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Notes -
Right-coded violence reasserts itself (?)
It's sobering, that this morning someone might have asked you "did you hear about the 40-year-old Iraq war veteran who committed a 'third space' mass murder over the weekend?" and you might have reasonably responded, "Which one?"
(Insert Dr. Doofenshmirtz meme here!)
Of course, like any normal American, the instant I heard that someone had shot up a Mormon congregation and burned their house of worship to the ground I
crossed my fingers and prayed the perpetrator was a member of my outgroupimmediately wondered if the shooter was a right-coded wingnut who somehow blamed Charlie Kirk's death on the Mormons.(I've never managed to determine whether Tyler Robinson and his family are actually Mormon, or maybe were Mormon at some point, but nobody seems to care; apparently all anyone else wants to know is whether he was really a gay furry, a groyper, or both. But living in Utah seems sufficiently Mormon-adjacent that a psychotic killer could draw the association.)
So far, no apparent Kirk connection! However the Michigan shooter indeed regarded Mormons as the anti-Christ. Perhaps that's the whole story: he just really, really disliked Mormons (sort of like everyone else). This makes Donald Trump's commentary interesting; the President immediately declared that this was a "targeted attack on Christians" and was met with an Evangelical chorus of "Mormons aren't Christians" (which to me seems a little tone deaf, under the circumstances, but times being what they are...). In any event this is probably the deadliest case of targeted violence against Mormon congregations since the 19th century.
(There was apparently a bomb threat in 1993 that could have been a mass casualty event, had the explosives been real. Other than that, I'm not an expert on hate crimes but Google does not seem to think that Mormons are very often the target of such things.)
The North Carolina shooter got less attention (he did not burn down any churches), but that didn't stop Newsweek from digging into some peculiarities of history:
This fellow has quite a colorful record, and part of that record includes the fact that
This reads like schizophrenia to me, but on balance it seems more right-coded than left-coded, concerns over "white supremacists" notwithstanding.
All this seems to have the usual left-coded social media spaces crowing; they have spent the past few weeks assuring us all that right wing extremism is far, far more common and deadly than left wing extremism. But to my mind, neither of these cases quite reach that "political extremism" threshold. The Michigan shooting appears to be genuine sectarian violence of a kind rarely seen in the United States, and the North Carolina shooting looks like a textbook mental health event. Nevertheless, I have no difficulty seeing these as right-coded, for the simple reason that they were carried out against minority groups by white, middle-aged, ex-military men. That's red tribe quite regardless of what their actual political views are--indeed, whether they have any coherent political views at all.
This got me thinking about all the other violence that I see as a blue tribe problem, quite regardless of its ideological roots. The obvious one that Charlie Kirk himself occasionally gestured toward was inner city urban gang violence; that is blue-coded violence, to my mind, though it is arguably "politically neutral." A couple weeks ago I suggested that we should be paying closer attention to the role that "Neutral vs. Conservative" thinking has to play in the national conversation on identity-oriented violence. This weekend's events strengthen that impression, for me. I do not really like the "stochastic terrorism" framing, particularly given my attachment to significant freedom of speech. But neither can I comfortably assign all responsibility for these events strictly to individual perpetrators.
I wish I had something wiser to say about that. I would like there to be less violence everywhere, but certainly the trend toward deliberately directing violence against unarmed, unsuspecting innocents seems like an especially problematic escalation, and one our political system seems to be contributing toward even when our specific political commitments do not. I don't know if drawing a distinction between "tribe-coded" and "tribe-caused" is helpful. But it is a thought I had, and have not seen expressed elsewhere, so I thought I should test it here.
This is... tricky, I think, in terms of sensitivity.
On the one hand, Mormons aren't Christians. Or at least, they do not fall within any historical confession of Christian orthodoxy. They're probably best understood as a type of heretic; personally I put them in a category that I think of as 'Jesusists', that is, religions that take Jesus as their central figure, but which are too different from historical Christianity to be understood as the same thing. The point is that "Mormons aren't Christians", as a statement, is substantially true.
On the other, it is obviously breathtakingly insensitive to bring that up at this time. Mormons believe that they are Christians, even if they are, in my judgement, in error. (I realise that technically definitions can't be wrong; even so I can and do believe that they draw the line between Christianity and non-Christianity in an indefensible place.) More importantly, whether Mormonism is a form of Christianity or not is irrelevant to this particular issue. Murdering a group of Mormons at worship is obviously very, very bad. Christians ought to respond to that by condemning the crime while offering empathy, support, and compassion to those grieving. It is not the appropriate time to engage in a confessional dispute.
