Man will become like God, say Mormons and transhumanists in Salt Lake City

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), aka Mormon Church, has a concept of boundless elevation and exaltation of Man, through all means including science and technology, until he becomes like God.

Conversely, God was once like Man before attaining an exalted status. “[Mormonism] allows for humans to ascend to a higher, more godlike level,” writes Max More in his introduction to The Transhumanist Reader, “rather than sharply dividing God from Man.”

I’m so glad that you spoke about the trolls. They are evident and should be ignored or told to go away.

So; now speaking the truth about a cult that is taking it's members to Hell, is now considered to be trollish behavior?

And CS Lewis would strongly disagree with the mormon doctrine of Exaltation. Standard mormon misrepresentation.

Not so fast. The “sleight of mind” performed by the Mormons comes nowhere close even to the “sleight of hand” of a Las Vegas lounge stage magician. C. S. Lewis is no crypto-Mormon. Not only do his works not support the Mormon theology of deification, in fact they expressly contradict it. Each of the Lewis citations have been taken out of their contexts and twisted. In addition, frequently in his writings about humanity’s eternal destiny, he carefully clarifies the eternal and impassible gulf between the only Creator and His creatures, including humans.

In the first quote, Lewis’s context comes in a chapter called “Counting the Cost,” and describes the process of sanctification that God begins at the moment one becomes a Christian and will continue until we are reunited after death and the judgment with our resurrected bodies, when we will be “perfect,” that is, “complete,” as creatures. In fact, the sentence immediately preceding the Mormons’ favorite is “He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command.”18 In the same small volume he explains,

What God begets is God; just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man. That is why men are not Sons of God in the sense that Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things of the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God.19

In The Weight of Glory Lewis explains what he means by the perfection that God will work in us as we are sanctified, resurrected, and glorified. He distinguishes between God, the only Creator, and humans, even glorified, the created. In the beginning of the essay he explains,

The promises of Scripture may very roughly be reduced to five heads. It is promises, firstly, that we shall be with Christ; secondly, that we shall be like Him; thirdly . . . that we shall have “glory”; fourthly, that we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained; and finally, that we shall have some sort of official position in the universe—ruling cities, judging angels, being pillars of God’s temple.20 Lewis’s positive assertions that we can never be deified in the Mormon sense come in a variety of forms. In his popular The Problem of Pain he notes,

For we are only creatures; our role must always be that of patient to agent, female to male, mirror to light, echo to voice. Our highest activity must be response, not initiative. To experience the love of God in a true, and not an illusory form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender to His demand, our conformity to His desire.21

Lewis notes the infinite chasm between Creator and creature when he describes, in the same book, the fall of humanity as “This act of self-will on the part of the creature, which constitutes an utter falseness to its true creaturely position, is the only sin that can be conceived as the Fall.”22 Lewis concludes The Problem of Pain with the glorious comparison:

As our Earth is to all the stars, so doubtless are we men and our concerns to all creation; as all the stars are to space itself, so are all creatures, all thrones and powers and mightiest of the created gods, to the abyss of the self-existing Being, who is to us Father and Redeemer and indwelling Comforter, but of whom no man nor angel can say nor conceive what He is in and for Himself, or what is the work that he “maketh from the beginning to the end.” For they are all derived and unsubstantial things. Their vision fails them and they cover their eyes from the intolerable light of utter actuality, which was and is and shall be, which never could have been otherwise, which has no opposite.23

Perhaps nowhere is Lewis’s consciousness of the utter difference between God and those made in His image greater than in his compelling science fiction trilogy, the Space Trilogy, consisting of three books, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.24 Lewis draws the reader into a world of time and space travel, alternate worlds, evil and technological destruction and good and selfless sacrifice. It is the story of all stories, the redemption story that began in Eden and, for this series, ends in post-World War II England: God has created us for glory. We have abandoned Him in favor of our own evil desires. He has done everything to redeem us to Himself. Will we respond in faith believing, inheriting the glory prepared for us? Or will we respond with continued self-worship and absorption, damned by our own idolatry to worship ourselves, gods beneath our own dignity? The first way is God’s way. The second—whether cloaked in pantheism, polytheism, the henotheism of Mormon theology, or the masterful guise of materialistic humanism—is not.

