My guess is that it was a cheap off-topic shot at Democrats, but to each his own.
I’m not mormon, but I was raised by them, baptised by them, went to the meetings until I was informed I wouldn’t be thrown out of the house if I didn’t (I was 19, I think) - and of course I’m probably still listed as a member by them. So I think I know what I’m talking about. NOTE: I’m talking about Idaho mormons, not Utah mormons. Differences may exist.
Ehh, Joseph Smith is considered to be awesome (or at least the fictionalized propaganda version of him is) but he’s not venerated or anything. Current leaders as similarly not venerated. Their ideology is law, but only because it’s the stated ideology of the religion.
Hell yes on the discouragement. Punishment may vary.
Eeh. There are group prayers and group songs at the meetings, but not in excess of what you’d see at any other church.
The actual church leaders don’t generally meddle in the minutae of people’s lives, aside from broad dictates like ‘no caffeine’, ‘no porn’, ‘don’t date non-mormons’ and the like. Those mandates, of course, are law.
Hell yes.
Yes, but given the heavy focus on prostelytizing they try to keep it on the down low. This was MUCH worse in the early days of the church, of course.
They historically have liked to think they’re not, and this line of thinking was why they moved out to Utah in the first place. However that didn’t get them out of the reach of the law and eventually the federal government slapped them down hard for their lawlessness. At this point I think that if the feds came for a prophet, he’d answer the door.
The ends pursued by the Mormon church are not overtly psychopathic - they mostly seem to have to do with amassing money and power for the institution. The church thinks these ends do justify the means, but the means have mostly to do with controlling its own members and tapping them as a financial and labor resource.
Certainly - though they’ll let the parents try to take care of it in the home first.
I can see this happening in extreme cases, but if your family is a mainstream christian sect they won’t ask you to do this or imply that you should.
Famously so.
It’s a MASSIVE focus of the religion, equalled only by their focus on controlling their members’ behavior - and sometimes putting them to work (unpaid, naturally).
Several meetings a week - but it’s not like you have to live in the chapel or anything. Semi-inordinate?
No - but members are required to date only with other group members.
Most of them hold day jobs or care for their families, so technically no. But there are some seriously fervent mormons out there, who consider it THE dominant force in their life.
I believe I’ve been fair. How this totals up, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
A tongue-in-cheek suggestion has been to call them Ziontologists.
That’s pretty good and doubtless I’ll use it but I still like Oxymormons for specialized cases.
I don’t personally think they’re dumb or morons; but extremely misled by a cult.
Someone trying to get high by shoving an opioid pill in their ear, that’s an oxymoron.
Tympanic membranes can absorb some drugs, you know. :eek:
Meh, this thread is littered with cheap-shots at Mormons. In another thread I’ve been following, someone recently posted “if you’re going to hurl childish insults at one group, then you might get some back at the side you support.”
I’d have liked your cheap shot a lot better had it actually made sense. “No you!”, enlightened discourse though it is, falls a little flat when when ‘you’ isn’t actually guilty of the thing in question.
The Democratic Party certainly checks some of those “cult” checkboxes, and not others, not entirely unlike the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. senoy wrote:
I think he’s correct that, at least according to his list, “most groups whether religious or secular will probably have a few things on the list.”
Like what items do you imagine it checks, out of off-topic curiousity? I did an exhaustive runthrough of the list for the mormon church and honestly it didn’t hit nearly as many points as one might think, on account of the fact it doesn’t actually lock people in a compound and claim their leaders are literally incarnated deities. It would take a feverish imagination indeed to decide that the democratic party locks people in compounds and literally deifies anyone (even Obama!), so the kind of frantic twisting it would take to portray them as such should be interesting (though possibly painful) to see.
Which is precisely why they exist.
I think a case could be made for these ones:
Would you willingly concede any of these?
No. The democrats are actually all over the place with regard to their ideology, with little concensus about how far we should go with the environment, the economy, nukes, preervation, and so on. Dissent it pretty common - about the only thing the left all agrees about is that the radical right is full of shit.
Well, we think we’re better than you, but few democrats think that the democratic party is superior to other liberal governments throughout the world. And nobody who’s on the rails thinks that any democratic politician is literally deified.
Which wider society? You have the democrats, the independents, and the republicans. Democrats think that the republicans are full of shit, but like independents fine. So Democrats are fine with the wider society.
Nope. Sure, there are fringe groups that are radical enough to think that anything goes for the purpose of saving lab mice or whatever, but the notion that the democrats as a whole are engaging in reprehensible behaviors on the orders of the party is lunatic talk.
