After the look at Scientology the other day (can’t see anyone having the cojones of releasing a music based on the Book of Dianetics!) Comes this from Will at Dangerous Minds!!
Credit: Dangerous Minds / Bertel Thorvaldsen / Joseph Smith / Reuben Hedlock / Public Domain
Kolob: The home planet of God, according to Mormons
Like pretty much all jokes in the hit musical comedy The Book of Mormon, the song ‘I Believe’ on the Mormon belief system is very simple, yet extremely effective.
It’s actually quite similar to the South Park gag about Scientology beliefs when you think about it. In both cases, the libertarian in your life’s favourite comedy writers sit back and let the bizarre beliefs of a religion do the hard work for them. Citing the most bizarre parts of both dogmas as a way of making both of them look cretinous.
Among the lines about ancient Jews building boats and sailing to America, the president of the church, Thomas Monson, speaking directly to God and how in 1978, God changed his mind about Black people, is one absolute gem that Elder Price tosses out like it’s absolutely nothing – he says that he believes God lives on a planet called Kolob, that Jesus has his own planet as well, and when someone who believes in him dies, they get their own planet as well.
Yup, this is all completely congruent with Mormon belief systems. Viewed from a certain perspective, Mormonism sounds just as much like a sci-fi acid trip as Scientology, principally because it’s completely obsessed with planets. Or, as they’re referred to in the scripture, “stars”.
The Book of Abraham refers to the star of Kolob being “the nearest to the throne of God”, and since we know today that stars aren’t actually, y’know, habitable, “stars” have been retconned to be the word this particular holy book uses for planets. So, where exactly does this idea come from?
The idea of Kolob is one put forward by Joseph Smith himself, the founder of Mormonism and the Latter Day Saints movement – according to Smith, he purchased a set of Ancient Egyptian papyrus scrolls in the mid-1800s, and he transcribed what he found and brought its teachings to the world, first via his newsletter Times and Seasons in 1842, then in The Book of Abraham, and it’s there that Smith lays down one of the key tidbits of information regarding the planet.
To quote The Book of Abraham, it says, “The measurement according to celestial time, which celestial time signifies one day to a cubit. One day in Kolob is equal to a thousand years according to the measurement of the Earth,” which checks out.
Especially when you take into account the accepted Christian dogma of the world being built in seven days. Or at the very least, six days, then rested on the seventh. Those were Kolob days – to us, they would have taken 6000 years, then 1000 more to move Earth from Kolob to its current position in our Solar System.
This would imply, however, that it can’t be anywhere close to us, despite a number of early Mormon converts declaring that our sun was Kolob. However, according to Smith himself, Kolob is visible from our world. Or at the very least, Methuselah and Abraham saw the planet by looking through Urim and Thummim, a set of seer stones embedded in a pair of spectacles that could also translate all languages. Handy to have around, I’m sure you’d agree.
It just goes to show that, say what you want about Trey Parker and Matt Stone (I will and I do), they are the masters of giving people enough rope to hang themselves with. They just repeated what Mormons actually believe, and now the entire church believes that their music is the work of the devil. Because truly, sometimes the only difference between religion and the rantings of a madman is how many people believe in it.
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