 Our next speaker will be Leonard Real and Leonard will be speaking on the subject of the Gods of Eternity. Leonard is a career diplomat with Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. Raised in Canada, he received a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from Brigham Young University and a Master of Arts in International Conflict Analysis from the University of Kent at Canterbury. He has lived on three continents and speaks English, French and Mandarin Chinese. He and his wife Jennifer have five children and currently reside in Ottawa, Canada. Please welcome Leonard Real. As you can see, my causing problem with technology, I'm somewhat of a Luddite myself. I do not even own a cell phone, so there's Luddites amongst us transhumanists. So I'm going to speak about the Gods of Eternity. My talk is on paper to fully ensconce my Luddite self. On June 7th, 1844, the first and only edition of the novel Expositor accused Joseph Smith of being a fallen prophet and having introduced false and damnable doctrines into the church, such as a plurality of Gods. Nine days later and two weeks before he was killed in Carthage jail, Joseph Smith preached the final sermon of his life. And in response to the accusation in the Expositor, Joseph chose to speak on the plurality of Gods, and he did not back down. Rather, he built on his final general conference address, the aforementioned King Fault Discourse, and began his sermon by highlighting Mormonism's interpretation of the Godhead, that the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are three separate persons and thus in Joseph's words, three Gods, even more bold was his claim that the term Elohim used thousands of times in the Bible and translated normally in the singular as God, should be read in the plural as the Gods, a usage that was already reflected in the book of Abraham, which he had had published in 1842, in which the creation is presented as being accomplished not by God, but by the Gods. His sermon touched on other aspects of the plight of the Gods and ended with this forceful statement that he did not believe in being scared of death, scared to death of this idea, for the Bible is full of it. Who then are the Gods? This is of course a complex question, and as with all complex questions, there are a variety of appropriate answers, but for the answer I will present today, I want, like Joseph, to start with the Godhead. These three beings, who, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, represent God to us and are types or models of the types of beings that could or should be included under at least certain circumstances within this rubric of the Gods. So God the Holy Ghost, premortal mankind, premortal spirits. The Doctrine and Covenants teaches that the Holy Ghost is a personage of spirit, and Joseph taught that the Holy Ghost would experience a probationary state, a mortality, and eventually become an exalted person of flesh and bones. Thus one member of the Godhead is a personage of spirit. But are there other premortal spirits who would appropriately fall under this category of the Gods? Well of course we know that in commonly accepted Mormon belief is that the God of the Old Testament, Jehovah, was of course Jesus Christ, who as a premortal spirit was the God of Israel, as was previously quoted today. And of course the book of Ether contains the account of the brother of Jared, dramatic encounter with the premortal Jesus in which he sees first his finger and then his entire body, his spirit body. In addition to Christ there is Adam, the first man who in his premortal status, Michael, is portrayed in the temple ceremony as one of a trinity of Gods, along with Elohim and Jehovah, who created the earth, a trinity which Brigham Young said is represented in the deity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Many church leaders such as Joseph Fielding Smith have also thought that other dispensation heads, other prophets such as Joseph Smith, he says, were likely involved in the creation as well. Perhaps all of us as premortal spirits within this Mormon mythology of the creation were involved in the creation as well and thus were also the Gods. At least in so far as we were involved in the work of God. God the Son, mortal mankind. Jesus Christ is typical of mortal mankind, the Son of God is typical of mortal mankind. Jesus Christ the Son of God was a mortal man, but the Book of Mormon portrays him as of course the Lord God Almighty, who condescended to become flesh to manifest the love of God to us. At his baptism the Holy Ghost descended upon him and the voice of the Father declared him to be the Son of God. Further the Book of Mormon teaches that the Son is called the Son of God because of the flesh, because of mortality. So are there other mortals who are also among the Gods? The scriptures proclaim that we all are to take upon ourselves the name of Christ, the anointed, and to become the sons and daughters of God. We are called to speak in God's name, to bear the authority of God, and to do the works of God here upon the earth. The scriptures teach that whether God speaks by his own voice or by the voice of his servants, it is the same. We know that we are called to be saviors upon Mount Zion. While Jesus is described as God's only begotten Son, he is not the only person described as the Son of God, nor even as God. In Joseph's final sermon he cites the Biblical passages that describe other of God's prophets as God's. For example Moses and Aaron, who are called to be God to Pharaoh. So far as we are engaged in the work of God, we mortals may be included among the Gods. As our exemplar, Jesus Christ was. Recall Jesus's quoting of Psalms 82 to his countrymen. Is it not written in your law? I said, ye are Gods. God the Father, post-mortal exalted mankind. So God the Father is