Eliza R. Snow on Eternal Progression

Eliza R. Snow

We have been instructed that each one of us in our organizations is endowed with the germs of every faculty requisite to constitute a god or a goddess. These little ones in their mothers’ arms have the germs of all the capabilities which we exhibit, and what constitutes the difference between them and ourselves? Merely a lack of development in them, and this development requires cultivation, energy, and perseverance. The organization of the Female Relief Society places the sisters in positions to bring into exercise and thus develop all of our faculties: thus in doing good to others, we benefit ourselves… Let us try to realize our responsibilities and honor our position.

“Let Us Cultivate Ourselves,” Salt Lake City Seventeenth Ward Relief Society Minutes, page 148, Salt Lake City: Church History Library, 1869.02.18

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Bathsheba W. Smith

We are called upon by the still small voice, a whispering from our father, to work out our own salvation. Briefly the constructive parts of the plan of salvation are these: What man is, God once was; what God is now, man may become; the glory of God is intelligence. Nothing can be annihilated and no act lost. It is impossible to be saved in ignorance.

Nick Bostrom

Further rumination on these themes could climax in a naturalistic theogony that would study the structure of this hierarchy, and the constraints imposed on its inhabitants by the possibility that their actions on their own level may affect the treatment they receive from dwellers of deeper levels. For example, if nobody can be sure that they are at the basement-level, then everybody would have to consider the possibility that their actions will be rewarded or punished, based perhaps on moral criteria, by their simulators. An afterlife would be a real possibility. Because of this fundamental uncertainty, even the basement civilization may have a reason to behave ethically. The fact that it has such a reason for moral behavior would of course add to everybody else’s reason for behaving morally, and so on, in truly virtuous circle. One might get a kind of universal ethical imperative, which it would be in everybody’s self-interest to obey, as it were ‘from nowhere.’

Heber C. Kimball

We shall go back to our Father and God, who is connected with one who is still farther back; and this Father is connected with one still farther back, and so on.

More from Eliza R. Snow

The time was when we thought that our husbands would save us, independent of our own exertions. Now we understand that instead of depending entirely on our husbands for salvation and position, we have to work them out ourselves. The responsibility and labor that devolve upon women are becoming more important. If society is reformed, it is to a great extent because women are refined.

For a wise and glorious purpose Thou hast placed me here on earth And withheld the recollection Of my former friends and birth; Yet ofttimes a secret something Whispered, “You’re a stranger here,” And I felt that I had wandered From a more exalted sphere.

I had learned to call thee Father, Thru thy Spirit from on high, But, until the key of knowledge Was restored, I knew not why. In the heav’ns are parents single? No, the thought makes reason stare! Truth is reason; truth eternal Tells me I’ve a mother there.