domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
jake
19m ago
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
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.
jkf
42m ago
And the fuckers keep following you unless you run many tens of meters (or over a hundred).
I've had them follow me for miles while I was driving away in the truck! Not sure if they were clinging to the side, tracking my scent, or flying supernaturally fast, but either way I drove to a place previously without horseflies and had a handful of them at again as soon as I got out.
Pretty much all of the most stirring and wondrous fiction I have read is inextricably tangled up with existential horror. Oddly enough, I think this feeling is most straightforwardly illustrated in a 1908 children's book, The Wind in the Willows - it's all based on bedtime stories the author told his son, and in line with this the vast majority of the book consists of extremely comfortable and idyllic stories of life in the English countryside. But there's one chapter that's completely distinct from the rest, named The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, in which the Mole and the Rat venture into the woods to look for a lost baby otter, and start being lured into the wilderness by a pagan god:
Slowly, but with no doubt or hesitation whatever, and in something of a solemn expectancy, the two animals passed through the broken tumultuous water and moored their boat at the flowery margin of the island. In silence they landed, and pushed through the blossom and scented herbage and undergrowth that led up to the level ground, till they stood on a little lawn of a marvellous green, set round with Nature's own orchard-trees— crab-apple, wild cherry, and sloe.
'This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,' whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. 'Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!'
Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror— indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy— but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. With difficulty he turned to look for his friend. and saw him at his side cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew.
Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.
'Rat!' he found breath to whisper, shaking. 'Are you afraid?'
'Afraid?' murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. 'Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet— and yet— O, Mole, I am afraid!'
It is only a side story unconnected to the main narrative thread - this brief delve into the cosmic is completely out of place and comes out of nowhere, and plays no part in the story going forward - but it's by far the most memorable chapter in the collection. It was removed from many versions of the book because it was deemed too strange or too creepy for its target audience.
Now, this certainly takes a lot more of a positive and uplifiting tone than much horror, but it does carry with it a haunting supernatural vibe that's merely incidental and necessary for such an encounter. I feel as if a lot of the best horror fiction gives me a more extreme version of that same feeling - it isn't gratuitous; it's just an intrinsic part of confronting something (an entity or a concept) that by virtue of its very existence threatens your sense of security and place in the world.
Shock (the thing a lot of bad horror films optimise for) is one thing. Horror is another. Done right, it's deeply affecting in a way I barely find in any other fiction.
ulyssessword
1hr ago
I'm with you. Sometimes people might just be actively working to corrupt your data, and the ease and proportion of fraudsters matters. It took a lot of effort to create the hoax, and I suspect that a large fraction of her source material is genuine and mostly-accurate (accounting for sensationalism). Given that she wasn't looking for super-rare niche events, that suggests that most of her stories were true.
If they wanted to show she was spreading fake news, then it would have been much more effective if they found organic false stories instead. Heck, it would've been much more effective (but very dishonest) if they didn't advertise how much work it took to create one fake story.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
1hr ago
@CrispyFriedBarnacales
Is that his Mexican alter-ego?
MayorofOysterville
1hr ago
Well I think they are wrong. Mormons obviously fit a patter of American restorationist movements and just because they fall outside echumenical Orthodoxy doesn't mean they shouldn't be considered Christians.
MayorofOysterville
1hr ago
I'm also a nerd who is interested in doctrine. But for example in academia or in a published work it would be totally uncontroversial to refer to the Ebionites as Jewish Christianity or Valentinius' followers as Gnostic Christianity and their beliefs are (well at least the Gnostics) are surely farther from Nicene Orthodoxy then Mormons. A lot of Evangelicals insist that Catholics aren't Christians because they pray to graven images and violate the ten commandments so obviously they can't be Christians.
