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Actually I think of this more as connected up with our no tattoos and few piercings policy. I wanted to kick this discussion up again after the topic I posted on cremation. The two are so similar. I was especially touched by amateurparent. amateurparent wrote:When our oldest daughter died, there were members who were shocked that we chose to bury her in her favorite dress and hat. Her outfit was not white. Apparently, white is the cultural norm .. But the outfit we chose was the norm for our daughter… And we had a patriarch’s wife tell us that our daughter wasn’t being healed because we didn’t have anyone with the right kind of faith to pray over her. That the right person could DEMAND healing from God. She had her husband show up in ICU to give our daughter a “more correct and righteous” blessing. Our daughter still died, and years later, I am still insulted that she thought our prayers were not worthy enough. To have someone state that they doubted my worthiness before God because my daughter wasn’t healed was so offensive. There aren’t even words to describe the depth of that offense.
I am amazed sometimes how insensitive we can be. I can’t imagine thinking this comment & action would be appropriate in any way.
Maybe because we are members of the same church, we feel we are entitled to say anything. Or, maybe it is mental or emotional illness.
AP, I give you a lot of credit. You showed more Christ like love & compassion than this Sister ever did.
I can’t imagine her position of: “The right person could DEMAND healing from God.”
My blood pressure is rising as I write this.
nibbler wrote:I always assumed that the suggestion not to cremate unless it was a “last resort” existed because it is harder for god to resurrect someone if they had been cremated.
A few people have had at least a portion of their ashes scattered in space. Do we really believe that He’s going to be sitting around like a kid with a jigsaw puzzle missing a piece when He gets to those?
Maybe it inconveniences the angels who must effect the resurrection. Operational efficiency is very important in some cultures. After all, all things are temporal, right? And not even the church is exempt from temporal concerns… 
I’m reading this thread and laughing about burial .. (Not my proudest moment). Im sure you all remember that in Europe, graveyards got crowded, so after a certain number of years, bodies were dug up, bones got put into a stack, and the cemetery plot got reused multiple times. Think of the mix of DNA in those plots!
I love the fact that the LDS church encourages blood donation, and has a neutral/positive stance on organ donation. It is the JWs refuse such things. They see giving or receiving of blood or organs as giving up part of one’s soul.
It is so interesting to me that the LDS culture shakes its head at those who bury wealth and fabulous clothing with their dead, but then turns around and treats temple clothes as an important item to be buried with. I see temple garments as entirely symbolic, yet many members do see them as something you are going to need immediately in the afterworld. Personally, I think a buried fiberglass kayak would last better than buried temple clothes, and be way more fun as a newly resurrected being.
LDS religious doctrine is along the lines of, “We were made from dust, and we return to dust and we will be resurrected from dust.” .. But then they add the importance of temple clothes. Those two don’t match up. I would love to know when the tradition of burial in temple clothes became the norm.
I do not want to be buried in temple clothes. The head gear never looked great on me. Maybe a baseball cap would be better ..
I’m going to ask God to add a little glitter to my dust pile .. Kind of a post-mortal bedazzling .. I can shine just a little brighter ..
amateurparent wrote:I’m going to ask God to add a little glitter to my dust pile .. Kind of a post-mortal bedazzling .. I can shine just a little brighter ..
You could go the life gem route.
Quote:I will add, however, that this is why I am puzzled by the inclusion of counsel in the CHI not to use cremation upon death if not mandated by law. I absolutely see that as a cultural bias that has absolutely no relevance to our doctrine or the Gospel.
As I understand it, if it is done as a decision of the deceased, then it is more of a problem than involuntary cremation.
I think it also goes back to the fact that fire was used as a horrific form of human sacrifice in the Old Testament.
[img]http://bible-truths.com/lake170.jpg [/img] 
[img]http://bible-truths.com/lake172.jpg [/img] Nah .. Nothing so deep and thoughtful as OT stuff. I truly think it is because during the time it was added to the CHI, cremation was not culturally “normal”.
Tattoos are discouraged — unless they are tattoos that are part of a cultural norm. In Papua New Guinea, tattooing is fine. Not in the US.
amateurparent wrote:I truly think it is because during the time it was added to the CHI, cremation was not culturally “normal”.
Tattoos are discouraged — unless they are tattoos that are part of a cultural norm. In Papua New Guinea, tattooing is fine. Not in the US.
I’m with amateurparent with this line of thinking. It’s just not what was known, liked, or accepted at a time when information was being disseminated like mice make babies. In an era where people gobbled up authority figures’ words like Americans culturally gobble up turkeys every Thanksgiving. Ok, ok. Enough analogies.
I personally have a couple of tattoos. And I love them. The main thing I had to get over was my cultural upbringing. I realized that I really like tattoos, but that I was told that they were defiling to a person’s body. Not to me. They have so much meaning, purposefully, that they’re as much a part of me as my personality.
Someone else mentioned that we are all made up of used bits and pieces of other people, and that’s what gets me hung up on this subject. I’m not sure there’s literally enough earthly particles to recreate every single human who has ever lived. I mean, maybe. There’s more weight in insects than people. But still. I love the concept of continuation, but I just don’t get how a resurrection is supposed to literally happen for how many people have existed. This is where variations of reincarnation come in for me.
