[JamesP81]

Would someone please give me a “rock solid” definition of Christianity so we can decide whether someone is Christian or not.

A Christian, by definition, is someone who follows the teachings of Jesus Christ. For a more precise definition, I'd say that to be a Christian means you believe a few things:

1) There is one God, the God of Israel, Who spoke all creation into existence. 2) That God's only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, came to Earth and was crucified for remission of all sin for all time past, present, and future and that three days after He died, He was resurrected. 3) That Jesus Christ was and is both fully man and fully God (the Spirit is also fully God, completing the three corners of the Trinity). 4) That at the end of time, Christ will return to bring his believers to heaven with Him.

The LDS church teaches that God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit are not One, but three separate entities which is contrary to the Word and what Christ Himself claimed. The LDS church also teaches that God was once a man who became exalted as a god fit to be our lord. This is also contrary to the Word.

[gitmo]

According to Dr. Martin's classic The Kingdom of the Cults the Mormon church teaches we are saved by grace "but it is received only on condition of faith, repentence, baptism, and enduring to the end in keeping the commandments of God". The quote is from What the Mormons Think of Christ by B.R. McKonkie (a Mormon publication). This is diametrically opposed to the scriptural doctrine of salvation by grace alone.

Brigham Young wrote "Old Pharaoh, king of Egypt, was just as much a son of God as Moses and Aaron were his sons." This is the Mormon teaching that all men are sons of God. Romans 9:8 says something quite different: "They which are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God; but the children of the promise are counted for the seed."

It's odd that the Mormon church is trying to blend in with the "other" Christian denominations. Smith wrote that he asked the Lord which of all the sects were right. He was told they were all wrong "and the personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in His sight; those professors were all corrupt; ... He again forbade me to join with any of them;"

The Book of Mormon fails all archaeological and linguistic analysis. The translations don't even begin to hold up to scrutiny, and the historical references in the book are far from what the historical evidence shows. The Bible, on the other hand, is continually attacked for historical inaccuracies, only to be proven true as archaelogical evidence is unearthed.

The Smithsonian Institution wrote in 1959, "There is no correspondence whatever between archaelogical sites and cultures as revealed by scientific investigations, and as recorded in the Book of Mormon. Interpretations of archeological and ethnographic data, moreover, are quite unlike the American prehistory which the Book of Mormon describes ... It can be stated definitely that there is no connection between the archeology of the New World and the subject matter of the Book of Mormon."

Dr. Martin's 51 page treatise on the Mormon church ends with

"From these facts it is evident for all to see that Mormonism strives with great effort to masquerade as the Christian Church, complete with an exclusive message, infallible prophets, higher revelations for new dispensation which the Mormons would have us believe began with Joseph Smith, Jr.

But it is the verdict of both history and Biblical theology that Joseph Smiths's religion is a polytheistic nightmare of garbled doctrines draped with the garment of Christian terminology. This fact, if nothing else, brands it as a non-Christian cult system".