I think the fact that the Mormons are so inline 19th century restorationist tradition and the family of 19th century American Protestant offshoots and spin-offs as you say basically means they have to be Christians in the same way the Essenses were Jewish and the Ismailis are Muslim.
anon_
1hr ago
If you left Italy in the late 1800s, you couldn’t easily get back routinely to see family (whereas now it’s maybe a days travel). You couldn’t FaceTime them at a whim. You couldn’t text message them. The populations were truly cut off.
This probably cuts the other way. Everyone everywhere is already partially pre-assimilated to US cultural hegemony.
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
As a Protestant, this matches a complaint I have with many of my Protestant friends - there is such a temptation to water down the faith, to boil it down to the thinnest possible gruel, on the logic that anything beyond that constitutes a kind of obstacle. But praxis does not merely repel; it can also attract! And the Protestant tradition if you actually look at it is not an anti-intellectual one, nor one hostile to unique practice. There is thickness and depth here, if you dare to offer it! I find it extremely frustrating.
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
I suppose what this boils down to is the question of what you think is important in defining Christianity. I take faith and belief to be central. If Christianity is about, as I would argue it is, who God is, then a group's position on the Trinity or on Christology is extremely important.
I certainly grant that Mormonism is what you call 'sociologically Christian'. They are Christian-ish - they gather in buildings that look like church buildings (mostly; they reject crosses), they read from the Bible, they talk a lot about Jesus. I just don't think that any of that is enough to make a person or a group Christian. They themselves presumably agree on this principle, because as you note, they believe that all traditional churches have fallen from the faith.
I'm in Australia, not America, but anecdotally all of my in-person interactions with Mormons have been incredibly polite, and the Mormons have almost been falling over themselves to emphasise, "We're just like you, we believe in Jesus too, Jesus is at the absolute centre of our faith, we have so much in common", and they never bring up any disagreements.
This is my tension with the LDS as well -- the "we're just like you" thing backfires for me, not because I think Mormons are bad people, but because I think it waters down -- quite literally, "milk before meat" -- the elements of Mormonism as a theological tradition in ways that make it genuinely less interesting. A lot of the wild cosmological speculations of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young are really really interesting, really unique, really cool. It just is slightly frustrating when the things that are so distinctive about Mormonism are downplayed.
It very much is like Catholics watering down the cultus of the saints or transubstantiation -- this is your thing, guys, this is what makes you unique, this is what distinguishes you from your competitors in the marketplace of ideas and makes me want to learn more. I think attempts at Protestantizing both faiths weakens them: the only way the Papacy or the Presidency can survive as an institution is by offering unique religious experiences, values, and beliefs that support and validate the intense level of religious authority you're presenting. If what you're offering is equivalent to what they're offering down the street, but joining you comes with a measure of social ostracization from the religious mainstream and asks a lot from me in terms of religious obedience, why shouldn't I just go to the chill southern baptist church down the street, where they'll have a similar service and sing similar hymns?
But obviously the Mormon strategy is working for them in important ways, and I think they're very explicitly going for normie, straight-laced kind of people and not people like me, who are spiritual seekers with high openness to experience. They want to be a church for normal, well-to-do, kinds of people. But when I read the writings, speeches, and accounts of Smith, Young, and the early Mormon movement, they really do strike me as intense spiritual seekers with high openness to experience, and a lot of the elements of Mormonism that seem most fascinating have slowly been pushed to the sidelines or rejected altogether and the idea space of American religion is worse off for it. If you have a mystery cult, don't dress it in khakis and pretend it's just another sermon. Own the mystery.
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
I do agree with the comparison to other 19th century restorationists. It seems to me that Mormons are part of a family of 19th century American Protestant offshoots or spin-offs - Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Science, Seventh-Day Adventism, Christadelphianism, and so on. They generally share a common method (charismatic leader/writer and reinterpreter, extremely strong emphasis on scripture and dismissal of tradition, etc.), and frequently some doctrinal conclusions (nontrinitarianism, narrative of general apostasy, etc.). Go back a bit further and there are Europeans following the same model as well - the Swedenborgian New Church, for instance. Likewise there are more recent examples - Iglesia ni Cristo in the Philippines is another instance of the same model, and perhaps even the Unification Church.
