Funny thing happened on the way to kolob

[_Mephitus]

http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agora/ ... 1173668708

Imagine that you have been told that you have the chance to go to another planet. On that planet, scientists have discovered the fountain of youth. You'll live forever and you'll look like a fitness model. You'll have all the material wealth you can dream of. In fact you'll be in charge of your own kingdom. Against your better judgment, you buy your ticket. All you have to do is put your whole body under water once and buy some special space clothes to protect you from cosmic rays.

All you have to do is live on this space ship for the length of your natural life. You won't get to do the things that other humans do. Your sex life, thinking, and free time will be heavily regulated. On this ship, there will be a group of commanders that can basically tell you to do anything they want in the interest of the space ship - and you have to do it or you don't get to go to the special planet.

During the flight, you realize that the women on the space ship don't get the same privileges as the men. In fact, they are put to work 24/7. And there are minorities. They aren't allowed in to the better parts of the ship. All the white passengers get to do the fun jobs, while the darker people have to clean dishes and toilets.

All this time, you are taught to worship the captain, but never get to meet him. Some claim to have received messages from him, and they get emotional when they talk about it. There is a man who took the spaceship long ago, who was a pioneer in the space program, who claims that he actually met the captain. That is the man who set up the whole space program, with a manual that the captain gave to him.

All your friends are on the ship. Your whole family is on the ship. You are told that you can exit any time and go immediately back to earth, but after years of hearing horror stories of life on earth, you don't dare contemplate it. It's a sad, dangerous place.

Your quarters on the spaceship are determined by whether your ancestors took a similar ship to the faraway planet. In fact, the job you do on the spaceship is determined by your lineage. The more you can talk about your relatives, who took similar ships before you, the more people defer to you.

Now suppose after a whole life of giving time, energy, and money to be on this space ship, you find out that they were lying to you the whole time. 25 years after take-off, you realize that you never left the ground. In fact, though you've been receiving news reports from the world, most of them have been heavily censored. You really don't know what's going on in the world around you, and your ability to understand every day life has been severely hampered.

But you get off the space ship and have a look around. Life on earth is nothing like the people on the spaceship described. It's a nice place with nice people. You start to enjoy living on planet earth, and slowly the fear of living outside the spaceship goes away. You take off the cosmic ray shield and you don't die. You start to wonder why you ever stayed on that spaceship so long.

Then somebody representing the spaceship company rings your doorbell or calls you on the phone. "Hey, wanna come back on the space ship?" What you start hearing is, "Would you like to give more time, money, and energy to an organization that is racist, sexist, and does not give you anything that you cannot get on your own?"

Then they start in on your spouse and children, trying to get them on the space ship. Your spouse might even spend some of your money at the gift shop. You try to tell your neighbors what it was like on the spaceship, but they look at you as if you have a 3rd eye. You sometimes have contact with the people on the space ship. They think they're still traveling in space, and treat you as if you have a rare disease that got you jettisoned from the craft.

I stepped off the spaceship to Kolob. Nothing happened. All the fear of life on earth was unfounded.

T-Bone

[_Yoda]

I love it! It's "The Matrix" with a Mormon twist. LOL