Nazis

[Catharz]

1195513682[/unixtime]]
Which may imply that the term is more loaded than what it just means to use the English term adversary.

No, it means that it's exactly as loaded as the English term.

When Christianity speaks of The Adversary, there is really very little ambiguity as to what is being referred to.

[cthulhu]

1195520973[/unixtime]]

1195513682[/unixtime]]
Which may imply that the term is more loaded than what it just means to use the English term adversary.

No, it means that it's exactly as loaded as the English term.

When Christianity speaks of The Adversary, there is really very little ambiguity as to what is being referred to.

to show I'm exactly as well educated about Islam as i am about Christianity, (and I even went to a catholic school! ) I totally didn't know that Christianity used adversary when referring to Satan. Whoops.

[CalibronXXX]

Catholic school is one of the worst places to go learn about Christianity.

[Koumei]

I went to a Protestant primary school and middle school, and it wasn't much better. Honestly, if you want to learn about a religion, the best way to do it is research it yourself (and start by reading the holy text - from there, you can even find bits you don't understand, or that seem contradictory with other parts, and ask a (religious authority, trickier with some of the self-enlightenment ones) without trying to sound like a smartass. They should give you good, honest answers).

At least, that's my experience.

[CalibronXXX]

Sounds right to me.

[cthulhu]

I don't particularly

What is funny to a mind like mine is that my university had a hardcore god created the earth in present form christian fundie group. I knew a couple of them cause they where in a bunch of the same engineering classes.

Australia has a fairly strong tradition of catholic education. Of the schools in canberra for example, the majority of the schools are public, closely followed by catholic (40%?) with a single private high school and an pair of single sex anglican schools. So its quite reasonable to expect that a fair chunk of any given group of people went to a catholic school.

Of the dyed in the wool fundy crew that I meet (about 25?), only one had gone to a catholic school long term, and another had done his last two years. The rest were the fine products of public education. Clearly banning god from schools can only help!

[tzor]

1195536432[/unixtime]]Catholic school is one of the worst places to go learn about Christianity.

Well if you want to learn it correctly then it's the only place, but few people want to do that.

Note there exists for every type of school good and bad acrhtypes. Many "Catholc" schools are run by lay people these days. Other schools are run by different orders and in the Catholic Church each order has a different attitude and approach to things; Franciscans do things differently from Jesuits and Dominicans and so forth.

[Username17]

Actually, I started going to church again (Yes, I'm Mormon, mock me later, please)

Actually, I'm going to mock you mercilessly right now because it makes a very important point.

See, Islam doesn't have a central authority. It's core beliefs aren't what's written in a book, they aren't what some guy says, they are whatever the people who identify themselves as Muslims happen to believe. And there are a billion muslims. There about 40 million wahhabists and Taliban and all that combined. That means that the people who even belong to the branch of Islam who support suicide bombs and shit are about 4% of the total. That's literally one fifth the percentage of Americans who believe that the sun moves around the Earth. So saying that Islam supports violent uprising against modernity is substantially less truthful than saying that America rejects the Heliocentric solar system. Indeed, the Wahhabists that we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan while arming in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (seriously, I don't understand it either) are heretics against the Muslim faith. They are heretics because 96% of Muslims think that they are full of shit.

But Mormonism isn't democratic. There's a high council. There's a pope (although he is called the "Chief Seer and Revelator" - apparently without irony). It is a top-down, structured affair and the views of the organization are the views of the people at the top. While in Islam anyone who happens to be Muslim can "speak for Muslims" in Mormonism there's seriously just one guy and what he says goes. If your opinions contradict his, you are a heretic, and it doesn't matter how many people happen to agree with you.

Now as it happens, it is the stated goal of the LDS church to destroy the planet. They have a number of plans, which range from DR. Strangelove to Captain Planet. In any case, if you oppose their actual world destroying agenda, you're a heretic. This isn't hyperbole or religious mumbo jumbo either. They are seriously and actually the largest financial backer of pro-nuclear, pro-war, and anti-environmentalist lobbying in the United States. A good part of every dollar that is tithed to the Mormon Elders in Utah is converted to straight up bribes to congressmen and industry leaders to advance the destruction of the world in any possible way that they can.

