Here is my current view on Mormonism, as of the year 2026. I think it's unwise and self-hating almost to take advice for how to live life from a bunch of middle easterners in the first century who thought the world was ending in their lifetime and who had no concept of modern American democracy. Why would anyone read a holy book not produced by their own ethnicity or countrymen and written closer to the century in which we live by instead choosing a holy book written in the 1st century in a foreign part of the world by a different ethnicity by those who are not a member of their country? It seems kind of odd to take advice and directions from another ethnicity with a 1st century mindset, speaking a different language in another part of the world, who's political ideology contains ideas antithetical to American democracy. This is what Creedal-Christianity is telling me to do, reject my own ancestral religion of Mormonism which was produced on the American continent during the time of American democracy, and instead embrace a Pauline worldview that is often antithetical to the American Dream.
In my view, Creedal-Christianity makes no sense. Especially when you realize that Paul's spiritual mysticism is based on his concept of imitating a suffering Messiah so that the more you suffer as a slave and express the virtues of a slave being weak and subservient and docile, the closer you are to this Jewish messiah. As Paul says it in Galatians 2:20 (Expanded Bible):
I was put to death on the cross [have been crucified] with Christ, and I do not live anymore—it is Christ who lives in me. I still live in my body [flesh], but I live by faith in [or because of the faithfulness of] the Son of God ...
In other words, to take Paul seriously and imitate him as he says to do in the New Testament, would mean copying his behavior which would mean abandoning the American pursuit of happiness through life-lived-now, property, and freedom, and instead living a life as a potential martyr not seeking to live now, not acquiring property or marriage or freedom but ideally being celibate and thinking of yourself as a slave of Paul's messiah. To be truly Pauline is to live a life of servitude and slavishness and seeking suffering and eventually a martyr's death. I think this is obviously impractical and irrational and most modern Christians completely ignore most of what Paul actually says in the New Testament as they simply reinterpret everything to match their American lifestyles.
As a Nordic and Anglo-Saxon American I also find it odd that so many Americans would take the advice of someone who spoke a foreign language in a foreign culture and country, who lived 2,000 years ago. I can certainly strain out a gnat from the camel of Paul's teachings and find a lot of beneficial teachings but the overall message is completely antithetical to the American way of life. Blindly following his way and his mentality and lifestyle does not make any sense to me. I think someone like me can get the same kind of spirituality and mysticism from a fellow Northern European like Frederick Nietzsche, who wrote closer to the 21st century in an Indo-European language related to English; who wrote on the other side of Darwin and the industrial revolution, who has more useful things to say on how to live today as an American.
So why would I ever be a Protestant or a Catholic or even an Eastern Orthodox when those spiritual ideologies are still stuck in the 1st century with the ideal being docile and slavish preaching egalitarianism and not embracing American democracy and American exceptionalism; and has nothing positive to say about the reality of our competitive world of "dominance hierarchies" (as Jordan Peterson put it). Note that Jordan Peterson himself in his Bible Lecture series, begins by completely rejecting Christian Fundamentalism (i.e. biblical literalism). For Peterson does not take anything in the Bible literally, as he simply mines it for psychological archetypes and reinterprets things through a Jungian and Nietzcheanish lens.
So if I were to be religious, or as they say "spiritual but not religious," holding to a religious or spiritual mental framework in seeing the world, why would I not go with my immediate ancestors chosen religion of Mormonism: when it was created by Anglo-Americans like me who were my own relatives, who canonized the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution as sacred writ?
Note that when I speak of being "Mormon," I am talking only about being an Independent Mormon. Independent means you are not a paying member of the mainstream LDS Church headquartered in Salt Lake Utah, nor any other Mormon sect or denomination. The reason I choose not to belong to any denomination is because I don't like when religion becomes controlling. So an independent form of Mormonism, where you don't belong to any particular sect or denomination but practice a kind of non-denominational Mormonism to me is the best version of "Mormon spirituality" for the American like me; for you have the psychological benefits of believing a God is on your side, seeing the Universe as a friendly place (as Einstein framed it), but you are forming a spirituality through people who are your own ancestors as a kind of ethnic religion for Anglo-Saxons in the 1800s. For all of the leaders in Mormonism in the 1800s, when most of the Mormon scriptures were produced, were Anglo-Saxons living on the American continent; they were Anglo-Americans speaking the Norse-influenced English language and therefore they knew what it was like to be an American living on the American continent. But when I pick up the Bible those are people in the Middle East who have no genetic or cultural or linguistic similarities to me, they live in a completely different culture and spoke a different language; with Paul himself unfortunately being mistaken about his Messiah is going to return to Earth at any minute and scoop up his celibate male-bride followers who have lowered themselves to acting as if they were slaves of their messiah husband as male-brides, who believed they became "spiritual Jews" by being seeded by Paul's Messiah supernaturally; so that they discarded their own cultures and genealogy by thinking of the memory of their great-grandfathers, whose image was projected onto their Norse gods, now seen as demons. So instead of maining the memory of their ancestors through their Norse gods, they became demons and avoid. Instead of retaining their ethnic European cultures, they rejected most of it as now "spiritual semites." They selected this foreign religion, this foreign deity from the Middle East; and so now they thought they should be slavish male slaves and male-brides to a male Messiah that's offering a psychology of weakness and slavishness (as Nietzsche rightly argued); with the end goal being your eventual suffering and death to discard your cursed and disgusting Anglo-Saxon body that was seen as contaminated by Sin that is now purchased as a slave and engaged to be married to a Jewish Messiah; and eventually the Earth will be conquered by a Jewish Messiah who will make every ethnicity (Norse, Anglo-Saxon and Japanese, etc.,) bow to this Jewish sovereign; so that there's no more American sovereignty or democracy. So I can't really take the New Testament seriously except as mythology and the only way to benefit from it psychologically is through a Jordan Peterson frame of mind; and the only way to integrate the Bible into my spiritual worldview that feels empowering and not disempowering and demoralizing, is to ignore what Paul says about being a slave and an supernaturally inseminated male-bride of a messiah; and instead reinterpret the Bible through Mormonism, because in Mormonism you have the insurrection of the texts as I argue here: wherein my own relatives as Anglo-Americans took over the biblical narratives and made my people, my ancestral lineage, the chosen seed and people of God; for in Mormon scripture the Father God is speaking to my people, Anglo-Americans and selecting my ancestors in the 1800s to be the chosen people of God with the power to rule and conquer over all the other nations. So again, unless I am a self-hating "white" person , despising my own ancestry, as a sad cuckolded type of person, why would I go with any other religion or spirituality than Independent Mormonism?
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