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Lutha Mahtin posted:As a big believer in ecumenism and interfaith understanding, the way you have described this makes me do the Mormons believe they are Christian because they believe in Christ as their savior and redeemer, and they believe in baptism by immersion by way of making that covenant. They believe that their church is a second dispensation, and that Apostolic succession enjoyed by the Catholic and Orthodox churches is delinquent from shortly after Paul. They believe the Bible is definitely Scripture, but it's not as important as the Book of Mormon, which was held in reserve specifically for this dispensation and the restored church. The Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants are really esteemed highly, and Pearl of Great Price is considered super important but generally not discussed because it holds a lot of the "deeper doctrines" like the existence of the Holy Mother, the ultimate path to personal apotheosis, and so on. So the other churches are basically not Christian enough, but still Christian. I believe the official party line, if pushed on it, is that Catholics etc. may receive resurrection to the Telestial Kingdom, maybe just the Terrestrial Kingdom, but because they lack the Temple rituals they would never be able to make it to the Celestial Kingdom and become gods themselves. The second part is that they require baptism by submersion, but if someone dies non-Mormon they almost certainly have their baptism performed by proxy in the Temples, and I believe the idea goes that a Christian would obviously recognize that their baptism was not sufficient and accept the baptism by proxy. I had a brief dalliance with Mormonism around my Senior year in high school, Freshman year of college, and was ordained with both Priesthoods but I never did the temple rituals as I hosed off out of the Church over some issues of conflicting revelations and my not wanting to go on a Mission in the middle of my college years as my Catholic family made it pretty clear I'd be disinherited. While Mormonism's theology is pretty out there, and obviously based on extremely shaky premises, it's internally consistent, if only because they come up with apologetics for anything - easy to do if you have a living prophet. Edit: the spiritual beliefs and so on are internally consistent, but obviously the religion itself has very little correspondent validity. If you accept all of the premises, it logically follows, so the biggest challenges to the church are things like the lack of fossil records of horses and elephants in South America prior to European colonization, the lack of DNA evidence supporting the "Native Americans are secret-Hebrews" things, and especially if you get into the Patriarchal Blessings which identify the Jewish bloodline of everyone - I think most people get Ephraim though because they were a "lost tribe" and so the Mormons go "yeah they went to Europe, etc." but I'm not sure - patriachal blessings are super private and secret. OP, are you an Ephraim bro?? Paramemetic fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Sep 7, 2016 |
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Sep 7, 2016 19:51
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face. It also makes me confused about why Mormons promote the "we are Christians" thing. Is it an attempt at saming* themselves with more established and "respectable" denominations? Is it a genuine expression of their doctrinal exclusivism? How genuinely self-aware are Mormons of the origins of their religion, and the fact that part of their claim to legitimacy lies in their claim that the religion of over two billion people is illegitimate?
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I've heard recently the commands out of Provo are that missionaries aren't to do cold knocking anymore but rather do the thing where they sidle up and offer to help with yard work or groceries or what not to get their foot in the door, then they start their push. This is in the last 4 years or so I think. Were you before or after this push and can you tell us more? A lot of people don't realize just how downright scientific the missionaries are about it. The language academy, though a bit limited, is one of the best in the world, and the amount of marketing and advertising research that goes on at the MTC is ridiculous. Since you did your mission, can you tell the thread some about that?
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Sep 9, 2016 13:03
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BattyKiara posted:Update: Missionaries not interested in food since it would be a sin to visit a single woman even if she is literally old enough to be their mum. Must be new in the mission field, pro move here is to grab another guy to come along and observe and bear testimony, then they aren't alone with a woman and can still get the grub.
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Sep 10, 2016 13:33
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It's also worth noting I think that there's a huge difference culturally between "Utah Mormons" and diaspora Mormons. The further you get from Utah within the US, the less weird and indoctrinated they get, because the Church infrastructure isn't there to be involved in every facet of life. In Utah church and family and career intertwine but if you're in a branch in a predominantly Catholic or Christian region there simply won't be enough Mormons in positions of power to let that happen, so diaspora Mormons tend to function much better in society. Like Utah Mormons often straight up don't understand non Mormons. They just don't get anything about life outside the Church and they tend to act mega weird as a result, because where they are from everything is all church all the time.
