Ask a Mormon, Part 4

Why do you use the word "magic"? We don't believe it has magical powers (it is primarily symbolic) and presumably neither do you, so there is no reason to call it magic. This has always bugged me. But whatever.

So all the Mormons who testify that their magic underwear has magically protected them from car crashes, accidents, and misfortune of all types were lying? I mean that's not a big surprise but neither is calling it magic underwear since so many Mormons attribute magical powers to their underwear.

Sure, it is loony but the Mormons are the ones making the claims so I'm just going with it. ;)
 
Then what about the final solution? Kill all potential question-makers! :D

I wouldn't do well in prison I am afraid.

Bing! See there? I just need to find a newly constructed temple and I might be able to look around! So now I'm not really that interested anymore! You just fixed the problem! :D

Huzzah.

(There are currently roughly a dozen temples either planned or under construction somewhere in the world right now. I don't know where you are but there might be one near you.)

Huh. Are there any way disgruntled ex-members could show pictures that would make any of it look bad? :confused:

Not bad as such, just out of context.

Yeah, especially now that you told me that there are actually possibilities of going into a temple. So what's the point? :crazyeye:

...

Okay, now you broke it again. And I feel that this time it's going to be even harder to come up with a solution. :sad:

There is a simple and fairly easy solution, actually. Convert to Mormonism . . . if that won't work (sure it will!) just accept it as one of those mysteries.

I'm not sure if you completely understood what I was asking. Wasn't a very well formulated question either I suppose.

If I, as a non-Mormon, talk about something relating to Mormonism, and describing it as Christian-like, would you then, as a Mormon, get the understanding that I know that Mormons think of themselves as Christian, or that I consider Mormons to not be Christians?

I wouldn't reach that conclusion, I would look to other cues to see whether you consider us Christian or not.

Actually, do you ever describe yourselves as Christian, either internally or externally, or just as Mormons?

Well, we consider ourselves Christian, but don't often use the name among ourselves. A crude analogy being the fact that humans rarely describe ourselves as great apes (apes, sometimes, and humans all the time, but not great apes).

Well, I know neither you nor any other Mormon actually hold it against me, but, and I feel I'm getting a bit philosophically sidetracked here,

if access to the temple is seen as a good,
and only certain people have the property of necessary qualities that allow them access to that good,
then by not being granted access to the good,
it is implicitly stated that one does not have the necessary qualities,
and to lack certain qualities that allows access to a good must then be a negative property of a person,
and a person with a negative property must by necessity be less valued than a person with a positive property,
thus it can be said that a person not granted access to the temple is less worthy than a person who is granted access.

... If this just looks like rambling from a tired student at 3 am, then just ignore it. :crazyeye:

All other things being equal (and they aren't, in real life), then yes, in a narrow and particular sense someone with a temple recommend is more "worthy" than someone without. But I would be more concerned with the specific things one must do to have a temple recommend (things like "do you believe in God"*, "do you treat your familiy members with love", "are you paying any child support you owe") which outweigh the fact of the recommend itself.

A front desk is included in what I thought of while writing "guard", so it wasn't meant that strong actually. :)

Oh, don't be so worried about the rules. Even Adam ate of the apple, and look how well that turned out! :mischief:

Pshaw, what Adam did was just a transgression.

Hm. So you have temples, chapels and meetinghouses? You have something between temples and chapels/meetinghouses though, right? I visited one during a project in high school, but that was a church I believe.

I realized there might be confusion - "chapel" and "meetinghouse" are synonymous. We do have lots of other kinds of buildings, but they are generally administrative in nature, or have other uses.

So all the Mormons who testify that their magic underwear has magically protected them from car crashes, accidents, and misfortune of all types were lying? I mean that's not a big surprise but neither is calling it magic underwear since so many Mormons attribute magical powers to their underwear.

Well, if said members actually used the word "magic" I would be surprised. And if they attributed whatever happened to the garment itself rather than God (and the relationship with him that it symbolized) then I would wonder what their doctrinal basis is, though who knows if they are correct.

Sure, it is loony but the Mormons are the ones making the claims so I'm just going with it. ;)

Of all the beliefs in the world, why single any out as loony? :)
 
There is a promise of protection that comes with regularly and faithfully wearing temple garments, but its really a spiritual one, not a physical one. I certainly would not expect, like Eran said, for them to stop a bullet or prevent my flesh from being burned, although I have heard members mention stories of that occurring. Miracles happen I guess (well, they do if you happen to be religious).
 
