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Not celebration, but there seems to have been a fair amount of "This is a horrible attack but it is important to remember that Mormons aren't Christians but instead a heretical sect etc." style of commentary, which resembles "This is a horrible attack but it is important to remember that Kirk was an anti-gay Christian nationalist etc." style of commentary that was read by many to be at least tone-deaf and possibly sort of celebratory/stochastic.
As a classic liberal, any kind of intolerance with an outgroup is very offensive to me. The entire “are Mormons Christians” sub-thread here is an example of that: It’s trying to make an entire group of people an outgroup, just as the illiberal left is trying to demonize Charlie Kirk because he was a Christian.
It’s human nature to separate people into outgroups and ingroups, but it’s a very unhealthy kind of tribalism which separates us when we should be together. Countless people have died in religious wars because of that kind of outgroup-vs-ingroup thinking, and I for one do not want to see us go back to the intolerance of the middle ages. And, yes, when the illiberal Left has real power, their intolerance can be just as deadly, as seen in how they cheered on Kirk’s death, and how they enabled and maybe even supported open riots during the George Floyd protests.
Brilliant. I am now a professor of every Oxford and Cambridge college, holding a doctorate for every subject on Earth. I also have full security clearance for every military on Earth.
For practical purposes, you do sometimes have to distinguish between who is rightfully in a group and who is not. You do sometimes have to distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘not us’, and even ‘thinks they are us but they aren’t’.
While I have no strong feelings about Mormonism in any particular direction, and generally approve of some fuzziness here, to say that it doesn’t matter who is a real Christian and who has the sacred right to perform important rituals seems basically to be equivalent to saying that these things are meaningless, weightless, to be picked up and put down by absolutely anybody without consequence.
As a matter of fact, I do go to different churches and jump between churches, to maximize my social circle and friendship groups. [1]
For me, being “Christian” is, yes, letting people know I love God, [2] and it’s also a simple way of expressing to women I may date that I have strong values about when a relationship should become sexual. Mormons, Catholics, and Protestants all agree that sex is reserved for a lifetime commitment. [3]
[1] It’s not really possible to do that with Mormon churches, because they assign which ward one goes to.
[2] Talking to Mormons, my general impression is that the exact nature of God is more open to debate than it is with other sects. Day to day Mormons don’t preclude God being a singular (or triune) being but it’s a philosophical conversation without absolute answers. They tend to not universally believe anyone can become a God the way, say, Catholics universally believe Jesus is God.
[3] A lot of people ignore those moral standards even if they regularly go to church, yeah, but at least the moral standard is there in a way it isn’t with progressive groups.
That sounds like, ‘I don’t see Mormons as an outgroup’ rather than ‘I find it offensive to distinguish the outgroup’ though. The defining lines seem to be still be there for you (must love god, must treat sex as a lifetime commitment in principle) and indeed the latter potentially excludes not a few of the Christians I know who are broadly pro pre-marital sex as an inherently good thing.
If you are not personally interested in arcana about lines of apostolic succession then fair enough. I’m pretty lax about most theology - probably too much so. But clearly to many people it does matter.
More like I think people who drink excessively (i.e. drink to get drunk), use drugs, and engage in promiscuous sex are engaging in a lifestyle which leaves them feeling very empty and lifeless. My issue with the illiberal radical Left is that they not only enable but encourage [1] that kind of behavior.
[1] In the linked article, the writer full on enables if not encourages promiscuous sex for women, then blames men for the bad feelings that result from that kind of behavior, one of which is being paranoid about the guys they’re having sex with.
Right -- they're your outgroup. If they started to describe themselves as "classical liberals", you'd balk: you've just called them the "illiberal radical Left", which contains just as much condemnation and othering as "Mormons aren't Christians!"
I agree with @Corvos's take: my view on what you've written is that religious distinctions aren't very important to you, and you don't believe a person's choice either way on the matter makes much difference to the outcomes of their lifestyle. So long as they avoid drinking excessively, using drugs, or engaging in promiscuous sex, of course.
