Growing Up Mormon: The Holy Ghost

When you're a Mormon, life is all about the Holy Spirit and trying to get the Holy Spirit to give you superpowers.   It's true.

Sunday school teachers, parents, and even the Bishop would extol to the youth of their wards or branches the amazing superpowers that the Holy Spirit could grant.  By praying to God (Our Heavenly Father in Mormon-speak) in the name of Jesus Christ (God's oldest kid and in Mormonism a completely separate entity than God), the Holy Ghost (still another magical being and the third person in the trinity) would come and grant you physical strength, mental acuity, the ability to find lost keys, the remarkable power to bend time so that you can do all the things your church callings require and still have time to deal with kids and a job, and the ability to supplement your inadequate studying with some spiritual guidance on tests (Mormons don't call this desperate plea for assistance cheating).

I was told that Mormons are better than anyone else at sports. 

I was really told that.  If I wanted to be good at basketball I had to have the Holy Ghost with me.  It didn't matter that the guys down at the playground had mean game skills and never even went to church.  It was about Mormons having the spirit and just naturally having a leg up on the competition.

How did they go about proving that Mormons have this unique ability to excel in sports?  Everyone in the church followed famous Mormons with fan club – like enthusiasm.  Dale Murphy played baseball for the Braves during that time and everytime there was a game on my father would mention that Murphy was a Mormon and look how much better he was than any other player in the league (umm, even though he really wasn't).

In basketball we followed intently the career of Danny Ainge, in football it was Steve Young.  These were the people who burned brightly with the spirit and excelled because of their personal relationship with our Heavenly Father.

Never mind the fact that if you take the population figures for Mormons in the country vs. general population you'll find that Mormons aren't over, or under represented in professional sports and it seems that many people without a relationship with the Mormon God do just fine. 

 

But day after day, week after week, we were hammered over the head with this idea that Mormons are unusually gifted.   Because Donny and Marie were the greatest singing talents the world has ever known (perhaps that's an exaggeration, but my father once said that exact thing), and their family was unsurpassed by any singing family (no one mentioned those heretics the Jacksons), the spirit must have been guiding them – directing them – and if we just had that spirit close to us we could be a little bit country, or a little bit rock and roll.

I can guarantee that Mormon children are currently being taught that Mitt Romney has the spirit with him, guiding his decisions and leading him in the presidential campaign. 

It's interesting to note what Mormons think the Holy Ghost really is. 

God was once a human being who lived on another planet and proved himself worthy to receive his own God's ultimate blessing.  After he died, his spirit was reunited with his body as it was restored to perfection and as one of his rewards for being so righteous he was given his own dominion (his own planet) to control.  Jesus was God's greatest spirit child – a leader in the holy wars that separated the righteous souls from the evil ones and cast a third of the host of heaven out with Lucifer as their leader. The ultimate goal of a spirit is to come to earth and to receive a body, be tested, and if found worthy to return to heaven and receive rewards (including presumably your own planet to screw up).  The HOLY GHOST is a spirit that has not yet received a body.  That means that this being that is granted Mormons special favors in sports, music, key-finding and test-taking is one day going to be born into the body of a baby and live a supposed normal life.  So, what happens to all the Mormons who want to excel at sports?  For a normal lifetime there isn't going to be any spirit to guide them and there isn't going to be any Mormons finding their keys – and Mormons are a disorganized lot, there's going to be a huge influx of lost keys into the key hell which is right next to the bin where all those mismatched socks end up.

What if I'm the Holy Ghost?  I think I am.  What if it was time to be born into a body and have my memory of being that eternal being wiped so that I could get tested and found to be worthy or not?  Well, according to Mormons I'm not and after I die I won't be resuming all my duties as a spiritual key finder so you dependent ninnies are just going to have to do things on your own. No more superpowers for y'all, beeeyatches.

- rick, heavenly messenger to the blogosphere.

Comments

[Cherise]

What's the deal with the ring?

[Cynthia Bagley]

I remember some of the stories Mormon's told to make themselves feel special. It never worked for me.

[Success Warrior]

Cherise, it's the Mormon equivalent of WWJD. Theirs is worded Choose The Right. CTR rings and pendants are very popular. By choosing their own letters and slogan, they initially cornered the market on the sale of such items. A smart business move on their part.

[Sister Mary Lisa]

Great post, Rick. I love your GUM memories. And funny you should call us all beeeyatches. I laughed at that.

[a rose is a rose]

i don't get it. who is god's god? who rewarded him? i really do NOT get it at all. and when the hell do we get to MORE magic underwear? now THAT is something i KNOW i'll understand!

[a rose is a rose]

i don't get it. who is god's god? who rewarded him? i really do NOT get it at all. and when the hell do we get to MORE magic underwear? now THAT is something i KNOW i'll understand!