At any rate, I don't think all the groups in that category are non-Christian - Adventists, for instance, seem pretty clearly inside the tent. However, I think some of them have placed themselves outside the bounds of orthodoxy.
I think you're probably correct that there's a scissor statement here. I am particularly interested in doctrine, but most American Christians are extremely ignorant of theology and embrace a number of heresies. (Though I should say that Ligonier, the people doing the State of Theology survey, themselves have a rather narrow and tendentious view of orthodoxy.) As long as Mormonism looks like church on the outside, only weird nerds like me will get stressed about what they actually believe.
MayorofOysterville
1hr ago
I mean isn't that just Protestantism. That's what Martin Luther and John Calvin did and why we have something like 50,000 Protestant denominations.
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.
MayorofOysterville
1hr ago
I dunno about destructive. I would say falls outside the bounds of Orthodoxy, but maybe that's inherently destructive idk.
I'm also not coming at this from a religious perspective so maybe my definition is useless to you. I'm just treating Mormons the same way I would treat Essenes, or Ismaliis or other hetrodox sects.
MayorofOysterville
1hr ago
Well but they celebrate the Eucharist, sing hymns, pray to Jesus, worship Jesus, put up Christmas trees, study the Bible for moral lessons, the content as well is virtually the same if you don't notice some of the books have different titles. It's not just the form is the same but the content as well. And the different scriptures thing while taken farther isn't really that unique. Protestants, Catholics and the Ethiopian Orthodox all have different scriptures. Their canon isn't the same. Catholics have Popes and Saints and pray to Mary, which Protestants don't. I agree Mormons fall outside modern Ecumenical orthodoxy. But I don't think their practices or even beliefs are farther apart then Catholics are from Protestants.
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
A heresy, I would say, is something that emerges out of Christianity but is destructive to Christianity. Does that seem a fair definition to you?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1hr ago
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.
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.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
1hr ago
Because the founder took parts of things that worked and added his own theology? The typical protestant church service was REALLY working during the second great awakening.
You don't think that the claim that Hajnalis aren't whites and Tropicals aren't blacks is undermined a bit by the post itself? In the top-level post you describe very specific elements of Tropical culture and phenotype - you suggest that there are 'eastern' Tropicals with slightly lighter skins who are clearly Asians, but it's clear that your central example of a Tropical is a sub-Saharan African.
Likewise you describe Hajnalis with a very specific cultural and religious history - you cite, more-or-less unchanged, Henrich's argument that the medieval Catholic ban on cousin marriage shaped the Hajnalis. It is transparent that Hajnalis are Europeans - even if some Europeans have moderately darker skin, the identification is clear enough. You describe both World Wars and the American Civil War, attribute both to Hajnalis, and say that the latter concerned "the imported Tropicals". You then go on to describe 20th and 21st century troubles in American education in a way that clearly maps to African-Americans - yes, you've said that Asians are a type of Tropical, but these violent schoolchildren reaching puberty earlier and making schools less safe certainly do not sound like Chinese-Americans.
Look, I'm not blind, and this is the Motte, where you are allowed to just speak plainly. It just feels like needless pussyfooting.
On your goals more generally:
If I were you I'd worry that this isn't a practical way to make your point. It's not clear that you need all these digressions in order to explain your tiger. A skeptical reader like myself is not nodding along to all these points you're making in earlier posts and will then happily be led to your conclusion. The less credible the earlier posts seem, the less credible the eventual conclusion will seem.
I understand and connect with the general theme of order emerging out of chaos - I'm not disposed to be skeptical of that, or of the idea that the large, invisible forces under the surface might be drawing civilisation back towards chaos, or that we are in a time of collapse. But when you bundle that up with a lot of extremely tenuous theories about prehistory which, when examined more closely, seem to reduce to just 19th and early 20th century racialism, maybe that makes people less willing to take that journey with you.
