Mormon Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The thing I find most objectionable about Mormonism is the prohibition against masturbation.Other than that Mormonism seems mostly to be about community and family bonds, which I can respect.

Oh, you mean like how Protestants use a different bible than the Catholics?

Yeah, but that was pretty much the result of heavy, violent intolerance against the Mormons.

Well, that hardly makes sense, considering that Catholics came before Protestants. If anything, it was the Protestants taking out books from the Bible.

Yeah, I'd heard about that attack. Honestly I don't mean to say that the Mormons have any less blood on their hands than any other group. In this particular case I fear it was the result of a siege mentality fostered on the Mormons by their continual oppression at the hands of other groups.But certainly they haven't always played nice.

Sure, the way he thought it was supposed to be. Obviously the Catholics thought different. And I don't recall Luther traveling to the middle east to do any digs. So he was clearly basing his opinion on the same information avaliable to the Catholics.How do you determine who was right?

Yeah? So? I'm not hearing the downside, here. I'm just saying that you can hardly condemn a church for altering the bible if your own faith has done exactly the same thing.

Well, sure. But all the places mentioned in Watership Down are there for you to see, but is it your position that rabbits can talk?Denmark exists, but Hamlet didn't really happen. Verona exists but Romeo and Juliet is made-up. What does the reality of the setting have to do with the veracity of the events?

So? The question isn't what the word means now, it's what it meant when Jesus said it then. Or didn't you know that words change over time?

Hrm, that really puts some of the works of Orson Scott Card (noted s-f author and Mormon) into perspective... it really explains some of his characterization choices.Just an aside.

How do you know who the decendants of Cain are?

So what you're saying is, they just pick who is "decended from Cain", that is, who doesn't get to be a priest, based on "revelation", which could just simply be "who don't they like." No surprise that it turns out to be mostly black people who are decended from Cain.I mean how would you determine the difference between somebody who was deciding who was decended from Cain based on actual revelation from God; and who was just deciding based on who they did and didn't like? Do you just trust god not to let that happen?This looks like just a big, involved justification for institutionalized racism. It's like spiritual racial profiling.

Well, you haven't really solved the problem. You've just passed it on, because you still have the same problem: how do you tell the difference between revelation and lying?How can you even tell the difference between genuine revelation and lying to yourself? After all racists aren't racist because they wake up one day and say "hey, I'm going to start trating black folks like crap." They do what they do because, at a deep level, it just feels right to them to do so.You can call it "revelation". I call it "acting on your pre-existing predjudices." I ask you how it could ever be possible to tell the difference. This is a problem of all religions, of course, and not just the LDS. (What would you prefer as the proper address for your faith? Mormonism? MC of JC of LDS?)

Thanks, I was wondering. Well, I'll accept that you can tell the difference in yourself - or that you think you can, anyway.The more important question is, how do you tell the difference in other people? Like, the ones who are setting doctrine or policy or even writing the Scriptures themselves? If you can't explain how you yourself do it, how can you trust that anybody else is able to?How would I explain what salty is like? I would take a random sample of foods, and have randomly chosen people taste them and identify the salty things. I would test many people with the same foods and see to what extent they agreed.Now, maybe I don't wind up knowing exactly what saltiness is "like". I do however wind up with a pretty good sense of what is salty, and what's not, and that's far more important. Yeah, pretty much. The words that would change my mind would have to be uttered from God's own lips.

That's not even close to Biblical, just so you know. The mark is on his forehead, not his entire skin.