domain:npr.org
OliveTapenade
just now
I... don't see how one can comment on the meaning of the word 'Christian' without being primarily theological. 'Christian' is a theological term.
I am actually, like C. S. Lewis, willing to bite the bullet on many, or even most, self-proclaimed Christians not really being Christians. I'm not hugely strict about this in practice where I tend to think that any good-faith attempt to genuinely know and follow God, to the best of one's limited ability, is acceptable worship, and in that light, sure, there are no doubt individual Mormons who render that worship. I don't claim that no Mormons are saved or anything like that. But if you ask me to accept that most Americans who call themselves Christians are not meaningfully Christian, then I will do that. That is probably and unfortunately the case.
(I am not quite as pessimistic as your linked study - I think survey design can be unreliable, most people struggle with theological language, and there is often a sensus fidei that exceeds the ability of people to explicate their faith. If a Catholic says the Nicene Creed every Sunday at mass, sincerely intending to believe it, but when asked to define the Trinity during the week descends into waffle, I would extend some charity. The linked paper doesn't include the questions themselves and has some red flags for me - who the heck are 'Integrated Disciples'? they possess a 'biblical worldview'? huh? - so I'm skeptical. Nonetheless, no one could deny that ignorance or confusion around the Trinity is very common.)
So perhaps it would be helpful to refine a little. I claim that Mormonism, which is to say that which the Mormon church presents for belief, is not a form of Christianity.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8m ago
Right, well, but can you define Christianity by similarity of vibes? By some standards Silicon Valley Buddhists are more similar to US Protestants than the latter are to Eastern or Oriental Orthodox Christians. Your "American Protestant would know what to do" standard also holds - I fully assume the US Protestant would be less lost at an American Yoga retreat than during Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox liturgy.
OliveTapenade
10m ago
Sunni and Shia have absolutely killed each other over the distinction, yes. There are rivers of blood between those parties. I'm just not aware of cases of Sunni or Shia declaring the other party not Muslims.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
14m ago
I’m not aware of any widespread right/conservative celebration of either of these attacks.
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.
Tenaz
19m ago
I don't think one needs a detailed knowledge of theology to be a Christian. The good thief addressed Jesus directly and appears to have perceived him to be the messiah and believed that he would be the ruler of the kingdom. The reference to the kingdom of God as well as the good thief's confidence that Jesus had done nothing wrong suggests that the thief was aware of at least the basic outline of Jesus' preaching. At any rate, he put his faith in Christ to the best of his ability. That would appear to meet most minimal definitions of Christian faith. (Some definitions might add something like "faith in Christ as God", but I think we can safely presume that the thief had that.)
I don't think that scenario is directly comparable to Mormons, though. The thief would naturally have been unaware of doctrines formally laid out after him - doctrines intended to clarify and explain the nature of what the good thief was privileged to witness directly - but ignorance does not constitute denial. Likewise for, even today, the Catholic or Protestant in the pews who happens to be theologically ignorant. The issue with Mormons is not ignorance, but rather denial of core doctrines.
My point is not that ignorant people can be Christian (though this is true). My point is that your use of the word is primarily theological; it has more to do with your beliefs regarding our standing before God than with anything else.
I exclude Mormons because I do not understand them to follow Christ in the sense that Christians do. As the Catholic document you cited says, the Mormon understanding of who 'the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit' are is so divergent 'from the Christian meaning' as to not even be heresy. The utility of the ecumenical creeds is as guardrails - they lay out a basic minimum understanding of who God is and of the economy of salvation.
There's so obviously more to it than this, though. If it were really about "following Christ" then the majority of Mormons would be Christian. The parts of our doctrine so repugnant to you, such as our belief in the Godhead vs. the Trinity, are utterly beyond not only the awareness, but probably even the mental capacity, of the vast majority of both Christians and Mormons. If you actually believed the creeds were a "basic minimum understanding" then you'd say the vast majority of Christians aren't Christian either. Those guardrails aren't working, yet you consider the people they have failed Christians nonetheless. Perhaps there actually is a deeper, more meaningful definition of "Christian" to you than the one you've put forward here.
ControlsFreak
25m ago
God's chosen representative on Earth, Constantine the Great
Almost good satire, but just a tad too obviously ridiculous here.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
38m ago
My plans to start World War 3 foiled again.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
38m ago
· Edited 32m ago
It always seemed to me like the most obviously divergent thing about Mormonism from typical old-world Christianity is the notion of Exaltation/what is pop-culturally glossed as "you will get to be the Jesus of your own planet one day". One thing all Abrahamic religions are reliably united in is a social cosmology in which all humans are equal (perhaps some negligibly more equal than others) and subordinate to a singleton God, with the pervasive vibe of ongoing subordination (and the attendant bliss of your life and fate being in the hand of another) being the single most important aspect of the believer's experience. The Mormon view, from that reference point, feels almost comically hubristic, making it seem reasonable for the haughty and ambitious to think of the subordinate life as a gauntlet to pass through to earn the master's privileges. Yes, it sucks being Jesus's gofer bitch now, but up with it for a bit longer - think of how one day you'll get to lord it over your own Spirit Children.
