obedience

From: "Curt" <saukkomies@y...>
Date: Fri Sep 3, 2004 1:01 pm
Subject: Obedience yields rotten fruits

Greetings fellow Terrestrial Level dwellers! LOL ;)

     I have received a few letters offline from people discussing the posting I sent to this group on the 24th of August (message #63631) entitled "Lucifer's Plan". As a result, I would like to follow up with another (hopefully not too lengthy) posting that sort of takes up where that one left off.

     As a brief recap, in that posting I described how when I was on a mission I first started having doubts about the Mormon Church as a result of something that I saw as a very significant discrepancy in the doctrine of the Church. It has to do with the Church's teachings of the "War in Heaven" in the preexistence where Heavenly Father chose the plan of Jesus that incorporated free agency over the plan of Lucifer that emphasized strict obedience in order for the children
of Heavenly Father to be able to earn the right to return to dwell in His presence at the end of times.

     The discrepancy that bothered me was the fact that the Church was following Lucifer's plan more than it was Jesus' as much as I could see, especially being a missionary. As a missionary we were given a huge list of very restrictive rules that were designed to reinforce the initial brainwashing that we'd gone through during the time we spent in the MTC (or in my case the LTM). Of course this is not what we were told these rules were for, and most likely the people that
created the "Little White Book" of missionary rules did not do so thinking that they were reinforcing a brainwashing program, but the truth is that it is indeed how it was used as in application. I talk more of this in another article (message #62886) that I wrote discussing the brainwashing techniques as they are applied at the Mission Training Center.

     In my posting about "Lucifer's Plan" I questioned the very basis for why a church is even necessary, given that we each should be receiving guidance for our own lives. If a church is to be set up that would be more in line with the plan of Jesus, it would emphasize the gifts of the spirit and encourage people to make decisions on their own, rather than setting up a very strict list of rules that must not be broken in order to live according to what someone else feels is the "right" way for each of us. In other words, it became quite clear to me that the Mormon Church was, according to its own
account of the preexistence, following more in the line of the plan of Lucifer than that of Jesus.

     So, what I wanted to discuss now would be what else happened to me while I was on my mission that further emphasized this point. It has to do with the concept of one of the leading principles that is emphasized in the LDS Church: namely the Law of Obedience. One of the scriptures that was very highly stressed that we learn and
memorize as missionaries (and indeed before as seminary students) is Doctrine and Covenants 130:20-21, which reads:

          20: There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon
                     which all blessings are predicated�
          21: And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated.

     This is Joseph Smith's attempt at explaining the law of karma, as it has been called for several millennia in other parts of the world outside of the frontier of North America in the 1830s. But it isn't quite the same as the law of karma, which states that there is a "cause and effect" relationship between action and result. Joseph Smith is implying that God grants blessings only to those who earn them through obedience to certain laws. Smith's version of this is such that it emphasizes the concept of an authority figure who dispenses blessings to those humans who obey certain laws, rather
than the more liberal concept of karma that says that if you do something, something else will happen (i.e.: if you drive without a seat belt, you run a higher risk of injury in the case of an accident). Karma takes the idea of a "god" authority figure out of the equation, and places the responsibility of action solely in the place of the person who is doing the action.

     So you can perhaps see how this idea of the Law of Obedience ties in with the Lucifer/Jesus plan. The Law of Obedience is something that fits more in line with Lucifer's plan that would force all of us to live "righteously", and the law of karma fits more in the line of how Jesus would give each of us our own free agency to listen to the promptings of the spirit as they pertain to us each individually. The Law of Obedience emphasizes a church that is focused on
controlling peoples' lives in very minute details, the law of karma is more concerned with enabling people how to learn to see for themselves in order to gain access to divine inspiration in which to apply to their own lives. The Law of Obedience is giving someone a fish, the law of karma is teaching someone to fish. The Law of Obedience creates tyranny; the law of karma creates freedom.

     I served my two-year mission in Finland during the late 1970s. During that time we were told that Finland and Spain vied each year for the lowest baptism rate of all the missions in the entire world. The average baptism rate per missionary in Finland during the time I was there was less than 1 baptism per missionary. I knew many missionaries who spent their entire two years working in Finland, only to return home with absolutely no baptisms. I baptized twice, but really they should be counted toward my senior companion, since they happened within the first two months of my mission, and I could barely speak the language yet.

     Imagine for a minute what it would be like to serve on a mission like that. The raison d'�tre for a missionary is to baptize, and when that is not happening it creates an incredible amount of tension and stress. When this is not happening for an entire mission, the stress is magnified exponentially.

     There are three places in which a missionary in Finland may place the responsibility for the lack of baptisms:

     1) That the Finnish people are an unrighteous people who reject the Truth.
     2) That the Mormon Church members in Finland are not doing their part to fellowship
              investigators effectively, or are too "weird" for "normal" people to be inspired to
              join the Church.
     3) The missionaries themselves are to blame.

