Posted on 06/09/2013 7:50:35 AM PDT by District13
Q. My co-worker, who is a pastor in a local church, gave me a whole bunch of handouts that he received at a training session. (The session was in preparation for a temple open house in our area.) He gave them to me and asked me to respond, but I don’t know where to start.
A. (by Allen L. Wyatt) Thank you for sending the materials so I could look at them. They are the normal “shotgun approach” that we see among many anti-Mormons. They take everything they can, load it into a series of documents, and then fling it at people hoping that something will stick. The documents you received cover Joseph Smith, prophets, grace vs. works, the Book of Mormon, the endowment, blacks and the priesthood, racism, the First Vision, polygamy, the place of faith, whitewashing history, scholarship and the Church, the endowment, unrighteous dominion, etc.
(Excerpt) Read more at fairlds.org ...
I see a lot of hyperbole and hot button language used both in the linked article and in some pro-Mormonism comments on this thread....”yapping dogs”, “assault”, “smear”, “attack”, etc. All very emotional in nature and painting Mormons as victims....I’m reminded of the type of arguments we see from the left when they defend homosexuality.
Of course you’re entitled to worship as you wish, but the problem comes when you try to say that your religion is Christian. Your doctrine proves it is not. All the protestations in the world won’t change that.
The “Lord’s wagon” isn’t driven by a deity who used to be a human being.
It's already in the works. The starting list is the Utah Chamber of Commerce, which is 100% behind illegal alien amnesty and the Gang of 8 bill.
One of the characteristics of Conservatives is supposed to be tolerance. Take William F. Buckley, or Ronald Reagan as examples. Ain’t seeing much tolerance on these pages. The hissing snake handlers, Harold Campings and fans of Crouches and Grahams, each of them claiming that his or her interpretation of the Bible is the correct one (but, curiously, never disagreeing among themselves or with their brethren among Jehovah’s Witnesses or 7th Day Adventists), viciously attack the Mormons and the Catholics, while claiming to love Jesus! Go figure.
Peace.
Not the point. This is not about "Mormons". I have Mormon friends who oppose amnesty for illegals. It is the LDS LEADERSHIP THAT IS CORRUPT and must be brought down by its own membership. Judge Murray Snow is part of this leadership, as is his father. The LDS leadership has betrayed Mormon precepts regarding obeying the law in favor of increasing their flock with illegal aliens from Latin America and Mexico. The LDS is a principal force behind the Gang of 8 amnesty bill. This is TREASON. Many, many Mormons do NOT know this!
On the island of Niihau. It was raining.
Help me.
Do it now.
Then your religion is the “religion of a decent life.” But what defines decent? Natural law gives us some impossible to resist clues, so even atheists and Muslims may be expected to live “decent lives,” sort of. Killing innocent humans via abortion, jihad, or inquisition excepted, of course.
But there’s the problem. You define “decent” one way (people being “nice,” whatever that means) and a jihadi defines it with, say, an honor killing of their over-westernized daughters. So you go back to the root question of authority. Religions are the same in some respects only because they have no choice. God has set up the universe to run a certain way and if you don’t cooperate you don’t last very long.
But that doesn’t get to how we can agree on what is right. If we presume, as Mormonism and other polytheist religions do, and as atheism, Buddhism, and others also believe, that there is no one, unevolved absolute supreme being from whom all moral authority derives, then every moral question devolves to a Nietzschean power struggle, with no final certainty of rightness or wrongness.
This, BTW, is why I believe all these discussions tend to degenerate into slobbering whine-fests of “you criticize our beliefs, therefore you are a hater.” There is no consensus on the determinability of truth, not even here at FR, so rational analysis becomes impossible.
Note that this is the exact problem we have with the left. It is a byproduct of the success in our times of post-modern philosophy, where the only absolutely true thing is there can be no absolute truth. This is the philosophical grounding of the attempt to deconstruct western civilization, including our constitutional republic, and why we retreat to the safety of vagaries like the “religion of a decent life.”
For my part, I believe in truth, that God has made it discoverable and expects us to use our minds in discovering it. I further believe that this not only includes hard science, but the grander science of life and its meaning in the universe, sometimes also known as religion. So I have no problem criticizing purported faith systems that fail on rational grounds.
And polytheism fails. Christians, definitionally, must accept the teachings of Christ and his apostles as our ultimate authority, and they are clearly against polytheism, and John even calls out an early form of Gnostic belief, also a form of polytheism, as a marker of anti-Christ religion.
So you will, I hope, understand that while some may wish for this debate to go away, there is a divine purpose in working through all this, and Christians are obligated to be faithful to that purpose, even when it results in us unfairly being called haters. God is no post-modern relativist. He wants people to know and believe the truth about him, and to reject the lies. Everywhere His Word is put forward as the standard for discovering truth, He is there, illuminating the discussion, for his own purposes. It is not something to be afraid of, nor is it necessary to try too hard, like Moses striking the rock, when he only needed to say the word. God knows those that are his, and he will find them.
Peace,
SR
“Mosiah”, “Ether”, “Moroni”.
Those names just slay me! Hie thee then unto Kolob, & greet Elohim for me. And just what is a “curelom”, anyway?
Don’t forget all those dark skinned Jewish Indians.
Merry Smithmas!
You wrote:
“You are wrong. Jesus Christ is the Head of my Church - The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.”
I see no evidence of that whatsoever. I am a Church historian with a PhD. I see nothing in scripture, history, logic or theology to support the idea that Jesus Christ founded a sect in upstate New York in the early 19th century. I have nothing against Mormons. I have met a number of fine people who are Mormons. That doesn’t change the fact that their sect was NEVER FOUNDED NOR LED BY JESUS CHRIST.
I thought it was Cain.
That’s a pretty big point.
The reason some people “shotgun” Mormonism is because there is so much screwy about it. Lots of “pellets” to shoot out.
Mormons are fine. Their doctrine and “history” is fantasy, easily shotgunned.
Just keeping it real, for the “latter day saints” who consider normal biblical Christianity so corrupt that your founder had to come up with something new and untainted.
One of the reasons that anti-Mormons are so effective are Mormons themselves. You don’t hear of anti-Methodists. The reason is that if you criticize Methodist beliefs, a Methodist will agree with you and add some criticism of his own.
Mormonisms unwillingness to criticize the church is the problem. It often results in an inability to voice the truth. Knowing too much about the church ends up being a liability to witness. Truth becomes shaped by the church, not by reality.
If Joseph Smith had multiple wives and some of them were married at the time to other men, what does that mean? Well, nothing really because it was so long ago so why deny it?
***I’ll start bashing Mormons when the blow up people at marathons, hijack airplanes and crashing them into buildings, shooting people at Ft Hood to defend the Taliban,****
They tried that during the Missouri Mormon Wars. Didn’t work out well for them, They even tried to murder Governor Boggs! So they went to Utah where they excelled in killing travelers to California.
Ever heard of the Fancher train (Mountain Meadows)? Then there was a less known attack on the Shepherd train and Miltmore wagon train. Quite a few people on these trains were killed, women raped, and children killed by “Indians” with blue eyes, beards, and spoke perfect English.
And when they could not kill enough travelers they killed their own as in the Morrisite Massacre of people who had enough of Brigham Young and tried to establish their own colony.
Do you know that after Mountain Meadows Massacre, much of the loot was stored in the Stake house in Cedar City. It was later reported that the place stank like a slaughter house for two years as a result.
Aw we can still find made up stories today.
Ever heard of the AQUARIAN GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST?
I’ve even got a fake 29th chapter of ACTS.
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