Well, it may imply that to you but it’s worded the way it is, “While all that is accessible to the senses remains as before” to refute the charge of physical change. Now, if you think that saying the consecration confers a real change in the nature of the foodstuff without fucking with the attributes is like having your christ and eating it too, well I can’t argue with that.
In fact, if what I have read is correct, it very well may. I have heard ex-mos claim that, WRT to the religion, lying is mormonically endemic. It is, after all, a secretive religion, like that Hubbard thing, they have to lie to prospects and initiates (“No, we don’t do that stuff”) in order to get them in, and tell them the truth (“Oh, well yeah, we do do that stuff after all”) when they are ready for it (fully indoctrinated).
Willard was, after all, a missionary to some extent, so he would have had to be comfortable with the culture of lying as salesmanship. Mormonism has served to acclimate him with dissembling and obfuscation.
What exactly is the stuff they (try to) keep secret?
BTW, since the eucharist, transubstantion, etc., has been brought up – do Mormons take communion in any form?
When recruiting new members, we don’t bring up the whole “You can become a God!” angle at all. Or polygamy. American potential converts may have heard of these things, but in foreign countries they haven’t heard of any of it.
Mormons do indeed have a Eucharist. They call it “Sacrament” and use Wonder bread (not a joke) and water instead of wine. They don’t believe anything magical happens to the bread and water; it’s just symbolism to them. The Mormon sacrament is also notable for the fact that the teenage boys of the congregation are responsible for preparing, blessing, and distributing the Eucharist/sacrament, in keeping with the Mormon belief that every male member is part of the priesthood.
I had Mormon friends in college. We never really discussed religion, but they did talk about taking “sacrament,” which Wikipedia says is their term for communion.
Interestingly, they apparently use water to avoid the alcohol of wine. I wonder why they didn’t go the grape juice route that many Protestants did.
Interesting. Do Mormon missionaries ever go to Muslim countries? (Where polygamy would shock no one, but “You can become a God!” might get you stoned.)
I won’t comment on the rest of it, but this statement struck a chord:
I worked with a Mormon for several years, went to LDS Church functions, even was a best man at an LDS wedding (NOT a Temple Sealing), then went and lived in SLC for four years. This was the basic impression I got. I was amazed that the LDS Church grew out of an American Protestant background, but re-instated a pretty good imitation of the Catholic Church hierarchy, with what look like parishes, diocese, bishops, and what looks like a College of Cardinals and a Pope. All of tghis coming from a background characterized by locally-run churches with much weaker lines of authority. There are even Church Legends that give the impression of greater age than the less than 200 years the church has been around.
Ofcourse, there are also a lot of interesting parallels between the LDS church and Islam, but that takes us much farther afield. I don’t claim any direct influence, it’s just observation. So i don’t think there’s any significance in the organizational relationship between the LDS and the Catholics – it all seems to be an outgrowth of how people organize their undertaking.
Inner Stickler has it exactly right. I never claimed that any of what I posted actually makes any logical SENSE, just that the way it is explained and promoted in the various churches in no way implies or endorses any sort of eating of actual Jesus bits, regardless of how it looks to the non-churched.
I know it looks contradictory and there’s a lot of woo there, but it really is very important doctrinally - there’s been a lot of ink spilled to try and navigate around how to have the “body and blood” not actually be *physical *body and blood, while still being *“real” * body and blood for sacramental purposes.
I’m actually a little suprised that Mormons (to get away from the hijack) are purely into communion for the symbolism. I’m also a bit startled by the water instead of wine, but I have to immediately wonder if there’s a Wedding at Cana connection there (ie, if Jesus wants it to be wine, it damn well will be).
I never heard the Wedding at Cana oficially given as an explanation, but I had speculated along those lines when I was a Mormon. I was taught that all references to Jesus drinking wine were really a mistranslation and he was drinking grape juice, but i don’t think I was ever gullible enough to take that seriously. In Doctrine & Covenants section 89, wine consumption is discouraged but an exception is made for the sacrament. And in another D&C revelation, it states that any food and drink may be used for the sacrament. Hence the bread (usually white) and tap water. And really, the tradition is more important than the scripture; if a boy were to prepare the sacrament using homemade wine citing D&C 89 for justification, he’d be in a LOT of trouble.
And as others had said, the Mormon sacrament is entirely symbolic. The blessing of the bread and water says “that they may eat / drink it in remeberance of the body / blood of thy son”.
Close, but I’ll nitpick. Joseph Smith himself didn’t unify mysteries (1) and (2) above. In the 1820’s upstate New York, there was a lot of speculation that the local burial mounds had been built by the lost tribes of Israel and that the Native Americans were a remnant of those tribes. Joseph Smith took that common belief and turned it into a religion. LDS church historian (and General Authority) Brigham H Roberts tried to persuade the top leadership to come clean about the likely plagiarism of the Book of Mormon’s ideas from Ethan Smith’s (no relation) book View of the Hebrews.
Luke 7:33-34: “For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He hath a devil. The Son of man is come eating and drinking; and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners!”
