After coming to this realization, I took a moment to look at their Statement of Beliefs to see if there were as many problems as I suspected, as I knew there were serious problems with Protestant churches broadly, as Swedenborg often pointed out in his writings. And, sure enough, I found the same problems, albeit they were cleverly masked behind subtle language and turns of phrase. Realizing this, I decided that I should point these out and shine a light on them.

The Mormon Church often says that its doctrines constitute a true restoration of the gospel, but it doesn’t. Rather, the Lord gave the true restoration of the gospel, in Swedenborg’s opus, True Christianity, where he made it clear how and why God is one person.

There is a section in Emanuel Swedenborg’s book, Conjugial Love (also translated as Love in Marriage) that has stopped me in my tracks while reading it because it felt incorrect, like it hit the wrong note and said something that just didn’t make sense. I decided to do a deep-dive into the Latin text and see if I could parse it out and understand it better, and to determine if what was translated was Swedenborg’s original intent.

Solving the mystery of how Swedenborg's spiritual experiences took place, and how they're true, requires an understanding of how time works in the spiritual world vs how it appears to work on earth. Developing this understanding is central for understanding the Word; how the Trinity of God exists as one person in the Lord.

"With the Lord, and consequently in the angelic heaven, the future and the present are one and the same, for what is future is already present, or what is to take place has taken place."

My main concern, in this article, is with our understanding of what the doctrine of the church teaches us, and making sure that we know what sin is, so that we are not propagating it in the church, in society, and in ourselves, and so that we are taking a stand against false teachings. Only once we understand what sin is, can the process of repentance begin, and only then, can our churches and society teach people, and our children, what is and isn’t appropriate.

True marriage, as the Lord designed it, rests on love, wisdom, and cooperation. Love initiates, wisdom guides, and cooperation brings the two into harmony. In this divine order, wisdom does not mean domination, nor does submission mean bending to another’s ego. Rather, wisdom is the Lord’s truth received in life, and submission is the free choice to align with what is good and true. A wife may choose to yield to her husband’s wisdom — but only insofar as he is living from the Lord’s wisdom, not from himself. This choice can never be forced, but is always from her own volition, for only then can the church in a marriage be whole and living.

Beginning with the revelations given to Swedenborg, the Lord established a new spiritual movement called The New Jerusalem, or The New Church. The New Jerusalem is not another sect among the old churches, but a spiritual reality that the Lord Himself forms wherever he is acknowledged as the one God and people live in charity according to his commandments. This means it can be present in individuals from nearly every background, even among those in the Old Churches, provided they are ignorant of their church’s falsities and hold to a simple faith in the Lord. What makes someone part of the New Church is not the name of the religious body they belong to, but the life of charity they live. In this way the Lord began a new paradigm, one not built on birth or tradition, but on a living faith joined with love.

There is only one God, the Lord Jesus Christ, but he has the ability to take on many forms and personas. When, in the Bible, Jesus speaks about the Father, he is speaking about his inner self — his soul — and when he speaks about the Holy Ghost, he is speaking about the effect of his actions and energy which radiate out into the universe, all of which are him, but simply different aspects of the same person.

Swedenborg wrote that the center of heaven is, in fact, made up of married partners, and although this is generally taught in D&C as well, it is sullied by false things that are spun into and among it. What’s most important to accomplish on earth is being joined to the Lord’s Spirit through the charitable way a person lives his or her life, which is symbolized by marriage. So long as that regeneration in the Lord is accomplished, if a marriage to a partner is not found on earth, one can be found in heaven, regardless of Mormon membership or temple rituals.

Although it’s obvious they still love each other, Mary is no longer Jesus’ mother. She was his physical mother who birthed him while he was on earth, but his physical body was progressively transformed and glorified, made one with the Father of Heaven, so that it’s no longer the case that she is his mother.

From this, we can easily discern that when Jesus said “hate” in the verse prior, he wasn’t talking about malice or violence. He was talking about getting your priorities straight. As a Christian, Jesus must be central to your life in every way. He must be more important than your father, mother, sister, brother, spouse, child, friends, employer, employee, etc. As sad as it is to say, I think the reality is that a lot of us choose to side with our family instead of with Jesus. We’re Christians by name only, simply to appear in good social standing.

The best economies consist of leaders who delegate tasks into the hands of individuals, enabling them with the power and autonomy to contribute without bureaucracy standing in the way. The reason this works is because these leaders thoroughly vet people for genuine intentionality before putting them to work and then allow them to fail and iterate quickly on their ideas, becoming more knowledgable each time. In fact, skillsets and resumes aren’t very important. What’s important is love, willingness, persistence, and ingenuity — values associated with capitalism, where work actually gets done, more than socialism, where work is often blocked for review by committees. Capitalism can certainly be motivated by excessive greed and pride and that leads to its own evil which we want to alleviate, but more often than not, even when that happens, it results in a less severe outcome than socialism, because at least something is getting done.

An important concept to understand is that the Father within Jesus is nothing but goodness. Sometimes that goodness may involve punishment, but he never wants that result. He wills that the sin never occurs in the first place, but if it does occur, allowing a consequence is the most loving outcome for everyone, not only to help reform the person, but to protect the innocent.

For years I’d felt somewhat out of place among Christians, of many different sects. Although I was raised Christian, and I am one, I sometimes felt like they didn’t have the ability to think rationally. I would disagree with their rejection of certain ideas which were obviously true to me, such as the evidence for human evolution, the age of the universe, the test of true prophecy, the idolatry within rituals, and other things, but few people actually understood (or wanted to understand) my statements. If the ideas I shared didn’t fall in line with their doctrine, they were unwilling to examine my ideas and build an argument about what they believed beyond simply repeating what they were told. Often, in my conversations with them, they’d become so emotionally invested in their church doctrine that they would become upset if I questioned those doctrines. This happened even though my intent was always the truth, as if the more truth I spoke the more it aggravated them.