Evil? Now, perhaps. Later? Not so much.

[palladin9479]

People who are not members of the church talking as though their expects on it's internals is amusing to watch.

#1 The Church of Later Day Saints (Mormans or just The Church) were Christians from the very beginning. They accept both the old testament and the new testament while tacking on a third testament and two additional books. The Book of Mormon is their third testament (gold plates story blah blah) and is considered an addendum to the first two books. The two additional books, The Pearl of Great Price (PGP) and Doctrine and Covenants (D&C) where either written by Joseph Smith or under his guidance. PGP is a story about him failing to do as commanded and the resulting loss of part of the BoM, D&C is a big a$$ rule book on how exactly to live your life and run a church. It was actually their insistence that they were Christians that got them persecuted to the degree they did. There was lots of pressure from the predominately Protestants of that era to remove them from communities, they were treated much the same way then that Muslim's are today in the USA, except Muslims are rarely openly shot at.

#2 Polygamy and it's acceptance in the Abrahamic religions is a direct result of where Abraham and his people came from, Egypt. At that time women were considered property and a man was allowed to own as many women as he could afford. Having additional women was a sign of prosperity so rich men of that era would have multiple wives. The idea of marriage was not the same then as it is now, it wasn't a contract to form a social unit. It was simply a statement of ownership. A man "marrying" a women was no different then a man buying a women for permanent personal use, which is to differentiate it from purchasing a women as a commodity for trade / servitude. In old Egyptian lore a man who died would be resurrected in the afterlife with the worldly possessions he was buried with thus women for personal use would be killed and buried with him while women for trade would just be sold off or transferred to his oldest male child.

Over time this changed, especially with Christianity forming and spreading like it did. It was merged with the pagan concepts of permanent tribe sanctioned social unions and thus marriage took on special meaning.

For the Church it's been a prickly thorn as the rules were written that way for a good reason. Church doctrine allows for multiple wives so that a widower is able to be remarried without becoming an adulterer. Christian religion does not differentiate between marriage on earth and marriage in the afterlife such that a partner that dies here is expected to be waiting in the afterlife for the other one to join them. This creates big issues if a man remarries because his previous wife is still waiting. So as a tenet the church supports spiritual polygamy while forbidding physical polygamy. Also no spiritual bond is recognized unless it's done by appropriately authorized people, in this case the priests of the Church. So a married couple converting into the Church are technically not recognized as being married, something that is often remedied shortly after their baptized into the church.

I may no longer consider myself a member of the Church but I still remember all the stupid rules and teachings. I didn't convert out until well after I had graduated.

[Diogenes]

The Cannibal Cop and the Dark, Secret World of Cannibal Porn

“It was not terribly long ago that a site such as ours would have been shut down and many of its members who had created original content could be dragged into court on obscenity charges at the minimum. We walk a fine line,” writes one forum poster on DarkFetishNet, a death-porn website.

- See more at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... APuk5.dpuf



Eventually they will want society to accept them and not discriminate against them. It's a civil rights issue, you see.

[GIThruster]

#1 The Church of Later Day Saints (Mormans or just The Church) were Christians from the very beginning. They accept both the old testament and the new testament while tacking on a third testament and two additional books. The Book of Mormon is their third testament (gold plates story blah blah) and is considered an addendum to the first two books. The two additional books, The Pearl of Great Price (PGP) and Doctrine and Covenants (D&C) where either written by Joseph Smith or under his guidance. PGP is a story about him failing to do as commanded and the resulting loss of part of the BoM, D&C is a big a$$ rule book on how exactly to live your life and run a church. It was actually their insistence that they were Christians that got them persecuted to the degree they did. There was lots of pressure from the predominately Protestants of that era to remove them from communities, they were treated much the same way then that Muslim's are today in the USA, except Muslims are rarely openly shot at.

I'm sorry but you don't know what you're talking about. I don't care if you're a lapsed Mormon. You're wrong, as per usual and as per usual, pretending you know about things you don't. Joe Smith was persecuted because he made claims that all Christians were lapsed in their faith and needed to accept his supposed revelation which was and is in direct contradiction to the New Testamant. I'm not a specialist in Mormon doctrine but anyone who wants to look this stuff up can find hundreds of points of discord where Joe was claiming things that all believers in the NT do not believe. It was not until after WWII that Mormons claimed to be Christians because in fact, they claimed to be the unique and only group of true followers of God. They decided to shun the term Christian and blaming this choice on others is childish in the extreme.

