Thread by @JesseLucasSaga

I have theories on why they look like this.
(I am a practicing member in good standing and attend temples regularly, I have seen more of the one on lower right than most people, and I just have theories, because the church's official description is just "directs you to God")

Take a look at some other temples. They come from very different belief systems but are all built to be, at some symbolic level, a place where a god dwells - and they are built to make that god comfortable.

(that's not the real Parthenon it's in Nashville but bear with me)

The cathedral in Reims has this nave taking up most of its expansive volume, a statement in stone of a God who is the Highest - the eye is forced upwards, there is a sense of dizzying height, the throne of the god in the Host

The interior of the Latter-day Saint temples, which can have similar proportions overall, are not like this. If it's tall, it doesn't have a huge nave, it has multiple stories. Verticality is just one element. The god enshrined here, it seems, does a lot of different things.

But the main rite done in these temples (the spooky one, yeah, that one) is done in what is essentially a play. The supplicant symbolically reenacts the story of the Creation, Fall, and God's covenants with Adam, and in the early temples each had its own stage.

(for time constraints, because the Church is dedicated to symbolically ushering every human who has ever lived through this rite, the rooms are now small movie theaters instead of stages - they are symbols of stages which are symbolic of the world, kind of a Borgesian recursion)

You walk in here, you're seated, and you are symbolically watching the Earth be created, same as you did before you were born. This room is, symbolically, the size of the Earth. Very important when considering what god lives here - the temples are *bigger on the inside.*

There is an actor who plays God, actors as Adam and Eve and Lucifer and other characters, and they break the fourth wall, they address the audience, the audience are characters, they are all Adam and Eve, we are watching our first parents show us how to obey God in first person.

In my Father's house are many mansions, in my Father's mansions are many worlds. The temple brings you to Edenic innocence, away from God's presence to the "World," and then, through obedience and the Gospel of Christ, back, redeemed. That is a LONG distance!

You complete the rite, cross the stage yourself, through the curtains to the "Celestial Room," symbolizing God's presence but not in any specific item, there's no Host or kami, it's basically a parlor, there are scriptures you can read in it. Then you leave and are busy elsewhere

Because you were *always* in the actual presence of God, the Spirit was *always* with you. The world we live in was Eden, is Babylon, will be Paradise, it will finish its own progression through these stages, and all of these stages are in all of these temples.

The temple is the world inside out, in a way, it is time inside out, because it's a templum, it's a measuring stone, it sets your compass for the world beyond, much as the Tabernacle was a surveyor's tent. It is a working building and it is sanctified for that purpose.

I've seen some people noting that the temples don't seem to have many windows, which is false, even in OP you can see some thin vertical windows on all of them, but they're practical lighting implements and not necessary, because the entire world's inside. You look inward there.