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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24820 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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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.

We believe the godhead is one in the scriptural sense.

20 Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word;

21 That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.

22 And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one:

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.

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.

I suppose you would fully condemn the many wives God gave to David, too?

Yes, they had a "revelation" to stop the practice, because if they hadn't, the army would have done it for them.

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.

You believe the "godhead" is "one" in the "'scriptural' 'sense'" via the eisegetical interpretation your predecessors tore apart the scripture in service of making, not what Christians have held for most of 2,000 years.

The meaningful historic definition of Christian can be shorthanded as one who holds and espouses the beliefs found in the Nicene Creed. The LDS rejects this explicitly. You claim to be Christian because you believe in a figure you call Christ (cc. "LDE"), not because you believe in the same Christ as those of the Nicene Creed. This is a matter of historic distinction of groups. The grand intersection of Christianity with the macro of world history is those of the Nicene Creed. You are not in one measure the same as us but through equivocation. You may continue to equivocate, we are not the same. For the most visibly signaling theological distinction, the Catholic Church, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches have interdenominational recognition of the validity of baptisms; all deny the validity of Mormon baptism. Mormons recognize no baptisms but their own. I repeat, and your leaders affirm for "The Great Apostasy," we are not the same.

I am also disinterested in matters of indeed settled theology. The Church is a monarchy, and while there is the priesthood of the laity, they are not charged with authority on matters of doctrine. The reason for this may be seen in many places but no better in its crudeness than the strained-to-shattered readings Mormon elders use to justify their doctrine. Stepping on John 1, which makes explicit the consubstantial nature of the Logos and God, to convolute John 17 as "This means there's 3 gods actually." Or far worse in the first LDS link, 1 Cor. 15:35-41 as Paul's secret code about resurrected states of being. This isn't even strained as I can say of John 17 and it's not the childish misunderstanding of the third heaven mention of 2. Cor. 12; it is not possible to have arrived at this interpretation without willful malfeasance. He's talking about astronomical objects, also called heavenly bodies.

I suppose you would fully condemn the many wives God gave to David, too?

The Septuagint condemns him. Solomon was tested with the lechery of his father, he failed, his chalice was filled with iniquity as the sin was visited upon him fully, the kingdom fell. There's a lesson in this.

"LDS leaders pretended that God coincidentally told them to stop practicing polygamy just in time to avoid direct conflict with the army"

The Edmund-Tucker Act preceded the "revelation" and this is what Woodruff is quoted as verbatim:

I have had some revelations of late, and very important ones to me, and I will tell you what the Lord has said to me.

The Lord has told me to ask the Latter-day Saints a question

The Lord showed me by vision and revelation exactly what would take place if we did not stop this practice

I saw exactly what would come to pass if there was not something done. I have had this spirit upon me for a long time. But I want to say this: I should have let all the temples go out of our hands; I should have gone to prison myself, and let every other man go there, had not the God of heaven commanded me to do what I did do; and when the hour came that I was commanded to do that, it was all clear to me. I went before the Lord, and I wrote what the Lord told me to write.

Now I will tell you what was manifested to me and what the Son of God performed in this thing.

You believe the "godhead" is "one" in the "'scriptural' 'sense'" via the eisegetical interpretation your predecessors tore apart the scripture in service of making, not what Christians have held for most of 2,000 years.

What you call eisegesis, I call exegesis. As I said, no matter your beliefs you must hold that some scriptures are figurative and others literal, and there is no clear reasonable-beyond-all-doubt key contained in the Bible to determine which is which.

I agree some of the other examples are strained, so it's a good thing we don't hold to sola scriptura. Nobody is claiming that 1 Cor. 15 + 2 Cor. 12 is proof, or even sufficient evidence, that there are multiple kingdoms of heaven. Nor, to be clear, am I saying that scripture is clear about the nature of the Godhead either. Then again, I have the freedom to say the Bible isn't perfectly clear about the nature of the Godhead/Trinity, because I don't believe that there's a multiple-choice test to get into heaven predicated on whether we correctly answer that God is three persons consubstantial in essence.

The Septuagint condemns him. Solomon was tested with the lechery of his father, he failed, his chalice was filled with iniquity as the sin was visited upon him fully, the kingdom fell. There's a lesson in this.

Dishonest. I didn't ask if you'd condemn David, I asked if you'd condemn the wives given to him by God. Do you deny that God says he gave those wives to David? Do you have some interpretation of those scriptures where God gave those wives to David, but accepting them was a sin?

I condemn David too, not for his polygamy, but for his involvement with Uriah and his wife, as well as perhaps the later polygamous excesses (after this conversation with Nathan).

The Edmund-Tucker Act preceded the "revelation" and this is what Woodruff is quoted as verbatim:

Well, yeah, that's what I said. Is "the government has made demands, and God told me to acquiesce to them" not allowed as a form of revelation? I suppose Jeremiah was wrong to tell the Israelites to submit to Babylon, and they should have listened to Hananiah instead?

It's actually the exact opposite--the declaration explicitly says that polygamy was ended due to external interference.

So if it's legalized it would pop right back around? Is social tolerance enough?

It could. It's not currently authorized in countries where it's legal, but it never really went away. We actually still practice it in the sense that, if a man's wife dies, he can remarry and be sealed eternally to the second woman too, provided she was previously single.

I suppose you would fully condemn the many wives God gave to David, too?

Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob also all had multiple wives/concubines. Not as many as David, but David isn't really a great example in my opinion (because he was condemned for wickedness in the end).

Yeah, but I'm not aware of anywhere where their polygyny is explicitly endorsed by God the way David's is.

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