The Goods of Family

Dear Loved Ones,

I have spent the last two days attending a conference at BYU on the “Goods of Family”, or the benefits that are gained from having traditional families.  It was organized, I believe, to bring together scholars concerned about families to stimulate fresh thinking about how to defend the traditional family which today is being attacked on all sides.

The conference participants were university faculty and other professionals who largely called upon the ancient Greek philosophers and poets for ideas about the role of the family as an institution in society.  Their thoughts were interesting and mostly edifying but generally missing the solid foundation that is only found in the restoration.

After listening to the scholars, I came away with the following thought from the classics.  When it comes to the true importance and “goods” of families the world’s great thinkers, whether for or against families, are like those citizens sitting in Plato’s cave watching shadows of families dancing on the wall and trying to comprehend what they mean while the true form resides outside the cave in the bright sunlight  (If you want to review Plato’s cave analogy it is in The Republic; Book VII or you can simply Google “Plato’s cave”).

By this I mean the true goods of family are only understood in the light of restoration knowledge.  Understanding what we believe about prior existence, particularly the concept of birth of human spirits to a Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother, provides us a Heavenly Pattern of family.  When you add the understanding that families continue into eternity you have an organization that governed in heaven before and will govern in heaven hereafter so we should exert all our efforts to get it right while in mortality.  We will never see the end of the family organization.

Satan hates his Heavenly Family because of his rebellion and he hates mortal families because he will never have one.  One of his cleverest strategies to undermine mortal families has been to destroy men’s understanding of their Heavenly Family by replacing it with a solitary, self-absorbed god who is uncreated and is allowed no personal, familial connections.  If god is solitary and unfamilial, than humans can be successful and contented with a similar lifestyle.  Marriage and family are therefore merely a necessary inconvenience to the liberated, solitary life, the kind of life god lives.

Of course, our belief in an anthropomorphic, corporeal, married god capable of procreation invites the terrible question that mainstream Christianity does not allow.  That is the question of who fathered this god?  We do not pretend to answer this question but we don’t disallow it either given our understanding of worlds without number and eternal progression.  Again, the mainstream Christian world cannot allow a corporeal god, or a premortal family, because of this terrible question and so will never allow the doctrine until they accept modern-day revelation.

Those without an understanding of the restoration seek for information about families, and other doctrines, as the blind groping for the wall  (Isa 59:10).  I am grateful for my testimony of a new dispensation, with knowledge being poured out upon mankind in a way the world has never known, at least never recorded.  I love all of you and rejoice in the thought that we are a sealed, eternal family.  Thank you for all the good you do and the love you show to each other.

Grampa Carter