With those nutty beliefs and that perfect grooming.
And magic underwear.
Say what you like about the Mormons, but I think that their whole “singles ward” thing is a really fantastic idea.
Also, what’s the question here?
Okay. Poll’s ready.
Mormons had a good thing going with that whole polygamy idea.
I’m an atheist, and therefore a smug little shit. All religions are ridiculous.
I don’t think I’m generally smug, nor that religions are especially ridiculous, I just don’t understand why believing in Mike the Garden Pixie; who lives under a mushroom at the bottom of my garden, loves me and protects me from evil makes me a raving lunatic. But believing some geezer runs around turning water into wine and healing lepers before getting himself deliberately crucified to “save me” is A-OK. I just pretend to be an atheist to ward off the men in white coats.
And I know bugger all about Mormons other than they might be the bunch who have lots of wives which surely makes them uber-Christians because apparently it’s all about the sanctimony of marriage or something.
Mormonism is the best reflection of America’s unique puritanical version of Protestantism, and of American views of their unique historical roles in the spread and maintainance of their respective faiths - America the Promised Land, the New Zion.
Even though, of course, many fundamentalist Protestants probably see them as heretical.
Good question. Maybe it’s for the same reason that if you repeat the story of (say) WMDs in Iraq then you’re misinformed, whereas if you originated the story then you’re a liar.
My Catholic friends think they’re a cult, my Protestant friends think they’re a little odd but generally decent, and my non-religious friends lump them in with the rest of the religious right. But the young Morman missionaries who ambush me outside Park Street Station invariably ask me if I’ve read the Bible and talk about how Jesus is the Lord, so yeah, I think they’re Christians.
Fuck Romney, though.
I think it would be fair to classify this as an appeal to authority, a common logical fallacy. I.e. “Jesus is in the Bible, ergo the Jesus’ existence/divinity/etc. is a fact.”
Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb!
I’ve generally seen that more as an argument by consensus (lots more people believe in my god than yours) or by age (Christianity’s been around for, like, ever, and is so much more right because of it). Usually the sort of protestants that argue these things save their authority fallacies for whatever the flavour of the month Jesus book writer is, which by the way is an industry that makes Harry Potter look small time, and Catholics…well, they may occasionally invoke it with the pope but most Catholics I’ve seen have a pretty decent amount of tolerance and tend to avoid arguing these things. Stereotype? Sure, but I get bludgeoned with religion in the workplace every day, so I’ll take the hit on that fallacy.
Even Protestants and Catholics can agree on the Nicene Creed. If you aren’t compatible with that, which Mormonism is not, you are far enough outside the bounds of orthodoxy to make a ‘Christian’ label inaccurate.
I thought Mormans were Nicene… er… -ists.
Or is that the Reformed church of JCoLTD?
The reason that Protestants do not consider them mainstream Christian is that they veer far, far away from mainstream beliefs. E.g., a universe filled with billions of Gods, of whom “God” is just the local guy, the belief that if you’re a good Mormon you become a god and get your own planet, that God was just a man who became a god, very different beliefs (albiet using the same words as others, but with very different meanings) about who Jesus was and was not, etc.
But great PR guys - super family oriented TV ads, and they could teach a lot on how to take care of others within your church family. (no sarcasm at all meant in that statement.)
I’ll be curious if faith has much impact on Romney’s candidacy.
Are Mormons the ones who believe Lucifer did not perform a truly evil action? That the devil is not the basis of evil? Or am I confused?*
A teacher of mine wrote his doctorate thesis on cults. He definitely put the Mormons in the cult group. I suppose I see them as a crazy, non-Christian cult on two counts, then.
*I can’t think of a great number of heresies larger than this one (nor more idiotic), so if so, they cannot be Christian.
Does non-Christian equal crazy? Or are these separately applicable to the Mormons, independent of each other?
*I can’t think of a great number of heresies larger than this one
Then you don’t know very many heresies. I can think of quite a few that are more cosmically disturbing to the origins of Christian faith than a simple rumination on the nature of the devil. In any case, IIRC the Mormon problem is actually a Christian problem that affects Mormons more particularly…it isn’t with the Devil per se, it’s with Lucifer and what that actually means in the original Hebrew version of the bible. In short, there is a good amount of controversy over whether the Lucifer-Morningstar-King Of Babylon portion of Isiaiah refers to a supernatural devil or to a human opponent of the Jews. There is a lot of evidence, beginning with the rather unlikely name itself, that it is the product of a mistranslation from the King James version of the bible, which was made from an already allegedly (mis)translated source.
The trick for Mormons is that their Joseph Smith fellow is supposed to have translated the Bible to English straight from a Hebrew source dating hundreds of years prior to Christ, yet it has the same, shall we say, nuances as the King James version. More than likely because big Joe copied straight from King Jimmy, but there is a longstanding precedent for religious folk telling Occam’s razor to fuck off, and this is no exception.
See also Mary: Virgin: Concept of immaculate conception.
(nor more idiotic),
Setting aside the possibly legitimate argument that can be had about the Devil belonging in a properly translated version of the Bible, and whether his origins have more to do with the adaptation of pagan mythology and human nature to Christian ideas, there is always the philosophical and literary dilemma of the devil, which is probably about the most positive contribution to popular culture the Church has going for it.
so if so, they cannot be Christian.
You can argue all day long with your fellow Christians (perhaps you could use small “c” christians or something for people you disagree with), but religion is largely a matter of self identification to people outside the group. The same arguments you use to cast out the Mormons could just as easily be turned on the Catholic church, and you would have only logical fallacies (but we’ve been around longer! look how many more of us there are! but our bible says we’re right!) to defend yourself. That’s the pickle of having Truth instead of truth. You know, like Shiites and Sunnis tell everyone the other is not Islam, but to everyone else they are just different brands of Muslim.
True story: My mom is a Turkish muslim. When she lived here, all her closest friends were LDS. She said that of all the people she met in the USA, only the mormons reminded her of the tight-knit family groups and community support that is a staple of Turkish culture. She felt immediately at home with them and considered them to also be God’s people.
So if you’re LDS, my mom considers you to be an honorary muslim. Congrats. :-)
Independent, obviously. I’d have to be even more stupid than I possibly already am to connect the two.
True. Again, I should not have really said that. Hence the missing post. As regards the possible mistranslation, Job is another possible source of error (i.e. the figure shown in Job is different). I’m still learning, so I’m open to new information.
I’m not sure what your exact problem is, but catholic is an old term that simply means ‘universal’. So the catholic truth is a universal truth, but a [Roman] Catholic truth… I had this drilled into me.
I don’t know enough, so I removed my post. I should not have posted it, really, but I did. One more for idiocy.
As in the other thread, I don’t want to start another argument. Are you prepared to shake hands?