How does it feel to open up a new 3rd Mormon thread (I know Downtown started the original thread) instead of dash star dash ;)?

Does the prospect of having to answer these threads ever make you consider converting?

For a moment, I thought he was asking US posters.
 
Does overpopulation come up in church discussions?
I heard it addressed by James E. Faust once when I was at BYU; he was an apostle at the time (now deceased). I've also heard members talk about it, including my wife :) The discussions I've heard include observations that God's first commandment, to multiply and replenish the earth, is still in force, that if you have the means personally to support more children then there is nothing wrong with having more, and discussions about whether it is immoral to have more kids than you can support (usually the opinion I hear is yes). In a recent discussion on it I heard the analogy made between owning a large amount of land and having many children. Some men could farm 100 acres and have no problem taking care of it. Others can barely take care of a quarter acre, and their property always seems to be in poor repair/upkeep. If you don't have the capacity to care for 100 acres, don't go getting yourself in deeper than you can handle.

@the names question--there were a lot of British and Scandinavian converts in the early days of the church. There were more British than Scandinavian, but the British surnames just don't stand out as well. Given that those early converts tended to have large families, their descendants now are many. In my immediate cousins, I have a Jensen but also a Petersen, Peterson, and Stevens, all of which are Scandinavian in origin.

Leroy, LaDawn, ReNae, Lamar, Dewayne, Sheryda are all examples of "Utah-sounding" names--usually marked by having a 2-letter prefix or suffix that consists of a consonant followed by a vowel (usually e or a). They tend to be found in rural areas of the Intermountain West, including Nevada, Idaho and (where my relatives with these names live) western Oregon.
 
I think that over-population is a major issue that Christians of all denominations - indeed, perhaps people of all religions or none - will have to face seriously in the coming decades; I suspect that future generations will regard our laissez-faire attitude to having lots of children as an immoral feature of our society rather as we regard (say) denying the vote to women or child labour in past generations. But as we all know, it is notoriously difficult to predict future moral trends, and perhaps like most people who attempt it I am merely assuming that future generations will come to agree with me.

Anyway, Eran, I note (with the caveat that I have not read the previous threads) that you said you have heard some good and some bad criticisms of Mormonism. So my question is: what do you think the best criticisms are, and how do you respond to them? If you had to play devil's advocate, what is the best argument you could construct against Mormonism?
 
I think that over-population is a major issue that Christians of all denominations - indeed, perhaps people of all religions or none - will have to face seriously in the coming decades; I suspect that future generations will regard our laissez-faire attitude to having lots of children as an immoral feature of our society rather as we regard (say) denying the vote to women or child labour in past generations. But as we all know, it is notoriously difficult to predict future moral trends, and perhaps like most people who attempt it I am merely assuming that future generations will come to agree with me.

I think most people don't think that overpopulation is a problem, and thus, if it is, then all groups will have to be shown the danger of having lots of kids. Given that we already consider it a bad idea to have more kids than a family can support, if the average Mormon can be convinced that this depends on both the family's financial situation and the ability of the world as a whole to handle more people, then said average family will have fewer kids. We are not, after all, actually opposed to birth control.

(I have heard that the trend is that population is expected to plateau as certain trends - especially greater freedom and independence for women - increase. But if it looks like that won't be the case, we would be willing to curtail our family size.)

Anyway, Eran, I note (with the caveat that I have not read the previous threads) that you said you have heard some good and some bad criticisms of Mormonism. So my question is: what do you think the best criticisms are, and how do you respond to them? If you had to play devil's advocate, what is the best argument you could construct against Mormonism?

Well, that's a tough question, but I will give it a shot.

The main issue seems to be that often the only way that certain doctrines or practices mean anything is by our constant recourse to the idea that God has revealed so much to us. I am not sure I make myself clear . . . imagine that someone says, "doctrine X doesn't make a lot of sense", my reply would be, "well, I would agree, but I trust God to know what he is talking about."

That all sounds kind of meta . . . I am not, here, criticizing our belief in revelation as such, nor am I mentioning specific doctrine, but the fact that so much depends on the idea that God is speaking to us through prophets means that if He isn't, then pretty much everything we are doing is way off base.

And then there is the Book of Mormon . . . I really couldn't think of a way that the church is at all what it claims to be if the Book of Mormon isn't what it claims to be. And the Book of Mormon is full of things that make even me, on occasion, scratch my head. It has several references to things that are (or appear to be) anachronistic, although I think that said anachronisms could very well indeed only be apparent. And the book itself deals with God intervening specifically in the course of the history of a relatively small group of people, so if you can't accept that, you can't accept Mormonism. Again, the only way to believe in the Book of Mormon is by asking God about it.