Since I seem to gather from Maj's conversational style that she personally is not intent upon wiping out all life on Earth in a holocaust of nuclear or solar devastation, Maj is a heretic. She probably tithes the customary 10% of family wages (such as they are) to the Temple, so really her objections mean fuck-all, but she personally holds views which would brand her as a heretic if the Church of Latter Day Saints actually kicked anyone out so long as they continued to pay dues (Ask Keith how being convicted of incestuous child molestation can get you nearly excommunicated from Mormonism).

As it is, she simply goes on day to day, week to week, and holds opinions which are not in line with those of the organization she supports. And that means that in the big picture she actually is supporting those views. If some Hui woman happens to wear a headscarf or some Indonesian man bows to Mecca, Osma Bin Laden gets no more power because Osama Bin Laden is a heretic as far as they are concerned and structurally they are correct. When Maj passes on the teachings of Joseph Smith or gives money or time to church projects, she actually does make Gordon Bitner Hinckley stronger.

The same Gordon B. Hinckley who was given a Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush in 2004 for his strident pro-war efforts. The same Gordon B. Hinckley who plays host to anti-environmental strategy sessions with Dick Cheney. And that is what Maj supports every day whether she likes it or not because Mormonism is a top down institution and Gordon B. Hinckley is on the top and she is down.

Now, we can perhaps only speculate as to why Gordon Hinckley wants to destroy the planet or why Maj might help him do that, but I think it has something to do with this:

On the other hand, the whole design of the gospel is to lead us onward and upward to greater achievement, even, eventually, to godhood.

-Username17

[Maj]

That was awesome, Frank.

[Surgo]

I totally didn't know that Christianity used adversary when referring to Satan.

It doesn't, really, at least not Satan as we think of him with the hells and the fire and the torture and all that. It's more of the sense of, say, the Book of Job. "The Adversary" is really just referring to something along the lines of a criminal prosecutor.

[CalibronXXX]

Mildly relevant.

[JonSetanta]

Mormons did Frank wrong, somewhere, sometime. Nothing other than bad game design has earned such a reaming. heh

I'll add that my own loving, intelligent girlfriend identifies herself as a Christian, but has actually never read the Bible herself.
I guarantee this phenomenon is common, especially in the Bible Belt (ironic?) since (from my experience) many 'believers' rely on simplified interpretation rather than sorting out complex scripture themselves.

Hell, I'm guilty, I read Tao Te Ching in English. I don't have time to learn Mandarin, or whatever.

But still, it's shocking when a 19 year old with a career, her own SUV, and an IQ easily as high as or better than my own says "I figured, why bother, when my dad read me the stories when I was young."

I call myself 'pagan' and yet know the Judeo-Christian tales by heart, more than many so-called Christians I know.
That makes me sad.

[Draco_Argentum]

1195644475[/unixtime]]I guarantee this phenomenon is common, especially in the Bible Belt (ironic?)

Given that tele-evangelists are pretty much the exact opposite of Jesus I think thats a pretty safe bet.

[Koumei]

Just checking, Frank, but is this a case of "He supports all of these things that happen to collectively point to the end of the world" or does he actually want to destroy the world as some kind of insane death cultist/Sephiroth?

Because seriously, I never realised Apocalypse-cults could make it big. I figured they always killed themselves off with poisoned Kool-aid.

[Maj]

Mormons did Frank wrong, somewhere, sometime. Nothing other than bad game design has earned such a reaming. heh

Apparently.

Quite honestly, though, that post was filled with so much hyperbole that I didn't have much luck on Google trying to look stuff up.

Just checking, Frank, but is this a case of "He supports all of these things that happen to collectively point to the end of the world" or does he actually want to destroy the world as some kind of insane death cultist/Sephiroth?

