Save the Dead People

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there lived a God who was very bad at math. He was so bad at math that he struggled even in the early stages, like where counting and addition were involved. You know, math stuff that kids generally master in first grade. Long division was right out.

Unfortunately, this God wasn’t really great shakes at sociology either. He also wasn’t setting things on fire in the critical reasoning department. Essentially, he was the kind of God who made you wonder what your planet had done so wrong as a previous planet to merit this particular God.

Spoiler: that galaxy is our galaxy, and that God is our God.

Here’s how we know our God, referred to by those of us in the know as Heavenly Father, sucks at math and sociology and critical reasoning: he created a master plan for all of humanity which would result in the vast majority of all people who ever lived accidentally going to hell, through no fault of their own.

Is it hell? Is it the Telestial Kingdom? Is it the Balrog in the Mines of Moria?

Yes.

Avoiding The Bad Place was already a serious uphill battle, even before the faulty master plan. Essentially, any sinning would land you there. Premarital sex? Straight to hell. Cheat on a math test? Also hell. Drink coffee, that delicious concoction created from a bean God made and put on most major continents for the greater happiness and effective functioning of humanity? Hell.

It’s unclear whether Heavenly Father ran his Plan for Humanity by anybody before proposing it. Like, whether there was a convenient angel on hand to say, “Hmm, is this bit maybe a tad harsh?” Maybe he had a whole team of advisors, but they were sycophants, like your average corporate board, and just said, “Sir, you are an unmitigated genius. Bravo!” before returning to plotting their fantasy football teams.

Given that there are many excellent statisticians out there in the human world, plus a ton of other people who math with a fair amount of competence, I’m also going to suggest that Heavenly Father might have distributed narcotics to his Pre-Existence full of Heavenly Children before pitching this plan, in order to minimize the pushback.

“So, listen,” Heavenly Father probably said to His vast multitude of spirit children. “Here’s the deal, kids. I made this giant Heaven place, and chose to quite literally father billions of you, but you can’t just stay here forever.”

“Why not?” somebody probably piped up. Even in the Pre-Existence, there were almost certainly people who could not read a room.

“Because I made a rule that says that you can only live here with me if you prove that you’re good enough.”

“Well,” that same person probably said, “that feels a tad harsh. Why not just un-make that rule? You’re God, after all.”

“I don’t much like your attitude, Bill,” Heavenly Father probably said. “Anyway, moving along. Here’s the plan: I’m going to create this place called Earth, and you’re all going to get mortal bodies and in the process forget about everything related to me, including that you once lived here. Then you will live a normal human life span, somewhere between zero and 120 years. If, during that normal human life, you prove that you love me and that you’re righteous, then when you die I’ll let you come live with me again.”

A lot of hands probably shot up into the air at that point, as multitudes of spirit children asked questions like, “What’s a mortal body?” or “What’s a human?” and “What’s death?”

Then one person probably asked, “Okay, so if we’re all doing the same test and supposed to prove that we love you and that we’re righteous, we all show up with the same level of memory, support, and access, right? So, like, we’ll all grow up in comfortably suburban neighborhoods and all have the same level of health and the same advantages and disadvantages, right? Because it’s a test and all, I mean. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be fair. It would be like giving some people the test answers in advance, and lying to other people about the day the test was on.”

“Yeah, I thought about doing it that way,” Heavenly Father probably said. “But no. Your circumstances are going to vary widely. Like, to an extent you would not believe. Some of you will be born into poverty in a war-torn third world country and watch your mother die of malaria after your father is executed by a warlord. Some of you will be born into incredible wealth with parents who love you and go to the best schools and spend summers in Europe. Some of you will be born with such severe birth defects that you only live seventeen minutes. Some of you will smoke a pack of cigarettes a day and never work out and enjoy astonishingly good health until you die peacefully in your sleep at the age of 114. Long story short, nope on the level playing field thing, it’s gonna be a total crapshoot.”

The future MIT professors were probably glancing at each other with concerned expressions at this point, while other spirit children asked questions like, “Why would you make it a total crapshoot?” and “What’s a third-world country?” and “What are cigarettes?”

Then another person, one of the relentlessly optimistic ones, probably piped up and said, “Well, at least we’ll all have exactly the same opportunity to learn about your One True Gospel, Heavenly Father.”

At that point Heavenly Father probably shifted uncomfortably in his chair, even though He could have just made the chair more comfortable, what with being the all-powerful Creator of the Universe. “Yeah, so. About that. Turns out, no on that, too. I mean some of you will, for sure. But a whole bunch of you - and I use that term conservatively - will never in the course of your entire lives be exposed to the true Word and Will of Me, God.”

The people in the Pre-Existence probably got real quiet at that point.

“Like,” the first guy, Bill, probably said, “how many is ‘a bunch’?”

Heavenly Father probably thought about this before saying, “Oh, about ninety billion. Give or take.”

This was worse news than finding out that the Celestial Kingdom’s Starbucks only carried hot chocolate and steamed milk. “I’m sorry, you said 90 billion? As in, billion with a ‘b,’ not million with an ‘m’?”

