If a Mormon tells you that the LDS Church believes that other faithful (non-Mormon) Christians are also eligible to go to the highest level of heaven in the afterlife, they are lying to you.
Official LDS doctrine teaches that good Christians may go to a intermediate level of heaven (think Texas Roadhouse) but only active, faithful Mormons can enter the Celestial Kingdom, (think Ruth’s Chris) which is the highest level of heaven, where both Christ AND God dwell, because Mormons believe Jesus is a distinct and separate personage from God the Father and the Holy Spirit.
A couple of things that most people do not know about Mormons:
(1) Mormons believe in an ADDITIONAL book of Scripture, The Book of Mormon. In it, there is an account of Jesus Christ making a detour from his Ascension into Heaven. This detour included a trip to the American continents (Mormons aren’t sure exactly WHERE) and He did a Reader’s Digest Condensed version of his Palestine ministry for the inhabitants in the Western Hemisphere. So when Mormons say they absolutely believe in Jesus, understand they believe in the Jesus who made the extra trip.
(2) Mormons believe if they follow ALL the rules of their faith (and there are plenty), they will not only go to Heaven, but the HIGHEST LEVEL of Heaven, called the Celestial Kingdom. There, they will progress to actual Godhood, and acquire their own planet to rule.
Do a little more research on Joseph Smith. He allegedly received a personal revelation from God regarding polygamy, yet denied it for years while he practiced it in secret. He married many women, some already the wives of his followers. He also took a child bride, Helen Mar Kimball, she being the tender age of 14.
~VOW
Nonsense. You are just buying into Christian propaganda. The Romans very much made a distinction. If you were prepared to make a symbolic sacrifice to the Emperor, thereby acknowledging him to be a god (and that, of course, was really a symbolic way of saying you were loyal to the Empire - no one seriously believed he was literally a god) then you went scot free. The Romans did not care waht you happened to believe about some dead Jewish carpenter, who they had once executed because the Jewish leaders had insisted on it. The Empire was full of people who believed in all sorts of crazy religions. The authorities did not care so long as you were not going to stir up revolt or something.
Some Christians outright refused to make the sacrifice to the Emperor, because they insisted that their god was the only true god. Those were the ones that got thrown to the lions, or whatever. (Even then, it only happened to any very great degree at certain periods during the history of the empire, notably under Nero and Diocletian, when it was politically convenient to have an unpopular group to persecute in order to “wag the dog”. Persecution of Christians was by no means continual.) But plenty of people who professed to believe in the divinity of Jesus were quite happy to make the symbolic sacrifice. Some of those of them probably acknowledged the reality of other gods besides Jesus/Jehova, others may just have been a bit more relaxed about their belief system than those who got themselves martyred.
The trouble is that when Christians finally got control of the empire, it was the militant, intolerant sort, the sort that would have been thrown to the lions in an earlier generation, and now they were in a position to do something about it they made sure that all the more tolerant sorts of believers in Jesus were declared to be heretics, and persecuted in their turn. Of course it was the militant, intolerant ones who evolved into the Christians we have today.
Nevertheless, even as an atheist, I have a good a deal of sympathy for those who say that Mormons are not really Christians. After all, they say some things about what Jesus actually did and said in his time on Earth that are quite radically different from what any brand of Christians (even ‘heretical’ ones) have been saying for the last couple of millennia. Just because they also call him Jesus does not necessarily make him the same (real or mythical) person.
On the other hand, those who say Catholics are not Christians are morons (as opposed to Mormons).
As an atheist-leaning agnostic, and obviously a non-Christian, I’ve tried to wrap my head around the Trinity. But it’s one of those things (sort of like the D.C. Multiverse) where, no matter how many hours I spend on Wikipedia, I’m never any clearer on the concept than I was when I started.
Traditional Christianity holds that God is 3 in 1 all at the same time; Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
As far as I know, the LDS church is the only major religion accepting Christ’s divinity (although they obviously claim they are the “ONE TRUE CHURCH” and so are the world’s only correct Christians) that holds this belief.
I get that. I guess I don’t really understand the nature and unique significance of each component of the Trinity, even though I have a reasonably good understanding of who and what God and Jesus are supposed to be.
Yeah, this one is really obscure. I mean, if you’ve never stayed in a Marriott hotel, or never watched late-night television commercials, or never heard of the Tony-award-winning Broadway play named after it, never seen missionaries flogging copies of it, never referred to the colloquial name of the church, you would have never heard of this obscure volume known as the Book of Mormon.
