Romney's religion: Who are evangelicals to question Mormonism?

Baltimore Sun ^ | 04/27/2012 | David Horsey

[SeekAndFind]

Jokes about polygamy and funny long underwear aside, Mitt Romney's Mormon faith has not been, and will not become, a factor in the presidential campaign of 2012.

I have a friend who wishes that were not so. She thinks it's creepy that Mormons comb genealogical records to find people to retroactively baptize into the church -- people who were not Mormons when they were alive and probably would not want to be Mormons if they still were. Knowing that the one constant in Mr. Romney's otherwise malleable set of beliefs is his religion, my friend cannot understand why the Obama campaign has not raised the oddities of Mormonism as an issue.

It is not going to happen. The Obama campaign gurus are wise enough to know there is nothing to gain by opening up the can of very fat worms that is religion.

I thought about this last week as I was driving down the King Kamehameha Highway on Oahu after sunset. As I approached the small town of La'ie, I noticed a bright glow in the darkness off to the right. When I got close enough, I could see where the light was coming from: the illuminated Mormon temple. It was like finding the Lincoln Memorial in the middle of a jungle; that is how out of context it seemed.

Yet, in La'ie, the temple is the center of the community. Nearby was the Hawaii campus of Brigham Young University and the sprawling Polynesian Cultural Center -- a Disney-quality re-creation of traditional life in the Pacific Islands, run by the Mormon Church.

[MHGinTN]

Horsey is either a fool or working to help little barry bastard commie divide the people into tribes attacking each other. I suspect the latter, so we see how the vermin in meida will be doing the lifting so their little demigod can stand back from the carnage as if innocent. Where are the guillotines ... SERIOUSLY!

[MHGinTN]

This time the media, at David AxelSleazey’s direction, will make it so clear what MormonISM has taught regarding Catholicism that moderate Catholics will be too insensed or embarrassed to vote for the LDS inc melchizedek high priest.

[Tennessee Nana]

I wonder if MITT ever got dunked repeatly for the dead?
__________________________________________________

Yes as a teenager he did...

Like polygamy he hasnt said it is unBiblical and wrong...

[Boogieman]

Yes, a lot of folks seem to forget, that we are called to witness for Christ in this world. A witness gives positive testimony, but a witness is also needed to rebut false testimony. Some Christians seem to not want to do that, maybe they think it is not nice or polite, but someone has to do it.

That’s fine, God doesn’t give everyone the same job, so there are some who will like to contend over this stuff more than others. I just wish they didn’t have to accuse people who do want to give testimony of being bigoted for doing what Jesus and the Apostles taught us to do!

[Boogieman]

“I obey my bishop, ordinarily. But not if he violates the known teachings of the Catholic Church. Mormons don’t seem to make that distinction.”

Well, I don’t think it’s unfair to call Mormonism a cult. It’s getting a bit old, and is well established and pretty respectable at this point, so maybe you can say it’s out-grown that term, but at least, I believe it started out as a classic example of a cult. So, it’s no surprise to me that, like every cult group, the peons are discouraged from questioning the leadership, even if they see them doing things that appear to contradict the groups’ values.

There is some of that pressure in probably every organization, bureaucracy, and religion, but the cults try to really maximize that for the benefit of the unscrupulous leadership.

[Salvation]

Who are evangelicals other denominations to question Mormonism Catholicism?

[svcw]

“When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done.” “When the [LdS] Prophet speaks the debate is over.” LdS Church First Counselor, Eldon Tanner in a 1979.
That’s a cult.
Shunning if you leave lds, that’s a cult.
Total absolute obedience, that’s a cult.
mormomism is a cult.

[Salvation]

LOL! at that article of falsehoods.

[annieokie]

I just found that Utah has Mandated ALL Cemetery records be put on line. I have a distant cousin there, who told me she is very busy entering her city's cemetery data.

This is just strange, as cemeteries are not an essential thing to know. Nice for genealogist, but not something that needs to be mandated.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: Who are evangelicals other denominations to question Mormonism Catholicism?

Since we're into "who are" questions... we might as well also ask ... who are Catholics to question other denominations?

[greyfoxx39]

I just found that Utah has Mandated ALL Cemetery records be put on line. I have a distant cousin there, who told me she is very busy entering her city's cemetery data.

That's disturbing, since the Catholic Church has ordered that parish records of Catholics are not to be given to mormons to be used for the baptism of the dead.

Ask your cousin if she has orders to leave the Catholic dead out of the system? If not, it's a slap in the face to Catholic church. The mormon church has promised Jewish leaders more than once to stop the baptism of dead Holocaust victims. Ask your cousin if the Jewish dead are being left out of the system.

This arrogance of the mormon church of attempting to baptize every soul who has ever lived as a member of the mormon church shows that there is none of the "respect" that mormonism continually demands of Jews and Christians alike.

[SZonian]

I question them back...it's as simple as that and for doing so, I'm called all kinds of invectives.

"I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight..." (Joseph Smith History vss. 7, 14-19).

[Salvation]

Catholics have the true Church founded by Jesus Christ on the Apostles — the first Bishops.

And your church?

[SeekAndFind]

RE: Catholics have the true Church founded by Jesus Christ on the Apostles — the first Bishops.

And your church?

______________________

Firstly, I never intended this thread to be a debate about Catholicism, but since as is your habit, you want to start one, we might as well.

Everyone who truly believes in Jesus Christ and obeys His teachings is part of the church of Christ. That ought to include non-Catholics too. And oh yeah, not every Catholic is a true believer, so not every baptized catholic is a member of the church of Christ.

[ansel12]

I don’t know why the Catholic church says that Mormons are not Christians, why (a very few, Pope John II for example) Catholics question Mormonism, what you are questioning about Christians that do?

[Elsie]

Where are the guillotines ... SERIOUSLY!

Thomas Jefferson...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Tree

[Elsie]

Some Christians seem to not want to do that, maybe they think it is not nice or polite, but someone has to do it.

SOME???

MOST!!!

They have been Oprahized and Rodney Kinged into a mass of fearful 'wishers'; not BELIEVERs!

---

It's no WONDER we have a problem with 'bullying' these days; as we've brainwashed our kids into submitting to power.

You wanna deal with a bully?

Knock the tar out of them!

UNITE, folks!

[Elsie]

I just wish they didn’t have to accuse people, who do want to give testimony, of being bigoted for doing what Jesus and the Apostles taught us to do!

What ELSE can they do?

Accept us or else?

Sound familiar?

[Elsie]

... maybe you can say it’s out-grown that term...

And MORMONs sure wish EVERYONE would do that; but the albatross will NEVER leave them.

Well; until they get FULL control of Internet access to things about MORMONism.

---

 

 

Eerily familiar...

 

 

Party ownership of the print media
made it easy to manipulate public opinion,
and the film and radio carried the process further.

 

16. Ministry Of Truth

.......

The Ministry of Truth, Winston's place of work, contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.

The Ministry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further.

The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary.

Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.

When his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. He dialed 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to rectify.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and on the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.

In the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one-sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs.

There were huge printing-shops and their sub editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices; clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall; vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored; and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed.

And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

 

 

[Elsie]

Look!

Over THERE!!!