The idea in the title is self-evident as an answer key to Christian religious history above all others. Other religions seem far more depressingly sensible and logical. But for the Christian reader who wishes the work behind this proposition to be properly shown, let us examine a succession of famous gentlemen of a prophetic inclination to examine the direction in which God generally likes to kick our faith whenever we get too dull.
The common theme is that reality is joyfully daft and cheerful, that God issues Revelations on a recurring basis to remind human beings of this fact, and that fallen humanity has a regrettably consistent aversion to the daftness, which puts it into greater and more constant communion with demonic forces than is typical in existence. That, by the way, is one major symptom of its fallenness.
(Although this also means that mortal humans are, on average, less arrogant and more realistic about their imperfection. The persistent demonic whispers still get into the minds of more-protected incarnate races eventually, and those races are caught utterly unprepared.)
Just a small selection, I fear:
Abraham: Allegedly told to sacrifice his son. At the top of the mountain an angel of the LORD meets him and perhaps says rather crossly: “You know you shouldn’t instantly rush to execute every stupid and evil idea an apparent deity tells you to execute, no matter how impressive and cinematic the Inner Voice sounds?” The King Canutes proceed to distort this staggering and humiliating object-lesson in Responsibility of Discernment into a story about the value of Unthinking Obedience, starting humanity on a dreary multi-thousand-year detour into Organized Religion.
Ezekiel: Well, to be perfectly honest, the business of preparing bread with dung is a rather grim and not joyful daftness. But Ezekiel was also rewarded for this (since God had regretfully established that the Israelites wanted to obey grim and daft orders and was tailoring his Lessons accordingly) by authoring the valley-of-dry-bones vision. The King Canutes seemed to think this was a metaphor for the political restoration of Israel, that it is just the Israelites' hopeless love-affair with mere matter, or something utterly mundane and asinine and dismissive of that nature.
Jesus Christ: Believed that He was Jesus Christ, which is agreed by psychologists everywhere to be a definite sign of insanity. First thirty years of his life He was doing… things, which may have included gap years in Albion and/or the Far East, and filled with deeds were either utterly-ordinary or so outrageous that they were, in any case, deemed not suitable for putting into scripture apart from oblique references. That was perhaps due to foresight that, however edifying and entertaining a Complete Biography of Jesus Christ might turn out to be, the proof-texters might spindle His utterly incidental sayings and shenanigans into some utterly monstrous doctrines. Among His various public works was a rather impressive object-demonstration, conducted under rather unfortunate political circumstances, that Ezekiel's valley-of-dry-bones thing was, in fact, meant entirely and completely literally. Apart from the emotional trauma of that harrowing sequence of events, Christ's disciples and friends were reported to enjoy spending time with Him immensely, although Christ's divine sense of sardonic irony fails to translate across the broken telephone of Aramaic -> Koine -> KJV English -> modern ears. Utterly baffled by the God-Man and his feats and sayings, the King Canutes went and armed themselves with Plato and Aristotle taken out of their original cultural and historical context -- the decay of Ancient Greek virtue -- to try to make the whole thing seem slightly less real.
William Blake: Aptly described by reputable authorities such as my old high-school philosophy-teacher as 'a bit of a nutter'. Next time I speak with him, I will be extremely pleased to inform him that, as of Apr 6 2023, I am, in fact, significantly and objectively more of a nutter than Mr. Blake, although nowhere near as skilled at drawing or print-making. After all, just to begin with, for all his eccentric visions, Blake did not dabble in Exuberant Mormon Revelations, although he did display a suspicious affinity for metal plates with writings on them. He was, sadly, not popular or well-understood enough for us to find out how the King Canutes might have handled his teachings.
Joseph Smith: Requiring an entire section of his own, and therefore terminating this list.
If nothing good comes out of Galilee, then that ironic saying surely goes double for Upstate New-York!
I have outlined in my prior post, with basic but steely napkin-math, how joyfully-daft the scale of celestial reproduction really-is if one takes it at all seriously as a doctrine, and hinted at how the LDS remained trapped between the inescapable joyful-daftness of their doctrine and the desire to resemble a respectable and orthodox Church organization. I now have reason to suspect that Joseph Smith was soft-pedalling the things he heard and saw mightily. Indeed, Joseph Smith’s King Follett speculations were perhaps only done as freely as they were under the considerable mental pressure of his own imminent demise.
