Diversity of God

Speaker 1

Our next speaker is Blair Ostler. Blair is a designer and artist. She holds a BFA degree in design and specializes in abstract modern art. Her paintings can be seen throughout residences and businesses in Seattle. She and her husband Drew have three children, whom Blair currently homeschools. She is passionate about aesthetics, design, art, spirituality, photography, gender equality, animal ethics and early childhood education. She’s also a board member of the Mormon Transhumanist Association.

Blaire Ostler

Thanks, Chris. Joseph Smith said, I want to ask this congregation, every man, woman, and child, to answer this question in their own heart. What kind of being God is? It’s an excellent question: Who is God? What is God? What does God look like? What does it mean to be made in the image of God?

Blair Ostiler

I believe religion to be one of the most intimate aspects of the human experience. If we do not learn how to empathize with each other’s experiences, we run the risk of allowing our religions to override our humanity. For this reason, I will answer Jose’s question through a personal narrative.

Blaire Ostler

I was a young girl who had been faithful to her religion. I sang hymns of praise to the man. I sustained predominantly male leaders. While men presided in my religion, scriptures, and family, I began prayers addressing Him, ending them in the name of the Son. I read scriptures glittered with the stories of men, only to soak my pillow with tears for the women who were raped, bought, sold, beaten, silenced and subjugated in our most sacred texts.

Blaire Ostler

Worshiping maleness was an inescapable reality when I was taught the Father is the ultimate object of our worship. As I sat in the pews each Sunday, I would even listen to the women testify over the pulpit. I know Heavenly Father lives. He loves us, and He wants us to be just like Him. But don’t they see? Our Father is male.

Blaire Ostler

As Joseph Smith stated in the King Follett Discourse, God Himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens. That is the great secret. If the veil were rent today and that great God who holds this world in its orbit and who upholds all worlds and all things by his power were to make himself visible today, I say you would see him today. You would see him like a man in form, like yourselves, in all person, image, and very form as a man.

Blaire Ostler

The Family of Proclamation to the World states, my gender gender is eternally ban my gender is essential to my eternal identity and purpose. So where does a woman find herself in such a patriarchal religion? For as beautiful as the concept of deification is, the male superlative placed on God is a sore limitation for those of us who don’t identify as male. I am one such person. The fabric of my body, mind, and soul are undeniably female. I see my effeminate nature as a source of strength. It is a vital aspect of my being.

Blaire Ostler

Even if I could become like God the Father through the evolutionary process of deification, I have no intention of changing my body, gender, or sexuality to fit such a patriarchal paradigm. I could not in good conscience deny such an integral part of my identity an identity my religion also told me was made in the image of God. But are females really created in the image of God? Could my body look like God’s body?

Blaire Ostler

I was repeatedly told throughout my youth comments similar to Elder Oaks. And young women, please understand that if you dress immodestly, you are magnifying this problem by becoming pornography to the men who see you. To them, my body wasn’t godly. It was pornography. My religion perpetuated the idea that my body was a dangerous symbol for sexual immorality that needed to be regulated, covered, and controlled. My female body, from my shoulders, breasts, and thighs, had been so overly sexualized that the body of God couldn’t possibly look like mine.

Blaire Ostler

It was clear. Embracing the trajectory of Heavenly Father meant rejecting myself. Embracing myself meant rejecting Heavenly Father. Heavenly Father became a burden. He was everywhere, dominating religion, scripture, praise, music, and worship. His name brought pain.

Blaire Ostler

Being restricted from the priesthood in my teens only intensified my feelings of rejection from God and religion. Why should I put faith in Heavenly Father and his priesthood when he would put so little faith in me? Why would I put my trust in my religion when it wouldn’t trust women as an equitable part of governance? Why would my religion praise my womanhood and then blatantly try to manipulate me with benevolent sexism?

Blaire Ostler

As a young adult, I attended the LDS Temple with my husband. The projection, oh, excuse me. As an adult, I attended the LDS temple with my husband. I felt such great pain about my gender, body, sexuality, potential deification, and God that the temple crushed my fragile faith.

Blaire Ostler

As a young mother sitting in the celestial room, projections of heaven and hell looked pretty similar. The projection of the celestial kingdom meant supporting my husband in his creation of worlds, silently adorning the background of his cosmo formed masterpiece. Proverbs states: A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband. The celestial kingdom meant I was an ornamentation in my husband’s throne, a symbol, an object to symbolize his glory. It meant watching my husband have unlimited ceilings, marriages, and intimacies with other women, while I would be confined to one man. Clearly my role in the Celestial Kingdom would be predicated upon my current role, and that was more than troubling.