Now, I'm only Christian in terms of upbringing/background, but it is easier for me to accept some quirky nontrinitarians as Christian than people who think that there is no category distinction between Jesus/God and themselves (except insofar as they are lower on the career escalator).
Tenaz
39m ago
What? No it's not, none of that is ambiguous teaching at all, let alone "routinely affirmed". AFAIK the last significant comment on this was nearly twenty years ago and was pretty much as ambiguous as it gets.
The "through good works" part in particular is totally wrong. As far as I know that has never been taught by any LDS leaders. We don't believe in works generally, not the way others would like us to.
Tenaz
45m ago
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.
ControlsFreak
46m ago
I ask it a few questions that are closely related to my research. When it inevitably is not very helpful, I go back to not caring which one I use for the trivial stuff in life.
OliveTapenade
46m ago
I don't think one needs a detailed knowledge of theology to be a Christian. The good thief addressed Jesus directly and appears to have perceived him to be the messiah and believed that he would be the ruler of the kingdom. The reference to the kingdom of God as well as the good thief's confidence that Jesus had done nothing wrong suggests that the thief was aware of at least the basic outline of Jesus' preaching. At any rate, he put his faith in Christ to the best of his ability. That would appear to meet most minimal definitions of Christian faith. (Some definitions might add something like "faith in Christ as God", but I think we can safely presume that the thief had that.)
I don't think that scenario is directly comparable to Mormons, though. The thief would naturally have been unaware of doctrines formally laid out after him - doctrines intended to clarify and explain the nature of what the good thief was privileged to witness directly - but ignorance does not constitute denial. Likewise for, even today, the Catholic or Protestant in the pews who happens to be theologically ignorant. The issue with Mormons is not ignorance, but rather denial of core doctrines.
For what it's worth, I specifically do not use the word 'Christian' to mean people that I believe are saved. I do not think that the categories 'Christian' and 'saved' are coextensive. There are Christians who are not saved (cf. Matthew 7:22-23), and there are non-Christians who are saved (cf. Luke 16:22).
You could draw a distinction whereby people who call themselves Christians, are recognised as Christians by the world, and appear in good standing in the church are not real Christians if they are rejected by Christ, and likewise that people who in their lives were never aware of Christ or put any explicit faith in him (like Abraham) are in some way implicitly Christian, but I think that does too much damage to the everyday uses of the words. My understanding is that all salvation is from Christ (cf. John 14:6), but that not all who are called by the name Christian partake of this, and that some who do not call themselves Christians do. The power of God is not constrained by human labels or categorisations.
My main use of the word 'Christian' is to identify members of the church. I believe Peter van Inwagen once argued that the word 'Christianity' is itself a mistake - there is no such thing as Christianity. There is only the church, and its various members. I'm not as rigid about the word as he is, and I'm happy to use the word 'Christianity' to mean 'that which the church professes', but I think there's something to be said for the basic point. Christians are the fellowship or the community of those who follow Christ - or perhaps more properly, those who follow the triune God, because I would probably exclude Christian atheists. I exclude Mormons because I do not understand them to follow Christ in the sense that Christians do. As the Catholic document you cited says, the Mormon understanding of who 'the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit' are is so divergent 'from the Christian meaning' as to not even be heresy. The utility of the ecumenical creeds is as guardrails - they lay out a basic minimum understanding of who God is and of the economy of salvation.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
59m ago
1
You mean 1942.
it's not that hard to count in battlefields: 1942, 2, 2142, 1943, 3, 4, 1, V, 2042, 6
At this point I'm almost expecting them to pull the 2010s most annoying fad and just name one "Battlefield" with no qualifiers so we have to start adding dates behind the dates to remain unambiguous.
Dean
Flairless
1hr ago
Nitpick: in my experience Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims do not try to exclude each other from Islam. In Islam there is a very strong consensus that anybody who says and sincerely believes the shahada is a Muslim. Sunni-Shia differences are obviously very important and a major driver of violence even today, and heaven help you if try to change from one to the other, but I have never heard a Muslim trying to suggest that a member of the other party is not a Muslim.
Ethnic cleansings have been done for precisely that distinction. The doers may have been 'bad' muslims doctrinally as well as ethically, and the determinations often coincide with political differences people feel worth killing over, but it has (and, occasionally, does) happen even if it's not the civilized norm.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
People being too lazy to use RSS and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
The special regime for social media was a trojan horse for censorship since day one.
If we lived in a sane world, the fact that these algorithms are increasingly using AI would convince people to make algorithmic social media publishers (unless you can pick the algorithm)
But we don't so what's gonna happen instead is we'll get regulation of what the AI are allowed to be like instead.
No U-turns allowed on the Road to Serfdom.
