … cs/1282186After viewing this rendition and pondering what the impact might be of copy and pasting this anthropologically correct Jesus over all the Christ images in my home, I have come to the following conclusion:
Joshua 24:15
But if serving the [anthropologically correct Christ] seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the [
culturally accepted form of Jesus].” 
Roy wrote:Featherina wrote:In reality, Jesus, or a typical Jewish-Israeli man during the time of Jesus is considered by forensic archeologists to look more like this:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/forensics/1282186 After viewing this rendition and pondering what the impact might be of copy and pasting this anthropologically correct Jesus over all the Christ images in my home, I have come to the following conclusion:
Joshua 24:15
But if serving the [anthropologically correct Christ] seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the [
culturally accepted form of Jesus].”
🙂 I know what you mean.Still, I think this is one of the reasons for the commandment to not make graven images.
Besides, that the kingdom of God is within, not external (Luke 17:21). Also it goes along with the commandment to not have other gods before God (who is LOVE). If we do, then we prioritize one race over the highest commandment to love all.
I don’t think the Israelis are a good example. Most of them have a good deal of European ancestry in them, and have only arrived back in Israel/Palestine within the last few decades, so they don’t look completely like people in the region. Ironically, Palestinians probably look more like Jesus than Ashkenazi do. A lot of Palestinians are descended from Jews who converted.
Don’t tell the religious right this, they’ll get upset though.
SamBee wrote:I don’t think the Israelis are a good example. Most of them have a good deal of European ancestry in them, and have only arrived back in Israel/Palestine within the last few decades, so they don’t look completely like people in the region.
Ironically, Palestinians probably look more like Jesus than Ashkenazi do. A lot of Palestinians are descended from Jews who converted.
Don’t tell the religious right this, they’ll get upset though.
😆 I think you’re right, SamBee.
We’ve had this discussion (of what Jesus really looked like) in church.
I’m always amazed how people will justify white pictures of Jesus by pointing to some Jews today…
That’s like saying, all of us in the US look exactly like the Native Americans did hundreds of years ago.
Well, I suppose to be fair, there are certain Americans who look like Indians, but have no native American ancestry at all. It’s a bit like the question of whether the Ancient Egyptians were black or white (see various internet discussions ad nauseam). The simple answer is that like North Africans today, they were both and a mixture of the two.
I don’t agree with the “one drop” theory.
The one drop theory was a stupid extrapolation of a flawed policy and one of the prime examples of what Elder McConkie said we need to forget. Period.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.