Bodies Bodies Everywhere

I am having a weird synchronicity WmJas style about the doctrine of the body.

It started leading discussions in Sunday School.

“Whoso will do his will shall know the doctrine”–what do we think about that?

Answer: lots of things, but one I wasnt expecting was the doctrine of the body.  “It shows there are some things you can only learn by doing, which means you can only learn them as a body.”

Ok, what about “Martha, Martha”?

Again, lots of things, but “both are possibly good choices, being a body means you can’t well do both, so being a body is what makes the choice and the story significant.”

Then on Monday driving in to work I was thinking about Darwin as a prophet for no reason, and decided that while the theory of evolution by natural selection is close to being the core Darwinian thought it is not actually the core thought. The core is that the end (ie goal) of a biological species is to reproduce.  You can’t ask why species reproduce and get a reason in terms of some other objective. Reproduction is the objective.  Which means–I felt a nudge at this point–one message of our doctrine of the body is that we as human bodies have no goal beyond reproducing. We have goals in addition to that or in complement to that but not bring that. Having children is the point, not just a means. In other words, as has been said  before, the doctrine of the family and the doctrine of the body are joined.

This morning I read about Joseph Smith’s seerstones.

to dumb it down it understood that using a seer stone (physical item doing a spiritual thing) was a demonstrable tangible manifestation of having the philosophical view that spirit and matter are actually one thing and not separate.

honestly thats pretty crazy ngl.

— owen cyclops (@owenbroadcast) May 9, 2023

Then today Zen posted on “Education.”

Education

One of the reasons we came to Earth was to experience mortality and physical bodies. There is a danger of too much screen time, of trying to live something like we lived in the Premortal Existance. We need dirt under our fingernails, sand in our shoes and the occasional sunburn. We need to experience and master the appetites of the body. We need to struggle with the problems of life. Even the Savior didn’t start his ministry until he had lived 30 years as a common laborer.