“What, are you saying I can’t count? Are you implying that your Heavenly Father is BAD at COUNTING?”

“No, no, nothing like that,” people probably said. “It’s more that we’ve just got some questions about this particular plan, maybe a little constructive criticism, plus a suggestion to create a review committee on the whole endeavor. We definitely want to get clarity on this.”

But additional explanation did not improve the situation. In fact, there were probably several thousand panic attacks in the crowd, if panic attacks were something that the incorporeal spirits of the Pre-Existence could even have.

This is the plan, as Heavenly Father explained it:

Part One: Every single spirit in the Pre-Existence would be required to go to earth and get a mortal body, a process that would result in such severe amnesia that nobody would remember that they had even been spirits in the Pre-Existence, much less gotten a set of clear instructions from Big Daddy. They’d also forget other crucial skills, like how to use words and how to not shit themselves.

Part Two: Heavenly Father would make a series of rules that His children would have to follow in order to gain entrance to VIP Heaven (aka the Celestial Kingdom).

Some of these rules would make logical sense from an anthropological and sociological standpoint, like “absolutely no murdering people.” Some of them would be less logical, like if a guy fucks a cow, both the guy and the cow have to be executed (even if the cow didn’t consent to the fucking, which, let’s be real, it probably didn’t).

One of the most important rules would be that every single person who lived MUST be a baptized and confirmed member of Heavenly Father’s One True Church. No exceptions. At the same time, Heavenly Father would tell zero humans about this rule for several millennia. It would be like Fight Club - and nobody talks about Fight Club.

As you can see, Heavenly Father, Jesus, and whatever other guy is standing on the stairs (Bill? Lucifer? We may never know for sure) are all white guys.

This is a rare photograph of the exact moment at which Heavenly Father revealed that 90 billion people or so were gonna flunk earth life through accident of birth.

Part Three: After all of the eternal rules had been established, Heavenly Father would dump a bunch of humans on a planet with only a handful of instructions, half of which involved fruit consumption, and none of which involved baptism. He would then let them run wild for a few thousand years, broken up by the occasional genocide so that Heavenly Father could prove He was still in control. During a substantial portion of these thousands of years, nearly all humans would be illiterate and thus incapable of keeping records of any kind - much less records of the names of everyone who had lived and died without being baptized into the One True Church.

Part Four: Heavenly Father would send his favorite kid, Jesus, down to earth to prove that it was possible to live a perfect life, and if you weren’t doing that already, that was definitely on you.

Part Five: After Jesus’ death and resurrection, Heavenly Father would wait a few hundred years to find out if people were going to fuck up His perfect religious system 2.0, as introduced by Jesus. (Spoiler alert: they were absolutely going to fuck it up.) When they did, He would then remove the Truth of His Gospel from the entire world for 15 centuries or so, which would mean that anyone born during that time wouldn’t have the chance to hear about the Gospel or Heavenly Father’s plan.

This would happen during a time which most people were STILL illiterate and incapable of keeping records of any kind - much less records of the names of everyone who had lived and died without being baptized into the One True Church.

Part Six: After roughly 15 centuries of letting humankind run wild to do things like burn people at the stake, invent cannons and impalement, and write bad poetry, Heavenly Father would look around the entire population of humanity and see if there might be a farm boy in upstate New York he could trust with all the information about Heavenly Father’s perfect religious system. He would spend years spooling juicy nuggets out to the farm boy, and nobody else. In the entire world. Literally everyone who wasn’t American and white would have no idea for DECADES that God’s One True Church had been restored.

Part Seven: Heavenly Father would make the millennia of humans who died without being baptized into the One True Church OUR problem. He would do this by requiring that the members of the One True Church find the names of every person who had ever lived since the beginning of humanity. They would load these names into a database, and then faithful Temple-going Mormons would have to go to the Temple and be baptized by proxy (and by immersion) for every single one of those people, going back to when Adam and Eve staggered out of the Garden of Eden, and before Mesopotamia invented the first form of writing.

Even after baptism, the work wouldn’t be done: Church members would need to perform all the other temple rituals by proxy for every person who had ever lived, like endowments or temple weddings, in addition to baptism, because otherwise all of those people would be stuck in Spirit Prison forever and ever, until the ending of the galaxy and beyond, amen.

This flow chart gives you a general idea of the broad strokes of Heavenly Father’s plan, though it DOES skip the part where most people in the history of ever will be born during a time that has neither a) the One True Church available on the face of the earth, and b) reliable record-keeping systems paired with widespread literacy.

***

“As you can see, this is an awesome plan,” Heavenly Father probably said, when he had finished explaining this to his billions of spirit children. “It’s basically flawless, which makes sense, because I am flawless.”

Somebody, maybe me, or maybe Bill from earlier who STILL couldn’t read a room, probably walked right into that one. “Okay, so, let’s set aside for a moment the fact that clearly most of us are going to be born during a time in which your One True Church is nowhere in sight, so we won’t have the option of accepting the Truth of the Gospel. How are those of us who are responsible for saving all the dead people even going to find out all of the names of everyone who ever lived? Given that there are going to be, like, thousands of years in which people are illiterate, and thus not keeping reliable records of any kind?”