DancingCarrot, I have see some LDS authorities who seem to talk about reincarnation without actually the term. They talk all the way around it but avoid that particular word. If I can find a quote, I post it. Some of the more recent comments have me questioning why it’s so vitally important that we resurrect. When faced with the fear of death I think the main concern is whether or not we retain our consciousness. In LDS doctrine we have the concept of our spirit that retains consciousness, why do we then have the need to return to a body? Stream of consciousness time:
I’ve been through some painful physical ailments, I don’t want any of that back. The answer, our resurrected bodies are perfect, you won’t have those pains. Well I wouldn’t have those pains as a spirit either.
If I remained as a spirit I wouldn’t have the joys of having a body. What of the concept that we can only experience pleasure as a direct result of being acquainted with pain? If you remove pain from the equation would an eternity of time stretching before us make us eventually forget about the pains and thus ultimately forget pleasures as well? How is that any different from life as a spirit?
Am I talking myself into a belief of reincarnation?
:think: So I find myself wondering, where did the desire to have a continued corporal existence come from? A lack of imagination that consciousness can exist independent of a body; fear of an unknown, a desire to put everything back together just as it is now (except without all that illness stuff); to be able to procreate/populate, I’d venture that entities with bodies beget entities with bodies, entities of spirits beget entities of spirit, but that reflects a limited view; was it added to the narrative of Christ to solidify an argument for life after dead (See, he has a body, a body. It leaves no doubt.), etc.
nibbler wrote:Some of the more recent comments have me questioning why it’s so vitally important that we resurrect. When faced with the fear of death I think the main concern is whether or not we retain our consciousness. In LDS doctrine we have the concept of our spirit that retains consciousness, why do we then have the need to return to a body?
Stream of consciousness time:
I’ve been through some painful physical ailments, I don’t want any of that back. The answer, our resurrected bodies are perfect, you won’t have those pains. Well I wouldn’t have those pains as a spirit either.
If I remained as a spirit I wouldn’t have the joys of having a body. What of the concept that we can only experience pleasure as a direct result of being acquainted with pain? If you remove pain from the equation would an eternity of time stretching before us make us eventually forget about the pains and thus ultimately forget pleasures as well? How is that any different from life as a spirit?
Am I talking myself into a belief of reincarnation?
:think: So I find myself wondering, where did the desire to have a continued corporal existence come from? A lack of imagination that consciousness can exist independent of a body; fear of an unknown, a desire to put everything back together just as it is now (except without all that illness stuff); to be able to procreate/populate, I’d venture that entities with bodies beget entities with bodies, entities of spirits beget entities of spirit, but that reflects a limited view; was it added to the narrative of Christ to solidify an argument for life after dead (See, he has a body, a body. It leaves no doubt.), etc.
I had heard of Stephen Webb before but I hadn’t really read anything he wrote – I simply recognized him as a Catholic defender of Mormonism. He died this week. While reading the article about his death I was intrigued by some of the stuff he said about physical/spiritual reality and “multiple levels of physical reality.” I’m going to do some research on him and this idea, which he apparently got from Joseph Smith. The SL Trib article is here:
http://www.sltrib.com/news/lds/3640037-155/mormon-scholars-pay-tribute-to-late ” class=”bbcode_url”> http://www.sltrib.com/news/lds/3640037-155/mormon-scholars-pay-tribute-to-late So without having looked further into this, is it not possible that the resurrection is on a different level of physical reality than our understanding of our current physical reality? That is, while the resurrection may be physical (and frankly I’m not sure it is), could it be a different physical than we are now? And not trying to go too deep here, because it is speculation, if there are different levels of physical reality are there also different levels of spiritual reality?
Side note: I can also subscribe to the St. Elsewhere ending where we all just part of an autistic kid’s imagination.
😯 That’s the beauty of it, imaginations can run wild. :thumbup: DarkJedi wrote:So without having looked further into this, is it not possible that the resurrection is on a different level of physical reality than our understanding of our current physical reality? That is, while the resurrection may be physical (and frankly I’m not sure it is), could it be a different physical than we are now? And not trying to go too deep here, because it is speculation, if there are different levels of physical reality are there also different levels of spiritual reality?
To me that would imply that:
1) We don’t carry knowledge from one physical reality to the next (we lose our consciousness/identities in the process). Kind of a bummer.
2) This is the first physical reality.
DarkJedi wrote:Side note: I can also subscribe to the St. Elsewhere ending where we all just part of an autistic kid’s imagination.
😯 In college I was hanging out with some inebriated buddies (I had just joined the church so this crazy comment was all me, no alcohol) and I mentioned, “the universe is probably just a quark inside a pool ball on a big billiards table.” They got a kick out of it. Men in Black came out several years later. I still wonder whether someone responsible for that movie overheard me.
nibbler, the more I think about it, the more I talk myself into some kind of reincarnation, too! Whenever I get to that realization again, I usually just laugh and then shrug it off because after that I have no idea what to do or think. As to the multiple/first dimensions of physicality, after the movie Interstellar came out, my friend sent my this video. I believe it’s part 1 of 2, but it’s a nice visual for a typically abstract concept.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA” class=”bbcode_url”>
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