FistLast2
1hr ago
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):
This is a reference to psalm 82, one of the oldest parts of the old testament. The commonly accepted interpretation today among Christians is that it refers to human judges at the time of Moses who were called "elohim" because they judged according to the word of God. A common academic interpretation is that it's a carry over from polytheistic Cannanite religion which even had two separate characters later merged into a single God. And a third interpretation proposed by the late Michael Heiser is that it has something to do with the beings we commonly refer to as angels serving on God's divine council.
It is worth noting two things, I think. First, that the word elohim used in psalm 82 is sometimes used to refer to beings that obviously aren't Gods (e.g. spirits in sheol), and second that Jesus is using this passage as a defense of his own divinity, which he has described as something unique (the son does nothing that the father doesn't do, sent by the father, the son of man--presumably the one from Daniel, etc.). That doesn't clarify a whole lot about this passage, except to say that it's difficult to know for certain exactly how this passage would have been understood in the first or second century AD, but it has probably never been taken to mean that people actually become Gods in the afterlife.
Tenaz
1hr ago
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.
Eh. This isn't really true. "The true faith" is faith in Christ, meaning love, obedience, loyalty, worship, and trust in the Son of God, qualities not confined to people in any particular religion. The LDS church doctrinally being "the true church" doesn't mean we have a monopoly on truth or even that in every respect we have more truth than any other denomination; it means we have the most truth and, perhaps even more important, God's authority to establish his kingdom on earth. This is quite comparable to the Catholic view of the nature of the Catholic church.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
I'm reminiscing of Mr. Period.
{commenting on "where everyone is gay"} This might not be necessary. If these are indeed the Gayzor Mountains, we can safely assume that the inhabitants share certain customs.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1hr ago
I'm going to start a social media site called "YourByte". User posts may be any byte 0-255. The algorithmic display will select and order these bytes in a way that coincidentally forms my preferred propaganda.
This is a post about TikTok.
It's completely outside of the Overton window and has been for several years, but this is all downstream of "algorithmic" social media being allowed despite it being a blatant violation of Section 230. If social media sites weren't publishers pretending not to be, then who controlled them would matter a lot less.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
To clarify, I flounced once, and was able to return because in the heat of the moment I managed to throttle down the message to 2% of what I wanted to say, and so did not completely burn my bridges here.
I do not generally want to say those things any more, and even in my worse moments I want to want to not say them.
Tenaz
1hr ago
My last conversation here was about precisely this though I don't think I did a good job of explaining myself.
They themselves presumably agree on this principle, because as you note, they believe that all traditional churches have fallen from the faith.
We still think traditional churches are Christian, though.
I agree that at some point it's reasonable to have a dividing line. Simply worshipping an entity called "Jesus", whatever the nature of your worship and your idea of who Jesus is, is not enough to be Christian. On the other hand, was the thief on the cross Christian? Sociologically, absolutely not, but in truth I'd argue that he was Christian, despite probably knowing virtually nothing of even core Christian doctrine.
Categories in general are made for man, and when it really comes down to it, which category to sort a group into depends on what you are using that category for. If your main use of the term "Christian," like most Christians, is to identify people who you believe are saved (whose faith is not misplaced, whose doctrine about Christ is close enough to reality, etc.), you probably don't consider Mormons part of that group. But I hope you recognize this is a more complex theological issue than it appears at first glance, and the assertion that "Mormons aren't Christian" is primarily a theological point, fairly irrelevant to those who do not recognize your theology as true.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1hr ago
The idea of deciding what content to view based on what an advertising company recommends to me instead of because an actual human recommended it strikes me as completely unhinged. It also seems to be how the vast majority of users interact with the internet for the most part.
Wake up babe, a release date trailer came out for Menace , alongside a steam demo:
Menace looks so good. For those not in the know, it's a turn-based realistic small-units tactics game with light RPG elements. You're the XO of a Not-USMC (Space Force) ship sent out to a distant star system where governance has failed, ready to bring order to chaos.
You turn up and find that the shit really has gone sideways, and that you're grossly underprepared, underequipped, and with no chance of resupply in the near future. It's up to you to use your starting forces wisely, while building relations with the locals so you can recruit and resupply, while upgrading your ship and soldiers.
It's damn close to being my dream game. Despite the scifi setting, the weapons and tactics are rather grounded, and you really are pretty much controlling a single USMC platoon with thinly-veiled modern weaponry and vehicles. It also has a really solid balance between determinism and RNG, suppression mechanics that make or break a push, and rock solid find-fix-flank-fuck. There's far less reliance on hero units like in new XCOM, no magic gimmicks, and tons of opportunities to customize every little detail.
I saw several YouTubers with early access play the demo, and finally got access yesterday, and it's damn good. I have a few minor quibbles with the balancing (why does a dedicated LMG or MMG only get to fire half a dozen bursts before running out ammo?), but as vertical slices go, it only makes me more hyped for the full release later this year.
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