I can appreciate the effort you have put into explaining how the fact that my dad was sealed to my mom and step-mom simultaneously doesn’t make sense in your view of the Gospel of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I’m flattered that you would care enough to write it all down. I think you may, perhaps, be placing a little too much emphasis on the effect that sin has on Priesthood ordinances and the Gift of the Holy Ghost.

Under your formulation of the concept, the Priesthood is basically impotent and useless, shrinking and extinguishing the moment somebody chooses the wrong. How far do you really want to go with that idea? Because one can, without much effort at all, use it to negate everybody’s temple endowments, send the Holy Ghost fleeing back to Kolob, and destroy the whole raison d’être of the LDS Church. In your view, does the Atonement of Jesus Christ have any lasting effect on the lives of people, or is it just as helpless against sin as every other structural component of His Gospel?

You have explained why you feel you have reached, with logical certainty, the conclusion that my parents’ eternal marriage was spontaneously aborted in its infancy according to the laws of God, but what you haven’t explained is why, if my parents weren’t actually sealed in 2000, President Hinckley felt the need to issue an official cancellation of the sealing. He didn’t say in the letter that cancellation was just a mere formality, or an empty and meaningless administrative matter. Are you saying you have logically deduced that President Hinckley sat on the paperwork for six months as a feckless bureaucrat, rather than as God’s greatest living Prophet deliberating over a grave matter carrying eternal consequences?

-PWM

That they may be conferred upon us, it is true; but when we undertake to cover our sins, or to gratify our pride, our vain ambition, or to exercise control or dominion or compulsion upon the souls of the children of men, in any degree of unrighteousness, behold, the heavens withdraw themselves; the Spirit of the Lord is grieved; and when it is withdrawn, Amen to the priesthood or the authority of that man. D&C 121: 37

To believe for one minute that your parents, who are divorced and do not want to be together in this life or the next, will somehow be “forced” to be married in the next life goes against all logic.

And why do I say it is illogical. First and foremost, it would mean that they both are going to get to the top level of the Celestial Kingdom (remember, even the Celestial Kingdom is split into at least three areas, and only in the highest are people married for time and all eternity.) Do you really expect your mother even wants to be there? And if both of your parents do make it, do you really think that putting them back together being together would constitute “glory.”

Second, it goes against intelligent thinking….and is not our God an intelligent God who tells us that his glory is intelligence.

You will never find flaws in God’s logic. You will find flaws in the way certain people live, and perhaps it is that dichotomy that has help you walk to the edge of Mormonism to “camp.”

God has no dichotomy in his truths or laws. If he did he would cease to be God (See Alma 42: 13, 22, 25) Which brings up another topic for another discussion…Even a God can “cease to be God” as a result of breaking laws. Hmmmmm.

All truth can be circumscribed into one great whole. If any idea or believe you have does not fit and harmonize with other truths, then it…cannot be a truth. Again, the idea that your parents sealing will be some sort of “triumph card” deciding their eternal pairing beyond anything they have done which lead to their divorce and the subsequent choices they made after the divorce goes against every idea of choice and accountability and saved by “works” as well as faith.

And no man receiveth a fulness unless he keepeth his commandments. (D&C 93:27)

Behold, here is the agency of man, and here is the condemnation of man; because that which was from the beginning is plainly manifest unto them, and they receive not the light. [underline added for emphasis] (D&C 93:31)

ALL scriptures about eternal progression or condemnation (i.e., condemnation or damnation means none progression) apply to people who were and were not sealed in the temple. Again, your supposition that your mother continued to be your fathers “spiritual wife” flies directly in the face of truth. It is “Cultural Thinking and you know it’s not true.

To believe such a thing is a total dichotomy of the gospel…but you can’t resolve the issue by studying the scriptures o fasting and praying because, because…well, you tell me.

Perhaps by sitting on the “periphery” and camp you don’t have to be responsible for what you should be doing…how you should be serving, the priesthood you should be honoring…the lives you could be blessing…the truth you could be teaching. Let me ask you, is it hard to “kick at the pricks?” Of course not. Blogs like yours are a dime a dozen.

“Oh my gosh, there is a dichotomy between cultural thinking and the truth! Well, guess I’ll be inactive!”

You are too smart for this. Take down your tent and hike back to the middle where you can teach. You see the conflict of the culture and the doctrine and use it as an excuse to live outside, instead of using your intelligence and teaching others why “cultural thinking” is wrong and the true gospel of Jesus Christ is right.

Generally, the only time anyone bothers with a Sealing Cancelation is to be remarried in the temple. The sealing cancelation assures that the two people are truly divorce and have no chance of reconciliation in this life or the next. This is an administrative action. Some people live together, having been sealed, but are breaking the commandments (in secret) they have covenanted to uphold. Do your really consider them still “sealed?” They are not. They may appear to be sealed to those who sit next to them in church, but, their sealing dissolved in the sin they chose to love. Every blessing we have is predicated upon a law. You break the law, the blessing is gone.

There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon which all blessings are predicated— And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated. (D&C 130: 20-21)

One must be intelligent not to confuse administrative actions with the Gospel of Jesus Christ (i.e. truth) in its purest mode. There is a different between administration of earthly issues, the Truth of the Gospel, and, and what I call the “Doctrine of the Culture,” that some people cling to instead of the doctrine.

Fight the culture. Live the gospel! Serve the Lord.