Spirit Children

[TurboGirl]

2 hours ago, BJ64 said:

I wouldn’t say that. Only the Adam God theory as far as I know. 

Not exactly, he also had a big problem with interracial marriages. From what I've read I think Joseph Smith was more okay with men of color holding the priesthood then Brigham Young and some of the earlier leaders of the church were. 

[BJ64]

2 hours ago, LePeel said:

The very same sermon continues a few sentences down:

"I am quite satisfied to be made aware by the scriptures, and by the Spirit of God, that He is not only the God and Father of Jesus Christ, but is also the Father of our spirits and the Creator of our bodies which bear His image as Seth bore the image of his father Adam."

 

Even so, the notion that children born in eternity have bodies from birth defies the very laws which demanded our probation in mortality. Furthermore, if spirits cannot be made, formed, or organized, as you suppose. Then children born in eternity must be different from us, a different race entirely, for they are not gods, for they don't have spirits. Unless you suppose they have spirits the same as ours? In that case they live in a state of damnation, for they don't have the knowledge of good and evil which we have, because they never fell, they never had the law. They have no path of progression, they have no future, they aren't happy, nor do they have joy, nor sadness, because, like a man born blind, they cannot see. 

You don’t seem to get it. As taught by early church leaders, our Heavenly Parents gave birth to Adam and Eve and placed them in the garden as immortal beings who then became mortal after the fall. They were then tried and tested in mortality as we are. Presumably this has been done for each world God has created. Therefore this has been done more times than the sands of the sea. If we follow that pattern we would create worlds and populate them with our posterity through all eternity, thus a continuation of the seeds forever. Since all of our posterity is also our Heavenly Father’s posterity then perhaps the spirits who would take on these bodies would be coming from the same “family” of spirits that we came from. 

There are quotes from prophets which say spirits have always existed and quotes saying that God created them. Sometimes by the same prophet. So I guess it’s sort of up to you what you believe but I’m siding with Joseph Smith. I believe he knew more about the things of eternity than anyone since Jesus Christ. 

We are told that everything we teach in the church should come from the scriptures and that if it doesn’t you may know that it is either opinion, speculation or false doctrine. Since these things I have written are based on quotes from prophets rather than scripture references they would then fall into one of these catagories. Nevertheless I am quoting prophets so it would be the opinions, speculations or false doctrines of them not me personally except where I have said so. 

I believe the church no longer traches these things because they are not directly in scripture. However I don’t know why more prophetic teachings haven’t been added to scripture. 

There are however scripture references to back up some of this. 

It’s sort of like how many early church leaders taught that Jesus married and the wedding mentioned in the Bible was his. This isn’t taught now days so far as I know but it is another case of something that is not directly in the scriptures. However I still believe it. We also learn things in the temple that are not in the scriptures. 

[BJ64]

 

“I know that God is a being with body, parts and passions and that His Son, Jesus Christ, grew and developed into manhood the same as you or I, as likewise did God, His Father, grow and develop to the Supreme Being that He now is. Christ the Savior, was born of woman; and God, the Father, was born of woman. Adam, our earthly parent, was also born of woman into this world, the same as Jesus and you and I.”

 

Joseph F. Smith, Deseret Evening News, December 27, 1913, Sec. III, p. 7

 

“The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, basing its belief on divine revelation, ancient and modern, proclaims man to be the direct and lineal offspring of Deity.”

 

First Presidency of the Church, The Origin of Man, Improvement Era, Nov. 1909, 75–81

 

“Man is the offspring of God…. We are as much the children of this great Being as we are the children of our mortal progenitors. We are flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone, and the same fluid that circulates in our bodies, called blood, once circulated in His veins as it does in ours. As the seeds of grains, vegetables and fruits produce their kind, so man is in the image of God.”