That all deals with criticisms of Mormonism's claim to be the One True Church; of course, criticisms can be leveled against it as a social organization, separate from all of that - bring up polygamy, for instance, or the limits we have placed on who can be ordained to the priesthood, or the fact that Mormons are often a pretty insular and exclusive bunch. (The last one I have heard far more than I have witnessed; non-Mormons in Utah, especially, mention it, but as a Mormon who never lived in Utah, I never personally witnessed it, since I was always surrounded by non-Mormons and thus had to make friends with them.)
 
Huzzah.

(There are currently roughly a dozen temples either planned or under construction somewhere in the world right now. I don't know where you are but there might be one near you.)
I'm currently in Japan.

Are there really any Mormons in Japan?

There is a simple and fairly easy solution, actually. Convert to Mormonism . . . if that won't work (sure it will!) just accept it as one of those mysteries.
Meh, I hate mysteries.

The conversion thing sounds okay though, except that I don't think I'm mentally able to believe.

I realized there might be confusion - "chapel" and "meetinghouse" are synonymous. We do have lots of other kinds of buildings, but they are generally administrative in nature, or have other uses.
Well, this was certainly a church as far as I can remember. Though the only thing happening at the time we decided to visit was a "womens' club meeting" or something. The women we met were quite friendly though, and we had a sit-in during their meeting.
 
I'm currently in Japan.

Are there really any Mormons in Japan?

A relatively large number; as the man says,

Well, the internet says they're building a new temple in Sapporo, which should be done in 2-5 years.

And that would be the third temple; very few other countries even have one or two. And as of 2000 Japanese was one of the 10 most widely spoken languages in the church - there probably aren't huge numbers but they can be found.

Meh, I hate mysteries.

Life is full of them.

The conversion thing sounds okay though, except that I don't think I'm mentally able to believe.

Well, I would hardly recommend that anyone convert if they don't believe . . .

Well, this was certainly a church as far as I can remember. Though the only thing happening at the time we decided to visit was a "womens' club meeting" or something. The women we met were quite friendly though, and we had a sit-in during their meeting.

Was it on a Sunday, or during the week? Out of curiosity.
 
Mmm, I've always found the fact that there are actually more Mormons outside the US than in it to be surprising. I suppose it makes sense for a religion, but since I tend to group Mormons with Scientologists and Jehovah's witnesses in terms of size, it's something of a surprise to see they're actually about double that size, being about the size of the Southern Baptist convention, or other mainline churches (although when we switch from looking at specific organizations to general labels like Baptist or Methodist, the LDS looks tiny again). Apparently they have a big presence in Brazil of all places.

Oh, by the way, what does the average Jen Olsen on the street think of various non crazy Mormon splinter groups, if he thinks of them at all?
 
I don't think of them at all really. Some members harbor a little resentment towards the Community Of Christ (formally the RLDS church), since they still control some important church historical sites (like the Kirtland Temple, in Ohio)...but that is fairly minor.
 
Well, I would hardly recommend that anyone convert if they don't believe . . .
Honestly, I cannot comprehend that anyone is actually able to convert. I can understand being brought up in a faith, and I can understand being forced (by swordtip or gunpoint) to claim one believes in a faith. But actually change such a belief?? I can't wrap my head around it.

Anyway.

Was it on a Sunday, or during the week? Out of curiosity.
Some weekday afternoon. A Thursday, if I'm going to make an almost random guess.

I put it into the "high school students learn to phone first and ask for an appointment" column. :crazyeye:

They were helpful with answering some general questions about Mormonism anyway, which was what we needed for our school project. :)

One of the women talked about how she had almost forgotten to get a blessing or such from her brother (who lives in another city) about some matter, and while talking starts sobbing and crying out of the emotions she still felt about it.

Call me a Vulcan, but such a display of emotion over a matter that was resolved quickly and some time ago, actually struck me as a bit scary...
 
Honestly, I cannot comprehend that anyone is actually able to convert. I can understand being brought up in a faith, and I can understand being forced (by swordtip or gunpoint) to claim one believes in a faith. But actually change such a belief?? I can't wrap my head around it.

Anyway.

Something like half of all American adults have changed religion in their lives (albeit usually from one Christian denomination to another).

Some weekday afternoon. A Thursday, if I'm going to make an almost random guess.

I put it into the "high school students learn to phone first and ask for an appointment" column. :crazyeye:

They were helpful with answering some general questions about Mormonism anyway, which was what we needed for our school project. :)

Ah, okay.

