Sunday, November 15, 2020

Answering the Question: "Why Don't You Kill Your Kids before they Reach the Age of Accountability if they are Guaranteed Celestial Glory?"

  

And I also beheld that all children who die before they arrive at the years of accountability are saved in the celestial kingdom of heaven. (D&C 137:10)

 

Sometimes, a question (usually asked for shock value, though sometimes asked sincerely) is why one should not commit suicide before age 8 (the age of accountability) or kill one’s kids before they reach such an age if they are guaranteed celestial glory. In his recent book on the topic of theodicy, Blake Ostler does a good job at addressing the problematic nature of such a query. With respect to the theological background to those who die in youth, Blake wrote:

 

God obtained the prior consent of those personal intelligences or spirits who were willing to confront the dangers of mortal life and devised a plan to ensure that each does not suffer without some potential redeeming purpose as follows . . .
e. Those who had already progressed to celestial glory before this life are fully served by moral life even if they die in infancy.
f. Once a person has had sufficient opportunity to learn that each came to this mortal life to accomplish or learn, death can occur at any time as a matter of chance—where “chance” means that their deaths are not planned, the timing and means of death are without particular significance, it serves no one’s end, and it might very well have been otherwise; thus if someone asks, “Why did that happen?” the appropriate answer is “There is no particular reason, it just happened.” (Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought, Volume 4: God’s Plan to Heal Evil [Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2020], 137, 138)

 

With this as background, note his response to the question posed above:

 

It has sometimes been argued that if little children who die before the age of eight are guaranteed celestial glory, then we should kill all children before eight years of age to guarantee their celestial glory. This type of argument fails because it commits the fallacy of misplaced cause. Children who have achieved celestial glory have done so whether they die before age eight or not. What guarantees their celestial glory is the progress that they made before this life and not the fact that they died before age eight. Thus, they will achieve the celestial glory even if they die after age eight. Because dying before age eight is not the cause of achieving celestial glory, the proposal to kill children before age eight misplaces the causes of achieving celestial, and instead of guaranteeing celestial glory to at least one person (who achieves it regardless of when he or she dies), the only thing guaranteed is the consignment to hell (the telestial kingdom, according to D&C 76) of the person who killed the child. (Ibid., 153 n. 8)