Which sounds rather defensive of Jesus . . . a lot like something an alcoholic-in-denial would say . . . Be that as it may, clearly Jesus had enough of a reputation for drunkenness, deserved or undeserved, that he felt obliged to answer the charge. You don’t get that kind of reputation by sticking to grape juice.
Which is why I never believed the grape juice claims. Jesus had been accused of drinking too much, and Noah and Lot both get pass-out drunk. Clearly the ‘good guys’ in the Bible were occasionally drinking something stronger than grape juice.
Here is a popular LDS apologetic site that claims “initially grape juice was used in the sacrament”, and here is an exchange between two Mormons looking for scholarly proof that the last supper was non-alcoholic. They propose shifting the burden of proof: “Rather than responding to such a devious challenge, who don’t you ask them to “prove” that any wine that the Savior drank was alcoholic?”.
I have a related question: it is well known that Joseph Smith dabbled in the occult, and was known as a minor con man (he hired out to help people find buried treasure). I have seen court documents related to such charges…so how does the MC explain this behavior? The guy goes from being a swindler to chief prophet-how did that happen?
[shrug] A sinner becoming a saint is perfectly mainstream Christian.
Only in America. And I’m not being entirely derisive when I say that; there is something very fundamentally American about Mormonism. Of course some people in the U.S. wouldn’t be satisfied with the idea that humanity was created in the Middle East and Jesus preached the gospel in Israel. It seems almost inevitable that someone came up with the idea that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri and Jesus came to America. That religion was founded by a guy who more or less had a fraud charge on his record, and of course (especially since it was hyperreligious upstate New York), people believed him when he said an angel had given him scriptures he wouldn’t show to anybody else. In any case, if people have time and want to read something else troubling about Mormonism - a story that is both troubling and encouraging regarding the way the LDS church deals with its own history - Slate just put out this piece.
I don’t know about the MC in specific, but the question of God working through flawed human beings as prophets was always made quite a big deal out of in my churches.
Abraham screwed his servants (technically because his wife told him to)
Jacob was a liar and a cheat.
Lot was a coward.
Moses purposefully didn’t do what God told him to do (and was also a whiny bastard and tried to weasel out of it).
David was an adulterer.
Saul had a temper problem (and consulted with demons, that last one is really what did him in).
Saul of Tarsus (later Paul the Apostle) was just a general asshole.
JS really fits in quite well with that crew. Churches love redemption stories - that’s the whole point after all. Who needs God if you’re perfectly good and honest and trustworthy and the world is working out for you? Or, conversely, what good is a God who only likes good people?
There’s a lot of people out there who know they’re crappy people, and you want to market to those people by making a special case that your God really likes people with personality flaws, and can use them despite (or sometimes because of) those problems.
Oh yes everything you wrote is totally true. I was raised a Mormon and our family was very active in the church. I left the church many years ago because of some of the facts you mentioned, and more besides.
The church membership is highly educated, in general. So why do they continue to believe? I think different people have their own reasons. Many members know full well that the church is based on a fiction. They stay with it because it’s good for the family, and because it’s a part of their culture, and they are comfortable with it. Others are true believers and you know how that can cloud your ability to see things for how they really are.
The bottom line is that people can be trained to believe practically anything. It’s a very strange fact of humanity. People are not that smart, and not that rational. I worry that my current set of beliefs are also false and I am just too dumb to see it. Not that I’m religious anymore, but my politics, my ethics, could be all wrong. For example, I like Obama. My family are all Romney fans, of course. But I don’t know: Maybe Obama is not as good as I think he is, because I don’t have access to enough facts, and because I am probably still reacting negatively to all things Mormon, so I would prefer virtually anyone over Romney. Besides, Mormons believe that eventually they will take control of the country and create a theocracy. That is embedded in their doctrine.
I’ve always been intrigued about the way the old testament was written. Abraham, Jacob, Lot, Moses, David, Saul, and Saul were protagonists. Stories were told about them and so they were humanized. They got angry, they got scared, they didn’t always do what they were supposed to. But the old testament is full of other characters who from our point of view are nothing more than mouthpieces for God. Moses was a prophet and he could fuck up big time. Did Nathan ever screw up? Did Samuel ever get anything but righteously angry? Not to my knowledge. Did Deborah ever have a period of self-doubt? No, but the minute whassisname did, she was all bitchy and snarky with the whole God will take the victory from you and give it to a woman. These people are much less developed and I think it’s interesting how some people apparently are nothing less than perfect avatars of God On Earth and other people who are given the same ‘job’ can’t seem to turn around without messing something up. I dunno how interesting this is to anyone else.
Sort of tangentially related to this thread, but I really, really would like a reporter to ask Romney if he genuinely believes that God, Jesus, and the angels are all hanging out on the planet Kolub, and if he feels that by being a good Mormon, he’ll go to that planet with them and himself become some sort of angelic/God-like being.
And then ask him if he really believes he has to perform a series of complicated handshakes and secret passwords with God and/or an angel to gain access into that heaven planet.
Sort of put him on the spot between his religious beliefs, and not wanting to alienate a lot of the religious right that don’t know a lot of the odd little details about Mormonism, and might get “scared off” by hearing about them.
Seriously, Mormonism is weird…I mean, so are most other religions, but it goes a tad beyond, IMO.