Obviously not. Sure, it would be great if more people were liberals, but neither the democrats as a whole nor the DNC as an organization devote a significant percentage of their time to prosteletization. (And neither do republicans.)
Preoccupied? Nope. I will grant that fund raising occurs, but you don’t have to pay a single penny to be a democrat, nor do you have to participate in any activities that funnel money to the upper ranks. It’s barely even encouraged, really.
This is, of course, insane for somebody to say on a so-called liberal message board that allows you on it. If you had even a semblance of a point with this, we’d refuse to talk to you.
ETA: Didn’t you notice me giving mormonism a pretty wide pass on the things it actually doesn’t do? You want me to call you a cult, you have to actually act like a cult. I’ve seen mormonism, I know what an organization that focuses on recruitment, money, and control of its members looks like. Democrats ain’t that.
I hate to agree with this guy, but yeah, I mean “oxymormon” is funny, but just “moron” is a cheap childish shot.
Ex-Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints member here. I don’t know how the General Authorities (the senile old guys that are Mormondom’s version of Cardinals) plan to pull this off – or, really, why? Even my uber-Mormon cousins are making fun of this on FB.
Outside of Utah, I assume “The Church” to mean Catholic if it’s not in a certain context.
I don’t have time right now to formulate a response to each point individually. You can read what I’ve written so far.
You’ve got to be f***ing kidding me: DNC ANNOUNCES NEW IWILLVOTE CAMPAIGN TO REACH 50 MILLION VOTERS IN 2018
Go to democrats.org. What does the button in the top right corner of the website say? “DONATE”
The SDMB isn’t an organ of the Democratic Party (at least officially). Agreed?
Some do. Here are some examples that have happened recently that I believe demonstrate this type of behavior:
One year later, how Trump’s election has changed the way we date
Swipe left if you voted for Trump
I can’t pretend to guess what Hurricane is or isn’t thinking, but active, believing Mormons often refuse to consider anything negative about the church. Why was the sex scandals in the Catholic Church allowed to continue for so long? There really isn’t anything different with Mormons.
It’s usually pointless to engage with members. So many are pretty hostile and attack any and everything. Former members usually aren’t very laid back, either which often results in simply “screaming over the back fence” that doesn’t get anything solved.
I don’t see HD’s question as being asked in good faith, but rather a method of avoiding an actual discussion if Mormon women are treated as second class citizens.
Do you believe that Mormon women are treated equally? Nawth Chucka was commenting on factors which makes lives difficult for women in Utah.
I don’t see a universal Mormon Corridor vs. Non-Mormon Corridor. (Link shows a map of the percentage of people per county who are Mormon. As can be seen, most of Utah and parts of southern Idaho have strong Mormon majorities.) But let’s just use the expression “Utah Mormons.”
I know Mormons from outside Utah who were every bit as insular as Utah Mormons and I’ve know Utah Mormons who weren’t very typical.
The Coke vs. Non-coke was a major question everywhere prior to the official word recently allowing caffeinated soft drinks. As missionaries, we were officially forbidden to drink colas, and those drinks were not sold at BYU and other church-run schools. Otherwise it was up to the occasional overzealous local leader.
My friend’s father took a job in Florida back in the 60s and the first thing his father was asked about which side of the coke/no coke divide in the congregation. His father said he always considered question how to be more Christlike as being far more important. Were more Mormons like my friend’s father, I may not have left the Church.
Obviously you didn’t comprehend what you just quoted. They are going after voters. Nowhere does it say that they are trying to sign them up as card carrying democrats. Do you have a problem with a party trying to get people to vote. Oh, you’re a conservative, so you want to suppress voting through restrictive laws wherever possible.
So does Wikipedia. The horror.
However, you are right that the Dems - and the Republicans - are fundraising day and night. Why would that be? Maybe because conservatives fought against reasonable restrictions on election spending. So it is a bit hypocritical for conservatives to complain about Democrats raising money to combat a situation they created.
Gee, why would someone not want to date a person supporting a racist? Maybe it is their moral values. I get bombarded by email from Democrats, and none of them asks me not to date non-Democrats.
Are you saying the Dems don’t date indpendents? Or even liberal Republicans? (The few left.)
We know Mormon restrictions on dating outside the faith. That’s anyone outside. If Mormons didn’t date Satanists, I doubt anyone would think them odd.
Yes I’m equating Trumpists to Satanists, which isn’t really fair - I think Satanists are a lot more moral.
The possibility of actual good-faith discussion was pretty much foreclosed in this thread by the second or third post.
I recall many years ago seeing something that said the Mormons also identified as “Lambs of God”. Now, there would be a fine acronym. But I cannot determine whether it would be the “Church of Logs” or the “Log Church”.