All My Gettings

In Sunday School this week, someone brought up the fact that, if we want to see a good example of fatherhood, we should look to our Heavenly Father. Now, I'm a fan of God, in particular the Mormon conception of God, but let's think about this assertion. Imagine for a minute that you're going to pattern your life as the head of your household after him. Here's some things you should probably do:

• Never show up in person
• Expect seemingly impossible things of your children
• Only be willing to accept your children if they do precisely what you want them to
• Demand that your way is better and require submission to it
• Don't communicate openly with them
• Give them examples of seriously injuring your other children as an impetus to shape up
• Make arbitrary rules, and change them from time to time
• Make your oldest son do most of the work
• Allow all sorts of bad things to happen to your kids, because you can't stop their siblings from being mean to them

It's pretty obvious I shouldn't go to church when I'm a snarky mood, right?

So, imagine for a moment you've baptized your ancestors by proxy. All is kosher and recorded, and they accept it and all that jazz. If the same folks have their corpses re-animated as zombies, would they be members of the church? Would we give them callings? What sort of first presidency missives would we see?

The theological concerns aside, I smell a good Mormon gothic novel here. A mysterious source turns the dead into zombies, but only the dead who haven't had their work done for them. What's that you say? Let the dead bury the dead? Well, if you don't get your genealogy done, it'll be more let my dead eat you! That'll light a fire under the saints' complacency, won't it?

Relatedly, I wonder if this is the real reason the church won't let us do ordinance work until one year after a person dies. I mean, surely the zombie window expires once the corpse isn't a fleshy creature. Granted, what with sealed coffins and embalming fluid, bodies stay bodies far longer. Thus, maybe the lesson we should learn here is that modern mortuary practices are a tool of the adversary.

They, monogamy, and extending the priesthood to all races is pretty much a sign of the apocalypse.