     Each of these reasons carries with it a price. First, if a missionary begins to believe that the people he has been called to serve are a pack of degenerate savages, then he will have a more difficult time getting baptisms, and so this is self-defeating.

     Second, if a missionary believes that the local church members are not worthy or righteous enough, that will also lead to a more difficult time in getting them to help fellowship, and therefore lead to fewer baptisms.

     And so therefore it was the default that we ended up blaming ourselves for the lack of baptisms, and that basically leads to insanity, as I will describe more fully. Of course the fourth reason (which we never considered) was that the Finns were too clever to fall for an obvious American cult. That never even entered our minds.

     So if it was the responsibility of the missionary for why he or she was not getting baptisms, what exactly should a missionary do to correct this? The obvious conclusion that most of us reached was that we weren't following the rules closely enough. It says right there in the D&C "�when we obtain any blessing from God (i.e. baptisms), it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated." So which law guaranteed baptisms? Why, all of them of course! And this is precisely what our mission leaders from the Assistants to the President down to the District Leaders were instructed to drill into our heads. Obedience, obedience, obedience! We actually chanted that in some meetings.

     So a lot of missionaries on my mission went completely ballistic in adhering to the rules laid out in the Little White Handbook that each missionary received. I sure wish I still had a copy of this. One of the rules was that we were to spend 15 minutes a day reading aloud to each other from this book, which a lot of missionaries actually did! Missionaries were instructed to shine their shoes each and every day, study scriptures or memorize discussions every day, spend their days in active pursuit of baptizing, saving one afternoon a week in order to take care of mundane chores such as washing clothes, grocery shopping, etc. etc. etc.

     It was quite literally impossible to follow all of the rules that we were supposed to follow to the letter. It would have required that we had absolutely no time to pay attention to such things as fixing a broken bicycle, attending a member's birthday party, and other things that might come up that actually aided and enhanced the missionary effort. What it did was to basically turn us into robots. Any amount of personal responsibility for listening to the promptings of the spirit that would have us do something other than what was specifically dictated by the handbook was forbidden. It was
unthinkable that we would be inspired to do something against one of the rules, no matter how asinine that rule might be.

     An example of this is that in Finland there are cross-country ski trails that go all over the various towns and cities. Finnish children learn literally how to ski before they can walk (there are special skis for toddlers). One may easily travel from one part of town to another on these ski trails during the winter. Okay, sounds great, doesn't it? It would also provide good exercise for the missionaries, and it would get us out in contact with other people who were traveling the ski paths and we could perhaps strike up a conversation about the Church. What a fantastic thing!

     Well, the problem was that it broke one of the rules. Skiing in Utah during the 1970s meant downhill skiing. So it was forbidden. Our Mission President made a specific request to the Church authorities to allow missionaries to go cross-country skiing in countries where it was set up like in Finland (Sweden and Norway were the same way). But because the leaders of the church did not wish to open the door to any rule breaking, they specifically instructed the Mission Presidents of these Scandinavian countries that there would be no skiing, period.

     So we had to ride our bikes instead. Imagine this situation, if you will. In Finland where the snow in some areas gets up to three feet deep in the winter, and the temperatures while I was there would sometimes drop down to minus 40 degrees, we had no other form of transportation other than public buses and our bicycles. And the buses just didn't take us to all the places we had to go. But the ski trails did! But we couldn't ride our bikes on the ski trails, so we'd have to ride them on the ice-covered cobblestone streets. I have to tell you that navigating a steep cobblestone street that is
covered with ice on a rickety bicycle is a large degree more dangerous than any cross-country skiing that we could have been undertaking!

     And riding our bikes at 40 degrees below zero was also a challenge because the gear oil in the pedals would freeze up, and it took an incredible amount of energy just to push the pedals. So often we'd end up walking, which would waste a lot of time we could have been spending teaching people. During about one-third of the year when there was lots of snow our transportation restrictions made it so that we could typically go to only one or two appointments per day.

     But we were following the rules, by gum! And so those folks back in Salt Lake City definitely were inspired. It was so wonderful to belong to a church that knew best how we should be living our lives by making up all of these rules. Obviously we weren't supposed to get any inspiration to do anything that the people in Salt Lake City didn't want us to. They were inspired to such a degree that they could know sitting in their offices in Utah what would be best for us
missionaries on the street in Finland. We were never allowed to question that authority.

     And there were other examples too, such as the rule of not taking ferries because "Satan ruled the waters". This was very handy when in the summer we had to go miles and miles out of our way in a few places I served in because we couldn't take public transportation just because it happened to be a BOAT. A lot of towns in Finland are bisected and trisected by waterways, and to avoid all of those Satan-controlled areas we had to take back roads and two-hour bicycle rides just to get around a lake that meandered through the middle of a town. If we had taken the ferry it would have taken about 10 minutes. And they allow bicycles on ferries, so it wouldn't have presented a problem. But nooooo! That would have been breaking a rule! And those leaders knew best what was good for us, right? Isn't that following Jesus' plan? Or does it sound more like the totalitarian concept of Lucifer? You decide.