[Success Warrior]

The god of this planet is Elohim and I think his god is a guy named Earl.

I'm not sure on that one. Elohim's planet is called Kolob or Kobol (whichever one wasn't in Battlestar Galactica whose writer was Mormon and snuck a bit of doctrine in).

Earl comes from a planet called Bamma.

What gets interesting is when you start talking about who Earl's god was. You see, this goes back forever. Gods procreate with multiple wives to create enough spirits to populate a planet. Those people can go on to become gods themselves and can procreate to produce spirits for their planet. And then those people can become gods. . .

There are millions of gods out there having spiritual sex to populate their own planets. It would be interesting to go back and find out who the very first god was.

[Graeme]

I think it should be a crime to teach children religion until they are old enough to understand it.

[C. L. Hanson]

I never heard that the Holy Ghost would ever necessarily receive a body. How he fit into the whole Mormon "divine reproduction" plan was a little vague. Ditto for Jesus, actually -- is he supposed to go on to create his own universe after this, or continue being an assistant God for this one?

[CV Rick]

I agree, Graeme. However that's never going to happen. Parents have an uncontrollable desire to raise children who have identical beliefs to their own . . . I believe it's genetic.

C.L. Hanson - I was most definitely taught in church that the Holy Ghost would eventually receive a body. To be fair, however, I was taught that this would happen after the second coming of Christ, when there was a thousand years of peace, when Satan was imprisoned.

Jesus is bound to get his own planet if what we were taught is true. The most righteous get their own world and what's more righteous than a half-naked dude hanging out with twelve other half-naked dudes like hippies wandering around the region?

[Cynthia Bagley]

I guess you guys didn't get the same supersecret religion (old Mormonism) that I got. Jesus rules the telestial world and the Holy Ghost rules the Terrestrial worlds. Only the Father rules the celestial kingdom. --I guess that means that Jesus is a side-kick forever and ever amen.

Oh, and I have read parts of the Journal of Discourses. We had a volume in our home that was passed down. I wonder where it is now LOL

[Cherise]

Thank you, SW! :)

[CV Rick]

Cynthia,

Interesting. That's like being Robin and never getting away from Batman . . . no independent adventures, no solo comic. What bullshit that would be!! I declare freedom for sidekicks in my universe!

[Sideon]

I remember my cousin's boyfriend (partly because he was one very muscular dude) and how he wore a CTR ring. Before he went on a mission, he bought my cousin a matching CTR ring. At that time in my life, my cousin was also one of my best friends and he (the hunky boyfriend) became a very good friend of mine, too.

Maybe they saw the horns before I did, or maybe their supreme powers of Mormon discernment because of the Holy Ghost gave them a wider vision of myself than I knew (or denied) at the time, but, they both encouraged me to get a CTR ring and go to church with them on the weekends. I'll admit that I went with them a few times, but testimony meetings were the times I wanted to run screaming from the room. While I sort of admired their rings, I never got one of my own. Mine would have meant "corrupt the righteous," anyway.

[Gluby]

I love it. Superpowers. And not an inaccurate comparison. It would make an interesting write-up in GURPS or something. "Gift of Holy Ghost (GOHG): 10 points. You occasionally receive inspiration and insights as to major decisions, the trustworthiness of individuals, and the locations of missing trivialities. However, these insights are indistinguishable from your regular half-baked and ill-considered thoughts. You you are required to treat them all the same and revere them all as spiritually-revealed truth. If they yield bad results or are somehow shown to be inaccurate, you are permitted to either disregard them as your own thoughts or blandishments from evil forces masquerading as the Holy Ghost, or you may regard them as punishment for your lack of faith or a test of faith. You also receive an undisclosed bonus to performance in organized sporting activities."

It's amazing how much bullshit will grow great glorious golden wings and fly as Truth among Mormons (and fundamental religionists in general) where there is no collective ability for real scrutiny of communications, stories and ideas within the belief system. Mormonism relies so much on aversion to and denial of truth that it's very vulnerable to this effect.

The primary function of the Holy Ghost, as far as I can see, is to introduce a massive amount of uncertainty about every little aspect of life in confessors of the religion. What is your thought? What is the holy bugaboo? What is Satan? How do you know?

EVERYTHING is mystified and rendered unknowable. All bets are off. If it works and everything went good, it was the Spirit. If it turned out bad, it was Satan or you, either of which are bad, for even if it's not you, the fact that Satan's influence is workable on you is horrifying. Either way, you are not you, but a single "free will" (ha, ha, nice joke, that "free will" thingy) flapping in the winds of external wills without the ability to determine which movements are its own.

Cheers, Rick!
Gluby