What's with the Kolob thing?

Sigh.

The short answer is:
Kolob is another word we use (occasionally) for the place where God lives.

The long answer is
Kolob is a star that is close to God's world.  We believe that God, a glorified yet physical person, has a glorified (yet physical) home, and the star there (like our Sun) is called Kolob.

The word sounds funny because it comes from Egyptian (I think). It comes from a book that Joseph Smith translated that we call the Pearl of Great Price.  The Pearl of Great Price is special because it contains a less garbled (freshly translated) copy of Moses's account of the creation than what has been passed down to us in the Old Testament, and it has some additional information about Abraham.  But I can't recall the word Kolob ever having been used in a talk or lesson.  It appears in one hymn, which we don't sing very often.

Apparently, Abraham was a really smart guy, and it appears that God revealed to him a little more about science and math and astronomy than we typically teach in church.  That extra knowledge is briefly touched on but not expounded.  Intellectuals in the church have tried for years to unlock additional knowledge through this snippet of scripture.  Some of them have proposed some weird theories (although, who knows, they might be right).  But these do not constitute the core and accepted doctrine in the church -- any more than the mystics or super-intellectuals in your church represent the minister or the Pope.

The great teaching that I have taken away from this handful of verses is that God wants his children to learn about lots of things, and if I am sincere and obedient, God will reveal to me things that are sacred and not available to the world, just like he did for Abraham. (And God will likely tell me to keep it between Him and me, so they won't be posted on my blog. Sorry.)  The sun and moon and stars were created to bless us, and to remind us of God, and since God's knowledge is Endless, I assume there are some things that he can teach me about Math or Astronomy or how to do my job or rear my family, if He sees it as helpful to my salvation and progress.

Do you really believe Jesus and Satan are brothers?

I've never heard it taught that way in church.  But I suppose that you can see it that way - sort of.  You see, we do believe that we all lived together before we came to earth, and we were one big family.  Some of Heavenly Father's children were rebellious and decided to try to lead us astray.  They became the devil and his angels.  

So the important doctrine (and the one we do teach in church) is that Jesus is our older brother.  We acknowledge the existence of the Devil (or Lucifer, or the adversary, or Satan, or whatever name you'd like), but we try not to spend a lot of time on him.

Also, since Lucifer's decision to rebel cost him his inheritance and place in the Kingdom, I think he's been effectively disowned. So I guess, technically, he is no longer our brother (Or Jesus's). 

The doctrine that Lucifer is a fallen angel is, by the way, based on the Bible.  Isaiah 14.

Now, good Christian, let me put it back to you.  Where do you believe the devil came from? Was he created by God?  Is there anything that was not created by God?  Did God create evil? 

You see, no matter how you answer this, it creates logical problems - and opportunities for me to distort your beliefs.  Which I would not do, because my focus (and the teachings of the church) are centered on a loving God who is our father, and we are his children.  Most of the complications come from this thing that Mormons call "agency" - the right to make decisions, which God gave to his children to help them.  It is where  the struggles with faith come from. You can distill this and many other questions back to this one: Why does a loving God allow bad things to happen like war and suffering? It takes an understanding of the whole plan (and believing that there is, in fact, a plan) to address the hard questions.