I’ve always been puzzled by other Christians’ reactions to the Book of Mormon. It’s a laughable work of pseudo-history purporting to describe ancient Native American civilizations and is demonstrably false in all areas of history. But what sticks in Christians’ craw is that Jesus stops in for a cameo and says the exact same things he says in the New Testament. I guess it’s like writing fanfic with someone else’s characters. They always get pissed.
I disagree with you pretty strongly here. Mormons pretty much believe the New Testament as written (and actually accept at face value the epistles and gospels that Biblical scholars now regard as pseudoepigraphic). Sure, Mormons believe a lot of extra things about Jesus, but not about his time on Earth. (The only thing I can even think of here is a Mormon belief that Jesus was married. And that has pretty much been downplayed and buried.) That hardly seems fair to deem them non-Christians because they think along the same lines as Dan Brown.
Yes, it was unusual when you were already a married man.
But seriously, despite our view of the past as a wild and savage place, marrying a 14-year-old WAS unusual at the time. Marrying ages were younger back then, but not to that extent. Plus, it wasn’t like they had a big reception and invited Smith’s current wives. It was done in secret but with the consent and collusion of the 14-year-old girl’s parents.
Mormons believe in the Bible (Old and New Testaments) up to the point where it disagrees with either the Book of Mormon or Church teachings. Then they trot out, “as far as translated correctly.”
They also practice something called “Baptism of the Dead.” Mormons are really BIG on geneology. They make trips to the Temple and vicariously baptize dead ancestors into the Mormon faith. Some even go beyond, and baptize ANYONE dead. The Mormon Church got into a lot of trouble in recent years when someone discovered they were baptizing Holocaust victims. Jews didn’t care for that.
~VOW
I can assure you, with 100% certainty that the leadership/hierarchy of the LDS Church doesn’t give a flying mollyfock what the relatives of “a bunch of dead Jews” (which is probably exactly how they put it when discussing the matter between themselves) thinks about their various practices, and the ONLY reason they showed any public remorse or contrition for their actions was to stem the tide of bad P.R., which is one of the only things they actually DO care about.
I would bet just about anything that there are still plenty of Mormons currently baptizing Holocaust victims, and just keeping it quiet as a matter of internal Church record…
I think the LDS leaders agreed not to baptize Jewish Holocaust victims UNLESS they were related to a current member of the Mormon faith; No word on how close of a relationship was necessary.
Luther’s anti-Semitism was certainly part of the cause of the Holocaust. Luther probably thought he was engaging in hyperbole. Would he have been delighted or horrified (or otherwise) if he knew what his words eventually led to? We will never know. But spreading hate, even as a personal flame war, is a very dangerous thing that has real consequences, including the worst imaginable consequences.
You’re getting carried away again. Official church policy is that the dead person must be a direct ancestor. Unfortunately, there is almost zero oversight, so in practice, a lot of famous people get baptized even though they don’t have any Mormon descendants, like Hitler, Stalin, and Barrack Obama’s mother. I believe the Mormon Church was supposed to implement a computer program to catch any Holocaust survivor names submitted, but who knows if that ever happened.
Mormons are pretty tone-deaf on the baptism of dead people, simply because they don’t see the big deal. The baptism is strictly optional for the dead person, and it doesn’t magically change dead people into Mormons. Plus, Mormons believe that eventually every person who has ever lived in the history of the world will be vicariously baptized Mormon. They agreed to remove the Holocaust victims from the database, but they certainly believe that someday, they will be vicariously baptized again.
I did recently see a documentary on the subject on Broadway by the noted ethnographers Matt Stone and Trey Parker.
Based on the fact that we came to learn that Josh Gad’s highly realistic character strayed somewhat from the tight bounds of established LDS Church doctrine, I can say that it is conclusively proven that all Mormon missionaries are instructed to lie to obtain converts.
It doesn’t work that way, though. The trinitarian God is eternally existent as three persons, not one guy wearing different hats at different times.
The more usual way to explain it is to invoke something that has three parts, like an egg. An egg has a yolk, white, and shell. Each piece can easily be called 100% egg, and yet they are still distinct from each other.
The problem with that analogy, of course, is that the three are alive and in constant communication with each other. The best analogy I’ve seen are those escaped Borg in Star Trek Voyager who are still linked together. They have individual thoughts, but they all hear them.
(Of course, that breaks down when you read that Jesus didn’t know things that the Father did know, but I could see that as being like telepathic races who learn to shield themselves from others: Jesus intentionally did not know that fact, delegating it to the Father to keep track of.)
Okay, I’ve gone pretty far off track, so I think I’ll shut up now.