But perhaps the LDS were punished exceedingly for their lack of faith and imagination. For example, why did they attempt the impolite and ill-fated gratuitous experiment of reviving Old Testament polygamy? An institution poorly adapted to mortal man’s sinful and increasingly-degraded-over-the-centuries socio-sexual psychology, reviled by the surrounding society they were supposed to preach a Restored Gospel to, that had no end of more-essential stumbling points to focus on overcoming. Christ Himself took some decisive steps to close the door on mortal polygamy by issuing or tolerating certain of His sayings attributed in the Synoptic Gospels to become undeniable Biblical Canon….
Well, supposing for a second that polygamy is a feature of the divine celestial or terrestrial world, even as an optional or occasional or third-best option, perhaps grandfathered in from Old Testament patriarchs who genuinely did love all their wives, and that the LDS did not permit themselves to contemplate the higher realms where such things are feasible and their extent and wonder and variety too closely, on account of their sheer daftness of what they would then be obliged to believe in… then their strong revelatory intuition of the reality and feasibility of those realms may have tempted them to attempt to enact the things they had an insistent intimation of here on Earth, in utterly biologically- and societally-unsuitable conditions.
I suspect, and plan to explore with further reading, the idea that, beyond merely polygamy, much of the unsuitable utopianism and social-experimentation of the early Mormons was an attempt to transplant onto Earth practices that were standard and Good… and adapted for a subspecies of humanity with fundamentally different biological traits, sociosexual psychology, divine blessings, and mode of consciousness! For example, to tile every land of the only Earth we have with identical plats of Zion — a documented proposal of Smith’s that he presumably uttered without blushing {TODO: need to find citation, but I'm fairly sure I've seen it; will retract or update this claim} — is ecologically and morally an utterly insane and ridiculous proposition. I should hope this was also evident in 19th America. But it would be a perfectly viable, if revoltingly dull and suburban, planning strategy to pursue for a hypothetical alternate subspecies of humanity that has terraforming skills and an overabundance of planets to cultivate, such that, I suppose, not all of them need to be menageries of untamed wilderness and ecological variety….
{TODO: The Plat of Zion thing definitely merits research and another post. I don't have the entire history yet of what the LDS were trying to do. But here's an urbanist article https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/plat-of-zion/ that also immediately suggests to me the LDS were copying Enochian or antediluvian blueprints and then realized that just wasn't going to work for mortals:
Young also realized a city couldn’t survive on businesses run out of people’s homes—it would need commercial and industrial districts.
That is to say, for reasons well outside the scope of this post, running a business out of one's home is an obvious and convenient default for Enochians, but it wasn't for Americans. Other stuff about street width and cars and what was supposed to go in-between the streets and inside the blocks is also suggestive, though not as blatantly.}
It would have been far better, I think, if the Mormons did not feel pressured to reenact the lifestyle of Enoch’s Zion, which, even prior to that city’s translation into terrestrial immortality… was a utopia constructed by incredibly-long-lived antediluvian humans from a far more communal era of human consciousness who were, it is important to note, not yet burdened by the Curse of Babel that was specifically and explicitly instituted by God as a safeguard against excessive construction of any further Earthly Utopias among the mortals!
Instead, I believe the Mormons ought to have studied with open eyes the copious revelations of other realms and eras of Reality being poured down on them, compared themselves with the Enochians and the Noachians and the countless other alter-human cultures they might have learned about if they’d continued asking about the nature of Existence out of mere honest childlike curiosity, studied and compared the natural talents of various far places and eras to their own human condition, understood the extremely deep differences among the various lineages of humanity -- and perhaps discovered the few, extremely crucial areas in which modern, degraded, latter-day barely-reproductively-viable mortal humans are infinitely superior to translated terrestrial Zionic or Renegade Enochians who, in almost all other respects, could easily and unfortunately be mistaken for capital-g Gods by any uninformed mortal observer who might happen to deal with them in the flesh.
Of course, some Mormons did blindly grapple their way to a partial understanding of the situation. They are, nowadays, over-represented among the ranks of those who write solid works of Fantasy. For example, Brandon Sanderson has an interesting book ('The Rithmatist') that centres on a complex system of chalk-magic. Eventually I will get around to reading it and using it as a litmus-test. If my suspicion is correct, then the system of chalk-magic in his book will be self-consistent and detailed and sufficiently-resonant that it may well point to some configuration of Reality and Beings that may actually be enacted somewhere, now or in the future. Note that, however Real the Magic, and however much his world may echo North America, Sanderson did not attempt to enact it in our own plane of reality with his limited abilities, and he certainly did not propose to incorporate chalk drawings as a weapons-system in the comprehensive territorial-defence strategy for the State of Utah. That, I think, should amply-illustrate my suspicions about what sort of gift of Revelation it was God had poured out on the LDS in the Midwest and where exactly they went astray in using that gift.
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