Do you think of Mormons as Christians?

thot i covered that w/ 'splitters'

the mandatory missions are pretty aggressively spread all over the world.
maybe the success rate is not so good if the stars are still phenotypically osmond-esque?

'mission to burma' would be a good name for a post punk mormon band.

thot i covered that w/ 'splitters'
― j., Tuesday, September 2, 2014 1:33 PM

if you have any special insight i would sure love to hear it

no really, is there some special knowledge of the reformation you are expecting of people in 2014

no, no, no. a "splitter" is type of fastball thrown with a minimum of rotation so it has more erratic movement than a normal fastball.

no really, is there some special knowledge of the reformation you are expecting of people in 2014

― j., Tuesday, 2 September 2014 04:52 (17 minutes ago)

tough trying to win an argument about religion with a character from the old testament

feeling like your actions represent/are judged as some subsection of humanity...feeling like you are always under the microscope...but not in such a derisive way that it can't be counteracted with some 'how to win friends and influence people'/customer service attitude, which can certainly be disingenuous

Well now, this just has me thinking mormons are the same as Minnesotans, based on my Fargo-watching anyways.

Minnesotans are stereotypically Lutheran

'minnestoa nice' seems more like a reflection of nordic politeness / janteloven culture rather than a religiously infomed thing

mormons are or believe themselves to be 'under the microscope' because other people think of them as strange, possibly sinister, possibly heretical and beholden unto private hierachies and their values (parallels with the panic about jfk's allegiance to the pope in 1960)

that is, insofar as nordic culture is separable from its gloomy lutheran inheritance

Ime as an evangelical, Mormons and Witnesses were all considered equally heretical and not Christian (and therefore not Saved), with Seventh Day Adventists having a slight edge in respectability but if you talked to one you'd prob be expecting them to traipse off into some theological thicket that mainstream evangelicalism didn't teach.

Otoh Catholics were Christians but only if they were Saved, otherwise they were just fake Sunday Christians who didn't live their faith and you should urge them to accept Jesus.

^^

I personally consider Mormons to be Christians, though.

i think nakh is otm about utah and utah-settlement mormons representing a distinct branch of anglo immigration than what you might find elsewhere in the u.s. the civil war-era overland migration is still the source of a lot of new-birth identification among people here but as the rest of the country asserted itself the zion-founding heritage and impulse mostly mainstreamed along to larger power lines in the blinkered and naive way that can only come from the strange mix of self-righteous self-identification persecution entitlement plus ultimately favored supreme whiteness in the eyes of the larger culture, and by 'people' it is obv. very male-centered. the offshoots (flds, etc.) are re-fundamentalizations of the 'zion' story which show the audacity of the whole thing in the first place, oddly assembled 5000 sq ft complexes in small wayward towns "hidden" in the network of the west/southwest. this whole heritage is very mystical-phallic homosocial and misogynistic which i think explains the high-level homophobia in the church administration and the vibrant underground metal scene in salt lake city among other phenomena.

the 'christian' campaign which afaict originated in the 50s was an attempt by the church to break into the protestant power currents of the time, which of course they did through both sheer ability to remake themselves and their sheer anglo ancestry, although there is still a lot of self-protective denials of mormon christian-ness from strongly evangelical camps esp. in the south (xps). of course 'christian' is not about 'christ' as if it ever could have been, that stand-in from 2000 years ago.

I think they're Christians too. I'm not one to judge.

However, I completely see where the other side is coming from. I mean, you can't tack on your own books to the Bible. (Right, Jews?)

http://i.imgur.com/xsLfe4q.jpg

But in the end, it's like arguing whether or not "Trapper John MD" is part of "M*A*S*H" canon or not.

I consider Mormons, Catholics, etc. to be Christians. Raised protestant, in a swings-both-ways Methodist and Presbyterian congregation (I know, I know. How could you reconcile the differences?) that itself was housed in a larger interfaith center. So I was completely baffled the first time I heard someone ask "are you Catholic or are you Christian?" I wish I had paid more attention to whoever asked that. Seems like something you'd want to keep tabs on somebody about.

xp thought we had an arnold friberg thread that maybe anthony started, can't find it

The whole "Are Catholics Christian?" sub-question baffles me a little bit. There was a time when ALL so-called Christians were Catholic. You'll even catch some older Jewish folk refer to all followers of Christ as "Catholic".

I mean, the Catholic Church was founded by AN APOSTLE. Protestants came about because someone was into making his own flyers.

