----- Original Message -----
From: Ranall <eleazarbenyair@yahoo.com>
To: davids_outcasts@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Saturday, January 04, 2003 9:31 PM
Subject: [888] Re: OBEYING THE SPIRITUALISM
As I look back, I recognize that my experiences with organized
religion have always ended in disappointment.
Whenever I hear someone say "I've had a revelation", I take a deep
breath. It seems that such sayings precede trouble.
And many friends cling to it like it is heaven itself despite the
experience that it is far from it.
PT
Well, you better take a really deep breath...
I have probably received and recorded in this lifetime over 300 pages of material. I don't publish it, and I don't even read it, except to check on a fact now and then. People might think this is strange that I don't, but when you start publishing it and canonizing it, you hold divine knowledge up as something scarce and unique, when it ought to continually flow freely. An excellent correspondence is the story of manna falling from heaven.
This not to trivialize these experiences. They ought to always be treated as special and sacred, but never unexpected.
Direct divine knowledge through experience should also flow from God to the individual, and not exclusively through someone else. A true teacher knows this and teaches his/her students how to obtain knowledge for themselves. One can read this throughout the scriptures, and it used to be taught by the LDS Church, and this was always what attracted me to the Church. I have never seen this teaching play out in actual practice, however.
I was once part of a Restoration organization based partly on the revelations I received and partly on the revelations received through another. From our members, we got the same two reactions you mentioned below. Whenever we received a new communication for the organization, people either smelled trouble in the air, or they considered themselves "bound" by the revelation, whatever that means, as if God was using it to tie them up. It was never my intention that either thing happen, but apparently human nature was taking its course. Eventually, the membership rejected both of us as leaders, edited out those parts of the revelations which they agreed with, and tossed out everything else. We did in 18 months what it took the Catholic church several hundred years to do and the LDS church several decades to do: from a divine institution, sink into the depths of apostasy.
Looking back on this, I blame everything that resulted on the fact that we created an organized hierarchical church (as opposed to a fellowship organized along family and Priesthood lines). An organized church seems to draw a circle of inclusion and exclusion, with the implication that failure to comply with church regulations results in being cast out, with resultant loss of eternal salvation. I feel that we unwittingly created something quite evil to ensnare and enslave people. I scoured the revelations looking for a specific instruction from the Lord to organize a church. I found none, but I did find references to the effect that the Lord recognized that we had listened to the arm of flesh and the clamoring of the members who wanted a church patterned after the one they used to have. Hey, didn't that same attitude get the Israelites and the Nephites in trouble when they wanted a king?
And, I will probably get an argument over this, but I have also scoured the D&C looking for specific instructions from the Lord to organize the LDS church. True, He speaks of His Church in section 10 as the body of followers, and He acknowledges the organization of the Church as an accomplished fact, but nowhere to my knowledge to Christ in as many words, command the organization of a secular, legalistic church, per se.
I have repented myself, and don't want to ever be part of such a debacle again. As Blayne said, this is one of those ideas which history has proven time and time again to be a failure. But I know that something is going to eventually succeed. (There's something about that on some of those 300 pages I'm not going to mention.) I think family is going to be a big part of it. I think Priesthood is going to be a big part of it. What's a family, but a group of people who are either intimately related or who choose to relate closely to one another, who are bound together, not by blind obedience to some revelation given by some authority, but by mutual love and by mutual covenant, and by personal ties to the god within. And, through the power of the Priesthood, these families are connected to one another, and to heaven. Now, in some circles the mere mention of "family" or "priesthood" causes people to take a deep breath, so what's in a name? In this scientific age, we could find another name to describe what they are and what they do. A lot of people I know who share the same dreams that we do are calling them "human molecules". I know of other people who are working as using technology to perfect the individual psyche. Now, if I could just get the group dynamics people talking to the individual dynamics people, talking to the Zionists in David's Outcasts, we might stand a chance.
But, I was impressed and reminded by Sterling's example of following not only our highest light, but our newest light. I'm staying tuned.
6:12:20 PM 
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