Endnotes: 1. C. S. Lewis, Beyond Personality (London: The Centenary Press, 1945), 48. Also contained in Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan Company, 1952), 174-175.
2. Lewis is misused by other individuals, religious movements, and organizations as well; and Mormons also attempt to defend their deification theology in other ways, such as comparing it to the nonheretical Eastern Orthodox theology of “theosis,” but the focus of this brief article is restricted to the Mormon use of Lewis’s writings for this purpose. For more information on these issues, see Richard and Joan Ostling’s Mormon America: The Power and the Promise (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1999), especially pages 307-314; “Grace and the Divinization of Humanity” at http://mysticalrose.tripod.com/grace3.html; and Kurt Van Gorden’s “Can Man Progress to Godhood?” at www.answers.org/Theology/Man_become_God.html.
3. Ted Olsen, “C. S. Lewis,” Christian History, no. 65 (spring 2000) in “The Ten Most Influential Christians of the Twentieth Century.”
4. Lewis died November 23, 1963, the same date as John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley.
5. Craig L. Blomberg and Stephen E. Robinson, How Wide the Divide? A Mormon and an Evangelical in Conversation (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1997).
6. In an article contributed by Robinson to editor Daniel H. Ludlow’s Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 5 vols. (New York: Macmillan Press, 1992).
7. Conference brochure, n.p., n.d.
8. John W. Kennedy, “Southern Baptists Take Up the Mormon Challenge” Christianity Today, 15 June 1998, 30.
9. Jay Copp, “Readers Cross Religious Lines for C. S. Lewis,” Christian Science Monitor, 23 May 1999, 19.
10. See www.signaturebooksinc.com/stranger.htm.
11. Despite its goals and the credentials of its contributors, there is no way to historically, evidentially, biblically, philosophically, or scientifically verify the fiction of Mormon history and theology. This, however, is not the forum for a critique of FARMS.
12. See www/farmsresearch.com/ free/qanda/basicissuesch5.html.
13. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1949), 14-15.
14. For information see www.jersey.net/~inkwell/mormonet.htm.
15. Quoted from Richard and Joan Ostling, Mormon America: The Power and the Promise (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1999), 308. 16. Ibid., 307.
17. Ibid., 307-308.
18. Lewis, Beyond Personality, 48.
19. Ibid., 12-13.
20. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 7.
21. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1962), 51. 22. Ibid., 80. 23. Ibid., 153-154. 24. Available in various editions, including 1996 edition from Simon and Schuster.

Godzilla - courtesy ping to a repost of your earlier post that contradicts the idea that good old Lewis meant anything similar to the heresy of mormonism...

“Would you speak up if you witnessed a Christian being seduced by a Mormon telling him that Mormonism is a Christian church?”
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I guess you missed the part of my post when I stated “.... what should be a magical word to conservatives—UNITE.” I didn’t state that DIVIDE should be a magical word to conservatives.

1 Peter 3:8 -— Finally, be ye all of one mind, having compassion one of another, love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous:

Divide is the magic word!

Yeshua promised to divide us.

Read Matthew ch 10.

So the Christian (nor the Mormon) would get no help from you as he was being seduced by lies to slip from Christianity and led into being converted into the religion of Mormonism?

So; now speaking the truth about a cult that is taking it's members to Hell, is now considered to be trollish behavior?

I would say is this constant attacks on the religious beliefs of others who share most of our interests is counterproductive to the goal of keeping this country from going to hell.

Man will become like God

Not exactly:

2Tim 3:2 For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, 4 treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5 having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.

“I think all Conservatives should unite regardless of faith.”
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Amen, brother.

“We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately” -— Benjamin Franklyn at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Some folks, some FReepers included, just don’t “get it”.

The horrific theology isn’t the assertion that man will become like God. Jesus did say, “Ye shall be gods.” The problem is in what Mormons see God as.

Man will become god-like in many ways. But God is uncreated; man is created. God was never man. And the process by which man becomes gods will be completely an act of divine creation, not the result of any human technological progress. Man will be given his godliness in every sense from God.

I occasionally feel like I have superhuman powers...No kidding...

Then I have to pick up dog poop, pay taxes and shop while trying to find the best deal on whole chickens.

Testy aren’t we.
Mia Love, is not someone I considered because she was running in a state I do not live.
She appears to be a great person, and that has nothing to do with mormonism.

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