But to return to the first hand - a major public figure, the president of the United States, just responded to this by asserting that Mormons are Christians, and that this shooting is an attack on Christianity qua Christianity. Now I judge both of those statements to be untrue, and though many might argue the former, the latter seems pretty hard to dispute. It is not factually true that this shooting was "a targeted attack on Christians". If nothing else, ranting about the anti-Christ suggests that the shooter himself is a Christian, albeit a very delusional one. So it seems like there is value in clarifying in this moment that Trump's interpretation of the shooting is wrong.
I suppose this is just another situation where Trump really needed to keep his mouth shut, because all his comments have done is make a tragic situation worse for everyone.
...how come?
see here.
But can you provide a more detailed explanation?
Mormon cosmology is completely different from the Abrahamic religions. In Mormonism, God did not create the universe, he simply organized preexisting matter. God himself is part of and subservient to the material universe.
This leads to a bunch of strange (though arguably coherent) beliefs, many of which are explained in this less-than-sympathetic cartoon, although from what I can tell everything in it is technically correct.
Also, endless celestial sex. You can decide for yourself whether this is a positive or a negative.
I think these high cosmology arguments are complicated by the fact that Mormon services are essentially indistinguishable from low church protestant ones. The average Protestant would feel more comfortable in a Mormon service than a Catholic one in terms of knowing what to do.
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Do you have a source on that? As someone who grew up in that faith, I never heard that.
Abraham 3:24
Creating the Earth out of materials existing in the universe doesn't mean that God didn't create the universe itself.
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...yeah, if that's all correct then it would be hard to call it Christianity.
There is no possible way Doctrine and Covenants 132:19-20 can square with Christian scripture.
The angels being subject to saved humans as a result of their union with Christ is pretty basic Christian soteriology, and an early form of it shows up in 1 Corinthians (chapter 6:2-3):
Angels are also never described as being "in the image of God" the way humans are, although they're considered to have a certain resemblence to the divine glory.
As for the "they shall be gods" part, well, that's also in the Bible, famously quoted by Jesus as an unbreakable line of scripture (John 10:34-36):
While there's a difference in the kind of divinity being ascribed, it's also fundamental to Catholic and Orthodox understandings of salvation since the early middle ages that the ultimate destiny of man is to partake of the divine nature by grace. The phrase appears across Christian history that a person who has achieved perfect sanctification could be said to "have everything that God has," to be divinized. What you've quoted is actually the least distinct element and phrasing in Mormon soteriology, from the point of view of analyzing historical Christianity in its broad scope.
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uh, sure, I guess. The following is speaking very generally and aiming for as neutral a view as I can manage.
Jews (speaking very broadly here as I will for all groups) think they have a revelation from God, and that revelation is at a certain point closed. Then they have a system pertaining to how that revelation interfaces with their community, which may not be closed per se but where thousands of years of tradition usually vastly outweigh present concerns.
Christians believe the Jewish revelation is valid, but don't see it as closed, and believe there was a subsequent revelation which at a later point closed. They likewise have a community-interface system which likewise draws on thousands of years of tradition, which is completely incompatible with the Jewish system. So while both Jews and Christians think the Old Testament is the word of God, Jews think the New Testament is heretical pagan nonsense and the church and its traditions have no valid connection to God, while (many) Christians think Jews missed the boat, the rabbinical system is in the same way heretical nonsense, made up to paper over the fact that Judaism ended with the destruction of the temple, when it became impossible to fulfill the requirements of the Law.
Mormons are to Christians as Christians are to Jews. They have what might be described as a Newer Testament, which they see as a subsequent revelation to the Christian one, which is, you guessed it, now also closed. And they have their own community-interface system which is only a couple hundred years old but hey give them awhile, sheesh. And to their credit, a couple hundred years ain't nothing, and they do seem to be going fairly strong to date, but this system is likewise incompatible with the Christian system in the same way that the Christian system is incompatible with the Jewish one. Christians think the Newer testament is bad fanfic, in the same way Jews think the Christian New Testament is bad fanfic, for similar reasons.
In each case, you have the older version rejecting the newer version as a heresy, and the newer version thinking the older version missed the boat. ...Only, I'm not actually sure whether Mormons think Christians are fine as-is, or should ideally become Mormons, the way Christians think Jews should become Christian. I'd assume so, just on a naïve application of memetics.
Actually, the Mormons make a big deal about having a living prophet, who can receive new revelation as needed. This has come in handy a couple of times when political considerations have forced the church to update its doctrine in a hurry, such as in 1890 when they stopped practicing polygamy in order for Utah to join the Union, or in 1978 when God changed his mind about black people.