Blaire Ostler

Worst of all, the celestial kingdom meant evolving into Heavenly Mother. Heavenly Mother is rather unique to Mormonism. She’s a lovely concept of God that I’ve taken comfort in on more than one occasion. But in all honesty, becoming Heavenly Mother terrified me. The Heavenly Mother aesthetic of Godhood is undervalued, underutilized, underappreciated, and unloved. Most troubling is that patriarchal leadership still discourages us to worship her or pray to her directly. The projection of Heavenly Mother is cut off from her offspring. As a mother of three children, the thought of being cut off from my offspring is hell.

Blaire Ostler

Words like exaltation, eternity, deification, and theosis became nightmares I couldn’t escape. What little faith I had left in my religion and God eventually vanished in the temple. They had me so worried if heaven would open its gates for a girl like me that I hadn’t taken the time to question: do I even want to go?

Blaire Ostler

I had no intention of ruining the projections of a loving Heavenly Mother or Father that brought peace, comfort, and motivation to people I loved. But I could not be inspired by these gods. I eventually concluded, no God is better than that God. I took refuge in functional atheism.

Blaire Ostler

It came all too naturally. It was attractive and alluring. It brought relief to gaping wounds that my religion was unwilling to notice or blatantly ignoring. How could they notice when the women who dressed my wounds were silenced or excommunicated? Functional atheism was beautifully numbing, like morphine pumping through the veins, dulling the senses. Stoicism was safe.

Blaire Ostler

In my apathy toward God, functional atheism allowed me to liberate my mind. I was free with an unbridled thirst for truth. I imagined I was limitless without any God.

Blaire Ostler

But the truth was, even if God was nothing more than my own imaginary projections of the past or future, rejecting the projection of God was in fact another limitation. The projection of no God or even the possibility of godhood was lifeless. Morphine was no longer enough. I wanted to feel again, and I wanted to stop fighting the past and start building the future. I needed freedom from religious dogmas, nihilistic projections, escapism, and even atheism.

Blaire Ostler

I needed to have the freedom to put my personal projections onto God so that my righteous aspirations of love, compassion, joy, and flourishing. could become a tangible reality. I needed to see the image of God within myself.

Blaire Ostler

I’d like to repeat Joseph’s comments concerning theosis while move removing the male aesthetic. God was once as we are now, and is exalted, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens. That is the great secret. Here, then, is life eternal, to know the only wise and true God. And you have got to learn to be gods yourselves. The same as all gods have done before you. This is the new God argument.

Blaire Ostler

For those of you not familiar with the new God argument, I’ll give a brief overview before expanding on the argument for intersectionality and diversity. The new God argument suggests there are practical benefits in placing trust in the existence of super intelligent beings, being so far evolved from humans that they warrant a new term, post-human, or God. The argument is not a means to prove the existence of God, but suggests practical faith that we may become such.

Blaire Ostler

As our species have evolved, we have developed tools and technologies that have greatly increased our creative and destructive capacities. We currently have the destructive ability to cause our own extinction. However, violence is declining and the world is getting better. I’m confident in saying that as a woman, there has never been a better time to be alive. And I have faith that someday my daughter and her daughter will be able to make the same claim. If this trend in compassion continues, it seems our motivation for life and flourishing is at least equally increasing alongside our technological advancements.

Blaire Ostler

If humanity manages to avoid extinction, we could have the capacity to simulate worlds similar to our own. Though technological through technological advancements, we have begun the process of simulating all kinds of experiences. Imagine what future simulations may entail. Would we become so proficient that we could simulate an entire world? Would it be beyond the capacity of super intelligent beings or gods to simulate our world?

Blaire Ostler

Even though this is an optimistic trajectory, we might miss the target. It’s possible we could go extinct, destroying the planet and ourselves. It’s possible our compassion has limits and that we allow our religions to override our humanity. It’s possible Moore’s Law is dead. It’s possible no such beings have ever evolved beyond our current state, and we simply cannot pass through the great filter. Yes, all of these pessimistic projections and possibilities are a possibility, and related risks should be mitigated.

Blaire Ostler

But I think it’s also worth noting that despite all the apocalyptic prophecies, we’re still alive. We’re still here. The resourcefulness and the resiliency of the human spirit has proven itself time and time again. Our species is not only survivors of the past, but creators of the future.

Blaire Ostler

What if we exercised our agency and took control over our future, not in blind assertion, but with optimistic trust and hope in humanity? We have a choice. We can prove Moore’s law. We can choose compassion. We can choose human flourishing, immortality, and even God, a God just as natural as the evolutionary laws that govern the universe. We can remove the shackles of superstition and cynicism and choose an egalitarian representation of humanity in a pluralistic deity as a hopeful trajectory for all bodies.