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Sep 11, 2016 13:52
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It's also not likely to change because the male/female marriage thing is doctrinally necessary. If you go into the deeper doctrines you find that marriage outside the temple is only a placeholder or a kind of substitute for the eternal temple marriage, which is eternal and necessary for a man to himself become a god and for the wife to become a Heavenly Mother, which is the kind of finer doctrinal point that is very difficult to get people to even mention outside the Temple, though it's been acknowledged publicly a few times. The Church's doctrines are that as spiritual children we must have heavenly parents, and that as children we must grow up to be like our parents, so baby puppies inevitably become dogs; kittens, cats; and children of God must become God. Also, it obviously takes a man and a woman to create a baby, so it must take a Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother to produce a child of God. From a hymn, Oh My Father maybe? There's a line: quote:In the heavens are parents single? So because this is a critical aspect of the theology of Exaltation, Mormon term for the process of apotheosis, it's super unlikely the Church will ever change something like this. Because it's believed that eternal marriages must be reproductive, and that legal marriages are just facsimile of eternal marriage, they have no way to reverse on this issue without calling into question the entire basis of Exaltation which forms the deeper doctrines. There's no easy "god changed his mind" way to change course like on the African issue - changing course here would mean self destructing the most important sacrament in the religion.
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Sep 12, 2016 04:16
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feedmegin posted:So they're latter day latter day saints? Even latterer.
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Sep 15, 2016 15:57
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ComposerGuy posted:You know what's always bugged me about the Mormon Church? The name doesn't parse. "The Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints" just sounds wrong. Has anyone ever suggested "The Church of Jesus Christ AND Later Day Saints"? Loses the meaning. There are three nouns: Church, Jesus Christ, Saints. Latter-day is a an adjective describing the type of Saints. So it's a Church, whose Church? Jesus Christ's Church. Comprised of what? Latter-day Saints. ((Church of Jesus Christ) of Latter-day Saints). It's not super catchy or anything but it's grammatically accurate describing what it is. It can't be "Church of Jesus Christ [and] Latter-day Saints" because the Church belongs to Jesus, not to Jesus and the Saints. The Saints are participants who comprise the Church, which belongs to Jesus. "Jesus Christ's Church of Latter-day Saints" would work well, so any splinter cells hit me up for trademark rights. quote:It's lax as gently caress, so I've always been fascinated by things like Mormonism and those denominations that are way more structured and rigid. The LDS Church (which is what they usually go by because like you said Church of etc. is tedious and awkward) is the most rigorously centralized and hierarchical church I know of. Everything goes up to the Prophet, and they also keep their records well so that I have somewhere a line of priesthood succession from me to Joe Smith. Which is great because it's like "Jesus, Peter, Paul, Joe Smith . . . " Nevermind those other 1800 years, they hosed up man. The Catholic and other liturgical Christians have a hierarchical structure too, and of course in the Eastern religions we have the student-disciple relationship which creates a de facto hierarchy, but it's more linear than the LDS thing. The LDS thing is so standardized that you can go from any branch to any other branch and basically just plug right in. Everything comes from the same official channels, and like was said earlier, you can even head across the country catching the same lesson series in order in YM/YW/RS etc. They have satellite TV and projectors in all the wards and most branches so that when they do their yearly teachings with the Apostles/Prophets they can livestream it all to their local branches as if you were there. I mean it's really put together, they do have their poo poo together. I mean, not theologically but necessarily but their logistics is on point. Incidentally I left the Church because the "continual revelation" started conflicting with my own experience and that is a big problem. A lot of Mormon theology is very internally consistent if you accept all the premises, but one of the biggest and most important premises that it hinges on is the idea of continual revelation. The idea is that Peter was also called to be the Prophet, the mouthpiece of God who gives continual revelation. All through the Bible from beginning to end we have Prophets who give real-time advice, law, rules, etc. to God's people. After Christ we have the Acts of the Apostles and then we have the Letters (also from Prophets), but after that it stops. The