Well, with a growing number of Mormons in political leadership in this country – they’re already significantly overrepresented in positions of authority – it’ll be interesting to see how long it remains socially acceptable to say things like “Mormons aren’t Christians.”
I am also under the impression that Mormonism is one of the fastest growing sects, both inside the United States. I notice that there are always Mormon missionaries plying my Hispanic Catholic neighbourhood. I wonder how successful they are.
Sorry to contribute to a hijack, but (Fighting Ignorance and all that):
Not quite - LDS doctrine relies on revelation in addition to the Bible, not rather than the Bible. Small semantics, huge difference.
Peers would be, IMHO, the wrong word - more that he will invest us with his power as trusted children.
This, however, is a little bit of a hijack - maybe someone should start a new thread, or resurrect one of the many threads previously started.
On to the original question. The closest I can think of is the Bahai faith. My (rather limited) understanding is that they hold both Mohammed and Jesus as revalators or spiritual manifestations of the divine. (But I don’t think they believe Jesus to be divine in the traditional “Son of God” sense, so they may not count as an answer to the OP. ) Any Bahai’s around to educate me?
Yes, and Moslems consider Bahai to be a heresy. Let me make clear that I consider heresy and heretical to be technical terms. I’m not interested in anybody’s witnessing in this thread or any other. To be heretical is to depart from the core beliefs of a religion. The social acceptability of a group isn’t relevant.
When did I say otherwise? I even used the phrase “add on”.
I can’t imagine anyone calling Baha’i (Baha’iism? Did I stick the apostrophe where it belongs?) either Christian or Muslim. It just doesn’t involve the central tenets of either of those religions.
Just to set the record straight, I do understand your point and I realize my comments were tangential. However, I do want to point out that my interest is not in the description of Mormonism as “heresy” – clearly, from any one person’s belief’s point of view, a lot of other people’s beliefs are going to constitute heresy.
My interest was in the phrase, which I have encountered often, that “Mormons aren’t Christians.” Having no dog in the hunt myself, I don’t have any personal objection to it, but it does strike me as being a rather strikingly different statement than “From sect A’s point of view, the adherents of sect B are heretics.”
As far as LDS (Mormon) beliefs go concerning Mohammed, I found this:
“The great religious leaders of the world such as Mohammed, Confucius, and the Reformers, as well as philosophers including Socrates, Plato, and others, received a portion of God’s light. Moral truths were given to them by God to enlighten whole nations and to bring a higher level of understanding to individuals. …
“We believe that God has given and will give to all peoples sufficient knowledge to help them on their way to eternal salvation” (Statement of the First Presidency regarding God’s Love for All Mankind, 15 Feb. 1978)."
An Aussie group which seemed to be a splinter Armstrongist-Mormon hybrid, the Christian Church of God seemed to teach that Mohammed rightly rejected the Trinity & Deity of Christ, but wrongly rejected His Divine Sonship, and yet rephrased it in a way that came to almost the same thing. I think they’ve since repudiated that teaching. (When I first read that, they were sorta unitarian-Armstrongists; when I tried to find it later, they’d gotten more Mormonite & I couldn’t find that essay.)
All the Unitarian-Universalist congregations I’ve dropped in on are not even pervasively theistic. In fact, the conversations and opinions and perspectives often resemble the range you find on this board.
The structure of services, however, seems to most strongly resemble mainstream Christian Protestant church services: invocations, intro music, responsive readings, songs/hymns sung together, announcements, music sung by a choir or played by an instrumental performer, a “message” (sermon), oftentimes another “message” for the kids who come forward for it, a ritual lifted from one or another religious tradition, another song/hymn, a benediction, and then people scattering to mingle and drink coffee or white wine and chat and whatnot.
No one who’s ever been to a Methodist. Lutheran, or Presbyterian service would fail to recognize the structure, whereas it’s distinctively not structurally as kin to a Catholic mass.
(Catholic here) We weren’t taught much about Mohammed, except that he was a holy man who started one of the world’s great religions and that we should respect all believers, yadda yadda.
However, I do remember hearing somewhere that Catholics believe that all other people calling themselves prophets (not inspirational figures, but literal prophets) were false; that Jesus, being the Son of God, was by definition the last word in Revelation before the second coming. This would mean Mohammed and Joseph Smith were not prophets and their religions, well, sort of invalid.
Like I said, though, in day-to-day life it doesn’t mean much. I don’t have a problem with Muslims as religious people and as for Mormons (not that I know many) I’d think I’d have so many basic Christian principles in common with them that I’d include them in the community of believers in Christ, if not technically Christian. Anyway, I was brought up in a wishy-washy treat-everybody-with-the-Golden-Rule and let God sort 'em out afterwards way–unless they’re using religion to marry twelve-year-old girls, stockpile guns, or blow up cafes, leave them alone.
Unitarians–I dunno. Some of those I know believe in Christ, some don’t, some don’t believe in God, etc. The few services I’ve been to had some New Age silliness (pouring water out of cups into a basin to symbolize how the Earth is All One or something) and also some prayers that were almost the same as the ones I’d grown up with.
You ask, we answer. You are right that we (Baha’is) do believe that both Jesus and Mohmmed were human embodiments of God, sent to earth to educate us about God and His purpose. So was Buddha, Moses, Abraham, Zoroaster and The Bab. But we don’t by any means consider ourselves either Christian or Muslim. I know of one Christian (LDS) family who considers my family to be Christian, simply because we believe that Jesus was Divine. But then, they certainly are the exception. I have many more Christian friends and acquaintances who are concerned about my eternal soul.
You are right that we (Baha’is) do believe that both Jesus and Mohmmed were human embodiments of God, sent to earth to educate us about God and His purpose. So was Buddha, Moses, Abraham, Zoroaster and The Bab. But we don’t by any means consider ourselves either Christian or Muslim. I know of one Christian (LDS) family who considers my family to be Christian, simply because we believe that Jesus was Divine. But then, they certainly are the exception. I have many more Christian friends and acquaintances who are concerned about my eternal soul.