 

 Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 9:283

 

 

Edited July 29, 2018 by BJ64

[LePeel]

1 hour ago, BJ64 said:

“I know that God is a being with body, parts and passions and that His Son, Jesus Christ, grew and developed into manhood the same as you or I, as likewise did God, His Father, grow and develop to the Supreme Being that He now is. Christ the Savior, was born of woman; and God, the Father, was born of woman. Adam, our earthly parent, was also born of woman into this world, the same as Jesus and you and I.”

Lets grant this is true, why would God tell Moses that Adam's body was formed from the dust of the earth? Surely the people in Moses' day could understand the concept of a literal birth.

[BJ64]

15 minutes ago, LePeel said:

Lets grant this is true, why would God tell Moses that Adam's body was formed from the dust of the earth? Surely the people in Moses' day could understand the concept of a literal birth.

We are all formed from the dust of the earth. Every cell in our body is of the elements of the earth be that carbon, minerals, water etc. We are literally of the dust of the earth and our body will return to dust upon decomposition. 

[LePeel]

4 minutes ago, BJ64 said:

We are all formed from the dust of the earth. Every cell in our body is of the elements of the earth be that carbon, minerals, water etc. We are literally of the dust of the earth and our body will return to dust upon decomposition. 

If that's the case, how could Adam's body be formed in the womb? That's really arcane and unnecessarily mysterious if that's what God meant.

Edited July 29, 2018 by LePeel

[BJ64]

38 minutes ago, LePeel said:

If that's the case, how could Adam's body be formed in the womb? That's really arcane and unnecessarily mysterious if that's what God meant.

I don’t understand your comment. We are all formed in the womb yet everything our body is made of is of the dust of the earth so to speak. The calcium in our bones for example is of the earth as are all the minerals and elements in out body. 

That is how I explain it. This is how Brigham Young explained it. 

• Some of you may doubt the truth of what I now say, and argue that the Lord could teach him. This is a mistake. The Lord could not have taught him in any other way than in the way in which He did teach him. You believe Adam was made of the dust of this earth. This I do not believe, though it is supposed that it is so written in the Bible; but it is not, to my understanding. You can write that information to the States, if you please-that I have publicly declared that I do not believe that portion of the Bible as the Christian world do. I never did, and I never want to. What is the reason I do not? Because I have come to understanding, and banished from my mind all the baby stories my mother taught me when I was a child. But suppose Adam was made and fashioned the same as we make adobies; if he had never drunk of the bitter cup; the Lord might have talked to him to this day, and he would have continued as he was to all eternity, never advancing one particle in the school of intelligence. This idea opens up a field of light to the intelligent mind. How can you know truth but by its opposite, or light but by its opposite? The absence of light is darkness. How can sweetness be known but by its opposite, bitter? It is by this means that we obtain all intelligence.
  • Journal of Discourse 2:6-7(October 23, 1853)

Edited July 29, 2018 by BJ64

[LePeel]

16 minutes ago, BJ64 said:

I don’t understand your comment. We are all formed in the womb yet everything our body is made of is of the dust of the earth so to speak. The calcium in our bones for example is of the earth as are all the minerals and elements in out body. 

What I mean is that God isn't being arcane. The bible is clear and it doesn't mean anything else than what it says, that Adam was formed from the dust of the earth, and Brigham Young agrees that's what it says. Brigham Young just doesn't believe it and thinks it should say something else.

[wenglund]

On 7/28/2018 at 1:32 PM, TurboGirl said:

On 7/26/2018 at 7:07 PM, person0 said:

@person0 @wenglund

I'll try and give you a really brief history on me so you know that I'm not completely lost on Mormon theology. My parents met in Utah County Utah as teenagers and got married. They had my older brother and move to Colorado where they had me. We then move to Texas. My brother was baptized, but my parents didn't really attend church until my uncle came to Texas to visit after he got off his mission, he gave my parents a book called The Miracle of forgiveness. And told my dad that he had to be the one to baptize me. So we started going. And I was baptized. They worked to be able to go to the temple and have me and my brother stealed to them. For the most part when I was a kid I didn't mind it, I had friends and it was sometimes fun. My brother spent a lot of Summers up working for that same uncle, who has been a bishop multiple times and served on the bishop brig multiple times. My brother graduated high school and went up to Ricks College or BYU Idaho, we then moved back to Utah I was 14. My brother went on a mission and then was married in the temple, he is still an active devout LDS member. When we moved to Utah my parents kind of stopped going to church or they go off and on. I chose to stop. I've been in a temple and did baptisms for the dead.

