Episode 86: Pricey Pearl 4 – Moses 7

7 Comments on “Episode 86: Pricey Pearl 4 – Moses 7”

1. 
   dagnyc Says:
   June 29, 2015 at 5:46 pm

   I can’t believe nobody has explained Enoch to you yet. They must all be touring Utah with you. Well as a long time listener but non-Utahan, I must post. Enoch lived 365 years and then was taken by God straight to Heaven without tasting death, along with the city of ZIon. He was that righteous… along with the entire city. All the crap about “no poor among them”? That coincided with Joseph Smith’s socialism experiments. Except Mormons hate anything that reek of socialism so they call it the United Order where all things were held in common. But that’s the Lord’s plan and Socialism is the Devil’s evil imitation.

   Reply

   • 
     Ephima Morphew Says:
     June 30, 2015 at 1:52 am

     Enoch is more Muslim than Christian, Mohammed flew to heaven the same way after he married a rich old lady, found God and bonked his his sister-wives –– there seems to be a pattern here.
     Thank God for a Bi-Polar Deity. Good and evil reside in the mormon mind as two distinct polarities, but, as can be seen Our Heavenly Father is utterly indifferent to the working of sentience.
     Mormonite Socialism is an amalgam of passions driven by willful ignorance; there is no theorem to resolve this duplicitous doctrine.
     As you know treasures grows slippery to slide away and disappear, good and evil is yet more slimy. A Kludged theology tacked together on the fly makes for doctrinal conundrums as time marches on. Polarity shifts occur with the speed of light to reveal Mormon faith in a lurch when divining Big-T truth and driving out the devil.
     Having accountants and attorneys as prophets makes sense as a business, pulling levers, but, their testimony is driven by keeping all the duplicitous balls in the heavens while hidden safely behind the Mormon Curtain.

     Me thinks Enoch is a great metaphor for this gathering storm –– TO BE SORTED OUT IN THE END.

     Thanks David Michael for torturing yourself, your beer elixir is your only salvation when drinking another kind of Jesus.
     And it came to pass, for your next reading, to assuage your cognitive dissonance you might take a tab of Midazolam before the beer, Yhay drink.

     PAX David.

     Reply

2. 
   Duke of Earl Grey Says:
   June 30, 2015 at 5:06 am

   Lots of good stuff here. I’m about to get long-winded and boring, as I tend to do.

   In case the narrative about Enoch was unclear in places, here’s the summary: Enoch is a slow lad of 65 years old when God first appears to him and makes him a super prophet, and after thwarting the armies of evil people by throwing mountains and rivers in their way, Enoch spends the next 365 years gathering all the righteous people to his holy city, Zion. After those 365 years, the people of Zion are so supremely righteous that God sees fit to scoop the whole city off the face of the earth, and take it and its people directly to heaven. This is the point at which “ZION IS FLED”, as in fled from the earth.

   There’s also a detail here that’s easy to miss. After Zion is taken to heaven, but before the Flood, there are still righteous people being saved all over the place, by being individually caught up into heaven by the Holy Ghost without dying. This is basically the same thing that happened to the Three Nephites, and to Moses, Elijah, and others, according to Mormon doctrine. Mormons refer to these great worthies as having been “translated”. Weird to use “translated” as an adjective describing people, but so it is. To this day, Mormons make fun of the self-righteous goody-two-shoes amongst themselves, saying they’re so good they’re about to be translated.

   Back in the 3 Nephi 8 episode, I said a lot of Mormons think that the destructions at Christ’s death may have caused the formation of the Gulf of Mexico, from all the cities falling into the sea, I guess. Apparently the existence of a large gulf of water as a natural feature of the earth’s surface was baffling and unthinkable to early Mormons, because there’s yet another theory for why there’s a Gulf of Mexico, and that’s that the City of Enoch was located there, and when it was taken up, the ocean filled in the missing land. (And of course those elitist geological scholars refuse to confirm either theory, as no doubt Satan must have a hold on their hearts…)

   I just referred to Zion as “the City of Enoch”. That’s the common name for it, probably to distinguish the ancient Zion from the latter-day Zion, or New Jerusalem, that Mormons will be responsible to build in preparation for the Second Coming. And according to this chapter, when the city is built, then the City of Enoch will come back to earth to join together with the New Jerusalem as one city.

