Kindle Notes & Highlights
No, the book is not only there to give us doubts about the Bible, but to give us reasons for taking our hopes long misplaced in the Bible, and for moving them to another divine-voicing text.
Creeds are thus argued against by fools, for the isms they voice cannot be dismantled, or unmantled. They can be laughed at, brought close and revealed to be one of the many follies of the Gentiles manifest in this Great Work.
Laughter is a vital factor in lying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically.[10]
Only dogmatic and authoritarian cultures are one-sidedly serious. Violence does not know laughter. . . The sense of anonymous threat in the tone of an announcer who is transmitting important communications. Seriousness burdens us with hopeless situations, but laughter lifts us above them and delivers us from them. Laughter does not encumber man, it liberates him. The social, choral nature of laughter, its striving to pervade all peoples and the entire world. The doors of laughter are open to one and all.[11]
Fools are not evil, but are deficient in judgment or sense, silly simpletons.
It was almost like a restoration of the early Kirtland period, when new powers and titles were passed around, everlasting covenants renewed, and honors and dignities like king and priest, powers to seal and unseal, revived yet again. Hardly anyone from the Kirtland days remained in Mormonism, of course,
But Nauvoo was once a real thing, and not merely imagined or standing for a more real Nauvoo. Any actual Bible, similarly, is riddled with contradiction, discordant voices, and hardly an appropriate guide for anyone not looking to end up in an “institution.”
When we consider that Smith had warned them about making a man their idol, and in reading Ezekiel 14 warned them specifically against the darkening of their minds that would follow such idolatry, we can see that Joseph Smith was hardly setting this up to further his domination over Mormonism.
Disputes over the presidency of the church continued among the Apostles for three years or longer, after Smith supposedly passed his authority to them.
Aside from an elaborate description from George Laub (apparently, but not certainly written in 1846),[51] no Mormon reports the mantle story as a transfiguration until the 1850s.
All the equality that might have come of these keys of knowledge instead showed how dependent the Saints really were on the authorities holding that chain over them.
Perhaps the wisest course was taken by Oliver Cowdery, who kept his own counsel far from the Saints.
at one point the Endowment itself was enacted on the floor of the Senate, to show just how treasonous Mormons really were.
Seagulls were said in European lore to have been the last remnants of a once great angelic race, ever in decline since the resurrection of Jesus and the rise of a great church. (I’m not making this up.) Some became infantile cherubim; others, gulls feeding upon flotsam and locust, and the state bird of Utah. Some say God is a bureaucrat, but others suggest he is more like a very clever poet.
The delay was the result of Brigham’s pride: to admit he declared the Great Salt Lake Valley the promised land, when most everyone could see more promise in California?
He would have to admit he was wrong, or, perhaps as Ezekiel learned, if the prophet is deceived, the Lord has deceived him because of the idols set up in the hearts of those come to inquire of him.
It is for this reason that thinkers like Bakhtin—who survived under Soviet surveillance and voicing of the “people” or the latest leader—insist on responding with laughter to authoritative discourse, and not with heresy. The heretic or apostate is created by that discourse, and affirms its reality by taking up that role. Laughter is not, and does not.
The Gospel had become the system or sequence of rites administered for the saving of souls—faith, repentance, baptism, and so on—and not itself the story of Jesus.
What would become the surest sign of being a Mormon was a discursive, interactional marker: consent or dissent from the voice of authority.
How different would a church be, if indeed it would be a church, if its leaders testified they literally held, dined and conversed with the Lord?
We benefit from these follies only when they are seen and understood as examples of Gentile ways, and realize they run contrary to the ways of the Lord.
Foremost among these abominations, it seems, is not coincidentally what drove them to slaughter women and children because they came from a certain state, and is also that most fixated upon feature of the sermons of Mormon apostles: namely, obedience to the counsel of leaders.
