Giving God the Finger Mark D Larsen March 8, 2014

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The evolved brain of Homo sapiens is a curious organ. Its enlarged cerebral cortex has enabled our species to survive and thrive, thanks to an increased capacity for memory, pattern recognition, an ability to connect-the-dots in the world around us. Yet it is still a woefully faulty machine, precisely because it did evolve in the world around us. The brain seeks answers, but is all-too-often satisfied with merely superficial, facile explanations that actually fail to answer the question.

I have particularly observed this neurological shortcoming among those of my former religion of Mormonism. They are willing to cling to an answer —some answer, any answer, no matter how illogical— simply to maintain the comfortable status quo of conformity and acceptance among their Mormon family, friends, community. Examples of such shallow reasoning are legion in the cult’s doctrines, but for starters... let’s first focus on the one that underlies them all: the Mormon concept of god.

Like other theists, Mormons believe in a supreme, omniscient, omnipotent deity (“Elohim”) who created and controls the entire universe. And like other christians, they believe that said father-in-heaven sent his son to earth to be sacrificed for all our sins. Only those who accept that sacrifice will be saved in an afterlife to dwell with Elohim for time and all eternity in heaven (the “Celestial Kingdom”). Unlike other theists and christians, however, Mormons actually endow this god with concrete, palpable, physical characteristics to answer the prime question of this treatise:

What Kind of Being Is God?

The very founder of the Mormon cult, their prophet Joseph’s Myth, established the dogma that answers this question in one of his most famous sermons, “The King Follett Discourse.” He stated:

God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret. If the veil were rent today, and the great God who holds this world in its orbit, and who upholds all worlds and all things by his power, was to make himself visible —I say, if you were to see him today— you would see him like a man in form, like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form as a man; for Adam was created in the very fashion, image and likeness of God, and received instruction from, and walked, talked and conversed with him, as one man talks and communes with another.

Years later, another Mormon prophet, Lorenzo Snow, distilled this belief into a couplet that all Mormons have heard, cherish, and know by heart:

As man is, God once was;
as God is, man may yet become.

So for Mormons the answer to the question is that God is literally a man —albeit now immortal and endowed with supreme powers. And in the hereafter —if valiant, faithful, and worthy— they will likewise be transformed into deities with resurrected, immortal, perfected human bodies.

Really? Huh. Well... it’s certainly an answer. But let’s think about that a minute, shall we?

Since god is actually a glorified man, does he have hair? Certainly the illustrations of him in the cult depict him with hair and a beard, as shown on the right when Elohim and Jesus supposedly appeared to Joseph’s Myth in a “Sacred Grove.” Yet this raises the logical question: does his hair grow? Does he have to cut it? Trim his beard and moustache? His nose hair? Ear hair? Does he have chest hair? Pubic hair? Hairy armpits? And what about his fingers and toes: do they grow nails that need to be clipped?

Hair and nails are dead cells, sloughed off by the body as it replaces them with new, living cells under the skin. Does this mean that god’s body produces dead cells? I thought he was supposed to be immortal. If his cells are immortal, how can they die, let alone be replaced with new ones?

Can his hair and nails even be cut, or are they of Superman strength? Does he just have to content himself with a fixed length that will never change? He can’t decide to try out a new hair style? Opt for just a mustache or go clean-shaven once in a while, just for a bit of variation now and then? Does his beard ever feel hot, perchance when spending a well deserved day-of-rest at the scalding sauna of Venus?

Come to think of it, does his human body feel cold and heat like ours? Does he get goose bumps? Does he sweat? In point of fact, does he need deodorant, or is his perspiration “perfectly” odorous? Is it possible for him to get dehydrated? Does he ever feel thirst and need a drink?

After all, Elohim obviously has a mouth to have “talked and conversed” with Adam —and Joseph’s Myth— “as one man talks and communes with another.” He must therefore have teeth (with or without those pesky wisdom teeth?), a tongue, a voice box to articulate his words. Come to think of it, how does that voice box work? Is it modulated by breath? Can we therefore assume that he must have lungs to inhale and exhale air? Is he therefore rendered speechless when in outer space for lack of atmosphere? Yet I thought he was all powerful and controlled the laws of nature rather than being controlled by them. And I also thought he was immortal, so he couldn’t suffocate without oxygen. Why does he have lungs then? Are they vestigial, superfluous organs from when he was mortal, now just useless memorabilia?

If he does have lungs, does he have the other internal organs of a man? Are they also vestigial, non-working relics from his past? That tongue he uses to “talk and converse,” does it also have taste buds? Can his nose smell? Does he have an esophagus, a stomach, small and large intestines? Does he eat and drink? Does he need to eat? An immortal being couldn’t starve to death, so a tongue to taste, teeth to chew, a digestive system to extract nutrition wouldn’t be necessary. Why have them, then? Or is his body just a human looking shell for his ghost to inhabit, empty, gutless, even boneless on the interior?

