The Character of God

Stay with me here, and I promise you, that I'll make it worth your while at the end. I've had a couple of thoughts and some experiences that have all kind of guided me to the same place.

First... I had a really good friend growing up. We shared most of the same classes through high school, and used to joke about life afterward. We were going to start a band called "My grandmothers dead donkey" and our first hit was going to be a remake of "Only you". I suspect had either of us had the desire to get laid, they performance of that in front of all the girls in our class likely removed that shot. Actually - you should all know me better than that... I definitely wanted to get laid, I just felt to guilty and didn't want to be smitten down by God for transgressing his eternal law.

Which brings me to the main part of the story. We lost contact when I left South Africa many years ago, and were able to hook up recently on Facebook. In the time between, he got a fairly decent job as a programmer, and then gave it all up to enter the ministry for his church. I believe he was raised Baptist, and I think that is kind of where his path led. He's a youth pastor, and from what I can tell, he does a really good job with the kids. When we reconnected, he asked if I was still Mormon, and when I confirmed that, he said that we needed to have a good heart to heart about that, since he was very concerned for my eternal soul.

Since leaving Mormonism, I've been tempted to shoot him an email, since I think he may be one of the few amongst my friends who would be overjoyed with the news. I'm hesitant to do so however, since I worry that the question might then be raised as to the direction my life has taken since, and I worry that Atheism may actually be worse than Mormonism.

The problem that other Christian religions seem to have with Mormons is that Mormons don't worship the same God as they do.

I was thinking about this over the weekend, and taking the position that there is actually a supreme being, who exists in the Cosmos somewhere, this is what I came up with.

Take me for example. If you ask my wife, my kids, my boss, my co-workers and my triathlete buddies to describe me, they would probably all give you a vastly different description of who I am as a person. It doesn't mean that I have 5 different personalities, but more that each of those individuals or groups interacts with me differently.

It would be kind of silly for my triathlete buddies to speak with my wife about me, and based on her description claim that she doesn't really know me, and thereafter get all hostile towards her. Actually it would be downright stupid, but doesn't that seem to be how religions interact.

The founder of Mormonism did a whole bunch of stuff about the nature and character of God - although to be fair, a comprehensive review of history would seem to indicate that he didn't really know either - just kind of made stuff up along the way, and the final idea was parsed together by a correlationary committee early on in the 20th century.

The final thing they came up with differs in several ways from the definition of God decided upon at the council of Nicaea. Of course that definition of God then differs from the Islamic view of Mohammad - Peace be upon him, Krishna, and pretty much any other deity out there. But yet, if you were to compare the similarities, the various definitions of God actually have more in common than they differ.

The nature and character of God just seems to be a rather stupid and childish thing for different denominations to argue about.

So after wading through all of that, please enjoy the following clip from Mr. Deity, which is somewhat related...