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Well, I never tell people the part about being Catholic where they have to take me out to dinner a lot until after they're signed on. So I understand the milk before meat thing. (Only in my case it's oysters before filet...)

This is actually pretty sad.

Being a sort of a would-be scholastic, if I had the smarts, I find an attempt at a coherent account and, at least, honesty about where one proceeds with reason and where one throws up one's hands and falls on one's knees pretty important.

Pretty much everybody makes fun of Aristotle's n "first mover" argument, but I think it does prove the existence of a 'first cause' and leads to important conclusions about it.

Nobody seriously pretends that Aristotle proved or that anybody can prove that the first cause is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Faith and Revelation, in our view, not only complement but 'perfect' reason, and the 'love' that Aristotle (or Plato or, for that matter, Hegel or Heidegger) talks about is a pale and mindless shadow of the love of God in Christ Jesus.

I guess I mention all this because if one approaches the Gospel this way, about the first conclusion one reaches is that what the LDS think God is SEEMS incoherent.

It's not a five minute conversation, but to me, terms like Justice, Love, Beauty, and even Truth imply ONE unconditioned and supreme being which/who unites those realities in itself/himself.

To cut to the chase, if we all can become 'gods' then the gods we can become are not what I mean by "God."

Put it another way: to me "Godness" implies unity and existence. For there to be a, so to speak, "species"of Gods, is literally unthinkable.

I reach that conclusion without a reference to Scripture. And if I were to talk this over with a LDS, that's where I'd begin.

And if he were to say, "Well, maybe it doesn't make sense, but you have to believe it," I'd ask how I could know that I believed it if I didn't have the least clue how it could be."

I know there is some sort of fellowship between LDSs and Catholics, because we both think we get mugged a lot. But, wow, your account is really stunning. A bunch of guys converting people to stuff they don't understand and are discouraged from trying to understand! Wow!