Fast forward to 1991 and I became a single mother and chose not to marry the father. Not a popular option with the LDS community. I would try off and on to go back to church and pay tithing and do everything that was asked of you, but it just never took. I am now happily married, have three children, 14, 21, & 27. And do not attend church.

Sorry this is already getting too long. Fast forward to 2014, my mom dies. My mom and dad had been together since teenagers so needless to say my dad was devastated. Me and my brother tried to pull him close but he hid from us with his pain. in Steps my uncle again and tells my dad that men are not meant to be alone that he needed to date and get married again. This Uncle first wife had also died and he is married to his second wife and the temple.I didn't think he was ready for that but when he asked me you just want to be supportive. The world of dating had changed a lot since 1966 and my dad hated it. He was on the LDS singles and hated online dating. One day he told me that he didn't think he wanted to date anymore. Two weeks after that he introduces me to a woman, quite a bit younger than him, and told me that he had asked her to marry him. This was not even a year after my mother's death. When he told us that he was going to start dating, he told both me my brother and my mother's mother that he was only going to marry for time there was no way it was going to marry anybody for Time and Eternity. Anyway This Woman's ex husband was not a nice person. Somehow she convinced my dad, that is she got a temple divorce to marry her for All Time and Eternity. And they were married a month later. 

And since I didn't really believe in the LDS faith and knew very little about polygamy. I was still going under the belief I had as a teenager that they had to marry the women whose husbands and died on the way out to Utah and that's how it started. So it just wasn't a big deal to me. It was harder that this woman had chosen the weekend of one year anniversary of my mother's death as their wedding day. She uses feelings and promptings of the faith and Temple work to manipulate my dad and that really bothers me and my brother. That is why I'm trying to understand this stuff, if I'm going to understand her at all.

Thanks for sharing this with us. It helps us to understand you and your situation better.

I wish you and your family all the best in working through your challenges. I have found that differences, even significant religious and opposing political views, can be surmounted when at least one party focuses on maintaining healthy and mutually beneficial relationships and looks more to understanding each other rather than converting and staking out unyielding positions and demanding agreement. Too often the deep love that people have for each other gets lost and tainted in the war of beliefs.

If it works for you and your husband and children to not attend or believe in the gospel of Christ as taught and practiced by the LDS Church, then I, for one, respect that and wish you well, and hope that your father and step mother will do the. And, I say the same in reverse regarding what works for your  father and his new wife. 

That having been said, and getting back on topic, I asked whether you had children or not because females who have become mothers tend to know what a joy and blessing it is to bring children into this physical world, and thus might somewhat understand why heavenly parents would want to bring spirit children into their spirit world.

Thanks, -Wade Enlgund-

[Madam_Mim]

Hi everyone!

I'm new here and didn't want to start a new topic because I thought my questions somewhat fit into this thread. 

If I understand this correctly (I'm not religious - just very interested in learning about what other people believe), God creates spirit bodies and when someone gets pregnant, that's one of those spirit bodies who now gets a "real" body until he/she dies. Women can also get pregnant in heaven. Does that mean that's one of the spirit bodies too, which immediately gets to heaven without living on earth in between? 

Oh and another weird question: Do you think God decides where he "puts" which spirit body or is it just coincidence if you are born into a good family of faithful LDS-members or into a Muslim family in Saudi Arabia that never even heard of your Church? 