One of the women talked about how she had almost forgotten to get a blessing or such from her brother (who lives in another city) about some matter, and while talking starts sobbing and crying out of the emotions she still felt about it.

Call me a Vulcan, but such a display of emotion over a matter that was resolved quickly and some time ago, actually struck me as a bit scary...

Well, sometimes I am a bit embarrassed by the shows of emotions that are occasionally produced.
 
I think that over-population is a major issue that Christians of all denominations - indeed, perhaps people of all religions or none - will have to face seriously in the coming decades; I suspect that future generations will regard our laissez-faire attitude to having lots of children as an immoral feature of our society rather as we regard (say) denying the vote to women or child labour in past generations. But as we all know, it is notoriously difficult to predict future moral trends, and perhaps like most people who attempt it I am merely assuming that future generations will come to agree with me.


I don't really think so. In the developed world, the birthrate has for decades been too low to maintain the current population without being offset by immigration (or in some cases the high birthrates of new immigrants who are still living in conditions like those of third world countries), and there is no sign of that trend changing. There is a lot of evidence showing that birthrates drop as a population's life becomes easier. In fact, some theorize that all lifeforms are programmed to adjust their birthrates to counter their death rates, often overshooting when conditions are harsh and undershooting when they are too easy. If we can raise the standard of living in the developing world then the Earth's population will probably level off at a sustainable level. (I recall hearing that there is actually one group trying to fight overpopulation in the developing world by giving them TVs, so they lazily watch those instead of relying on sex for entertainment and relaxation.) My Environmental engineering professors taught that the consensus is that Earth's population will never reach 12 billion but has a carrying capacity of at least 15 billion. I predict that in the future people will think it is strange, but not repulsive, to have a lot of kids. It is quite possible that in a century or two our growth rate will be like that of the declining Roman Empire, and moralizers again will encourage more reproduction to maintain the population.
 
MagisterCultuum said:
If we can raise the standard of living in the developing world then the Earth's population will probably level off at a sustainable level.

Yes, and since beauty in developed nations is often associated with higher standards of living (due to increased success in business and social interactions), it leads to beauty sometimes being inversely associated with reproduction. Call me odd, but I've always thought it terriby tragic (and backward) that the most beautiful people in our society--the Angelina Jolies, Jessica Albas, and Gwyneth Paltrows, for example, seem to have the fewest kids, while the most mutt-faced and naturally overweight reproduce in larger numbers. There are some really nice genes out there that aren't even getting passed on at all--they're too sexy to have kids, they think it would ruin their figure and their career prospects. If I could have my way, supermodels would be the breeders, and others would need to have a license. But that is a very non-mainstream Mormon opinion to hold. Just throwing it out there as an example of how there is diversity of opinion in all religions, including this one.

Miles Teg said:
Oh, by the way, what does the average Jen Olsen on the street think of various non crazy Mormon splinter groups, if he thinks of them at all?

When the drama with the Texas polygamist group was going on last year, I was very annoyed that a lot of ignorant people were calling them Mormons, and that other people were thinking we were one and the same. I heartbroken over what was happening to the children who were separated from their mothers. And I was incensed that their temple was broken into by the government to remove records on marriages.

While I don't see any of these splinter groups as "true," i.e., on equal footing with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I do feel some kinship with them. For example, I understand how painful it must feel to them to have their temple violated like that, and my heart goes out to them. I think it is terribly ignorant that they didn't educate themselves about underage sex laws, and thought that they could do whatever they wanted. But I still feel compassion for their isolationist bent, since I have some of that in me too (I think it is part of Mormon culture, with the tradition of Zion being established as a refuge, and coming out of Babylong and being a separate people and all).

downtown said:
I don't think of them at all really. Some members harbor a little resentment towards the Community Of Christ (formally the RLDS church), since they still control some important church historical sites (like the Kirtland Temple, in Ohio)...but that is fairly minor.
I have heard (and felt) some smugness when I hear of some of the former RLDS church's financial difficulties and problems with membership (they have lost a lot of members with their doctrinal changes in the last couple of decades. There seems to be some sense that people hope that the Church will fold someday, or at least need cash so badly that it would sell off its portion of the Temple Lot in Independence Missouri (and other assets, like the Kirtland temple) to use. I have heard it said (and this may be false) that the LDS church has been giving premium prices to the Community of Christ for some of its assets for awhile now, but the highest profile ones will probably never get sold--unless they get desperate.

