Posted on 06/20/2012 12:17:00 PM PDT by Colofornian
...When Sean replaced his temple garments the sacred underwear hed promised to wear day and night with boxers, I couldnt take it anymore. It was too much betrayal. I called up a neighbor with a husband like mine and cried. But instead of empathy, she offered questions that stunned me into silence. Was Sean addicted to pornography? Watching R-rated movies? What sin had brought him to this terrible place?
...Her questions were so off-base...She was sincere, and trying to help, but she believed what the Church teaches that a man would only leave because hes disobeying the commandments. She couldnt understand this was a rational inquiry. She saw everything as the result of sin.
...The Church was wrong about him. What else might they be wrong about?...
...I often found him hunched over his iPad reading everything he could find on Mormon origins...Im sorry, but I just have to tell you. Did you know that and then hed tell me...About how Joseph Smith mistranslated some Egyptian hieroglyphics that are part of our canonized scripture. About how he translated the Book of Mormon while looking at a stone inside of a hat.
I listened half-heartedly...though I wasnt about to go looking at them myself...until one night it was about polygamy, my archnemesis.
Did you know that Joseph Smith married a 14-year-old girl against her will? Did you know that hed send men on missions and marry their wives in secret when they were gone? ...he kept talking, a horror growing in my gut. I knew that if Sean was right, then Joseph Smith was a fraud. I saw no difference between his acts and the modern-day acts of Warren Jeffs, whom I abhorred. And if Joseph Smith was a fraud then what did that make the Church?
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
Well...I just recently came across a quote from an early church father who referenced a heretic as an atheist.
Did the heretic believe in a god? (Yes)
So why did this early church father reference the heretic as an atheist?
Because the heretic did not know the true God.
You see, this early church father wasn't satisfied with "theism" being defined as only an abstract acknowledgment that "Yes, a generic god exists out there somewhere." To this early church father, if the heretic didn't know -- didn't relate to the true God -- he was no different than an out-and-out atheist.
I outlined big distinctives between the God of the Bible and the Mormon god (see posts #89, #94, #96). Do Christians believe in that Mormon god described in those three posts? (No) Are Christians then, in effect, "atheists" if that "theism" is defined by Mormon beliefs? (Yes)
The reverse is also true: Do Mormons rule out a God-the-Father who "is spirit" (John 4:24) and is not a man-become-god? (Yes, they rule that out) Are they therefore "atheists" toward that defined theistic divinity? (Yes; in effect, they are!)
Mormonism, therefore, is already in effect "atheistic" toward the God of the Bible. It has redefined God that greatly!
mormonism is the same today as it was yesterday, only today they actually hide what it really is
place marker
Tampa might put a hitch in your giddyup.
LLS
Conservatives stand against evil... we do not embrace the lesser... savvy?
LLS
(THE TRUTH: It's the new hate speech..)
Now THIS is an interesting pairing you don't find every day!
That was my point exactly.
LLS
I see FACTS about MORMONism.
Where is the SMEAR part?
Bah!
Who needs Salon???
No, Ma'am. We are NOT Liberals!
We are from your local LDS stake, and we'd like to tell you the truth about religion in America; whose Constitution is hanging by a thread.
Color coding explanation:
Added stuff... Changed stuff... Rearranged stuff... Removed stuff...
*(UNDERLINED stuff is the DISTRACTING reference on every tenth word or so that infuses LDS 'scripture' online.)
|
I’ve seen ads for the LDS church for over a decade.
The Official Scriptures of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
© 2010 Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved. Rights and use information. Privacy policy. |
If you have cable TV, there wont be much on to watch.
If there isnt much on to watch, you will answer your door whenever someone rings.
If you open your door, you will see mormons.
If you talk to mormons, they will trick you into praying about whether something is true.
If you rely on your feelings, you may become a mormon.
If you become a mormon, you will have to wear magic underwear!
If you wear magic underwear, people will immediately label you as a cultist.
DONT be a cultist!
Get DirectTV.
Heck; can you even do that with a BoM???
(It's worse online: LDS.ORG)
Good!!
Now tell all you can!
We'll have you know know we spend MANY times more than a mere 3 minutes daily; spreading the TRUTH through out America and the World!
An average tour of duty is about a year: 6 days a week - 10 hours a day.
What flimsy '3 minutes' can stand THAT onslaught?
Party ownership of the print media
made it easy to manipulate public opinion,
and the film and radio carried the process further.
....... 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. |
Son; ya gotta give us TIME; for there are ONLY around a 100 or so of us - give or take - depending on who's counting...
I don't think we can ever transcend Joseph Smith or consider him to be a valued personality, but now we'll move on.I don't think you'll see that among believers in the faith, because there are too many other things that came from himthat are the reasons why we do what we do and we are what we are. That there are unanswered questions, to be sure.That there are things that I'm as anxious as the next guy to learn more detail on, I really want to know. But in the interim,it really doesn't, doesn't trouble me.We're in the religion-making business, as you intimated earlier, only for a short time, I mean, compared to theChristian church, which has been at this for a couple of millennia. We're about halfway to Nicaea.And so, and so in that sense I remember a very tender moment. I was speaking with I've been invitedto the Salt Lake Theological Seminary, basically an Evangelical seminary, to discuss a book I had done on Jesus.And they had read it, and they wanted me to come and just respond to questions.And it was, it was a very enjoyable couple of hours.The very last question that was asked by one of my friends there was this one.He said, 'Bob, what can we do for you?'And I, I wasn't ready for that question. I said, 'What do you mean?'He said, 'What can we, as Evangelicals, do for our Mormon friends?'And I, I guess my mind could have gone a hundred different ways, but what I came back with was this.I said, 'Boy, I appreciate you asking that. I don't think I've ever been asked that.'But, but I said, 'Try this. Cut us a little slack, will you? Give us a little time.We're in the religion-making business, and this takes time. It takes centuries.And, and trying to explain the faith and articulate the faith, that doesn't come over night.We've really only been about that for 20 or 30 years.'
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