My friend's coworker is a sikh who moved to the US from Tanzania (with his family having moved there from India) around the time he turned 20 and occasionally he'll voice some odd assumption or observation he picked up from popular culture that isn't quite right. It took a lot of explanation to convince him that no, the mainstream Mormon church has not endorsed polygamy and has in fact condemned it since before 1900.

this kind of question exists strictly to cast out heretics and since I don't care about internecine squabbles of gentiles yes from my outsider POV anybody who believes any nonsense about Jesus/the New Testament is a Christian.

iirc pplains, Catholicism got corrupted somewhere between becoming the official religion of the Romans in 380 or so and the common era

something regarding the Borgias, maybe, hard to say

My POV (raised Protestant)is if you've got baptisms, communions, and New Testaments, then you're in the club!

this kind of question exists strictly to cast out heretics and since I don't care about internecine squabbles of gentiles yes from my outsider POV anybody who believes any nonsense about Jesus/the New Testament is a Christian.

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, September 2, 2014 12:42 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol how benevolent of you.

i was trying to think of a jewish analog to this kind of boundary-making identification but afaict jewish ethnic divisions are much older much more about family groups than ideological posturing. is there a modern equivalent in jewish culture i wonder.

idk do Xtians care if Orthodox Jews consider converted Reform Jews actual Jews? (they do not btw)

lol xp

I really can't conceive of a rationale for saying an individual who professes to be a Christian is somehow wrong or mistaken about that. Contrariwise, while I profess to be a Jew and was raised Jewish, some Orthodox Jews wouldn't consider me Jewish based on the rules of matrilineal descent (my mom isn't Jewish), and we're all familiar with the phenomenon of people who profess not to be Jewish being told that they are by various authorities (including Jewish ones).

i was trying to think of a jewish analog to this kind of boundary-making identification but afaict jewish ethnic divisions are much older much more about family groups than ideological posturing. is there a modern equivalent in jewish culture i wonder.

― mattresslessness, Tuesday, September 2, 2014 11:57 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's the "did you know [X famous person] is Jewish?" game.

my take is that if you're not of a religion, and someone says "I'm a <X>" then whatever, they can be whatever they say they are

if you're part of <X> then in some small way, everyone is doing <X> wrong and you can make whatever metrics you need to decide if they're actually <X>

Can I be a buddhist that eats brisket? That would be awesome!

I really can't conceive of a rationale for saying an individual who professes to be a Christian is somehow wrong or mistaken about that.

the rationale is that they're weird sicko heretics. duh

Up the heretics imo

here tics

*vapes*

this clip explains rationale p well imo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBKIyCbppfs

i was trying to think of a jewish analog to this kind of boundary-making identification but afaict jewish ethnic divisions are much older much more about family groups than ideological posturing. is there a modern equivalent in jewish culture i wonder.

i think this is chassidim v. misnagdim probably tho very few jews would say that the other isn't actually jewish.

and of course this is at play in conversions today - orthodox doesn't accept conservative conversations, conservative doesn't accept reform, reform probably accepts any conversion

When I was a fundamentalist, our youth group leader showed us Anti-Mormon propaganda and essentially told us to be 'closed-minded' to this un-Christian form of thinking. It wasn't until later that I learned 20% of the propaganda video was 20-30 years out of date. Not to say that the Mormon religion view on Blacks wasn't completely o_O anyway but there's a lot of that anti-Mormon sentiment still circulating more traditional forms of Christianity

if yr Christian upbringing was only 20 yrs out of date with crucial info you got off lightly son

lol

tbf religion in america remakes itself at like 100x the speed of the rest of the world

I don't remember seeing any anti-unitarian propaganda when I was a kid/christian. How did they get off so easy?

do you think of steve jobsians as christians? why yes i do, i am open-minded that way

there's a lot of that anti-Mormon sentiment still circulating more traditional forms of Christianity

if you're a non-Mormon Christian it seems to me like you should at least firmly believe that Mormons are going to Hell, but my ideas of Christianity come from Baptists + evangelicals + King James onlies, not huggy liberal all-inclusive new agey types

i went to a mainline methodist church as a kid, they mostly seemed to believe in agape. and youth groups.

yeah, i kind of self-raised myself Methodist and we seemed to be pretty chill and not much hell stuff in there

i found a thread for unitarian jokes on the simpsons, and they found over the expanse of the series, there were four.

I never even heard of Unitarians until I was an adult in NYC! My impression is that they're a Northeast thing?

lol my mother was raised Methodist and then decided it was too much about doing good in the world and not enough about one's personal relationship with Jesus Christ, ever-present in your heart. Sealed my fate right there.

iirc aside from their internal problems with splitters and all-includers and gradual disappearance due to indefinite vagueness, unitarians had a hard time weathering the periodic religious revivals over the 19th/20th c and u.s. expansion

i told my grandfather he was going to hell when i was like 5. grandmama was delighted.

i went to a unitarian congregation in slc once, i was very put off by the western white liberal subaru w obama sticker congregation and sermon, made me think of crazy grandpas with "get US out of the United Nations!" bumper stickers with fondness

lol otm