Um. Wow, jmull, that’s quite a list. You know, sometimes you sound like an atheist interested in philosophy, and sometimes you sound like a Bible-thumping orator from the South. Are there two or more of you?
Well, I hope we try not to do any of those things you listed. For your first item, no one but the financial clerk and the bishop (once a year) knows what mr. genie and I give in alms, whether it be tithing or fast offerings or what. I have no idea what anyone else gives. So I think that counts as secret. We usually give alms to the ward, which then uses and distributes it to those in need in the most efficient way–I’ve seen the system, and it’s excellent. We’ve had some people post here about their experiences with Church welfare–maybe they will elaborate. I don’t think we give to the rich and steal from the poor.
I think we do our best to avoid those other sins you listed–I have always been taught that pride and avarice are forms of idolatry and to put God before the things of the earth. Divorce is a very serious and sad thing and I hope we try not to divorce unless it’s necessary–but I’ve never been divorced or pried into others’ private affairs, so I wouldn’t know. The prophets I’ve studied have borne very good fruit indeed. I hope that covers it.
You are again trying to discredit me for simply dismissing your claims, which are useful to you because they don’t deal directly with Mormonism. This is an avoidance technique, with several common names as fallacies.
Here, I’ll help you out again:
Arguments can be criticized, then, in at least two ways. First we can criticize an argument by showing that it is not valid. We do this by constructing an argument of the same form that has true assumptions and a false conclusion (aka “counterexample”). Second, we can criticize an argument by showing that the argument is still not convincing, even if it is valid. (p. 16)
Principles of Convincingness:
An argument is not convincing for the conclusion if the assumptions are not plausible.
An argument is not convincing for the assumptions if the conclusion is not plausible.
An argument is not convincing against the assumptions if the conclusion is plausible.
An argument is not convincing against the conclusion if the assumptions are plausible. (p. 50-51)
Introduction to Logic, by Dennis J. Packard and James E. Faulconer, (D. Van Nostrand: New York, 1980)
The big picture here being, GB, that God did not necessarily restore Mormonism for the whole world to join just because you think Mormonism should be true. Furthermore, if some of Mormonism has been proven utterly false, and it claims to be entirely true by virtue of my first statement, then you have an unfixable dilemma on your hands and no amount of argument is going to make it go away.
Like the Bible says, Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved.
ANyone who believes in Jesus and acts like He did, is a christian.
Mormonism teaches and its leaders have said so unequivically that any other church but theirs is from the devil and not true.
Sounds inclusive to me.
According to Mormonism, Polycarp our dear christian here isn’t going to the “top” level of Heaven casue he doesn’t believe properly.
Do you fancy yourself a logician too? Here, let me ask you a few questions regarding your asking me for proof that no accurate statistics come from the Mormon church (a slight irony, since no statistics come from the Mormons, except their estimated membership numbers, upon which are added the number of baptisms from year to year, not subtracting for deaths, excommunications and name removals).
Ready?
How many members of the Mormon church, or percentage of, are active?
How much tithing is collected and where is it spent?
What are the salaries of the officers of the church in question?
What is the estimated per-capita income of church members?
What is the average number of times a name will be baptised for the dead and receive temple work? (I actually heard an estimate of this from a former temple worker who thinks it is all a recycle job, so I would like to compare it with your true stats.)
Genie, I think you’ve got the wrong person…I was asking why Brian was being so hateful in his presentation of his personal opinions as fact.
Brian. what corner of your ass are you pulling this one from? Reading all of your posts is so damn frustrating because you make wild claims and then neglect to back it up with any kind of cite or proof, and yet you criticize a religious belief that they don’t have proof.
I didn’t claim that my statistics deal directly with Mormonism. I merely brought them up once you implied that your Utah statistics did deal directly with Mormonism.
So you’re essentially stating that the statistics are irrelevant since they don’t deal directly with Mormonism. That’s fine as long as you’ll agree that your so-called statistics (I say so-called because you still haven’t provided a cite) are also irrelevant.
The appropriate question then is…
“What determines the plausibility of a given assumption or conclusion?”
The answer?
FACTS
Facts are usually acceptable in the form of a cite. Have I mentioned cites before? I think so… just wanted to be sure I didn’t skip the fact that you have no cites.
I disagree that some of Mormonism has been proven utterly false. To simplify this debate I propose the following format:
You give a single instance where you feel that Mormonism has been proven utterly false. You back up this instance with evidence in the form of a cite.
