The Development of Mormonism and Its Implications

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Hi all. I just thought of something.

Lately, I have been reading about the history of the Mormon religion. A lot of people think that the Mormon religion is really silly, but I can totally understand why it was created in the first place. In the past, many people sincerely believed that all wisdom had to come from religion. Christianity provided European people with answers to life's great questions (not true answers, but whatever) for a long time.

… then the Americas were discovered. These were two new landmasses which were never described in the Bible. A lot of people struggled to fit all of this new information into their Christian worldview.

Mormonism was clearly an attempt to update Christianity for the 19th century American, and it shows. Around this time, new information about the cosmos was starting to challenge biblical cosmology. The Book of Mormon "fixes" this by acknowledging the existence of other planets, and acknowledging the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence. At the time, white Americans were struggling to justify their horrible treatment of black people. The Book of Mormon says that black people are black because they were neutral during the war between Elohim (God) and Satan.

In other words, Joseph Smith saw that the Bible was a square peg, and 19th century America was a round hole. The Book of Mormon is a mallet that people use to pound that square peg into that round hole. Of course, it's hard to hammer a square peg into a round hole without looking like a goof.

This has got me thinking. When humans colonize space and start meeting aliens, will a new spin-off of Christianity be created? What would that look like?

You think Mormonism is weird? When people start traveling through space, they'll probably make another new religion which takes the multiverse hypothesis into account and believes that Israelites went to the Andromeda Galaxy in pyramid spaceships.

Discuss.

Was thinking along similar lines awhile back.

I had thought that Scientology, a creed invented by a published Sci Fi novelist(and has a theology that involves ancient aliens visiting earth), was the first "science fiction religion".

But it turns out that if you study the lesser known parts of the theology of the Mormons you also find notions about souls traveling to other planets in other solar systems.

Also the Cao Dai religion of Vietnam (a creative blend of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Roman Catholicism) also involves reincarnation to and from beings on other planets. So both Mormonism (founded in the early 19th Century), and the Cao Dai sect (founded at the turn of the Twentieth Century) anticipate Scientology(founded in the mid 20th Century "space age") in having theologies that involve exoplanets.


Also, you're right that the Bronze and Iron Age authors of the Bible didn't even know that China existed. Much less the Americas. So that omission about our own little planet's geography probably was a problem for the North American faithful by the time of Joseph Smith.

I think religious beliefs will always be with us. They will continue to change and morph in the future as they have in the past.

I don't know why Mormons think jackson county Missouri is Zion. I live here. Its pretty dumpy in places.