It's weird to me how the Mormons seem like the most boring, steadfast, buttoned-down, no-nonsense of all religious groups in the way they act. And yet their actual religious dogma seems like one of the craziest. Sure, just dial up their direct hotline to god whenever they need an update on current political issues, that makes sense...
I mean, yes? If you think God is real, God has the ability to send messages, and God wants certain things of humanity, then it's pretty logical for God to send such messages whenever humans get confused about what he said. Judaism has plenty of prophets doing this, and pagans typically had oracles.
The overly-convenient nature of the Mormons' updates certainly doesn't gel very well with claims that their hotline is plugged into something eternal, but the notion of having a hotline to the divine is really a pretty-logical extension of Actually Believing In Gods.
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The LDS church famously has an open canon, though the current books are considered the "standard works" that make up the existing canon. But it's perfectly possible in Mormon theology that the church could, by "common consent," add a new work if there was an overwhelming consensus that a text should be added to the canon.
Leading to considerable efforts to add the Book of Arnold in some quarters.
Which I found particularly hilarious because once you take the idea of a separate revelation of Jesus to North America seriously, the possibility of a separate revelation to Africa of the type that Elder Cunningham appears to deliver is entirely plausible at a theological level. "One with the people of Africa" indeed.
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I stand corrected!
...my main point, in any case, is that in any of these questions of categorizing people, there's the answer from the people in the category, and there's the answer of the people outside the category, and neither is obviously correct.
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I was looking for examples of specific theological beliefs or other aspects of Mormonism that might render Mormonism incompatible with Christianity as it's traditionally conceived. Looks like Quantumfreakonomics has it covered though.
I can. The quickest one is they reject the oneness of God and Christ. This isn't in any standard nontrinitarian sense, it is in the uniquely Mormon polytheistic sense as they believe God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit are three distinct gods, among multitudes. They employ rhetorical tricks, they believe in a "godhead" that is "one" and you'll find that "one" often in quotations because it's an equivocation. As trinitarian Christians mean one in the literal sense of one essential being, Mormons mean one in the figurative sense, acting in a common purpose. You could say that of the religion, the Church of Latter-Day Equivocations. Smith used a bunch of words because they sounded Christian when he meant anything but.
Yahweh said to Moses "I am." Christ said to the Pharisees "Before Abraham was, I am." The Pharisees understood he was claiming to be God, that's why they tried to stone him. Mormons post-hoc their nontrinitarian beliefs by saying instances of YHWH/Jehovah in the OT actually refer to Christ. False to an absurd degree, in the number of verses clearly describing Yahweh as God the Father, and those that go on to say "and no other gods exist."
Smith followed in the line of Muhammad. He gutted a religion, wore it as a skinsuit, and in America exploited some of its inertia for his cult. There are nominally Christian sects that also reject the divinity of Christ. Same goes for them. That's not what's really relevant here, though. Apropos this discourse, you see among righties some saying "Christendom is under attack" and the retort spiral of "Mormons aren't Christians" / "Yes we are" et refrain. Christianity, most historically, is the belief in Christ and God as one. Most Christians today believe in Christ and God as one. They think Mormons believe the same. If they knew Mormons didn't, they would no longer consider them Christian but a deeply heretical, borderline if not overtly blasphemous, likely Satanic cult. Dante would find Joseph Smith in the Eighth Circle, Ninth Bolgia. Ever-cleft from groin to abdomen.
Personally, I find polygamy, especially polygyny, as so gravely wicked as to be self-apparently disqualifying of Smith and so all of his work. Today, a man who wants multiple wives hates women to a degree I don't know how to put into words, and he hates men even more. Smith had 30-40 "wives." And that's always what it's about, at least in the US. Men go to remarkable lengths so they can have sex with whichever women they want.
Yes, they had a "revelation" to stop the practice, because if they hadn't, the army would have done it for them.
We believe the godhead is one in the scriptural sense.
It's hard to get more clear and straightforward than this.
On the meta level, you have reasons to think that Jesus was speaking figuratively here but literally when he said "there are no gods besides me." I have reasons to think the opposite. We could get into a very long, tiresome debate about which is correct, and as loathe as I am to begin such a debate, it's still far preferable to your current insinuation that the question is entirely settled; that one approach is straightforwardly un-biblical and heretical while the other is fully and self-evidently sound.
I suppose you would fully condemn the many wives God gave to David, too?
Please read the declaration, lol. You're implying here something like "LDS leaders pretended that God coincidentally told them to stop practicing polygamy just in time to avoid direct conflict with the army" It's actually the exact opposite--the declaration explicitly says that polygamy was ended due to external interference.
This is just dishonest.
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