Blaire Ostler

From the perspective of a Mormon feminist transhumanist, God is quite lovely, so authentically beautiful that a skeptic like myself could not deny such a sound aspiration. The evolution of God is a story of epic proportions when diverse communities band together in an effort to lift one another. God is as intersectionally diverse as ourselves.

Blaire Ostler

Strangely, the words of Joseph Smith have newfound meaning. In all God’s complexities, Since the dawn of humanity, God is simply the desires and faith of what we may overcome and become. Every one of us is a God in embryo, striving to evolve into something far more than our current state. Yearning to defy death reaching beyond our known limits into what can only be described as the unknown.

Blaire Ostler

Blending of the human and divine is suggested in Psalms. I have said, Ye are gods, and ye are all children of the Most High, and the offspring of God. In Genesis, we are symbiotically created in the image of God, both male and female.

Blaire Ostler

But what does this mean to be made in the image of God? What does this mean for female bodies, brown bodies, intersex bodies, or homosexual bodies? We are all composed of both male and female, metaphorically, generationally, and physically. From an LDS perspective, Elder Aratasnow stated, If I believe God has ever said anything about himself, I must believe that deity consists of man and woman. To be made in the image of God is far more diverse and personally intimate than a monotheistic male aesthetic.

Blaire Ostler

In 2 Nephi we read that God denieth none, black, white, male, female, all are alike unto God. Note the Scripture does not state, all are alike unto each other as a homogeneous group, but rather, in all our diversities, all are alike unto God. If we suppose that super intelligent post-humanity is more evolved than ourselves, then evolution would result in a more diverse God.

Blaire Ostler

Overall, evolution generally favors increasing complexity over long periods of time. For example, look at the various species of dogs that have been the product of evolution. The wolf is their common ancestor, but how did this broad diversification take place? Wolves gave up their freedom in exchange for a partnership with the humans. They slowly domesticated over generations until they warranted a new label, dogs. Thousands of years of breeding and artificial selection have resulted in every species of dog among us today. The diversity sculpted by human hands is truly astounding.

Blaire Ostler

Even more radically diverse is the diversity of life on our planet. Billions of years of natural selection and random genetic mutations have resulted in practically countless species. Humans have been diversifying life on this planet for centuries. Your family tree is not only composed of a diversity of genders, sexes, races and humans, but a variety of species fish, beetles, giraffes, oxen, trees, flowers, bacteria, and humans all share a common ancestor.

Blaire Ostler

Life, the ultimate image of God. God is personified in every unique, complex, and multifaceted being that has ever lived. Suddenly, the image of God is far more diverse than our previous representations, and the further a life form evolves into a greater state of knowledge, consciousness, and awareness, the more godlike a life becomes.

Blaire Ostler

God is every hope, dream, and desire that we may transcend our meagre existence and into our supreme selves through an increase of light and knowledge and the radical expansion of our intellectual capacities. Genesis supports the evolutionary sentiment of enhanced knowledge. When Adam partakes of the fruit in the Garden of Eden, the Lord God said, Behold, the man has become as one of us, to know good from evil. This scripture supports the plurality of God and the notion that increased knowledge is essential to our evolutionary transcendence.

Blaire Ostler

In Mormonism, we call it eternal progression. It is not our destiny to blur into a homogeneous white, cisgender, heterosexual, faceless society. Quite the contrary, our diversity should be celebrated as part of our godly attributes. God is incomplete without us. We are co-eternal. It seems our diversity is required for humanity to truly display the all-encompassing image of God.

Blaire Ostler

The God expressed in Job is more diverse than we could possibly imagine. Behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain God. When you look in the mirror, what do you see? The image of God is in your reflection, and I am convinced that image is no more complete than when we unite in all our diversities to lift one another into a transcendent exaltation.

Blaire Ostler

Consider the practical benefits of broadening our understanding of God to include the intersectional image of all beings on the planet, Doctrine and Covenants. Prophesies the earth may be prepared for celestial glory, that bodies who are of the celestial kingdom may possess it forever and ever, and the celestial kingdom is prophesied to be right here. if we choose to cultivate such a godly community for all bodies.

Blaire Ostler

The oversimplification of God may have once served a purpose, but we have sacrificed rationality and logic in favor of convenience. In closing, I’ll answer Joseph’s question more succinctly. What kind of being God is? God is what we may become in capacities. We have only begun to imagine and discover by embracing religion, technology, God, science, and faith as the catalyst to enhance the evolutionary process of eternal progression. God is eternal life, and that image resides in you.

Blaire Ostler

Thank you.