If Gordon B. Hinckley is literally out to destroy the world, then no one in the church knows about it. I couldn't find one shred of evidence that the LDS church has paid for anything pro-nuclear, anti-environment, or pro-war. I can find evidence that donations above and beyond tithing were used to fund campaigns against gay marriage bills in three states (No, I don't agree with that, and no, I'm not a heretic for saying so), but right now, I'm totally ignorant as how that's anti-environment, pro-war, or pro-nuclear. I also couldn't find anything to back the assertion that GBH was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom for any pro-war efforts (the last speech he made about the war basically said: you can choose to support it or not). The White House statement was that it was for humanitarian aid, disaster relief, and funding education around the world.

The only thing I can really think of is that Mormons tend to vote Republican...?

So I'm just an interested as you are, Koumei.

Neeek: If you read this, since you're the lawyer in these parts, would you tell me... If a church used its tithes to pay for political lobbying, wouldn't it lose its non-profit status?

[Koumei]

Oh, the Church of LDS would increase a coolness notch in my books if they were out to slam a huge meteor into the planet or something.

But yes, mostly it really is curiosity as to what Frank is specifically referring to here. I find this hilarious already.

[tzor]

I would also like to point out that the Roman Catholic Church also devotes a whole lot of attention against gay marriage and I don't support that either.

I firmly believe that the "sacrament" of marriage is between a man and a woman, but the civil institute of marriage got permanently fucked by Henry VIII and the liberalization of divorce permitting remarriage and that causes so much headaches for people in the church, "I'm afaid we can't marry you in the church because you see you are already married," that adding civil rights to gay couples won't hurt the sacrament in the slightest.

I'm not neek, Maj, but the answer is yes. Political lobbying is a no no. But there are other ways a organization can do it without direct lobbying. The easiest is an information service which political lobbyist groups can then use. I am not sure I can find examples of this in such short notice, however.

[JonSetanta]

Yes, being "Catholic" does not imply by default that the person or organization will kiss the (current, whichever) Pope's anus on demand.
Many Protestants make that blunder.

[Username17]

The Mormons, like the Scientologists, were formed by a con man with a story that is incredibly stupid and only a moron would believe. But honestly, that in and of itself does not mark the Mormon religion for ridicule. Sure, the Book of Mormon is a work of inane fiction, at no time did Jews come to the United States in a barrel in order to have giant wars using steel swords and wheeled chariots pulled by horses before being cursed by god to have the dark skins we associate with Native Americans. That story is false, it's stupid, and people who believe it have something wrong with them. But it's not unique. At the very least almost every religion was started by a con man or a mad man, or someone who was both. They can't all be right, which means that at least almost every religion is wrong. And the whole point of tolerance is that we put up with people whose religion is wrong, because simply believing something which is factually incorrect doesn't really hurt anyone.

When a religion is merely wrong, I shrug my shoulders and move on. Seriously, you have to be the bigger man, and pointing fingers at people for heresy is completely pointless unless and until those people's religion starts actually threatening real world concerns.

If a church used its tithes to pay for political lobbying, wouldn't it lose its non-profit status?

The Mormon Church is constantly in danger of losing its non-profit status. They were in the middle of a court case that could have stripped them of it for racial discrimination when they had the "revelation" that black people could become priests. Joseph Smith himself died when creditors came for him in lynch-mob style and he ended up fleeing out an upper story window - only to break his leg and die slowly and painfully of sepsis.

Like Scientology, the LDS Church has secret finances. Finances which pay for many things, including vacation get-aways for Dick Cheney and other politicians who are not Mormons. And they bring in guest speakers, who are likely as not politicians from other countries. Like the president of Czech Republic: Klaus.

Nevertheless, there is another threat on the horizon. I see this threat in environmentalism which is becoming a new dominant ideology, if not a religion. Its main weapon is raising the alarm and predicting the human life endangering climate change based on man-made global warming.

Because seriously, I never realised Apocalypse-cults could make it big. I figured they always killed themselves off with poisoned Kool-aid.

