UPDATE: this is from before the 2012 election, but now that Romney is raising his hoary head and threatening to run for Senate, where he will be a loud-mouthed, sanctimonious Never-Trumper, just when we’re getting shed of hypocritical assholes like Corker and Flake. We don’t need him there. So here is yet another reason to hate the self-righteous dickhead.
An excellent article by Garry South of Politico concerning the very facts I’ve been pounding about the anti-American and in fact literally un-Christian, not to mention uncivil, hateful and slanderous lies Mormons preach as a literal fact in their religion.
Also, it answers the apologists for Mormonism who point out racist and intolerant passages in the Bible: the fact is, enlightened and liberal, righteous religions don’t damn and slander other religions in this day and age. Cults, however, do.
Ask Romney about Mormonism’s intolerance
The fundamental raison d’être of the Mormon Church is the core belief that no other Christian denomination whatsoever —- whether Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Assemblies of God, Baptist, Anabaptist, you name it —- is valid. In fact, Mormons assert that there was no legitimate Christian church whatsoever, and therefore no legitimate Christians, virtually from the time the last remaining apostles died off at the end of the first century until the founding of the Mormon religion in 1830 by the self-proclaimed latter-day prophet Joseph Smith. They refer to this nearly 1,800-year interregnum as the “Great Apostasy,” which pretty much speaks for itself.
Smith was born in Vermont, one of eight children of a struggling farmer and occasional schoolteacher. By 1816, the family had moved to Palmyra, N.Y. Smith’s father was reputedly religious but unchurched. In 1820, young Joseph was pondering which of the most prominent Protestant denominations of that day to join. Smith’s mother, two brothers and a sister had become Presbyterians. According to an account he wrote 18 years later, the 14-year-old Smith repaired to the woods to seek God’s guidance as to which church merited his allegiance.
He reported a vision in the forest in which both God the Father and Jesus the Son appeared before him. Smith asked the spectral heavenly presences which denomination he should join. Here, in Smith’s own words, in “Pearl of Great Price,” a writing published by the Mormon Church, is the response he claims to have received directly from the mouth of God (my comments added in brackets):
“I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination [apparently, including the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed, the two most common summations of Christian belief] in His sight; that those professors [those who professed those creeds] were all corrupt; that ‘they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men. …'”
All Christian creeds an abomination? Every follower of an existing denomination corrupt? So much for ecumenical spirit — or even basic religious tolerance. This means, in Mormon doctrine, that the post-apostolic Roman Catholic Church has been apostate during its entire 2,000-year history; the Eastern Orthodox churches that split from Rome in 1054 also were and remain illegitimate; even the various denominations founded by the great Protestant reformers in the 16th century — Martin Luther, Thomas Cranmer, John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli, Jan Hus — are all null and void.
How does this hard-line theology play out in real life? Let’s take baptism, the nearly universally accepted, biblically mandated rite of initiation into the Christian faith (Jesus himself was baptized by John the Baptist). Even the Roman Catholic Church acknowledges the validity of baptisms carried out by other faiths if they are performed using water and the Trinitarian formula (“in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”). The overwhelming majority of Christian traditions also believe that emergency baptisms are valid even when administered by a layperson, say at a moment of great peril or impending death, when no ordained clergy are available.
But Mormons believe that no baptism performed between the extinction of the original 12 apostles and the founding of Mormonism in the 19th century was valid, and that even today, only holders of the Mormon priesthood can perform an efficacious baptism. The ubiquitous Mormon missionaries who circle the globe — Romney himself was one, in France, while he was in college — are trained specifically to proselytize and convert members of other Christian faiths and bring about their rebaptism into the Mormon Church.
What about all those billions of putative Christian souls through the last two millenniums who thought they were saved via baptism in a non-Mormon faith but were unwittingly lost? Mormons hold that only a posthumous proxy or “vicarious” baptism by a qualified Mormon practitioner, in temple ceremonies off-limits to non-Mormons, will ensure they end up in paradise. Hence the church’s famous focus on extensive genealogical research.
This “our way or no way” approach is pretty much unique to Mormons in this day and age. No doubt there remain some hard-liners in the Vatican who still believe Roman Catholicism to be the only “one true church.” But that attitude is most certainly not shared by rank-and-file Catholics in this country, millions of whom have abandoned the church of their upbringing and many of whom have defected to evangelical brands of Christianity. While there are still no doubt some anti-Semitic Christians who believe God doesn’t hear the prayers of Jews, most American Christians today believe that Jews are God’s chosen people and that they will be in heaven.
