Mormon Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

I have a pretty neat Mormon friend, who lives a very moral life. Some of that "moral" means not going to R-movies and stuff, but the part I like is he's honest, goes out of his way to be kind to people, and they go to great pains to take care of their own. He kept one "brain-injured" fellow on his payroll for years, even though the guy was working for another (Mormon-owned) company. He paid half the guy's salary, anyway, and the guy was a real pain in the neck (because of the brain injury). It looked to me like the Mormons really took care of him.Now, that said, it's a pretty bizarre religion with pretty bizarre beliefs, just based on what they say themselves. There's really no evidence that anything Joseph Smith wrote in the Book of Mormon really happened. It doesn't fit American history from 2,000 years ago.I've read a lot of the Book of Mormon, and my thought is that Joseph Smith was very familiar with the Bible. I understand he may have borrowed a lot of his story of the travels to America from a book he read (such borrowing was not unusual in the 1800's, I think). The rest, the part's that not story, is borrowed directly from the King James Version of the Bible, with some commentary thrown in so that the strange or difficult to understand parts don't seem so unusual.There ain't no way Joseph Smith translated it letter for letter out of a magic hat with a stone in it. They've had to make a lot of small corrections to it over the years.But, like I said, they can be wonderful people who take care of each other, which is better than Christians, although the majority of Mormons I've met are "Jack Mormons" (I heard that name from one of them). They're Mormon mostly in name only. They don't attend their wards or avoid caffeine, etc. But they stay linked to each other. That part's pretty neat.

LOL. That's interesting. Were you being sarcastic, or did you mean that?Obviously, Jesus didn't write that sentence for us to remember. The person who wrote that sentence was in the process of telling a story meant to prove Jesus is the Son of God and that he is alive, risen from the dead, seated with the Father in heaven.So, whoever wrote that sentence (Luke), did not intend to convey that Jesus was talking about a cemetary.I noticed later someone mentioned paradise in the afterlife belongs to later Jewish apocalyptic writings. However, Enoch predates Luke by a bit, and it has a description of Hades that is exactly like Jesus' story of the rich man.Anyway, I think it's pretty clear that what Jesus was referring to in Luke was the afterlife, not a cemetary.

I just wanted to point out one more time that the issue is not whether Jesus bought into the paradise/afterlife myth (as you put it), but whether Luke did.

The story of the Orthodox church is kind of neat, if Rrhain will forgive me for jumping in.The Council of Nicea (I'm about 90% sure that's right council) set up four patriarchs, who were basically in charge of final decisions for the church (one or perhaps two have been added since). That was the fourth century. The fall of Rome led to a geographical and political separation between the patriarch in Rome and the rest of the patriarchs, who were all in the east.In the 9th century, the world situation restored better communication between the eastern and western churches and the eastern patriarchs and the western patriarch/pope. By then, the Roman patriarch had changed the Creed of Nicea (apostles' creed) by adding the phrase "and the Son" (Latin: filioque) to the phrase "We believe in the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father."The patriarchs of the east argued for 200 years that the Roman patriarch couldn't do this without permission of the others. The Roman patriarch said he could. After 200 years they gave up arguing and split ("The Great Schism").It was all over one latin word (three English words). A couple years ago, Pope John Paul II recited the Nicene Creed without the filioque, and it was taken note of.The Orthodox churches and the Roman Catholic church have been "evolving" mostly separately since late in the 4th century. There are a lot of differences that wouldn't be significant to outsiders, but are extremely significant to informed members, especially if they're Orthodox.The Orthodox aren't allowed to make big doctrinal changes, because, in their opinion, they don't have all the patriarchs. One is fallen away. The Romans can make all the doctrinal changes they want, because they only recognize one of the patriarchs.The two groups have different rites, baptize differently, view the Trinity differently, Mary differently, and salvation differently. The Orthodox consider the use of statues to be idolatry. They use icons, which are two dimensional and not exact replicas (they're more cartoon like).Real committed Orthodox believers can be very rude, a lot like fundamentalists. To the Orthodox, Protestantism is just a part of Catholicism, all of them equally separated from the true catholic (universal) Church.