No. Apocalypse Cults make it big all the time. Hell, some groups of "normal" Christians put Revelations into the standard liturgy despite the fact that it is full of crazy. There are groups that are actively trying to make a pure red bull so that they can properly remake The Temple complete with animal sacrifices so that the "anti-Christ" can stop the sacrifices as described in Revelations as a stepping stone to the end of the world.

But the end of the world work of the LDS church is much more specific and effective. The people who try to make prophecies in Revelations come true are just crack pots. Getting Jews to start and then stop animal sacrifices will not cause 200 foot Jesus to come with laser eyebeams to smite the unbeliever or whatever the crap they think will happen. But getting people to use more oil, burn more coal, and shop down more trees - that seriously could spur a massive algae die off that makes us run out of Oxygen.

Gordon of course comes out against gay rights, even against equality for women:

You do not need some of the extravagances that working outside the home might bring.

But that's just fucked up - it's not actually a threat to the planet. It's their other work, their anti-planet work which bothers the fuck out of me.

No. Being a Mormon is not "OK". The LDS church is not quaintly humerous, it's a threat to everything decent in the world. It's a threat to the world.

-Username17

[Koumei]

1195712121[/unixtime]]pointing fingers at people for heresy is completely pointless

HERETIC! *points finger*

No. Apocalypse Cults make it big all the time. Hell, some groups of "normal" Christians put Revelations into the standard liturgy despite the fact that it is full of crazy. There are groups that are actively trying to make a pure red bull so that they can properly remake The Temple complete with animal sacrifices so that the "anti-Christ" can stop the sacrifices as described in Revelations as a stepping stone to the end of the world.

That's crazy, but it seems to be crazy in a "They want to destroy the world, but what they're doing isn't going to destroy the world, it won't hurt anyone so let them have their fun." sort of way, like me with my drawings of meteors colliding with Earth.

[CalibronXXX]

I'm pretty much in the same boat as Tzor when it comes to gay marriage and the sacrament of marriage; I'm also over all unhappy with the secularization of marriage, but that's not exactly recent events, being an issue hundreds of years old and all. I'm also against any sort of earthly monolithic church system or bureaucracy; it's not biblical and tends to have...unfortunate...side effects.

[Maj]

The Mormon Church is constantly in danger of losing its non-profit status.

Yeah. It doesn't really surprise me because the minute anyone who's Mormon does something, their church is obviously behind it. And really, there's good reason to think so because the LDS church is more tightly knit than any other large organization I've seen, but the fact that they haven't actually lost it suggests that either there's some vast conspiracy going on where the church pays millions from tithes to buy politicians and lawyers off, or it can prove that the money didn't come from tithing, but rather people who donated money otherwise.

And they bring in guest speakers, who are likely as not politicians from other countries. Like the president of Czech Republic: Klaus.

So if it's Utah, it's Mormon? Probably more like a place where they'll get less protesting since more of the general citizenry are conservatives.

So Cheney was meeting with the CNP, but also meeting with Klaus separately from that. I can't find any links between the church and either the CNP or Klaus. The CNP was founded by Tim LaHaye - the author of the Left Behind series. Traditionally, the LDS church has been on the Evangelical shit list. I'm not sure why that would change now.

But if you want to make a connection between Cheney and the church, you should totally mention that BYU asked the VP to speak at the school last April, and he actually did.

But getting people to use more oil, burn more coal, and shop down more trees - that seriously could spur a massive algae die off that makes us run out of Oxygen.

You've still lost me. Are you referring to family size?

Gordon of course comes out against gay rights, even against equality for women:

That's just sad. That section of Hinckley's speech was to tell mothers that working outside the home in order to buy things that they (or other members of their family) want but don't need was not as important as being there for their children.

But the end of the world work of the LDS church is much more specific and effective.

If it's so specific, would you please just state it outright and link to your references, because after all your typing, I still have no clue what you're talking about.