I (or another) will rebut the evidence you provide.
Once the current single instance has been addressed to each parties satisfaction you bring up another single instance (again with evidence and cite) which you feel proves Mormonism false.
Repeat process until all claims are handled. One at a time.
If you agree to this format what is your first single instance which you feel proves Mormonism is false. Please remember to include evidence and cites.
Brian, I got my endowment in 1995, and I don’t remember any of that.
jmull, your sentence doesn’t make grammatical sense. Do you mean, ‘why do they know how much I give?’ Well, someone has to process the checks, and that’s the financial clerk’s job. I doubt that he pays much attention to who’s giving what. Then once a year, he prints out the record and gives it to us to check. We keep it for our records. The bishop asks us if it’s correct and if we classify ourselves as full or partial tithe payers. He asks no questions about our actual income; the call is ours to make, but we must be full tithe payers in order to enter the temple (as well as keeping the other commandments).
Brian, some of your questions are valid. I know the approximate answers, but have no citations or hard numbers, and have not got the time to go looking. So if you want the vague numbers, I can tell you. Then, some of your questions are silly. The Church does not know the average income of its members, because it doesn’t ask. And names are not ‘recycled’ through the temple–we have enough to do without that, although I understand some names do get done more than once because of the inherent messiness of genealogy. And of course the Church doesn’t count the dead or excommunicated as current members!
This scheme seems to be a clear violation of Jesus’s commandments not to give alms in a way that is seen by men. It is clearly seen by even more men furthermore since by this unsecret giving it is known who may or may not enter the temple. This is hypocrisy. In fact, you are almost saying you must violate one of Jesus’s commandments to enter the Temple.
But, if you make no income, then can you enter anyway? Perhaps.
Furthermore, if this temple is a house of God, what right does anyone have to say who may or may not enter? It sounds as if you truly have piled a treasure on the earth where theives can break in, for why else would you lock the doors to this place if there is no treasure to be found in it?
Like the Book of Mormon says, “…for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.” (2 Nephi 25:23).
I agree.
All or most churches have some degree of truth in them, to a greater or lesser degree. But as you and I have talked about before, the LDS teaching is that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the only church on the face of the earth that has the authority to act in God’s name (the Priesthood, in other words).
We give checks because we don’t normally carry that much money in cash. You can give cash. But we do pay tithing under our own names. Since 2 people out of the 6 billion in the world know what we pay, and they aren’t giving the information out, I fail to see how that is public alms-giving. You can make anonymous donations–the Nauvoo temple is currently being built with money from an anonymous donor–but tithing, as a commandment, is done under our own names. Next question, please.
The temple contains the spiritual treasures of God. We do not cast our pearls before swine. In order to enter, we should be doing our best to keep all of His commandments, and tithing is a commandment. Of course you can enter if you have no income. I have no personal income; I’m a stay-at-home mom. I can go to the temple. Anyway, I don’t want to discuss the temple too much here–it’s very sacred to me.
You’ve completely lost your objectivity by saying that you would refute any evidence before the fact. You just implied that you can never be convinced that you are wrong (it’s called self-righteousness).
First on the list is DNA, a link already published here by me in my first post. By the way, I already listed my ten reasons for why Mormonism was not what it claims to be, why are you pretending I didn’t? Oh yeah, you claimed they were already refuted somewhere. Where was that again?
DNA and ARCHAEOLOGY!
The first one contains quotes by BYU archaeologists lamenting the fact that Mormonism is in an archaeological crisis:
A recent article in the SLTribune exposing the fact that nobody believes that any Native Americans have anything to do with the racist curse story in the Book of Mormon.
By the way, you cannot refute these, you can merely offer FARMS counter-claims to confuse the issue which do exactly what you have been doing all along, selective science and selective reasoning (in other words, you think you can make your superstitions make sense to you, then pretend you have faith). Good luck.
Next, we can move on towards the Book of Abraham fiasco.
Assuming you are female, you may be lucky you no longer have to pledge unswerving allegiance to your husband, whether you had one or not. When I went through it, I had to make gruesome motions and promise to slit my own throat if I ever didn’t keep my pledges. I had no idea I was joining a secret blood cult, no idea at all, because one is NOT allowed to talk about the temple, or else one volunteers to be murdered (this is what the pledge was). Maybe you don’t know this due to the change, but a character named Satan, representing Satan, in the film shown inside the temple, boldy ordered me to keep my oaths or threatened to punish me if I didn’t. Ask any Mormon over 35 here if it isn’t true. And don’t try to say my experience was unique, it was the same film everyone else sat through.
vanilla, it’s simply not true that, “Mormonism teaches and its leaders have said so unequivically that any other church but theirs is from the devil and not true.” If it were, why would we cooperate so much with other churches? Why did we invite a Catholic choir to sing in the Mormon Tabernacle? Yes, we believe that the LDS church has Christ at its head, with His mortal representative as the Prophet and President. However, we in no way say that all other churches are of the devil.