But Nicene Christians of the sort who would say "Mormons aren't Christians" disagree with you: they believe that following the LDS faith to its endpoint leads to eternal conscious torment, or in other words is a lifestyle that "leaves them feeling very empty and lifeless." You can disagree with their point of view on this, and perhaps you should, but that's their point of view which motivates their feeling.
You're frustrated that people are writing online articles encouraging women to have promiscious sex, and see that as harmful... well, the LDS literally sends its young men to go door to door actively encouraging people to become Mormon! If you believe that's a harmful path to go down, as many Protestants do, you would feel the same level of concern about it. They'd argue that abstaining from promiscuous sex, drinking, and drugs does you no good, if you don't have the right set of beliefs. You disagree, and invert the importance, but that's not their view.
Furthermore, plenty of people disagree that excessive drinking, using drugs, or promiscious sex leads inevitably to lifelessness and emptiness. To make that determination, you have to actually take a step back and look at evidence, listen to anecdotes, read statistics, as I'm sure you've done. But because the truth claims of the LDS and Nicene Christianity are cosmic, we can't use the same kind of empiricism on them, and so people who believe these things are important rely on their own epistemological standards for what's cosmically true: sacred texts, ancient creeds, community consensus, personal testimony -- all of which are vitally important both for Nicene Christians and the LDS. When people say, "Mormons aren't Christians", they're making the exact same claim as "the radical left is illiberal," applying personal values and epistemology to a category problem.
Classical liberalism did not emerge out of a sudden singing of kumbaya, and many of the world's most fruitful democracies have histories as twisted and bloody as the religious wars that led to religious tolerance. You can handwave away that similarity, and say that of course the democratic revolutions in France or America or the English Civil War or the revolutions of Latin America was violence that led to good things, but the people who killed the Huguenots and the Calvinists who stripped altars in grand riots believed they were doing the very same thing: eliminating pathways that lead to feelings of emptiness and lifelessness in the long run. You can believe they were horribly mistaken about this, and many people do, but simply saying "these feelings historically led to violence, therefore I am revolted by them," seems to miss the point that the classical, classical liberal archetypally holds a musket pointed at the head of an aristocrat.
I think the important thing isn't to refuse to draw category distinctions or recognize outgroups, but consists of how you treat them. Even in the moral teachings of Jesus, he presupposes that one will have enemies -- "a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household" -- but that one should love them and pray for them and do right by them. I don't agree that refusing to do the former automatically achieves the latter.
That’s very key: There’s no way to empirically prove the theological assertions of either group. And, indeed, when the empirical evidence made it clear certain creeds of classic Christianity are false (e.g. the Earth is around 4 billion years old, not 6,000 years old, and the Earth rotates around the sun, not the sun around the Earth) the initial reaction was to threaten anyone who made those scientific claims with torture.
If we don’t consider the Bible reliable, the claims that Jesus even existed are very flimsy, resting on a passage in Antiquities of the Jews that may not even be authentic, and may not be true even if authentic; I myself find the claim that Decius Mundus (to use another story in the Antiquities) was so lovesick for one Paulina that he would pay what would amount to over a million dollars in today’s money to be with her questionable, especially with how he supposedly got into bed with her.
If someone comes up to me and says “You’re going to Hell because you don’t have my particular form of Christianity”, my reaction is “yeah, that’s a pretty strong claim, what’s your evidence?”, at which point they open up their Bible so I retort with “that’s nice, but what’s your empirical evidence.” For centuries we were in the dark ages, with people slaughtering each other over what interpretation of the Bible is correct. Those religious wars only quieted down and life only improved for mankind when we started looking at actual real world empirical evidence and engaged in the scientific process.
I’m a big fan of Christianity. I’m opposed to any type of fundamentalism, whether it’s fundamentalist Christianity or narrow-minded illiberal “left-wing” thinking — for example, the notion supported by empirical evidence that someone with a high sex partner count is more likely to divorce someone than a virgin will is considered heresy by the illiberal left, and they will use shame and other non-empirical tactics to refute the notion because it goes against their creeds.
And yet you’re insistent on dating women who are part of communities dedicated to those principles, and considering yourself a part of them.
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