[JonSetanta]

Religion is just evolution and any other cannibalistic creature.
Or rather, like fish that eat their young.
The big ones eat the little ones, or at least make sure all availible resources (laymembers, cash influx, control) gets redirected to the religious directors and organization.
So it's in a religion's best interest, as a quasi-living entity constructed in the minds of multiple humans, to not only preserve its environment in an optimal state for continuing its own existence, but to squash every tiny new threat to survival

We see this religious Darwinism between little churches (Mormon) pushing against older, larger, more secure religions (the multitude of Protestant foundations, types/regions of Catholics) for the same resources.

Now, every once in a while I check the news for any sniff of info on wiccans, pagans, and other non-Christian groups in my country, and lately I've seen a healthy increase.
For instance, a recent lottery winner Elwood "Bunky" Bartlett made public recently his well-funded plan for an "all faiths church" in not only my own state, but fairly close.
(And oh yes I'll fuckin be there)
It's odd, since there hasn't been news on wiccans, pagans, or anything related, other than the random FoxNews report on some kid skinning pets, or morons raiding a grave, or Floridians enacting a living dissection on a boy (while playing Skinny Puppy music) in the name of some cult.
Propaganda, of course, from Christian conservatives to make sure that

• 
  
• the 'religious Right' remains dominant, and
  
• anything unaccepted within the influence of the dominant religion remains villified, scapegoated, or too muddled with rumors to function within the nation. Conversion by force or intimidation ensures propagation of the self-perpetuating religion.
  
  I'd cite examples of recent hints of new Russian pogroms and nation/church complexes persecuting subcultures within out of fear (against Russian Jews, just like old times), but that's a whole 'nother ecosystem. Religions can be codependant but the economy must have niches for each, or else competition escalates tension in the guise of racism.
  It really isn't about race... it's about ways of life for the religion-entities, two big beasts scrabbling for the food.
  
  The successful religions thrive... but only as long as the environment (minds) allow it to.
  Paganism is seeping through the hard cracks of orthodoxy and scriptured dogma like a damaged floodgate.
  Christianity's influence on Western culture seems to have nearly burnt out, really.
  People are tired of the monotony, and cultures driven by fear of eternal torment and lured by fancy ethereal hopes of reward don't seem to fare so well.
  At least, in my hopes, more will come to world-tribe beliefs as the dinosaur churches die out (or at least, go lame and passive, impotent)
  Instead of "me, me, our church, our people, our way of life is best" more humans will remember that dumping trash over a fence puts it into a neighbor's yard, and that hoarding resources rather than spreading them where needed will only continue poverty, war, and internal national strife.
  
  The concept of "one god, one true way" has proven by now not to work. Simply too many are being killed for nothing.
  I know why so many people can't accept both a Christian God, a YHWH, and an Allah in the same world, but I refuse to accept that this asshattery of so-called "monotheism" must be the fate of Earth.
  
  Pagans are hiding, picking up scraps from the big religions, but when the human climate changes.... who knows what will come next.

[Koumei]

The Mormon church in SLC is pretty cool. They stockpiled all kinds of tanks, firearms, food supplies... all so that when the Demons invade, they can fight them off, or at least have a last stand. It's pretty sweet.

Reference material: the second Doom novel, "Hell on Earth".

[CalibronXXX]

1195723676[/unixtime]]
Instead of "me, me, our church, our people, our way of life is best" more humans will remember that dumping trash over a fence puts it into a neighbor's yard, and that hoarding resources rather than spreading them where needed will only continue poverty, war, and internal national strife.

What exactly are you implying here? Tithing and giving offerings for the poor or otherwise underprivileged is a core practice in Christian faith. If you're talking more about hoarding people, well if you were under the impression, and pretending for a moment that you legitimately care about people and want what's best for them, that any people you didn't "hoard" were going to suffer for all eternity wouldn't you "hoard" as many as you possibly could? Similarly I don't know what you mean about dumping trash over the fence. Missions, another core practice of Christianity, are all about going into other peoples yards and picking the trash up for them, and maybe doing some much needed repairs to their house while your at it.

This is why I don't like centralized church organizations. They get run like a business and struggle to survive and thrive rather than adhere to the tenets they were founded on and spread good works and the good news.