And jmullaney:
What is your scriptural claim that the method genie outlines for how tithes and offerings are handled is “a clear violation of Jesus’ commandments”? If you are referring to Matthew chapter 6, I interpret verses 2-4 to mean that the intent is not to be seen of men. If someone finds out, it doesn’t somehow invalidate my offering. I’m not sounding a trumpet when I give alms, nor do I give alms to be seen of men. Do you literally not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing? (That, by the way would require a surgical operation normally used to reduce/eliminate grand mal seisures and is invasive to the brain, but I digress.) Do you only pray inside your closet?
Grim, I finally got around to this bluff. And I must forwarn you, I will never present information in the way you demand it, which is odd, because of how little proof you actually need to commit your life and money to a cult.
First of all, any person who earnes a Utah average wage and AND pays tithing, and support missionaries, and donates alot of their free time to the Mormon church and whatever is left over for their relatively large family as per Mormon doctrine (do you need a cite for family size too?) will go bankrupt, obviously, AS THE STATS ATTEST! The fact that you need a cite for this implies your lack of reasoning. Of course there is not a local cite for it, it is not allowed to be published anywhere near here and you know it.
Secondly, you can question the wisdom of rejecting a stat on personal experience all you want. I wasn’t rejecting the accuracy of the stat per standard methodology, and you knew that. I was rejecting the fact that two such stats were not counted and couned elsewhere and extrapolated from there. Now, you might know something about stats. What about bootstrapping here? What are the odds that I happen to know the only two anamolies to your official stat? As such, I am not rejecting the stat outcome, I am rejecting the input. You knew that as well.
Thirdly, your question about culture of anything has nothing to do with me. I don’t need to answer it, nor do I understand the question. Religion is culture.
Fourthly, the LDS church does not arrange teen marriages, they merely encourage teens to get married, as soon as possible, you know this as well, they try to send you on a mission to pressure the girls by 21. Arranged teen marriages happen among tens of thousands of Utahns who also believe in Mormonism, but are from earlier more original groups. You are the splinter group, GB. Brigham Young’s movement was a splinter group! You really have an amazing nerve on this question. I am debating the whole banana, and you might as well say that you are the only true Mormon and slither out of the argument entirely.
Yes, the LDS officially promotes self-interest and self-seeking rewards, and even confuses the next life with this life, overlapping rituals, etc. This is actually the most obvious assertion I made. Materialism is an extension of that abject selfishness. Oh, so you noticed other churches also practice this. Bravo, GB, bravo. You are all the same to me in this regard. Cite an official stance on tithe-paying and rewards? Show me where they say they don’t. I heard it about two-thousand times as kid.
Let me ask you. Why do you pay tithing? If you give me an official response, that is fine, I expect it. But why would anyone want to risk losing all that money to an organization that doesn’t spend it or need it more than their own family? (Nevermind the conservative contradiction here). I assert that there is only one reason to pay tithing in such circumstances: Spiritual extortion (fear of destruction, did you read Faust call it “fire insurance?”) AND to help things along, extortion in mafia-style (take this bribe or we kill you, they say to judges). The bribe? Unearned rewards (via rumor, hints, local secret advice, counseling, etc.) I have had people claim to me that they would not lose their investment in something speculative BECAUSE THEY PAY TITHING! So much for Utah being the unavoidable fraud capital of the nation.
Mormons are a poor lot. I pity them. I fear for their children’s future, Utah will look like Ireland in a few generations. They are very much into personal displays of wealth, I live here, so I know as much from a personal observation. I hear Mormons everyday yak about what car they need, what house they dream of. They also have a double-bind they foist on each other. They claim if you are rich, then god gave it to you, implying anything resembling poverty is a curse. Have you not heard this among all zealots? It is a conservative item all the way back to Calvinism (yes, Mormonism was also influenced by Calvinism, but do your own research). As such, poor Mormons, who overwhelmingly believe this, must struggle to keep up appearances to be godly. That is why so many bankruptcies, on top of not having their earned money saved in the bank for family uses.
