What do you expect to spend the majority of your time on in the celestial kingdom? Or, if you don’t think you’ll qualify, what do you think people will be doing there?
Justify your answer below
Monday Mid-Afternoon Theological Poll: Active Afterlife Edition
August 12, 2019 by
Justify your answer below
By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog 
Urim & Thummiming.
The non-linearity of time in many of governing theories of space makes me wonder if energy or thought is required to keep this universe playing nice. And as this universe may be a closed system, if one transcends that barrier, it may be similar to the transformative of matter to plasma … same “stuff” but totally different properties.
The church-taught notion that we’ll be basically doing missionary work forever chills me.
Why isn’t “Enjoying some well-earned solitude” an option?!?
Lying under a shade tree dozing.
Hopefully reading everything Jane Austen wrote after her death is an option.
Frolicking on a sea of glass and fire while marveling why my feet don’t get burned.
Dipping fried foods in fry sauce
I hope the afterlife is like a library. But not one of those Borges-Peck libraries.
Space exploration comes the closest. I’m pretty sure an eternity of anything I can imagine would be hell. So the answer has to lie in the realm of unknown and unknowable.
Pregnant for eternity as part of a harem of sister wives worshipping my husband-god and pumping out spirit babies to glorify and worship him too.
I’ve always considered multi-day family reunions to be hell on Earth, so…….
You did not give anything I want. Reading, skiing, swimming with whales, petting dinosaurs, designing beautiful clothes, inviting friends and family for dinner, laughing, taking a nap by the river.
Definitely space exploration. It’s gonna take a lot of time finding potentially habitable planets for the next cycle.
I selected family reunions primarily because you forgot to include, “I expect to be in a lesser kingdom” as an option, but also because I’ve always liked this quote from Marlin K Jensen’s “Living After The Manner of Happiness” devotional:
“Sometimes after an enjoyable family home evening, or during a fervent family prayer, or when our entire family is at the dinner table on Sunday evening eating waffles and engaging in a session of lively, good-natured conversation, I quietly say to myself: ‘If heaven is nothing more than this, it will be good enough for me!’”
It would be interesting to see the results of this poll broken out by sex.
Personally, I have no ideas about the afterlife. I’d say I picked up at church that LDS theology teaches Planetary Engineering and Guiding Mortals for men and Spiritual Family Production for women.
I probably won’t make it because I clean the church with a grudging heart, but if I were to make it I would enjoy eating lots of fruit and ice cream. For a while, at least. And then I might explore “celestial dementia,” where I get to experience new things–the same new things–over and over again. Like fruit and ice cream.
Harp playing.
Whatever our Father is now doing.
I’ll probably just sit around and complain about other people. But I enjoy that, so…
One of the big problems with our half-baked LDS afterlife theology is that we have two opposing views of celestial residence. One is that we will be living on the earth here with our family in eternal bliss. The other is that we’ll be like God and be off on some Kolob of our own creating worlds without number and peopling them with our spirit children (trillions upon trillions of whom we have birthed through a process similar to what we do here in mortality). Perhaps the celestial kingdom, per se, is just a way station, where we learn the ropes of being deity and then go off to create our own galaxy. Or perhaps we just don’t have a clue what the hereafter will be like. One thing to consider is that this earth, celestialized, will be the most populous of the kingdoms. With the number of kids who die before the age of eight and are therefore exalted without other requirement (according to LDS theology) and with all those billions who didn’t hear the gospel in mortality but will accept it in the spirit world (according to several LDS prophets), this is going to be a very crowded place. Let’s hope it’s a way station. Unless celestial resources are much more plentiful or permanent than earthly ones, we’ll use them all up fast and pollute the heck our of the celestial kingdom.
Well, this proves that we really have no idea what happens in the afterlife… and some of those choices are definitely not things I would choose to do.
Evolving.
Think it through. One eternal round. Never was a father with out first being a son.
If you think the idea of a father and mother caring for their children is hell, what are you doing with your life? What do you think was done for you? Broaden your mind.
I thought and wrestled with the idea for over a decade in the temple before coming to the question I needed to ask to receive the right answer and the light in the room most certainly came on.
The eternal destiny of the faithful sons and daughters of God is to receive all his glory. Everything Elohim has done and is doing, his exalted children will do. I find comfort in the fact that Elohim is plural — generations of fathers and mothers making it possible for you to be one with them, through the plan of salvation.
Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.
Attending eternal meetings.
Speeding across the alkali flats in my gold plated rocket car.
First I plan to learn everything there is to learn; that oughta take a while. After that, who knows? All sorts of lovely things, I should think.
Reliving scene after humiliating scene from my mortal life from various perspectives while in cosmic therapy until somehow I find the courage to stumble out from under my primordial hillock.
DB, I think you are referring to the Telestial experience..