Philosophy and the Great Questions

I just read Eternal Man by Truman G. Madsen, and it was brilliant.  He does a good job of answering the philosophical theological questions that have been asked through the ages.  It turns out a lot of those questions are answered by Joseph Smith's doctrine of eternal intelligences.  We will exist forever because we always have.  Intelligence can't be destroyed.

And I like the doctrine, but I don't see how it answers all questions.  It just raises new ones, and those new ones are harder and deeper and more confusing.

For instance, if God didn't create us, he just organized us, and we were intelligences all along, then who or what DID create us? 

And, the question that I will always have, since in Mormon theology God was once a man, then who created God?  Who is God's God?

So I like that the doctrine of the pre-existence answers some of philosophy and theology's toughest questions.  But what to do about the questions that it raises?

I ignore them, usually.  I bring them out when I'm bored and want something else to think about.  These questions don't actually need an answer in this life.  The answers that we have, the basic and essential ones, are all I need worry about.

Once, years back, I had a vision of eternity that I couldn't hold on to or else my head would explode.  I imagined an interconnectedness that extended in all dimensions, like spokes of a wagon wheel that connected to new wagon wheels at every intersection.  I saw 1 wagon wheel and then, where the spokes should have ended in a circle, 8 more wagon wheels, and then the vision zoomed out and out and then! ... and then I had to shut it down because I couldn't compute it.  Why is eternity, a time without time, a space without beginning or end, so hard for us to comprehend?

The questions of eternity will largely have to wait until I'm past this life.  I understand that.  But I sure wouldn't mind being able to understand them better now!

Soccer on Friday Nights

I love playing soccer on Friday nights.  Love, love, love it.

Sometimes I do things that make me feel like a soccer goddess.  Like last night when I scored off a lousy cross.  The ball was behind me in the air, about waist level, and going too fast.  On reflex, I turned to the ball, hit it out of the air, and lobbed it over my head, over the goalie's head, and into the goal.  And my team went crazy.  Cause it was awesome.  Could I have scored that if I had been trying?  No.  But my inner soccer goddess knew what to do.

I trash talk and say things like, "If you guys would step it up, I wouldn't have to score so much."  And, "You shoot like a girl.  And I'm not talking about a girl like me."

I get to show up on Friday nights and have my ego stroked.  I don't normally care about my ego.  I don't normally find opportunities to have it stroked.  But soccer is different.  It's My realm where I get to rule as I wish.  And I'd like it if you stroked my ego, thank you very much.

And then I go back home and Rob is waiting for me and I tell him about my game and about how awesome I was (or sometimes wasn't), and he tells me again that he thinks I'm awesome and that he loves that I love soccer so much, and then tells me I'm awesome again and I smile.

I go to sleep and the next morning I wake up and I'm a wife and a mother and I love my real life.  I no longer "need" the release that soccer provides.  But I still like it anyway.