Who was on the Lord’s side, who?

(Nutshell for Non-LDS: Mormons believe that everyone alive once dwelled with God before being born. Before the world was even formed there was a war in Heaven, as John’s Revelation made famous, and this war was about whether we should be allowed to make mistakes when that would mean we would suffer, or if our lives should be so controlled that nobody would be able to sin or choose wrongly at all. Satan advocated for the latter, and the rest is mythology.)

If the War in Heaven was a war of words, an essentially missionary war, and nobody was won over from the Bad Side to the Good Side, then it had to have been the most supremely ineffective missionary effort of all time. Which means that we need to consider…

How many of us were once on Satan’s side of that war?

How many of us only stayed on the right side of the war because that’s where our friends were or for some other reason? Many people make good/bad choices not because of what they believe but because of who they decided to follow along with.

Out of billions and billions, if even just one-sixth of the Host of Heaven was once on Satan’s side but was won over before the war ended, then this means that out of the loyal-two thirds, a quarter of that was at one time on the wrong side of the line.

Just playing these odds, there’s a 1-in-4 chance that you bought into this whole “force people back into Heaven by restricting their agency” thing, is what I’m saying. And the more effective you want to imagine the greatest missionary effort of all time, the higher the odds that you were on the wrong side at one point. You’re almost certainly friends with some of these people, if you aren’t one yourself (and I probably was, given how hard I need to work to remind myself that certain courses of action are Bad, Very Bad).

And who knows how many people were only on the winning side to start with because they were in the right situation, with the right friends? An eighth of those that were loyal? Half?

Even an eighth adds up to a loooooooot of people, especially if we don’t know how they were all distributed (Non-LDS: Mormons believe that more worlds than this are inhabited with intelligent life). Did this planet receive as many of these people as any other? Less? The lion’s share? And now that they’ve entered the next phase of the war, are they still in the right situations, with the right friends?

There’s definitely a lot of people down here that were susceptible to Satan’s smooth talk up there, is what I’m saying.