#2 Polygamy and it's acceptance in the Abrahamic religions is a direct result of where Abraham and his people came from, Egypt. At that time women were considered property and a man was allowed to own as many women as he could afford. Having additional women was a sign of prosperity so rich men of that era would have multiple wives. The idea of marriage was not the same then as it is now, it wasn't a contract to form a social unit. It was simply a statement of ownership. A man "marrying" a women was no different then a man buying a women for permanent personal use, which is to differentiate it from purchasing a women as a commodity for trade / servitude. In old Egyptian lore a man who died would be resurrected in the afterlife with the worldly possessions he was buried with thus women for personal use would be killed and buried with him while women for trade would just be sold off or transferred to his oldest male child.

Abraham didn't come from Egypt. He came to the "Promised Land" as Abram from Mesopotamia, what is currently Iraq, with his father Terah. He was later renamed Abraham when he supposedly formed the First Covenant. Abraham and his son Isaac, and Isaac's son Jacob are the fathers or Patriarchs of Israel. It wasn't until the famine in the Promised Land in Jacob's time, that all the Jews moved to Egypt to escape the famine. After that time a Pharaoh came to rule who decided not to honor the earlier agreement with the Jews and placed them into slavery. They lived that way for 400 years until they were delivered by Moses and returned to the Promised Land.

If you can't get even these simplest of things straight, why should we lend any credence to your nonsensical ramblings?

[kunkmiester]

You're both wrong.

The Pearl of Great Price was translated from some papyrus given to Joseph. In the modern version used in the scriptures, it also contains the account of the First Vision. The Doctrine and Covenants is a record of revelations given to the early church, God talking to his prophet the way he has done from Adam onward.

There were myriad reasons they were persecuted, generally voting as a block and doing things like being abolitionists in Missouri(slave state at the time) were big deals.

One of the biggest remaining debates, and at the core of the claim of being Christians are the Creeds. A few hundred years AD(don't recall all the dates off the top of my head), a bunch of conferences were held and scripture, doctrine, etc. were all sorted out, leading to a bunch of things Christians believed, and if you didn't believe those things, you weren't Christian. Scriptural support for those is debatable, but one of the things Joseph did was reject them all. Since all the Catholics and Protestants held to those creeds--the Nicene Creed being the biggest one I hear about all the time--to reject them is to reject the community and make yourself outsiders. It's settled into more of a stalemate now, Mormons haven't gone away like everyone at the time said they would, so the world is having to deal with it.

[MSimon]

You're both wrong.

The Pearl of Great Price was translated from some papyrus given to Joseph. In the modern version used in the scriptures, it also contains the account of the First Vision. The Doctrine and Covenants is a record of revelations given to the early church, God talking to his prophet the way he has done from Adam onward.

There were myriad reasons they were persecuted, generally voting as a block and doing things like being abolitionists in Missouri(slave state at the time) were big deals.

One of the biggest remaining debates, and at the core of the claim of being Christians are the Creeds. A few hundred years AD(don't recall all the dates off the top of my head), a bunch of conferences were held and scripture, doctrine, etc. were all sorted out, leading to a bunch of things Christians believed, and if you didn't believe those things, you weren't Christian. Scriptural support for those is debatable, but one of the things Joseph did was reject them all. Since all the Catholics and Protestants held to those creeds--the Nicene Creed being the biggest one I hear about all the time--to reject them is to reject the community and make yourself outsiders. It's settled into more of a stalemate now, Mormons haven't gone away like everyone at the time said they would, so the world is having to deal with it.

One of the "heresies" stamped out was that Jesus was a prophet not identical with the Head Office. Which essentially ended the Christians as a Jewish sect. Now Christians are idolaters in the eyes of Jews. And of course the proliferation of statues of "God" in churches is especially suspicious.

This seems pretty good on the question:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSKBGdv07nQ

Needless to say my grasp of Church history is not extensive. But my understanding is that the heresy of Arius was a longstanding if minor sect. I once knew an old man (I was in my late 20s he was in his 60s - 50 years ago) named Arius. A Bible scholar. I wonder if his parents were adherents of the old heresy.

However, I discuss here the fact that what we call Christianity has a lot of parallels to the pagan beliefs of Egypt:

http://classicalvalues.com/2010/11/a_pagan_resurre/

The resurrection is a different telling of the Horus myth. So we have something condemned in the Torah - a Pagan overlay on top of the Jewish religion.