     Anyway, so here we were, following all of these rules as closely as we could, but we still were not getting baptisms. When a missionary pair got lucky enough to actually baptize someone, it was usually a Donny Osmond groupie teenybopper or some divorcee who was trying to get off of booze or some other type of individual that would only
stay in the Church long enough to have a nervous breakdown within a year and leave. The dropout rate of people leaving the Mormon Church in Finland during that time was greater than the baptism rate. There were more Mormons in Finland in the decade prior to when I was there. Entire congregations had had to be disbanded because of loss of membership. It was a losing proposition, no matter how you looked at it. We were lucky to get anyone to join the church, let alone an entire family.

     And then there was Elder X. I will protect his name for his own privacy. Elder X had been on his mission about a year before I arrived on the scene. I only knew of him distantly, and only got to meet him in person a couple of times, as he was in another part of the country than I was in. Elder X had entered his mission late in life � I believe he was 23 when he became a missionary. It was my experience that those missionaries that were older were able to resist the brainwashing more effectively that took place during the LTM experience. What this meant was that they had had more time to live on their own and develop stronger personalities than the typical 19-year-olds did.

     Elder X came from Southern Utah, and had been a raft guide on the Colorado River before his mission. When he entered the LTM he had hardly any knowledge of even the most rudimentary doctrines. For instance, he had no idea who the Angel Moroni was. And he really didn't do very well at learning the discussions or memorizing the scriptures. After he got to Finland he almost never wore a suit; instead he wore typical regular clothing like everyone else (what we missionaries called "P-Day" clothes). He grew his hair long and actually a number of times grew a beard! He'd go on camping trips for a couple of weeks in the summers, leaving not only his assigned district, but actually becoming a tourist and going out of the country up to Hammerfest in Norway to see the Arctic Ocean! These behaviors were completely unheard of, and they broke so many rules the rest of us missionaries who heard about them were numbed with shock!

     The problem with Elder X was this. He baptized over 70 people during his mission. And not only that, but he baptized at least 5 full families, almost all of whom stayed in the Church. He baptized more people in that mission than anyone else had for the previous twenty years.

     The Mission President had made Elder X a Zone Leader for a while. But after his trip to Hammerfest he was busted down to a District Leader. Then something else happened (probably showed up at a Zone Conference in P-Day clothes with long hair and a beard), and he ended up serving the last 8 months of his mission as a regular Senior Companion. But he kept on baptizing! All the way up to the end of his mission.

     What he did was he would find a nice family that was receptive somewhat to the Church. He would then basically attach himself to them and love them into the Church, bringing the local members in on the act so that after he was transferred their conversion took. He would go over to their house and hang out almost every day; he'd mow their lawn, baby-sit, help make meals, etc. It was like he became a family's adopted son from America for a couple of months. And so the whole family would join the Church, and Elder X would then reward himself by taking a camping trip for two weeks.

     Elder X was such an embarrassment for the mission! But they didn't want to send him home, because he produced the one thing that couldn't be argued with: baptisms! How could this be happening, though?

     Here I would be, sitting in another conference meeting, listening to some boring Zone Leader instructing us that if we followed the rules we would be rewarded with baptisms. And I'd look around the room at some of the missionaries I knew who were total "rocks" and followed ALL of the rules and believed that they were going to get baptisms, and almost all of them were going to go home without one single baptism under their belt. And then I'd think about Elder X.

     So why were these people telling us this pack of lies about obedience? And there you have it. The bottom line was that the Law of Obedience was put there to control people. It had nothing to do with divine inspiration. It had nothing to do with the value of the individual. It was not about free agency or self-choice. It was not the plan of Jesus.

     So it was then, during the last year of my mission, that I really began to lose my belief that the Mormon Church was true. I ended up where I stopped knocking on doors of homes where about 20 other missionaries had visited within the last 5 years, and I began to hold English classes for free in the basement of an apartment building in the city of Helsinki where they stuck me for the last six months of my mission. I quit wearing my suit, and started hanging out with the youth gangs that frequented the area I was assigned to (which was the government "projects" of Helsinki, i.e. the "slums"). I got permission from the city to take over a room where we'd have the English classes. We took these kids out to see symphonic concerts downtown, picnics in the country, etc. I'd be raked over the coals by the Mission President each month during his interviews with me, but I'd just nod my head "yes" and continue as I did. He assigned companions to me who were real rule followers, but by the time I was done with them they were pretty much as screwy as I was!

     I finished off my two years, and I was more proud of how I had acted in the last six months, doing some actual real service to the Finns, than I had in the first 18.

     Well, again, thanks for allowing me to vent some of this in this public forum. I appreciate the support and respect that you all share with me.

     Humbly submitted,

~~Curt Allred

Obedience Yields Rotten Fruits
This was posted to an online group on September 3, 2004.