[Just_A_Guy]

6 hours ago, Madam_Mim said:

Hi everyone!

I'm new here and didn't want to start a new topic because I thought my questions somewhat fit into this thread. 

If I understand this correctly (I'm not religious - just very interested in learning about what other people believe), God creates spirit bodies and when someone gets pregnant, that's one of those spirit bodies who now gets a "real" body until he/she dies. Women can also get pregnant in heaven. Does that mean that's one of the spirit bodies too, which immediately gets to heaven without living on earth in between? 

Oh and another weird question: Do you think God decides where he "puts" which spirit body or is it just coincidence if you are born into a good family of faithful LDS-members or into a Muslim family in Saudi Arabia that never even heard of your Church? 

Hello, and welcome!

—The LDS Church does not teach that women get pregnant in heaven.  For a spirit to get a body, that spirit must be born to a mortal woman on earth.  The closest thing to an “exception” to this rule that we are aware of, is during the  “Millennium”—i.e., the thousand-year period of peace on earth that occurs after the Second Coming of Jesus Christ but before the end of the world.  We believe that period will be a heaven-like time on earth as pain, sickness, sin, death, etc will be held in check; and child-bearing is believed to continue during that time.  

—Within LDS circles there’s pretty good authority for the idea that God deliberately places people into circumstances into which they were born  (at least in a very general sense) so as to maximize that particular spirit’s opportunities for development given that particular spirit’s predispositions and potentials.  But we have absolutely no idea how this works in practice.  You just can’t say “this spirit was born in Ethiopia because he wasn’t righteous enough to be born in the first world”, or “this spirit was born in the US because he’s too much of a squish to handle a more rigorous lifestyle”.  We just trust that God knew what He was doing, and leave it at that while we seek His aid in  making the most of our lives.  

[anatess2]

16 minutes ago, Just_A_Guy said:

—Within LDS circles there’s pretty good authority for the idea that God deliberately places people into circumstances into which they were born  (at least in a very general sense) so as to maximize that particular spirit’s opportunities for development given that particular spirit’s predispositions and potentials.  But we have absolutely no idea how this works in practice.  You just can’t say “this spirit was born in Ethiopia because he wasn’t righteous enough to be born in the first world”, or “this spirit was born in the US because he’s too much of a squish to handle a more rigorous lifestyle”.  We just trust that God knew what He was doing, and leave it at that while we seek His aid in  making the most of our lives.  

We also had a choice in the matter.

[zil]

Welcome, @Madam_Mim!  Please eat a pretzel for me!  One of those big, soft kind. I haven't had a good pretzel since I was in Vienna way back in the early 1990s.

[Madam_Mim]

1 hour ago, Just_A_Guy said:

Hello, and welcome!

—The LDS Church does not teach that women get pregnant in heaven.  For a spirit to get a body, that spirit must be born to a mortal woman on earth.  The closest thing to an “exception” to this rule that we are aware of, is during the  “Millennium”—i.e., the thousand-year period of peace on earth that occurs after the Second Coming of Jesus Christ but before the end of the world.  We believe that period will be a heaven-like time on earth as pain, sickness, sin, death, etc will be held in check; and child-bearing is believed to continue during that time.  

—Within LDS circles there’s pretty good authority for the idea that God deliberately places people into circumstances into which they were born  (at least in a very general sense) so as to maximize that particular spirit’s opportunities for development given that particular spirit’s predispositions and potentials.  But we have absolutely no idea how this works in practice.  You just can’t say “this spirit was born in Ethiopia because he wasn’t righteous enough to be born in the first world”, or “this spirit was born in the US because he’s too much of a squish to handle a more rigorous lifestyle”.  We just trust that God knew what He was doing, and leave it at that while we seek His aid in  making the most of our lives.  