Put it this way: if you want to convince people that Western commitment to the idea that everyone is equal will lead to disaster, I think you can make that case more strongly, persuasively, and succinctly without the grand historical narrative. You don't need a millennia-long just-so story to make this point. I applaud your patience and your very high level of courtesy and kindness to commenters through this project, but I'd gently suggest that the project is misconceived.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
1hr ago
And there stood one among them that was like unto God, and he said unto those who were with him: We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell;
MayorofOysterville
1hr ago
I don't think we actually disagree very much. But I do think the word heretic describes them much better as their services are essentially just American Protestantism except they also read from the book of Mormon and the doctrine and covenants.
I agree it's different but it's very similar to a lot of other sects that sprung up in America around this time. Such as the Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists and the Shakers which are all very sectarian in character.
Mormons remind me of Ismailis many Muslims think of them as non Muslims and they are obviously a heterodox sect but essentially all non Muslims still consider them Muslims. Heterodox sects are generally still considered under the umbrella of their big religion. I think the question of whether Mormon's are Christian thing is a bit of scissor question because they fall outside of ecumenical Orthodoxy but are at the same time obviously to any outsider a schismatic Christian sect. So since modern people don't use the word heretic then things get all muddled. But I think heretics, heterodox sect, schismatic sect and similar terms are all accurate whereas non-Christian really doesn't make sense for them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
My assessment was that all of this was fair game. LibsOfTikTok doesn't follow "journalistic standards", this is plainly true, why bother claiming otherwise?
In my view, the problem comes when we claim that LibsOfTikTok shouldn't be listened to. LoTT doesn't need journalistic standards, because all they're doing is posting up primary sources. This means you can get them to post fake things, but it doesn't mean that all or even most or even an appreciable fraction of what they post is fake. Likewise, it doesn't mean that those "journalistic standards" prevent much or even the overwhelming majority of what Real Journalists output from being fake by any reasonable definition of the term.
The proper response to Trace's prank was to grab ten or twenty top-engagement stories from LoTT per week, week after week, and just check them off; this one's real, this one too, and this one, and so on, and note how even if they are operating through pure partisanship, and even if their standards of evidence are low, their approach to journalism requires so little trust from the audience that they are still highly effective and probably less deceptive than the NYT.
I think this is the key issue we've been going round on. Mormons don't see Christianity as synonymous with the true faith. The see Christianity as a big tent full of many denominations and their own Church as the true faith within that big tent. This is also why I don't think the trinity is a useful tenant for determining what is and isn't Christianity. Because from extremely early on the umbrella of Christianity. This is my personal view as well. I see Christianity as a big movement of many mutually exclusive Christianities even from the beginning. (see Paul's letters) And I don't think removing them from the category of Christianity is much use, we'd just have to come up with another term to categorize these Jesus worshipping movements. Also for someone without a Christian background the trinity may not even seem that that important. To someone not primed to see it, the father son and holy ghost being one in purpose but not in being versus different aspects of God together and separate in divine mystery, doesn't seem THAT different. Especially compared to things like worshipping graven images or praying to the saints and Mary.
Just as many Sunni Muslims try to exclude the Shia from Islam and insist they aren't Muslims. This just devolves into silly language games. The Ebionites, the Marcionites, the Arians obviously all fit under some category with the Orthodox. Virtually every university and textbook everywhere calls that thing Christianity and if we exclude them from it then we need to create an umbrella term for them. Which again seems redundant when we already have terms for these. But this debate actually only seems to come up in relation to modern American religions because Mormons seem weird to Americans and nobody uses they word Heretic anymore so they get excluded from Christianity.
But I think Christianity is too big a tent to do that. Fundamentally woke high church Episcopalians and Independent Fundamentalist Baptists believe extremely different things and live extremely different lives if they can be under the umbrella of Christianity so can the Mormons because the word Christianity does not describe one particular tradition but rather many disparate traditions which is the whole reason we have denominations in the first place!
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