GB, I don’t need to cite others sources for any of this, it is based on reasoning, not data that is forbidden to be compiled. I think Mormonism contributes to depression. Citations? None, they wouldn’t dare cite it. I see what I see. Where did Mormonism say they prevent depression. They claim one will be “happier” if one follows their way. Since when is depression “true happiness?” Education, same sick joke. Since when is God’s only true church supposed to be the most ignorant and least qualified in contributing to society? Your default assumptions confound your logic.
I’ve seen dozens of families lose all they had in cash to get-rich-quick schemes sponsored by Mormons. The last one was in Ohio and Pennsylvania with a fake pyramid scheme of calling-cards or something, mostly Mormons, to the tune of over 100 million dollars. One was recently in Oregon, a Mormon rancher who scammed investors in a cattle breeding scam by approaching people, using his anti-government Mormonism, to deliberately scam the IRS, and aain, over 100 million was lost. I’ve read these accounts online, I’m sure you can still find them. In fact, there are so many Mormon scams in Utah, it is the saddest part about Mormonism being the original scam.
Utah Mormons were mostly immigrants from England and Scandanavia, mostly poor. They never knew the American way, they learned their citizenship by being told how to think. Citations please! By the way, your obsession with citations to negate secret cult claims is dubious. It sounds like a taunt from Ted Bundy, “Prove I am guilty.” Prove your own claims, I am counter-asserting cult rot with reason, not with information issued from Mormon cult leaders, most of them having sat on corporate boards of directors until 1995 collecting alot of personal wealth while pretending to minister a church. GB, try reasoning without citing a single official source for once. You may get somewhere.
As long as we’re allowing limited personal observations to override statistical evidence, let me add a couple of data points.
On charity: A woman I know very well was unable to pay her natural gas bill, and had her gas shut off about 10 days ago. This means no heat in the house, no hot water, no working oven, stove, or clothes dryer (as I helped to install both her oven and stove, and have frequently fixed her clothes dryer, I’m certain they are all gas appliances). Things being a little short this month, I couldn’t come up with the six bills needed to get things going again. I got a couple of electric heaters for her, and stocked her up on microwave food.
After trying several things (the Red Cross was willing to chip in $200, but only if someone else would pay the balance, and a low income program called HEAT would pay $150, but it takes two weeks) her home teachers stopped by for their monthly visit. (Home teachers are LDS members who go around and visit families in their ward, try to get you to attend more meetings, ask how you are, and usually deliver a little “spiritually uplifting” message in the form of a short story combined with scipture. The sheer joy of this is hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t had the “pleasure” inflicted on them.)
When they asked why it was so cold in the house (we’ve had nights in the 15 to 20 degree range this last week) she explained the situation. The bishop of her ward paid the bill today, and her heat will back on tomorrow.
Now bear in mind she is not the most active LDS member. She attends meetings probably four or five times a year, smokes like a chimney, and was an unwed mother. However, she does consider herself LDS, and welcomes the home teachers when they drop by.
On out of state adoption: I have personal knowledge (and I mean very personal, these were in my immediate family or the families of my in-laws) of three children born to unwed teen mothers, all of which were adopted by LDS families here in Utah. These adoptions were all arranged by the bishops of the respective mothers. None of the mothers were kicked out of the church, although one did leave voluntarily at a later date.
Now I’m all too ready to admit that the LDS church is often much too willing to cross the line between church and state, they have a terrible desire to mind everybody’s business, and my personal experience leads me to suspect a high level of hypocrisy (although not necessarily more than the membership of any other group). But they do sometimes do good (both as an organization and as people).
And based on my anecdotal evidence, all babies resulting from teen pregnancies are adopted in state, and the LDs church pays everybody’s bills for them. (Note for the sarcasm impaired: the preceding statement makes about as much sense as some we’ve heard from Brian.)
Brian, you post as if the mormons had all taken a collective dump in your cheerios. Get some perspective. You come across not as informed or presenting a legitimate argument, but as shrill and whiney with a huge axe to grind.
My wife’s aunt and uncle are just the mormon family you describe. Total income of about $35000 a year, 7 kids, two boys who served on missions, faithful tithing payers, and spend a fair amount of time in church activities. They have not declared bankruptcy, and I see no sign that they will. They are a long way from rich, and watch their money VERY closely, but seem happy with their situation. So your assertion is wrong. Care to try again?