“Obedience” conceals what is really just Power, making it into a virtue for those too weak to lead themselves, and it darkens the minds of both.
Had it not been for the pity of the Indians, we would have seen an eventual scattering of Saints to better lands: further west, north and south, laced with streams of gold and easy lives abundant in sunshine. Belief or not, death by hunger will eventually drive a people away.
By their survival the Saints were allowed to persist in follies and abominations. Only when they had received the pity of the “degraded” Indians would they be bound to this land of Deseret, most isolated of all the inhabited lands in the known world;
there is in Mormonism enough hagiography to last us a millennium.
apostasy could now be ascribed to a man because he “found fault” with “The Brethren,” with the church leadership; and not because he did not believe in Mormonism. Their voice had become Mormonism.
that was the only rule of economy: to function orderly.
The Christian community was a “house” or ekklesia, and not a “city of God,” Agamben points
The administration of a mystery of redemption would be thought of as redemption by the mystery of administration,
This means that redemption became a problem of administration, rather than a one time appointment to Christ in the household of his father.
God was held to move human history through His will, and thus whatever was done by his agents in the church or the kingdom was held to manifest His will
The Kingdom of God and its government of men would be explained in terms of auctoritas and potestas, of powers held but not exercised, for God had given his power over to man.
Secularism, ironically, was the outcome of the economy of mystery being converted into this mystery of economy.
Only those who stand and wait, and laugh as they watch, might be in a measure independent of this church.
Atheism, of course, is merely one mode of belief catechized in this church.
We can no longer pretend that democracy is a goal reached after various political transitions and tragedies, a summit made after passing through the Hell of Totalitarianism. Instead we must realize democracy like atheism has an inherent connection with politics otherwise found utterly contemptible.
The foundation of Western culture is not religion, he explains like Kirkegaard might, but it is politics: the mystery of economy, of finding laws to govern all life.
Christian theology, the covenant of grace that so concerned Calvin and Grotius and Campbell and Rigdon, these are theologies of exception, attempts to render law greater than God, as though Man really was made for the Sabbath.
We have become, in the modern world, all sacred lives subject to a sovereign.
The great expansion of therapeutics in the form of talking-listening, all the way to powerful psychotropic drugs should be evidence enough to show how ill this exposure to anonymous, institutionalized violence has made so many of us, even as we are all homo sacer.
Who was the Saints’ sovereign? Not Brigham Young. He was a king of their imaginations. The sovereign is not embodied, but dispersed throughout the modern world. Young was merely a bearer of its power, a figurehead.
We are what remains when the living and dead have not been brought into communion as one, and that, I think, is what the failure of Nauvoo has brought upon us.
Greek mythology tells how gods and men have antagonized one another until we finally learned to live apart. The gods thereafter visited men in the disguise of the stranger, the vagabond, the poor man. Thus was Abraham proven to be of a divine nature, for he welcomed strangers and washed their feet. So the men of Sodom were condemned to destruction, for they treated strangers with contempt.
That ceremony remains nothing more than an image of transformation: that is, marking no transformation whatsoever. It provides the image of a reality it cannot actually bring about, no matter how pure the enactors,
So we remain sacred, banned by our own voices, being accursed by the works of our hands knocking before completing the transformation from wolf to human.
Follies and abominations we have in abundance, and these should be laughed at, not rendered with pathetic seriousness. Let us laugh with them, and not at them, and say as we laugh: You failed because you cannot read your book even at it speaks to you. You are not in the wilderness, even. You remain in Egypt.
Our Father is perfect for the wonderfully simple reason that he blesses those who curse him, and sends the rain upon the just and unjust. That is the way for our bodies and biographies to go, if we seek for their restoration and the fullness of joy that comes with the rest of the Lord. It is not abstract, nor an ever moving horizon. It is practical counsel given to every ye, and requires no secret councils.
Capital is bound into time.
Any person might take up its powers, but only a chosen few will not be possessed by capital.
