Sour grapes : One makes a disparaging remarks (usually untruthful) about something, when he does not get it, or when the situation does not turn out to how he wishes it to be.
But since I just meant it to mean he seems to find reasons to try and make me upset about whatever I say in regards to religions, it was the first thing that popped in to my head. What would be a better phrase to use? Asshole? I was trying not to be so crass.
Personally I think that was a big mistake. If the Church advocates to stay out of promoting a candidate they should stay out of the political process short of encouraging people to vote.
P.S. Why can’t I just sty out of this thread? Ergh
No, AprilR, never said that government should direct any church’s ceremonies. Just wanted to clarify your stance. You’re cool with a handful of state queer marriages, as long as they don’t occur in your church. Them deviants gotta marry the opposite sex to earn heaven and planets. Got it.
(FTR, I’m in the southeast, straight, white, and unaffiliated. Mormon catnip, at least to the bicycling doorknockers I encounter on the regular.) But the treatment of gays, women, and annihilation of third world cultures…no way this educated woman would participate in such an oppressive regime of middle aged white men. I won’t dictate who people should love in this physical world or any subsequent realm.
I had been pretty busy for the last couple of days and wasn’t able to respond to sooner.
As Erdosain points out, FAIR is the master of misleading information. Here is an interesting 18-minute video which shows how FAIR claims are misleading. You don’t have to watch the entire video, even the first three or four minutes show how FAIR operates. It’s pretty damning evidence of FAIR’s tactics.
The link at the end is for a seminar at Utah Valley University, a predominately Mormon state college. The title of the session is UVU: Mormonism and the Internet Session 4 Journeys of Faith on the Internet. At the same session, there are two other presentations which are also interesting. The first is an obviously LDS scholar who is upfront about the problems the Internet is causing for Mormons and how that is contributing to the current large scale defection on Mormons.
Your great indictment is the fact that a Mormon college had a seminar on the perfectly benign topic of “How does this huge new cultural influence—the Internet—intersect with Mormonism”, which is a perfectly unremarkable seminar that any number of denominations—and even secular groups—have had seminars on. This is about as fiendish as anything the Audubon Society has done. Or psychoanalysts.
As to your invitation to watch some kook’s twenty-minute video on “Everything is Connected,” I can only say you knew everybody is going to send their regrets. I’ll add: “This YouTube explains everything” is the crank’s last stand.
Yes, it’s the crank saying that a religious organization isn’t trustworthy. :rolleyes:
You’re supposed to be a lawyer. Surely you know that an ad hominem doesn’t defeat someone else’s argument. If you honestly think “Crazy people post like you do” somehow wins an argument, then I’d suggest you need to go back to college.
You belong to, defend, and promote a religion which encourages female congregants to pursue educations in foreign languages, anthropology, and sociology for the sole purpose of dismantling other cultures and replacing it with your own belief system, limits the roles of women in church, shames gays and denies them equal rights, and generally elevates straight men to godhood by devaluing female members of the congregation, shunning gays despite being aware of the suicide rate and other hardships faced by disfellowshipped gays, and generally spends your free time attempting to homogenize the planet to your belief system and I’m the asshole?
You think it devalues women? Guess what, men can’t get anywhere in our church without women. Fact. They more than make us feel like equals, they make us feel exulted. The men who don’t, well they don’t really believe in what the Church teaches. Because it clearly teaches a man cannot reach the highest level of glory without a wife. And his wife will be there by his side in equality to receive all the blessings together. Nether is one without the other.
April R - you seem like a nice, intelligent person. Do you see things like the Garden of Eden being in Missouri, and American Indians being the lost tribes of Israel. and Jesus coming to North America as literal truths or as metaphors like many Christians view Noah’s Ark and the flood?
It’s just hard for me to take someone who believes in that stuff seriously, much less elect them to Commander in Chief of our nuclear arsenal.
Of course I believe that. About the garden of Eden, who knows. But that Jesus wouldn’t visit all of His creation is preposterous if you believe He visited some. And it’s not just the Native Americans, it’s all of God’s creation who are part of his Kingdom and we believe that it will be eventually revealed through additional scripture that he was able to visit all his children after his Resurrection. God doesn’t neglect any of His creation.
Now if you don’t believe he visited anyone or that he was ever really resurrected and was just some dude running around the Middle East preaching, then it’s all a moot point anyway.
P.S. The concept of Lost Tribes is not a new one:
{sorry for the wiki quote, it was the most succinct summary of various Lost Tribe beliefs I could find right now}
Oh heavens, it really speaks for itself. But at a first approximation, it means people who see Mormons holding seminars on “What’s it like to be a Mormon on Facebook” (a seminar that has been held, mutatits mutandis, also by Methodists, Baptists, Jews, Hindus, Democrats, gays, nudists, Tea Partiers, the transgendered, the disabled, international development officers, so on and so forth) and react, “Aha! Here is their plan for global cultural domination!!” (usually in all-caps). And then make a twenty-minute YouTube video painstakingly documenting this diabolical development.
The difference, of course, is that the paranoid never queries whether the conclusions of his extended syllogisms actually match what is taking place in the real world. And as Hofstadter notes, this is precisely the point of the paranoid’s deductive system—to permit a system that allows one to “deduce away” more temperate conclusions. Conspiracy theories are dangerous not because they are incoherent, but because coherence (and a disinclination to reality-test one’s deductions) is elevated to a position of importance well beyond empirical validation.
I have no doubt that your Everything is Connected kook meticulously makes his case. However, I do not need to meditate on the question “Do Mormons want to take over the world, and are they making progress on that front?” because I have not insulated myself from the real world and can answer this real-world question with real-world experience, rather than concocting highly footnoted proofs of what “must” be taking place.