Whoops.. I obviously misread or misunderstood something and assumed you can have babies in heaven. Thanks for explaining this! I read a lot about the Church but I'm still a noob when it comes to what members of the Church actually believe about certain things. 

 

Hahaha @zil I will! I wasn't aware that you can't get good pretzels in the US! That's just wrong. Everyone deserves pretzels  

[estradling75]

9 minutes ago, Madam_Mim said:

Whoops.. I obviously misread or misunderstood something and assumed you can have babies in heaven. Thanks for explaining this! I read a lot about the Church but I'm still a noob when it comes to what members of the Church actually believe about certain things. 

There is a lot we simply do not know about things that happened before we were born.  We know that parts of us always existed (aka are eternal) but we do not know how God organized those parts into US as his Spirit Children.  The only thing we have is how in this world is the process of taking existing material to create our physical forms.  Some people run with that idea for the creation of our spirit bodies.  Its not necessary a wrong idea... its simply a we do not know for sure idea.  No matter what we think we need to be very clear on the difference between a spiritual creation (which we do not know the details about), and a physical creation which is something we can observe/experience here on earth. 

[zil]

13 minutes ago, Madam_Mim said:

Hahaha @zil I will! I wasn't aware that you can't get good pretzels in the US! That's just wrong. Everyone deserves pretzels  

Yes, it's very wrong.  I suppose somewhere in the US there are good pretzels, but I've never found anything like what we had in Vienna.  

[Jane_Doe]

1 hour ago, Madam_Mim said:

Whoops.. I obviously misread or misunderstood something and assumed you can have babies in heaven. Thanks for explaining this! I read a lot about the Church but I'm still a noob when it comes to what members of the Church actually believe about certain things. 

 

Hahaha @zil I will! I wasn't aware that you can't get good pretzels in the US! That's just wrong. Everyone deserves pretzels  

Howdy @Madam_Mim, welcome to the forum and (more importantly) welcome to checking out the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints!

We totally get that understanding what different people believe can be challenging- especially when there's bad information out there to confuse things!  That's why we're all here to answer questions!

If you're interested in our beliefs 101 and are more of the reading type, I totally recommend this book--https://www.lds.org/manual/gospel-principles?lang=eng    And of course the scriptures!!  https://www.lds.org/scriptures?lang=eng  We happen to find them to be super important  

[Madam_Mim]

Thank you @Jane_Doe

LDS-members are quite rare over here - I only have one friend who's LDS (who happens to be one of the most wonderful people I know) and since meeting her I'm interested in learning more. Not because I want to convert (I'm a lost cause  ) but as I said before.. just to learn a bit more about what and why you believe. 

I've read the Book of Mormon. Next on my list will be D&C and I guess that will be more helpful to understand some of the "rules". Reading this forum is also quite helpful to get some insight. 

 

[anatess2]

33 minutes ago, Madam_Mim said:

Not because I want to convert (I'm a lost cause  )

 

I don't think there's such a thing.  I mean, look at @Grunt, he was a lost cause and look at him now, visiting Salt Lake and all...

 

[Jane_Doe]

57 minutes ago, Madam_Mim said:

Thank you @Jane_Doe

LDS-members are quite rare over here - I only have one friend who's LDS (who happens to be one of the most wonderful people I know) and since meeting her I'm interested in learning more. Not because I want to convert (I'm a lost cause  ) but as I said before.. just to learn a bit more about what and why you believe. 

I've read the Book of Mormon. Next on my list will be D&C and I guess that will be more helpful to understand some of the "rules". Reading this forum is also quite helpful to get some insight. 

 

That's awesome!  Let us know if we can help in any way!

[Grunt]

3 hours ago, anatess2 said:

I don't think there's such a thing.  I mean, look at @Grunt, he was a lost cause and look at him now, visiting Salt Lake and all...

 

Only because they want to excommunicate me in person.

[Barrett Maximus]

This woman is seeking help and understanding, maybe the doctrinal argument is better conducted in a separate thread?