halley... our task at hand is to complete our earthly trial. We are given the Scriptures as a guide. Our Spirit is able to recognise essential truths known to us in our pre mortal existence. But the full knowledge our Spirit had achieved before our earthly birth is withheld. We will remember all when we pass from mortality... and no doubt will mourn the choices made, and the consequent opportunities for eternal advancement lost.
All right, if this earthly trial is the most important thing, let's discuss it.
Let's suppose for the moment that the LDS narratives about how to achieve a "high score" in your earthly trial are correct. That performing LDS rituals and believing LDS stories are the way to do it.
For a person born into and LDS family and LDS community, the personal qualities needed to excel in the earthly trial include
obedience to authority especially to parents and to the LDS clergy they interact with,
inclination to yield to social pressure by going along with community practices, and
passive acceptance of the truth of stories even when, as in the case of ancient horses in America, they appear to contradict what we actually see in the world.
But imagine a person born into a different family and community religion. For that person to excel in the earthly trial, she would need completely opposite personal qualities:
disobedience of the family and religious community she was born into,
inclination to resist social pressure by seeking a different faith, and
doubt of the truth of the stories her born religion tells. She then has to act completely contrary those qualities to accept the LDS version, while maintaining them regarding every other religion she encounters.
To say this is unfair -- which of course it is, in spades -- is only scratching the surface of the problem here. The deeper problem is that this entire elaborate earthly trial is testing for
different characteristics for different people. It rewards a passive obedient credulous incurious child born into an LDS family, but also rewards a rebellious disobedient incredulous curious child born into a Buddhist family (if that person made the right guesses later in life). It's no better than if the way to excel in the earthly trial were to complete a crossword puzzle written in Chinese. For a Chinese person, it would be a test of crossword puzzle solving ability, but for everyone else, it would be mostly a test of amount of interest in Chinese crossword puzzles among all the other potentially interesting matters in the world.
I have a hard time believing that the Creator of the universe would devise a trial that is so completely ineffective at determining what it's supposed to determine, the actual worth of a person as proven by how they lived their life. It makes no sense. Maybe this might have escaped notice in older times when people in general sucked at inventing effective tests for things (such as, believing that ability to win a combat or ability to resist torture were good tests of criminal guilt or innocence), but it's glaringly obvious in today's world.
Therefore, I propose an alternate explanation that has the advantage of not making an infinite hierarchy of creator gods look as incompetent and ridiculous as the judge of a medieval witch trial. Let's now suppose instead that the LDS story of how the earthly trial is judged is as wrong and arbitrary as the afterlife stories of every other religion. Instead, what is being tested is how much regard, empathy, and love you have for your fellow mortal human beings.
Wouldn't it be marvelous and appropriate if your score in your earthly trial, the exaltedness of your position in the afterlife, depended directly on
how many other people you wished and expected to share that position with? Those with prideful and selfish expectations of being "the elite" would actually be the opposite. They're the ones who, in their earthly trial, learned the least from mortal life, held their fellow humans in the least regard, tried to convert them instead of love and respect them, cast the seeds of their charity and goodwill upon the narrowest stoniest ground.
Now the trial finally makes sense. The heavenly pyramid you imagine is inverted. God is at the base, with everyone; not an exalted former mortal who climbed upon a high throne but a Holy Spirit that encompasses all, loves all. Those who imagine themselves the most elite, the most separate from everyone, the apex of the pyramid, are the farthest from God.
If you don't find this explanation at least more plausible than the "LDS are afterlife elite" version the LDS church teaches, read the Parable of Workers in the Vineyard. "So the last will be first, and the first will be last." The Vineyard represents the Kingdom of Heaven. (The parable says so explicitly.) The first hired erroneously regard themselves as the elite, not accepting others as deserving of the same reward. Jesus rebukes them for their envy and lack of charity. It's pretty clear.
Respectfully,
Myriad
