What a Faulty Flux Capacitor has to do with Polygamy, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and Blood Atonement

Greetings to you all.  Thank you for being at one with this blog and choosing to read.  Thank you for your comments and e-mails.  May peace and joy fill your life.

I seem to be on a roll with 80's movies.  (Am I betraying my age?) So why stop now?

For many Nicodemus Mormons and uber literalists, as well as anti-mormons, the Restoration of the Gospel began with Joseph Smith.  This is not entirely true.  God sends new messengers to a people who yearn for their message.  This fits the pattern described in the unrighteous judge parable taught by Jesus (Luke 18: 1-6).  Eventually the Lord hears the cries of his people and gives them what they truly desire the most.  Often, most people are not conscious of what they truly desire.  (Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.)  Joseph would not have ushered in the Restoration without a people searching for and prepared for such a message. 

Many members of the church think that the church is a top down hierarchy.  It is easy to see it that way.  However, this top down concept does not completely align with the scriptures.  When the children of Israel wanted a King, did they get what they wanted eventually?  Was the prophet Samuel in charge or the people?  It is Samuel who then enforces God's will which was triggered by the collective desires of the people.  Thus the Restoration occurred according to the desires of the people.  The people of Joseph Smith's day desired to go back to a time when there were Apostles and Prophets as in the primitive Christian church.  My guess is that this was yearned for even before Joseph was born.

In the Back to the Future movies, Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel back in time using a DeLorean DMC-12.  The flux capacitor within the vehicle is what made time travel possible.  At the end of Back to the Future Part II the DeLorean is struck by lightening and the flux capacitor's time settings malfunction and Doc Brown is sent further back in time to 1885 instead of 1985.

Like Doc Brown in the movies, who woke up from a stupor and was subsequently inspired to develop the key to time travel, I too woke up from a stupor after hitting my head on the uber literalist/Nicodemus bathtub so to speak.  What I discovered is an internal flux capacitor that takes me where I want to go.  For the people of Joseph Smith's day, they wanted a restoration of primitive Christianity.  They wanted new scripture and a return of the spiritual gifts of that time.  Their hearts were counter to the prevailing notions of the period that God had already spoken through the Bible and the cannon was now closed and that the spiritual gifts associated with the early Apostles had come to an end.  Thus, their collective flux capacitor took them to where they needed to go.

What they did not count on is that their "flux capacitor would malfunction" and they would find themselves going further back in time beyond the early Christian church and back to the Telestial world of the law and the prophets.  As a consequence they went deeper into a pseudo-mosaic law world dominated by an all or nothing mindset.  This can be seen in many ways:

1.  The church moves westward.  West is usually symbolic of moving towards death, the physical rather than the spiritual, and deeper materialism and literalism.  There continued to be a deeper partaking of the tree of knowledge of good and evil which is symbolic of seeing all things as entirely good or evil.  West is considered to be on the left hand of God and further away from light and truth.

2.  The temples, women, and scripture.  The Kirtland temple was built of simple materials compared to Nauvoo and Salt Lake and the top floor was the school of the prophets where the Lectures on Faith were discussed.  The washing of feet was conducted which is a symbol of unity and leaders as servants.  There is some evidence that women were permitted to use their spiritual gifts in a greater fullness at this time, including the laying on of hands for healing.  The spiritual manifestations associated with the Kirtland Temple are well documented and appear to occur with the broad membership of the church as a whole.  The Nauvoo Temple is a more complex building made of more elaborate materials than Kirtland.  A new endowment was given that is a complicated symbolic parable with signs, tokens, and covenants.  The Book of Commandments or Doctrine and Covenants has reached its fullness and is becoming a new Torah for modern Israel.  The Relief Society is formed as a separate women's organization but there continues to be some evidence that the women were on track to receive the priesthood or at least a copy of its structure.  The Salt Lake Temple takes 40 years (time of preparation and cleansing in the wilderness) to complete and is made out of granite (suggesting hard, inflexible and unchanging literalness).  The new endowment is now secured and viewed in an increasingly literal perspective (as evidenced by the literal Adam worship of many fundamentalist sects) and an oath of vengeance is also added by Brigham Young.  Women are further separated from the men and equality between men and women continues to erode over time.  The words of the living prophet and the living prophet himself becomes supreme and there is less and less need to add to the D&C due to the use of church policy as the main means of governing the church.  The church as a whole giving common consent to policy and doctrine continues to be eroded.  Eventually the Lectures on Faith that were developed in Kirtland are removed from the Doctrine and Covenants because the Brethren are concerned that it does not fit with the materialist view of the separated and distinct Godhead.  All of this suggests a faulty flux capacitor that takes the people further back than they originally intended.

