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Show 232 disarming pleasantry (not many sins were very original, ha ha), explained that no, we made our own beds and slept with our own lumps, not with Adam's. This led naturally enough to the discussion of Adam's complicity in the whole plan, because (and only Mormons knew this) Adam was none other than the Archangel Michael himself, who, a_s_ Michael, had been party to the Creation, and as Adam, held the priesthood, partook of the fruit knowingly in order to bring mortality on himself and Eve and consequently their descendants (whom otherwise they would not have had), and thus set in motion the chain of events that made it both necessary and possible that the Redeemer be born to salvage the wreckage of sin and mortality. (Dead silence usually followed this disclosure. It was one of the make-or-break points in the series of lessons.) Did Mormons believe in the Trinity, like other Christians? a middle-aged housewife with hymns on the piano asked. Of course, they told her blandly, understanding that the burden of the question lay in its anxious last clause. Were they asking her to enter something wholly alien, or were there points of congruity with order as she had always known it? Of course, they said reassuringly. This led handily to an elaboration of one of the first principles, that God was physical and so was Jesus Christ and they weren't the same person at all, except in purpose, and that the Holy Ghost was someone else again, and was not physical. From there it was easy to move to the disclosure that God himself was once mortal, and that mortal human beings, locked into a continuum of eternal progression of which this life was only a part, might themselves aspire to godhood, each with his own universe to create and embellish. How did they reconcile eternal progression with perfectibility? asked an unpleasant man whom they didn't see again. A quiet reference to relativity and an allusion to Zeno's Paradox settled him handily, though |
