HBM111: Waiting for Earth

Here Be Monsters

Here Be Monsters Podcast

Science, Society & Culture, Social Sciences, Personal Journals, Documentary

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2019

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Motherhood always seemed non-negotiable for Bethany Denton. Her upbringing in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints certainly instilled this. Mormons believe in what’s called a “premortal existence,” a place up in heaven where the eternal souls eagerly wait their turn to be born on Earth so they can prove their faith to Heavenly Father, and then return to glory in the afterlife.

For Mormons, life on Earth is just a short test, an opportunity to practice free agency and serve God’s will. That’s why leaders of the LDS Church like Elder Dallin H. Oaks are concerned about falling birth rates among members of the church. They believe that “one of the most serious abuses of children is to deny them birth.”

This belief in pre-life gives additional weight to God’s commandment to “be fruitful and multiply.” It’s about more than maintaining the populations; it’s about giving other children of God a chance to live. As an adult, Bethany lost her faith in the LDS Church. She stopped believing that her primary purpose in life was to be a mother, and for the first time, she started to seriously consider what her life would be without children.

Producer: Bethany Denton
Editor: Bethany Denton
Music: The Black Spot, Lucky Dragons

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, this is Here Be Monsters.
0:07.0	I lived in heaven a long time ago it is true.
0:16.7	Live there and not there with people I know,
0:20.3	so did you.
0:23.0	Then and we fought. So did you. Then Heavenly Father presented a beautiful plan.
0:30.0	All about Earth and eternal salvation for man.
0:38.0	My mom used to like to tell me that we were probably friends long before either of us were born, back when we lived in heaven.
0:48.0	My siblings, too, all of us.
0:50.0	She believes that the spirit is eternal and that every person who has ever been alive or ever will be that they already exist.
0:58.0	Like a rope that is infinitely long, with no beginning or end, our life on earth is a single knot tied in the middle.
1:05.1	And the time that comes before that knot, that's called the pre-mortem existence.
1:10.1	That's what the Mormon Church calls it.
1:11.9	As in, before you were born into a body of flesh and blood,
1:15.0	your soul already existed for eons.
1:18.4	Before you were mortal, you lived a pre-mortem existence.
1:26.0	I studied the pre-mortem existence. I studied the pre-mortem existence a lot in Sunday school but honestly my favorite depiction comes from this LDS musical
1:31.0	called Saturday's Warrior.
1:33.0	Come on, it's all part of the plan, remember?
1:35.8	The bitter with the sweet.
1:37.3	Hey, I know, hey, we can be roommates at BYU.
1:41.5	Now, Saturday's Warrior has everything.
1:44.0	Romance, puppets, casual references to BYU and not drinking Coca-Cola.
	...

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