3.  The Exodus.  The Exodus from Nauvoo to the Salt Lake valley is a major symbolic parallel that modern Israel has been restored and the saints will be living something akin to an Old Testament lifestyle.  They will inhabit a desert land next to a dead sea.  The parallels are amazing and beyond comprehension but they are not necessarily flattering as many members of the church even today believe.  They not only have travelled westward but they are travelling back in time to the Old Testament.

4.  Polygamy.  Joseph Smith begins polygamy early in the church's history in Kirtland.  Polygamy accelerates in Nauvoo and reaches its zenith in the Salt Lake valley.  Polygamy is central in the Old Testament and a sign that the early saints went too far back.

5.  Blood Atonement.  Blood Atonement was a doctrine that developed in the Salt Lake Valley by Brigham Young.  The doctrine's premise was that the Atonement of Jesus Christ was not sufficient for forgiveness of certain sins such as murder.  Therefore, the blood of the individual committing these sins would need to be spilled in order to achieve full forgiveness.  Blood Atonement was not enforced except for capital crimes such as murder.  In many ways, it is a parallel to the harsh mosaic law where stoning was the method used to spill blood.  It suggests a view that Jesus Christ was not sufficient and the Atonement was more finite rather than infinite and all-encompassing.  A firing squad was typically used and interestingly, is still to this day a valid option for capital punishment in Utah.  Today only Mormon Fundamentalist sects consider blood atonement to be a valid doctrine.  The Blood Atonement concept clearly shows that we as a people went too far back in time to the point that even Jesus Christ's atonement began to fade and become less central.  Very Old Testament.

6.  Race.  There is extensive evidence that Joseph Smith ordained black men to the priesthood.  However, after Joseph's death, racist views and policies began to escalate.  This is a major symbol of fragmentation and disunity.  Not only were black men banned from having the priesthood but other racist philosophies that early church leaders and members brought with them from their prior religious and cultural traditions were allowed to contaminate the church.  This parallels the Old Testament themes of tribalism and is counter-parallel to Jesus Christ and New Testament doctrines of unity and that God is no respecter of persons.  (Although even in New Testament times Jesus forbade the preaching of the gospel to the Gentiles until after his death).

7.  Mountain Meadows Massacre.  Probably one of the most disturbing and tragic events in Mormon history was when members of the church utterly destroyed (except for a dozen or so children) a wagon party coming from Arkansas passing through southern Utah on their way to California.  This holocaust far surpasses any crimes committed against the early members of the church in its scopre, brutality and savagery.  It truly is of Old Testament proportions and is reminiscent of Joshua receiving the command to "utterly destroy" the Canaanites or Simeon and Levi's killing spree after the rape of their sister Dinah.  This, in my opinion, was one of the darkest moments in church history and the pinnacle of our Old Testament journey.  We as a people have been trying to make our way back, more or less, ever since. 

Collectively, we simply went too far back in time and as a consequence we still continue to struggle in our journey to leave a harsh, Old Testament world of the law and the prophets.  The good news in all of this is that we can learn from history.  We know that the hearts and desires of the people are heard by God and if we choose to align our internal flux capacitors to a millennial destination we can avoid the mistakes of the past.  As you can see, there is a lot riding on the decisions you make.  May you be conscious of your heart and may it align to noble and peaceful principles that will first create an internal millennium within yourself, and then the church, and finally a millennial world.  May you fall in your bathroom and knock your head on the bathtub, only to wake up with inspiration concerning your own internal flux capacitor and take your DeLorean for a conscious spin!  It is time to wake up!  God will respond to our collective desires and tell His secret to the Apostles and Prophets.  The church is a mirror of where our collective desires are right now.

Peace and blessings to you my friends.  May your flux capacitor never fail to take you to where you truly want to be.  Become, remain, and expand your consciousness.  Remember who you are!  Thank you for using this website as a "Mr. Fusion" to assist you in generating the 1.21 gigawatts of power needed to operate your flux capacitor within your amazing DeLorean body.  May you have a wonderful journey and remember:  "Roads?  Where we're going, we don't need roads!"