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Biological Fatherhood


Does biological fatherhood matter?  

15 members have voted

  1. 1. If you learned that your earthly father was not in reality your biological father, would that knowledge materially alter your relationship with your father?

    • Yes (please elaborate as to how your relationship would change)
    • No
    • Not Applicable
      0
    • Other / Unsure (please elaborate)
  2. 2. If you learned that your earthly child was not in reality your biological child, would that knowledge materially alter your relationship with your child?

    • Yes (please elaborate as to how your relationship would change)
    • No
    • Not Applicable
    • Other / Unsure (please elaborate)
  3. 3. If you learned that your Heavenly Father was not in reality your "biological" Father (meaning, for this question, that you were not the product of a sexual union between heavenly parents), would that knowledge materially alter your relationship with your Heavenly Father?

    • Yes (please elaborate as to how your relationship would change)
      0
    • No
    • Not Applicable
    • Other / Unsure (please elaborate)
      0


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1 hour ago, JLHPROF said:

I think the issue is in the definition of "materially alter".

It would absolutely make a difference.
But it wouldn't necessarily make a difference in love, interaction, or even relationship.
But to say it wouldn't change anything I think is wishful thinking.  How it would change would depend on each person and I think unless you experience it you're guessing.
 

I agree that anyone's answer will depend on how they define 'materially alter'. I chose that term specifically to leave the judgment up to everyone. Feel free to vote and elaborate in a comment how you define a material alteration. 

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59 minutes ago, teddyaware said:

Am I correct in surmising that the bottom line purpose of this exercise is to rhetorically open the door to the possibility that, in eternity, married homosexual couples might be permitted to adopt the spirit children of heterosexual married couples and thereby become the ‘lawful’ heavenly “parents” of said adopted spirit children? My other surmise is that, in spite of the fact that the resurrected bodies of both men and women will be fully functional and anatomically correct, you might be suggesting the creation of spirit children in heaven has nothing to do with the act of sexual procreation engaged in by exalted men and exalted women?

Not really. I'm trying to stay away from SSM here (it's tough as you can see in the other comments). My intent is really to understand how the slice of mormondom found on this board views the criticality of sexual reproduction to their idea of deity. For me, what type of body, organs, etc. God has doesn't matter to me at all. They are not part of His 'image' that I am trying to adopt.  The 'image' we take on is His attributes found in places such as the beatitudes and D/C 121, not any physical form. God could be a pink river dolphin for all I care. I'm personally planning on being a falcon.

But I know that some here (and certainly in the rest of the church) feel very strongly that a celestial body must look and operate like a mortal body. This belief has important ties to how someone views issues such as homosexuality, evolution, and so forth, but none of those issues are specifically it issue in this thread. 

And, yes, I believe that the creation of spirit children has nothing at all to do with sexual procreation. It's a very long process that began in the pre-existence, continues here, and will yet continue into the next estate. None of us has been fully 'created' yet; we're works in process. 

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10 minutes ago, Buckeye said:

Not really. I'm trying to stay away from SSM here (it's tough as you can see in the other comments). My intent is really to understand how the slice of mormondom found on this board views the criticality of sexual reproduction to their idea of deity. For me, what type of body, organs, etc. God has doesn't matter to me at all. They are not part of His 'image' that I am trying to adopt.  The 'image' we take on is His attributes found in places such as the beatitudes and D/C 121, not any physical form. God could be a pink river dolphin for all I care. I'm personally planning on being a falcon.

But I know that some here (and certainly in the rest of the church) feel very strongly that a celestial body must look and operate like a mortal body. This belief has important ties to how someone views issues such as homosexuality, evolution, and so forth, but none of those issues are specifically it issue in this thread. 

And, yes, I believe that the creation of spirit children has nothing at all to do with sexual procreation. It's a very long process that began in the pre-existence, continues here, and will yet continue into the next estate. None of us has been fully 'created' yet; we're works in process. 

For me, the type of reproduction is less important than that reproduction occurred.  As in, I don't really care how it works, but I do find value in being the same species (for lack of a better word) than God, and in having both a mother and a father.  

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10 hours ago, Buckeye said:

I'm personally planning on being a falcon.

I would love to be able to shapeshift in order to experience different sensations…including having different types of human bodies, bodies of ballet dancers, gymnasts, track stars, mountain climbers, yoga experts,…etc.  Different strengths and flexibilities needed to excel.

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I feel like I should answer points 1 and 3 since I already have 2.

Bluebell’s answer for 3 works very well for me.  The belief I am the same kind of being as God the Father is extremely meaningful to me as well as the belief he has chosen to step into the Eternal Father role for me in a very personal, immediate way.  That relationship doesn’t need to be directly “biological” for me because he is “all in” from every perspective in my view.

I am guessing my reaction to the first question is rather irrelevant to what you are actually asking, but it is an interesting thought experiment to me and I benefit from having to try and make it understandable for others, so I am going to try and explain anyway even though it seems likely a derail more or less.  So feel free to ignore.

