The Salt Lake Temple

Yesterday I rode my bike down into the valley to see the famous Salt Lake Temple. Salt Lake City's roads are built on a grid system which follows cartesian coordinates; For example, my friend Mark lives at 1300 E, 600 S. It's a bit weird at first, but actually becomes intuitive and makes it very easy to navigate the city within a day of arriving. Can you guess what the coordinates for the Salt Lake Temple are? Yes, its 0,0.

The temple is rather pretty, and the grounds very pleasant with well-kept gardening, but I always become a bit reflective around religious buildings and iconography. It all seems so...vain. Vain in that humanity would think God would actually care about some collection of stone built for him. It there is a God, overseeing our huge universe, it seems incredibly presumptuous to assume this deity cares about me. Take, for example, a tenet of Christianity, "God sent his one and only Son Jesus in the form of man, and Jesus died for your sins." Now,if you take away the fact that Christianity has permeated our Western culture for 2000 years, doesn't it all sound a bit ridiculous? I remember in college some of my Muslim friends pointing this out.

I like to think of my pet Gecko. He cannot possibly comprehend me in any sophisticated way as other than "The top of the cage comes off, and I wait for he who delivereth unto me crickets and rain." Maybe my gecko has arranged the dirt in the cage as a way of saying thank you to me. Maybe he worked really hard on it. Do I care about some arrangement of dirt? It is beyond to ability of the gecko to communicate with me.

Anyway I digress and the things I am saying are not particularly original. The truth is religion gives people comfort, a code to live by, and eases/erases the fear of the unknown darkness (i.e. the existential "this is all there is"). So it was enjoyable to see some Mormons in their young 20's, happy, with their three kids already, strolling around the grounds. And to be honest, I became a bit jealous. At how they seem to have it all figured out, even if it is all based on a rather shaky foundation.

You can see newly weds posing in front of the temple (lower left). The golden arch in the center of the temple contains an inscription which reads: "Holiness of the Lord, The House of the Lord Built by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Commenced April 6th, 1853. Completed April 6th, 1893." And above the main door there is the inscription, "I am the Alpha and the Omega" (which is not true. The cingulate cortex is the alpha and omega. My research has proven it). The golden statue at the top of the temple is a 12 ft sculpture of the angel Moroni, who was the angel who appeared to Joseph Smith in a vision and told him where the golden plates for the Book of Mormon were buried in Palmyra, upstate New York.

Which, by the way, makes Mormonism about the coolest religion I know. It's just so distinctly American. Whereby protestants and jews have to go all the way to that powder keg which is the Middle East to see their holy sites, Mormons simply have to drive an hour east of Buffalo to visit the place where it all went down.

Well, tomorrow, I go off the grid and into the wild of southwest Oregon to raft the Rogue River. This trial diary will not be updated for a week or so while I am out there.