[mission9]

I don’t hate anyone, I am embarrassed for you as my brother. The above discussions quite clearly delineate the boundaries of bigotry.

As a matter of simple human decency, it is always best to assume the best in your neighbor rather than to assume the worst. When you assume the worst, you provoke a response from your neighbor, which seems to confirm your worst suspicions. I can have honest policy differences with Rudy or Huck or a Log Cabin yet show them respect for their beliefs. That courtesy to Mr. Romney is lacking here. There is no doubt that a long history of controversy and heresy has made attempts at ecumenical respect of Mormonism difficult. I invite you to rise above this and Judge the man by the content of his character, and not the echo of rantings from the 1840s.

[Gondring]

As a matter of simple human decency, it is always best to assume the best in your neighbor rather than to assume the worst.

Okay, so what's the best to assume?!?

• Is it "bad" to assume that he follows his religion faithfully?!?
• Is it "bad" to assume that he believes the Book of Mormon, which states clearly that the Bible is corrupt (I Nephi 13:28)?
• Is it "bad" to assume that he believes in the word of a guy who was arrested for fraud and later claimed to translate an Eygptian papyrus into the Book of Abraham (when it was really a funereal text [Book of Breathings])?

Or do we take his word that he believes "the echo of rantings from the 1840s"...and might be either disingenuous or gullible? Or are we to take it that he just is very open to change, from the lack of a closed canon?

How would it be "bigoted" to ponder these questions, any more than to question whether Sen. Fred Thompson's membership on the Senate Centrist Coalition indicates he might not be a conservative, as an example?