   So naturally, the verse that gets most of the attention in this chapter is verse 18, describing the Zion people as “of one heart and one mind”. The rest of the verse about “no poor among them” always gets read, but usually gets glossed over. Instead of trying to create heaven on earth through the elimination of poverty, the current LDS strategy to create its Zion people is to focus on obedience to church leaders, as nothing makes a people one in heart and mind like perfect conformity to authority.

   Some tap dancing has to be done in selecting verses to read in church lessons, however, as verse 18 sits uncomfortably right in the middle of all those racist verses, which are ignored by the church of course, where possible. Ignored, thus never apologized for. As for why there are black people post-Flood, that’s a subject better tackled in the next episode, I think.

   So does the Earth itself have a spirit and consciousness (and a feminine one at that)? I suppose it could be read that way, though most read it metaphorically. Still, there were some influential doctrine shapers in the church who must have believed this literally. Our old friend, President Joseph Fielding Smith (who declared in the 1960s that man would never walk on the moon), referred to the Flood as “the baptism of the earth.” So the earth had some spiritual need for baptism, I guess? And surely, if the earth required a literal baptism by water, one day it must receive its Baptism by Fire…

   Reply

3. 
   Duke of Earl Grey Says:
   June 30, 2015 at 5:29 am

   I laughed quite a bit when David Michael was reading about islands and giants, and said this was starting to sound more like Lord of the Rings than scripture. Appropriately enough, I couldn’t help but notice, in this very chapter, two strong parallels to the Middle-earth mythos. (NERD WARNING!)

   First, in The Silmarillion, there was an island that gets uprooted by the gods and moved from shore to shore to ferry the elves across the sea to the Blessed Realm of Valinor, while a similar island mysteriously shows up in the Book of Moses and people climb aboard. Second, much as God removed Zion from the earth but the Holy Ghost could still bring select people there, Valinor is eventually removed from the “circles of the world”, but the elves are still permitted to find the straight path back across the sea to reach it.

   I have to say, I always enjoyed proselytizing for Tolkien more than I ever did for Jesus.

   Reply

4. 
   Tina Says:
   July 3, 2015 at 3:11 pm

   David asks a great question about how there could be any black people post-flood. This all gets clarified in the next chapter of the Pricey Pearl, the Book of Abraham, specifically Abraham 1:23-25. I don’t want to give spoilers, but you can imagine that at least one of Abraham’s descendants must have married “out of the fold.” Unfortunately, for many years (embarrassingly, until quite recently), several LDS leaders cautioned people not to marry outside their own race. And to this day, many (if not most) active LDS are very dismayed if their children marry out of the faith. The Church has dropped the within-your-own-race interpretation of “out of the fold” and focused more on a within-your-own-religious-tradition interpretation.

   To be fair, I remember a Diff’rent Strokes episode in the 1980s where Mr. Drummond confronted a social worker who thought that black children ought to be raised by black parents and that he shouldn’t have custody of the kids. So Mormons weren’t alone in this line of thinking, by any means. However, if you claim that your church actually has a prophet with a direct, Bat-phone line to God, you would expect (or at least hope) that he is giving advice that is forward thinking and ahead of current social trends, not reluctantly dragging his feet to conform with social progress.

   Reply

5. 
   Tina Says:
   July 3, 2015 at 3:13 pm

   Oops – I meant “Noah’s descendants” – typo there. Sorry.

   Reply

6. 
   SeedsOfDoubt Says:
   December 4, 2015 at 11:44 pm

   “A litter over three beers.”

   Three beers is hardly a litter, unless you have strewn them all over the floor.

   Reply