Although eating would be unnecessary for an immortal being, if Elohim chooses to eat, does he process food like a man? Does he need to urinate? Does he have kidneys and a bladder? Does he defecate? Does he ever get indigestion? Does the supreme, omnipotent being emit supreme, omnipotent gas?

What would he eat, anyway? Food is basically the dead remains of what were once living organisms. Does this immortal being thus grow and kill mortal feedstock, be they plants or animals? Or does he just go hungry forever, with mere dormant, token intestines inside?

If he eats, what is his system extracting from the food? An immortal being wouldn’t need nutrients like vitamins, minerals, proteins, carbohydrates, fats to circulate through the bloodstream and replenish his body —unless his immortal hair, nails, skin, and other cells really do need replacements after all. Does he have a heart capable of pumping forever and ever, never missing a beat? Does it slow down or speed up depending upon the circumstances? Come to think of it, does he ever feel fear? Of what, since he’s immortal and immune to any danger or threat that could curdle his blood?

And what constitutes that blood? What is his blood type? Does he have red and white blood cells? The latter shouldn’t be needed, since he is immune to infections and diseases caused by viruses, bacteria, parasites, right? Does he even have an immune system? What kind of DNA genome does he have? Unlike us, does he only have genes that correspond to a “perfect” human body, stripped of all the defunct backlog of ACTG coding from ancestral life forms? What about glands to produce hormones? Does he have some sort of supernatural testosterone, estrogen, adrenaline, tryptophan, thyroxine circulating through his immortal body? What for? He must have gonads, since he is a man, but do they only produce some kind of spirit spermatozoa to impregnate his similarly immortal, plural wives’ ghost eggs? They have physical bodies, but can only engender ghost children —like he supposedly did to beget us in a pre-mortal existence? He's omnipotent yet impotent? And speaking of being "all powerful." does he get spontaneous erections or does his omnipotence control them at will? Is he thus impervious to external, unsolicited stimulation?

Like all men, does he have useless nipples? How about our useless appendix? Are his nerves equally useless? I mean, he can’t be injured or killed, so does he not even feel pain? Are his cojones invulnerable? Does he ever get tired? Need to sleep? If he does, do his brain cells spontaneously generate random memories, images, dreams? Does he have a belly button, perhaps another relic from his previous mortal existence? Wouldn’t his abdomen be more “perfect” without that telltale scar?

Does he ever cry? If so, does he shed tears? He would need to drink, then, to replace the fluids excreted. Or is his crying tearless? He weeps, but his eyes don’t show it? His eyesight must, of course, be perfect —although he apparently lost sight of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Oops. But what color are his eyes, anyway? What constitutes the “perfect” color of eyes? Of skin? Of hair? The “perfect” height? Face shape? Build? Genitals? Looks? Is he “perfectly” handsome? Is true beauty therefore not in the eye of the beholder, and thus no woman could ever check out Elohim and conclude that he’s just-not-her-type?

When all is said and done, what is so outstanding about the human body anyway? We have a long list of inherited genetic frailties in our physiology that plague us from cradle to grave. Indeed, there are numerous forms of life that have evolved far better abilities in terms of speed, strength, longevity, more acute hearing, sharper eyesight, a keener sense of smell, environmental adaptability, prodigious lungs, anatomies that natural selection honed for flying, digging, swimming, hunting, fleeing, hiding. Our one advantage is that we have... that swollen cerebral cortex, large enough to enable self-consciousness, but apparently not large enough to see beyond that self. What an incredible ego to imagine that Homo sapiens is the special creation of an even more advanced and immortal... Homo sapiens! C'mon: who created whom in whose image, in reality?

I could go on and on and on —and obviously have. The Mormon facile answer that “god is an eternal, immortal man” is so irrational, so devoid of common sense, that it only raises more questions than it answers. And the coup-de-grâce is when we put that superhuman creator into proper dimensional perspective, as illustrated in this comparison, or this animation, or this program, or this model, or this infographic. Who do Mormons think they’re kidding? That a deity the size of a human being could create and control this entire vast universe is so utterly unfathomable that it is ludicrous. How can Mormons not be embarrassed to entertain such a ridiculous notion of reality?

Of course, having been in that cult for many decades, I know very well what standard, default responses Mormon apologists would give to all the above questions, as I have heard them many-a-time, like a broken record:

God’s knowledge is far above that of mere mortals. “Intellectuals” are the enemies of the Church, deceived by Satan in a last-ditch effort to destroy God’s plan in the latter-days. We are mere infants who can only handle milk before we can eat meat. Someday He will give us “further light and knowledge” and we will understand all this —and much more. Until then, our solemn duty is not to ask questions, but to obey, follow the living prophet, have unwavering faith, keep our sacred covenants made in the holy temple —and doubt our doubts instead of our beliefs. Yadda, yadda, yadda; blah blah blah.

To quote Shakespeare in Love, “It’s a mystery.”

In short, if an answer doesn’t suffice, if you think the Emperor is naked, there is something wrong with you —not Elohim’s wardrobe. Just stop thinking —and choose to believe.