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To: sitetest
It's in Plato, though I forget which dialogue. I'm very open to usages such as "bad christian". A fellow may be a king, but a very bad king. There's a kind of attraciton to saying, "He's not REALLY a king." But it turns oout to be more helpful too discourse generally if one goes with the "bad King" alternative.

I don't know how much about Him Jesus expects us to get right. I'm pretty confident most Mormons don't get a lot right.

I've been married 35 years and I STILL don't have a clue who it is I married. .... But I love her, whoever she is.

3,160 posted on 09/09/2010 8:44:03 PM PDT by Mad Dawg (Oh Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.)
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To: Mad Dawg
Dear Mad Dawg,

The problem is not so much with how much you get right, but how badly you may be getting things wrong.

This is the difference between Islam and the LDS.

Islam acknowledges a God Who is eternal, having always been God, from all time, is omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient. The Muslims acknowledge that He is the Creator ex nihilo, that He is the Supreme Being and there is no one like Him. He is impassable. They acknowledge (although they wouldn't use good, Catholic language like this) that He is of a different substance, a different nature from us.

Ontologically, that is God, as known and knowable through natural revelation. In fact, with human reason unaided by supernatural grace, that's about all one CAN know about God.

Interestingly, they also believe that Jesus is the Word of God, conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin, Mary. They believe that Jesus is the Messiah. But not God. Sounds kinda sorta like Arianism. It sounds more Christian than some of the pseudo-Christians running around this spiritual “open” sewer.

The Muslims get some key things wrong, but mostly get most of the basic God stuff quite right. And they get EVERYTHING right that is knowable via human reason unaided by supernatural grace. The old God of the philosophers.

Mostly, the Muslims get nearly everything right that they've got, but they fail to get the whole picture, they fail to get it all.

But they get very little actually completely wrong.

But the LDS, on the other hand, believe that God is basically a junior level executive in a very, very large multi-level-marketing scheme. He has his own god, who has his god. They all sold enough product to get their own planet to make their own spirit children, etc., etc.

No ontologically supreme being here. No omnipresence. No being God from all eternity. He isn't impassable. He is not of a different substance from us, we share his nature and his substance.

This is a different fellow. Not God, but a god. Not monotheism but henotheism.

The LDS, unlike the Muslims, get a whole bunch of things wrong about the ontology of God. In fact, they get nearly EVERYTHING wrong about the ontology of God.

Thus, it's difficult to posit that the god of the LDS organization is the actual Supreme Being. This is why we Catholics don't recognize Mormon baptism.

I think that on the current question, it's unclear whether the belief system presented is more like the former or more like the latter. In terms of the analogy (obviously, Muslims aren't Christians, but one COULD say that they are “bad monotheists who poorly believe in the One God” - conversely, LDS are not monotheists - at all), the question is whether in the current case, it is more like the former or more like the latter.

I think that the most reasonable conclusion is that the jury is out.

I have seen no evidence that would persuade me otherwise. At all.


sitetest

3,176 posted on 09/09/2010 9:03:18 PM PDT by sitetest ( If Roe is not overturned, no unborn child will ever be protected in law.)
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