typical of post-mortal exalted mankind. The Doctrine and Covenants teaches, of course, that the Father has a body of flesh and bones. Joseph taught further that God is an exalted man, that he was once a mortal in another world and is now a glorified being. Other other post-mortal beings among the Gods? Of course the scriptures teach that Jesus, following his death and resurrection, is also obviously a post-mortal exalted man. They further teach that all who enter into a covenant relationship with God and are faithful to that covenant can be redeemed through the power of Christ and become Gods as well. Signing specific examples such as Abraham, who it says is already entered into his exaltation as a God. Brigham Young in talking about the resurrection said, they, us, will become personages of tabernacle, like the Father. Ye Gods in eternity. Spencer W. Kimball put it a hundred years later, exaltation means Godhood, Creatorship, as man now is, God once was, as God now is, man may be. This is in the future. Now regarding the future of exalted beings, of us, the scriptures teach that this earth will become our heaven, that we will enjoy the same sociality that we now enjoy only coupled with eternal glory. I believe this is a key, that as I read the scriptures, I do not see a future in which each of us, as is sometimes said by critics, will become a God of our own world in our own heavens as single Gods or perhaps a God coupled with, of course, my wife beside me, because this is not the sociality that we now enjoy. Our sociality is our family, our friends, the community that we live in in our daily lives here. So if this earth is our future heaven and if our future is to be together in an exalted society, does not stand to reason that our Father's heaven is the same way, could it be that it is not simply our Father's heaven, but the heaven of our Fathers and of our Mothers, the heaven of all those exalted beings who on a previous mortal world obtain their Godhood and together organize our spirits and this world for us to inhabit. I can't get this to work. Does this vision not make sense of Joseph Smith's final sermon where he states that the God of the Bible, our God, the God whose relationship with mankind, the scriptures recount, is not a single deity, but is in fact a plurality of Gods and should be, as Joseph said, read the whole way through as the Gods. I do not believe that Joseph was talking about the Gods of other worlds, but rather as the Book of Abraham recounts the Gods of this world are a plurality of exalted God beings. And speaking of our future, Brigham Young again said, then will they become Gods, then will they become eternal Fathers, eternal Mothers, eternal Sons, and eternal Daughters. Being eternal in the organization, they go from glory to glory, from power to power. They will never cease to increase and to multiply worlds without end. If that is our future, is it not reasonable to believe that that is God's present? That is the question, what are we doing here on Earth? Rather we are trying to become like the Gods and as our prophets have said, to live with the Gods of eternity and eternal worlds. So, our Mormons polytheists, as critics sometimes maintain, if by polytheists one means believers in more than one divine being, yeah, of course we are. We should own it, as someone said earlier. But of course, polytheists one means a believer in more than one variety of Gods, in Gods of different values and different attributes and different goals. But of course we are not, because we believe that the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost possess a single set of values and attributes and goals or as the Book of Mormon plainly puts it, they are one God. Indeed, you will notice that there is one person that I referenced under each member of the Godhead. One of them declares, Jesus is the Christ, the eternal God, manifesting himself under all nations. He was God before he was born, here on earth and now resurrected in heaven. He is our prototype. Joseph further taught that Jesus did what he saw his Father do and by walking the path he learned from his Father he showed us the path we too could follow from pre-mortality, mortality and then on to post-mortality as Gods. It is not, this idea of a plurality of Gods between peace of trivia that Joseph revealed one day, nor is it just a deep doctrine that we shouldn't discuss, because of course a doctrine that's not discussed is not much of a belief. Who are the Gods? We are. And through the grace of Christ we should become soar more fully. I will end with a quote from John Taylor who said, it is for the exaltation of man to the state of superior intelligence and Godhead that the Mediation Son of God redeemed capable to become rendered capable to coming to God, possessing the position, power, majesty, exaltation of a God. I'm grateful for the Mormon Transhumanist Association and the work of its members in promoting a vision of how we can take this spiritual idea and actively and with faith try to bring it about that we might become Gods the same way that other Gods have done before us. Any other questions? Let's make it a good one. Unless there's none. Oh, Chris. Chris gets it, I guess. Okay. Yeah, I just wondered how much hostility do you get from traditional Mormons against this kind of polytheistic God idea? I sometimes get a quizzical look as in the what on earth are you talking about. And certainly some have expressed and much as I believe Chris put it more so on the internet than elsewhere in which there are those I've interacted with who essentially believe that Joseph was out to lunch and that this is silly and that we need to simply stick with really that only the father is really God and some seem uncomfortable with even the idea that Jesus is God. Again, despite what the scriptures say. Thank you.