Mormon line goes that it stopped because the Church done hosed up, and with the restored church (LDS Church) God went "okay, no more trying to go it without a Prophet, y'all gently caress it up when I do that so you will forever more have a Prophet now." The Prophet supposedly literally meets with Jesus in the Temple, like they hang out and have tea or something, and Jesus tells him what's up and how to run the Church. The Prophet and other Apostles I think also get to hang out with Jesus occasionally. The Apostles appoint the Quorum, and it goes down the hierarchy from there. So supposedly every Bishop of every Branch or Ward is supposed to be able to serve as the prophet, providing revealed guidance to the people of that branch. There's also as we mentioned the Patriarchs who provide the big picture revelation for someone's entire eternity. Anyhow, I was a "golden investigator" in that I sought out the missionaries and converted intentionally, but I quit over the issue of divine revelation being the lynchpin that holds that together. When I went to college I now had two bishops, one of which had said to me "nah you need to go to college, family is important, don't piss them off by going on a mission right away" and another going "nah, you need to go on a mission right now man, just wait 2 years for college" and my parents going "we will disinherit your rear end immediately idiot." So over all that I kind of came to the conclusion that it wasn't working out. I did become an atheist briefly after that, well, for some time actually, but now fell comfortably into Buddhism, where I am fulfilling basically all of my patriarchal blessing about being a leader and teacher of the truth and so on, it's just not the Mormon truth lmao
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Sep 16, 2016 18:57
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counterfeitsaint posted:I remember there was a whole hullabaloo a few years ago. Holocaust survivors were getting a bunch of help from the mormon church, or at least a genealogy company closely associated with the mormon church (note: that is basically all of them), with their genealogy and cataloging all the Jews that died and their families and poo poo. Then eventually the survivors found out that all their dead family members were getting posthumous mormon baptisms on the side. There are large and comprehensive records of Jewish victims of the holocaust and the Mormon church basically went down the list. This caused a big stink because it was disrespectful to the Jewish people who died basically as martyrs to get (literally) dunked by Mormons, and the Church promised to stop. This actually was going on right around when I was in the Church and it was mostly a lot of under the breath "can't believe those Jews didn't want saved" along with a small minority going "well they were God's chosen people first, I'm sure they'll change their minds after we rebuild Zion." Mormons are literally Zionists, it's just they think that Zion is going to be in Missouri.
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Sep 16, 2016 21:19
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ComposerGuy posted:This is the most depressing thing I've ever heard. Basically yes. They claimed a spot in Jackson County, Missouri and decided that was going to be the spot where when they build the temple it'll kick off the second coming. This prompted a bunch of Mormons from all over to move in to build it up. Then because so many Mormons were moving in and it was going to gently caress up voting for slavery, as most Mormons were from the North and pro-abolition, the locals basically evicted them from their town. The Mormons gathered up their posse and it turned into a series of skirmishes that ultimately resulted in Smith being arrested but then allowed to escape, and the Mormons all moved to Nauvoo, Illinois, where, fresh out of having their asses handed to them, they proceeded to build a bigass standing army for self protection. These days the Temple Lot in Independence belongs to the RLDS church, as it belonged to Smith's family and where the LDS Church recognized Young as the next in charge, RLDS followed Smith's ... Brother? Son? I don't remember. But anyways yes the Temple Lot is something that the LDS Church desperately wants so they can put a nice temple there and invite Jesus over for
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Sep 17, 2016 06:54
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 23:50 |
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ComposerGuy posted:So like, is the priesthood given to ALL good Mormon males or just a select few? Like if you don't get it are you looked down upon? When I joined the church at age 18 I was given the Aaronic Priesthood the week after and the Melchizedek Priesthood the week after that I think. Melchizedek Priesthood way better and cooler, but Aaronic Priesthood gives you command over angels so you know, still pretty dope. They give it to all men because you cannot have a family if you don't have the Melchizedek Priesthood.
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Sep 18, 2016 02:52
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