Now all this makes no difference to me. I don't judge people by their religion. I judge them by their willingness to live and let live. i.e. find their own way while doing their best to minimize injury to others. Especially organizing to inflict harm. But it all gets quite complicated because sometimes you need to organize to inflict harm if others are organized against you. And sometimes it ought to be preemptive. One must tread this ground very carefully because humans are wont to organize to express their passions. Fear and anger being the most common.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. - H. L. Mencken

The Noahide laws seem like a pretty good minimalist set of seven rules:

http://classicalvalues.com/2008/04/tribalism/

But of course I'd probably eliminate 1 & 5 cutting it down to five rules.

[Stubby]

Wow arguing over fiction.
2000 year old book club gone wrong.

[GIThruster]

The Arian heresy was indeed popular at one time. It was said there was a time just before the Nicene Creed that the dispute was between Athanasius and the world, meaning Arius had convinced many. Of course this distinction whether Christ was indeed fully God is an important one to any worshipper so again, Stubby is hopelessly out of touch. Indeed to this day, whether Christ is considered fully God is often used to define between orthodoxy, meaning churches of Greece, Rome the Protestant, Reformed and Evangelical churches and what are usually considered pseudo-christian cults: Jehovah's Witnesses, The Way International, Mormons, etc. Certainly the Bible records Jesus having claimed to be God Himself (John 8:58) and he was after all crucified on the charge of blasphemy for this, despite it was not illegal in the Roman Empire and Jesus had broken no laws. It was the reaction of the Sanhedrin, or the ruling Jewish authority, that had Jesus illegally executed on the charge of blasphemy, for claiming to be God.

[Stubby]

John claims that Jesus claims to be god. get it right.

[GIThruster]

Actually I had it right, Stubby. All of the records of that time record the same thing. The quote from Joh is the simplest to see but you can even look in the secular records such as Josephus Flavius. Everyone agreed that was Christ's claim, and he was crucified for it. If he had not made the claim, he would not have been crucified.

This is actually bordering on philosophy of religion rather than theology since it can be analyzed rationally, quite apart from placing any trust in the texts. The record is he made this claim. Given the claim and the record he was executed for the claim, one then arrives at the famous philosophical argument "the aut Deus aut malus homo" or "God or a bad man". The bad man part was broken down into two types by C.S.Lewis since he noted "bad" could be "evil" or "sick". So he created the interesting trilemma argument, "Liar, Lunatic or Lord". Someone claiming to be the Creator is either a Liar, and a particularly wicked one at that, especially for allowing his followers to all die miserable deaths for his sake, or a lunatic, on the level of a man who claims to be a poached egg, or he is who he claims to be.

That is philosophy of religion, not theology.

[Stubby]

Actually yes I had that wrong.

Someone translated what someone else copied from a translation of a copy .... saying John said that Jesus said.
Sorry about that.

Would you like to provide any contemporary accounts (outside of the bible) of Jesus saying anything?
That would be interesting.

[Diogenes]

And you guys thought *I* was nuts when I said that people would attempt to mainstream pedophilia and beastiality.



Yale hosts workshop teaching sensitivity to bestiality

On Saturday afternoon, Yale hosted a “sensitivity training” in which students were asked to consider topics such as bestiality, incest, and accepting money for sex.

During the workshop, McDevitt taught the approximately 40 students that just because people think something is deviant does not mean that it is bad.

http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=4646

[Diogenes]

You know what else fits this meme?


Hugo Chavez!!! He was evil, now not so much!


He has assumed room temperature.

[Diogenes]

Girl wants to pretend she's a boy. And OTHERS are paying for it.


Reversal: College to Pay for Transgender Surgery

School officials told ABCNews.com that its insurance carrier had agreed to cover so-called "top surgery" or breast removal for Collins, who was born female but has identified as male since prep school.

http://gma.yahoo.com/reversal-college-p ... ealth.html



Just more attempts to redefine reality to suit the whim of someone with mental problems.

[hanelyp]

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/167144/
"CHANGE: Legalize Polygamy! No. I am not kidding. ... Who could have seen this coming?"

[paperburn1]

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/167144/
"CHANGE: Legalize Polygamy! No. I am not kidding. ... Who could have seen this coming?"

somebody about sixteen posts ago.