I wager that this exclusionary Mormon theology, once widely revealed, will come as a shock to most U.S. Christians, regardless of their particular denominational preference or worship style. This is a country where ecumenism and church shopping have been de rigueur for decades. Christians in our pluralistic society are accustomed to local interfaith councils, interdenominational prayer breakfasts, Shrove Tuesday pancake suppers shared by various denominations, fall harvest dinners that rotate among the church halls of different local denominations. They are accustomed to Lutherans and Presbyterians sharing their church buildings with Korean Methodists and to Episcopalians and Lutherans exchanging ordained clergy.
I believe that Mormon doctrine on this point, once made plain, will prove equally offensive to modern-day, ecumenical-minded Christians around the world, who in recent times have:
• Witnessed Pope John Paul II as the first pope to visit a synagogue, meeting in Rome with the grand rabbi and asking for forgiveness from Jews for the persecution and forced conversions of previous centuries. He also called on the grand mufti of Jerusalem on the Temple Mount.
• Observed several archbishops of Canterbury, spiritual leaders of the church formed by Henry VIII when he unilaterally broke with Rome in the 16th century (and was excommunicated by the pope for his trouble), make pilgrimages to the Vatican to meet with various pontiffs over the past few decades.
• Watched Pope Benedict XVI pray facing Mecca with an imam at Istanbul’s famed Blue Mosque and meet with the ecumenical patriarch of Eastern Orthodoxy. (For those who don’t know their religious history, after the Great Schism of the Western and Eastern churches in 1054, the pope and patriarch had excommunicated each other.)
This is the question the LameStreamMedia has yet to ask Romney. It’s kind of ironic that most LSM types detest Christians as much as Mormons do. Its probably the reason the liberal media has not taken on Romney in any substantial way, because they see him as a finger in the eye of the Religious Right they detest.
If, by chicanery and the lying posturing by which Romney has made a career, he games the Republican system and gains the nomination, the LSM will savage him for these beliefs they ignore now.
In fact, I’m sure Romney is the dream candidate the Democrat party and their liberal allies in the media most want to face in ’08 because he is virtually unelectable. The media will wait until after the nominations to expose Romney as the racist bigot and cultist nutbag that he is, however, keeping Republicans who don’t bother to investigate exactly why most people instinctively detest Mormonism, and buy into Romney’s bullshit that its just “religious bigotry”, kind of like having disgust for the “religions” of Waco Texas or the
Mormonism is a repressive, oppressive cult, period:
Racism and elitism still permeate the modern Mormon religion through its writings and teachings about the so-called “Laminites,” a mythical people apparently invented by Joseph Smith, but accepted by Mormons as historical fact.
Thomas Murphy a Mormon anthropologist recently attempted to address this issue by proving Smith’s historical claims were scientifically false.
However, the response to his research results was the threat of possible expulsion through excommunication. Other Mormon scholars and intellectuals have experienced similar resistance.
From the article referenced in the above post:
Thomas Murphy, chairman of the Edmonds Community College Anthropology Department, also co-teaches a class titled “On Becoming Human.” Not that it has cramped his style. “I think it’s fair to conclude that the Book of Mormon is a work of fiction,” he states, flat as fact.
Murphy, 35-year-old chairman of the Edmonds Community College Anthropology Department, contends DNA analysis contradicts Book of Mormon claims that American Indians are descended from ancient heathen Israelites, an argument he will outline in a 1 1/2-hour talk today at the University of Washington.
He’s out to expose what he calls “racism” in scriptural texts. “The Book of Mormon assumes that dark skin is a curse for wickedness. I’m trying to examine where that idea came from,” he says.
His stand could make Murphy the first Mormon in church history to face excommunication for publishing conclusions on the basis of genetic research.
In December, the local stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints scheduled a disciplinary council and informed Murphy he faced the possibility of excommunication, or expulsion from the church. But the president of the stake — a district made up of a number of wards — indefinitely postponed the council after the debate hit the press and supporters staged rallies across the country.
Sounds like a cult to me.
Most Americans seem to agree (via Hot Air)
Key findings of the study include:
# Bias against Mormons is significantly more intense among the public compared to bias against women and blacks. The bias against Mormons is even more pronounced among conservative Evangelicals. Their bias against Mormons rivals their bias against atheists.
This seems to anger Allahpundit. I beg to differ. People have a bias towards neo-Nazis and skinheads, as well as secular humanists who demean and slander religious people. They are quite right and decent to do so. Not being bothered by the hateful, disgusting lies and libels of the Mormon cult is much more disturbing than being biased against a repressive and oppressive cult that demands women be no more than chattel, obeying their husbands every command, that believes “dark-skinned” people are cursed by God and who believe all other Christian churches are created, and run, by Satan himself and all non-Mormons are damned to hell, their churches being “abominations” and the Catholic Church being “the great whore”.
Anyone who does not condemn this type of teaching, which Mormons are commanded to believe and act upon literally, is himself a bigot and a racist. Therefore, I have to wonder about the racial prejudices of anyone who would support a racist for president of the United States.