Number 1 is much more problematic and complicated because my earthly dad wasn’t “all in” in some of the more personal, emotionally intimate ways.  He avoided things that made him uncomfortable emotionally and at times physically (in theory he was the no pain, no gain type, but that only went so far…he lacked patience in many areas) and couldn’t deal with confrontations of his own weaknesses….he was very, very capable and kindhearted so talking mostly fine tuning aspects here for him, but his avoidance of emotional pain created an unbridgeable gap between us, but one most people including my siblings and my dad himself in many ways wouldn’t have been aware of. Bottom line is he avoided me and interacting with me when we were in the same location, more so as we got older.  But in a lot of ways that was a refusal to see how I was so truly his daughter, so I don’t think my not being his biological daughter would change most of our relationship or his desire to be there for me to the best of his ability nor would it change my feeling of his fatherhood.

 But it would change my perspectives, I am guessing, on why he struggled connecting with me and might change a lot of my own frustrations with our relationship because the things he struggled most with in me came mostly from him even if he refused to accept that (my independence, competency in not needing to be rescued or protected, my primary health issue that he interpreted as mostly hypochondria was inherited from him).  There is resentment there on my part, much more than I realized when I was younger and possibly why I tested my parents to see if they would accept me even if I didn’t meet their expectations (which screwed me up in other ways because I didn’t recognize I wasn’t completing something as a choice rather than because I couldn’t do it).  Much of the stuff I feel most guilty about or ashamed of in myself and my life are from his genes and his habits of avoidance.  My mom thought he saw me as the embodiment of her weaknesses (in his view) and he spent a lot of any interaction we had over the years trying to correct those and support what he saw as strengths, but the more I think about it, my biggest weaknesses that are not uniquely my own were actually his.  It got confusing in part because being female instead of male, the dynamics at the surface shifted as well as the physical expression.  But a lot was his own refusal to see his own weaknesses, poor follow-through on things he wasn’t interested in being the biggest, but finding it very easy to see the problems in others (all of his kids have this issues as we learned what we saw rather than what he said).  

So if it turned out that I wasn’t showing another manifestation of the Lesser curse (the sleep/movement/neurological disorder that has screwed up my life big time since puberty though it started showing up at least by age 8, but only really caused issues for my dad and his dad and who knows what other ancestors in their 60s and later), but just happened to be one of the 2ish% of the population with significant RLS, I would be rewriting my script and his function in it would change….though him showing little empathy when suffering it himself would still be mind boggling to me, but my guess is he projected his distaste of his physical weakness on to me and that works whether I inherited it from him or not.  And it is hard to know how much the habit of avoidance is hardwired vs learned as restless legs symptoms can be coped with most of the time before it gets severe by being highly focused on things.  Poor follow-through might be in part because something gets less novel, less interesting over time and therefore less distracting, so we may be not so much dropping the ball, but trying to find more interesting balls to play with to keep our minds off the annoying, even painful sensations.  

However, the essentials of what most people say when they say “fatherhood” is much less about inheritance/biology than we think imo*** and more of a cultural or behaviour role of protector, provider, adviser and the child receives the benefits and costs of those roles and gives in return…I don’t see those aspects of our relationship changing much, if any, at all.  In his view, I am guessing, however he came to the role of being my father wouldn’t change the fact that he was my father.  And the reverse is true for me as well.  He filled that role for me, the biological aspect is really irrelevant to me in the long run.  I see us eternally as brother and sister, children of God, my sealing to him as a child…that seems to me in an eternal sense to be more about just being family than in some hierarchy where he is always protector, provider, advisor and me subordinate or beneficiary of his gifts.  Who knows, I might even be ‘older’ than him as a spirit, if time existed then as we think of it.

***the least abuse occurs when there is a biological connection between parent and child, I wonder how much of that is seeing the child as a physical continuation of oneself (an mental cause) or something else that creates a bond that helps us be more tolerant or more committed to our children and how much is it shared biological characteristics might make us tolerate weaknesses in our children more so we are less frustrated, less likely to strike out or us having more shared interests due to biological tendencies.  I have a weird sense of fellowship with my youngest grandchild because she holds the same position in the family as I did and her brother and sister are sort of like my older siblings, sister likes performing and brother can beat times quiet and removed from what is going on while she is shy.  I am trying really hard not to project on to her or to get overprotective of her.

Edited by Calm
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I highly recommend the book, "Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love" by Dani Shapiro. Especially for any who have experienced this kind of discovery.

"Relationship" means many things to different people, depending on many different factors including how well we know our parents, our spouses, our children, anyone else intimately involved (and how they were/are involved), and God. This is why I believe the gospel is so useful.

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I think it would materially (though not necessarily significantly) change my view of the father who raised me.  (And probably why I was just learning it now, and whether other stuff was hidden would also be part of what difference it would make.   The hugest difference would be handle due father relationships and additional extended family.

The question of Heavenly Father is different because I think the eternal essence of us as intelligences has nothing to do with our Heavenly Parents GENES.  And we do not know how we became spirit children and what that process offered and informed the intelligences that were gathered into becoming Their spirit children.     

Being born mortally means we get our earthly parents genes and mortal predispositions.   But our eternal spirits are based on the organized intelligences (if we got a physical part of our Heavenly Parents in the process we don't know  now what it was or how it works).

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