"It seems to me that anyone who is solidly grounded in their Faith will not have the time or inclination to obsess about what other churches are teaching or practicing."
You have uttered the most brilliant statement I have seen on FR for a couple of years. Seriously.
"Mormons" and Christians" alike should take heed and attend to the really pressing issues that face us all as individuals and as a Nation....
"Religions are divisive and quarrelsome. They are a form of one-upmanship because they depend upon separating the "saved" from the "Damned", the true believers from the heretics, the in-group from the out-group. Even religious liberals play the game of "we're-more-tolerant than you." Furthermore, as systems of doctrine, symbolism, and behavior, religions harden into institutions that must command loyalty, be defended, and kept "pure", and - because all belief is fervent hope, and thus a cover-up for doubt and uncertainty - religions must make converts. The more people who agree with us, the less nagging insecurity about our position. In the end one is committed to being a Christian or a Buddhist come what may in the form of new knowledge. New and indigestible ideas have to be wangled into the religious tradition, however inconsistent with its original doctrines, so that the believer can still take his stand and assert, "I am first and foremost a follower of Christ/Mohammed/Buddha, or whomever." Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, open-ness - an act of trust in the unknown.
"An ardent Jehovah's Witness once tried to convince me that if there were a God of love, he would certainly provide mankind with a reliable and infallible textbook for the guidance of conduct. I replied that no considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend on one book, the Bible, for all the answers. For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency." -- Alan Watts, "The Book", 1966
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This thread has shown us some wonderful examples of arguments over who has the better rulebook, but it is devoid of spiritual truth.