“You know what? I can’t solve all of your problems for you,” Heavenly Father probably said. “Also, a little faith would be nice. It took me a solid afternoon to come up with this idea and I don’t appreciate the negativity.”

***

Conservative estimates of the quantity of people who have ever lived on this particular globe put the number at around 100 billion, give or take. This one guy actually did the calculations - check them out, they’re really interesting - and figured out that, at the current rate of temple work, it would take “dozens of thousands of years” to perform enough baptisms and other temple rituals to save all of the dead people. That estimate’s probably low, given that it doesn’t take into account all of the future people who will live and die without having the opportunity to be baptized into the One True Church.

And this is assuming that we can even find the names of the relevant dead people who need saving, which is by no means a sure thing. My dad’s family history research goes back like six generations and it’s both incomplete and bulky as hell. It takes up four bookshelves full of binders in my parents’ basement. My dad once offered to help a friend of mine out with his family history, but then was stymied when that friend said, “I think you’re going to have trouble finding those records, given that my ancestors were abducted from Africa and enslaved here more than two centuries ago.”

Fortunately for the dead people, there are some work-arounds when it comes to shitty records, and I experienced these work-arounds firsthand when I did baptisms for the dead.

I was twelve years old when I got my Temple recommend, and it was a lot more effort than I thought it was going to be. I had to talk to the Bishop, sure - I expected that. He asked me questions about whether I paid a full tithe (10% on gross income, not net, although I didn’t have an income, given that, like I said, I was twelve) and whether I obeyed my parents and whether I was sexually pure (on that last one I lied my ass off while my cheeks went fluorescent pink). And then I had a second interview, with the Stake President, who asked me all the same questions, but in a different office in a different building.

Then, BOOM! just like that, I was eligible to save dead people.

It was a very cold Tuesday morning well before dawn when my dad took me to the Temple for the first time. I had no idea what to expect, but it still took me a little off guard to realize that I was gonna have to get buck naked in the women’s locker room because my normal underwear wasn’t holy enough to do baptisms in. The Temple workers gave me a weird little bodysuit that stood in for underwear, along with a white jumpsuit that zipped up the front. I stripped down in a little cubicle, fighting back a panic attack at being naked in a holy place and hoping that I wouldn’t start my period out of nowhere and bleed all over somebody else’s underwear and jumpsuit.

The baptismal font in the Temple is way fancier than the normal one living people get baptized in. It’s a giant bowl of water balanced on the back of twelve stone oxen, which I guess represent the twelve tribes of Israel, even though most of those tribes weren’t even Mormon.

The water in the font was warm, but I still shivered as I waded into it. I’d fucked up my own baptism - one of my feet kicked up and my toe broke the surface, which meant that my dad had to start the baptism all over. What if I still sucked at getting baptized, except this time it would cost some random woman her immortal soul?

The Temple worker guy who was performing the baptisms smiled at me reassuringly and explained how to plug my nose when he dunked me under water. The plugging my nose part was important because I was getting dunked ten times in a row, for ten different women, and it would be a bummer if I blew diluted snot out of my nose and into the baptismal font.

Then he started the baptisms.

“Latter-Day Skank [he didn’t say this, but you get the gist], I baptize you for and in behalf of Deborah Smith, who is dead, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.” Then he dunked me under water, and we started the whole thing over again for the second woman.

We were a few baptisms in when he said, “I baptize you for and in behalf of Mary, no last name, who is dead,” and all of my worries about flinging a body part out of the water collided with a much larger concern:

How would Heavenly Father, or anyone else, for that matter, know which Mary I was being baptized for? Mary was a pretty common name, and had been for centuries. There had to be gajillions of Marys whose last names had never made it into any permanent records; which one was this one? Did all the Marys in the afterlife just stand in line, and get their baptisms knocked out on a first-come, first-serve basis? How would anyone know when we had handled all of the Marys with no last names? Because there were no last names, how would we know, for that matter, whether we were baptizing the same Mary over and over again?

I worried about this the rest of the day, before realizing, with some relief, that maybe this was the solution to the problem of not knowing the names of everyone who had died. If it was okay to baptize someone without a last name, it was probably okay to baptize someone without a first name, too. In that case, a Temple worker could just say, “I baptize you for and in behalf of some woman in Persia who lived 2,500 years ago” and Heavenly Father could sort it out.

We’d be able to finish redeeming the dead in record time if names weren’t important! We could take a stab at how many people we thought had lived and died in a given civilization, and then go nuts doing some generic baptisms. It was the perfect solution - less labor intensive than finding actual historical mentions of people we were pretty sure existed. It would be like putting fluoride in the water, but in a much more holy way - everybody would be covered whether they needed it or not.

And if we missed a few people in strict terms, it would probably shape up okay, anyway.

After all, it wasn’t like Heavenly Father knew how to count.