Imagine the Jews seeing the Muslim world get so hard up for cash that they would be conceivably willing to sell the Dome of the Rock. It is never going to happen, but it certainly would get them very excited.
 
Well, that's a tough question, but I will give it a shot.

The main issue seems to be that often the only way that certain doctrines or practices mean anything is by our constant recourse to the idea that God has revealed so much to us. I am not sure I make myself clear . . . imagine that someone says, "doctrine X doesn't make a lot of sense", my reply would be, "well, I would agree, but I trust God to know what he is talking about."

That all sounds kind of meta . . . I am not, here, criticizing our belief in revelation as such, nor am I mentioning specific doctrine, but the fact that so much depends on the idea that God is speaking to us through prophets means that if He isn't, then pretty much everything we are doing is way off base.

And then there is the Book of Mormon . . . I really couldn't think of a way that the church is at all what it claims to be if the Book of Mormon isn't what it claims to be. And the Book of Mormon is full of things that make even me, on occasion, scratch my head. It has several references to things that are (or appear to be) anachronistic, although I think that said anachronisms could very well indeed only be apparent. And the book itself deals with God intervening specifically in the course of the history of a relatively small group of people, so if you can't accept that, you can't accept Mormonism. Again, the only way to believe in the Book of Mormon is by asking God about it.

That all deals with criticisms of Mormonism's claim to be the One True Church; of course, criticisms can be leveled against it as a social organization, separate from all of that - bring up polygamy, for instance, or the limits we have placed on who can be ordained to the priesthood, or the fact that Mormons are often a pretty insular and exclusive bunch. (The last one I have heard far more than I have witnessed; non-Mormons in Utah, especially, mention it, but as a Mormon who never lived in Utah, I never personally witnessed it, since I was always surrounded by non-Mormons and thus had to make friends with them.)

Thanks for that answer. Do you think that Mormonism is more vulnerable to these points than other religions? The point about everything ultimately coming back to revelation which you either accept or you don't could apply to most religions, after all, except perhaps Buddhism. The same with the problems with the sacred text.

(I must admit I only tried to read the Book of Mormon once, and didn't get very far; I have to say it seemed to me like it was written by someone who really, really liked the Old Testament and wanted another one, and the fake nineteenth-century American imitation of sixteenth-century English grated. But then I don't get on much better with the Old Testament either, so perhaps I'm not much of a judge.)

Honestly, I cannot comprehend that anyone is actually able to convert. I can understand being brought up in a faith, and I can understand being forced (by swordtip or gunpoint) to claim one believes in a faith. But actually change such a belief?? I can't wrap my head around it.

Why not? There's nothing strange about changing your mind, is there? Haven't you ever changed your mind about anything, ever? Well then, it's just the same, but on a bigger scale.

In any case, minority religions such as Mormonism almost always grow almost exclusively through social contact. What happens is that somebody has, maybe, one or two friends who are Mormons. Perhaps they met at some non-Mormon society, or perhaps they were already friends with them when they converted. Through them they meet other Mormons. They may find their social centre of gravity shifting: more and more of their friends are Mormons, either because they are converting, or because they are meeting new friends who are already Mormons. Eventually there comes a point where it's just more effort not to be a Mormon than it is to be one.

No matter how rational people are, and how irrational they may believe a faith to be, it is extremely difficult to resist it when you are surrounded by it. It's a well known phenomenon which anthropologists report when doing fieldwork in other societies. For example, Edward Evans-Pritchard - one of the most prominent social anthropologists of the early twentieth century, and a staunch product of Brideshead-era Oxford - reported that during his fieldwork among remote African tribes he found himself effectively believing in their magical practices, even though from an intellectual point of view he thought them nonsense. Our instinct to conform socially can force us to change our practice, and when our practice changes our beliefs tend to follow. Similarly, when people become immersed in a new religion, for one reason or another, they typically find themselves conforming to it.
 
Thanks for that answer. Do you think that Mormonism is more vulnerable to these points than other religions? The point about everything ultimately coming back to revelation which you either accept or you don't could apply to most religions, after all, except perhaps Buddhism. The same with the problems with the sacred text.

Well, there is little place for "tradition" in our religion, as there is in other Christian religions.

(I must admit I only tried to read the Book of Mormon once, and didn't get very far; I have to say it seemed to me like it was written by someone who really, really liked the Old Testament and wanted another one, and the fake nineteenth-century American imitation of sixteenth-century English grated. But then I don't get on much better with the Old Testament either, so perhaps I'm not much of a judge.)

I have heard other people describe it that way, sure; to me of course it is completely different, especially because I basically grew up with the language used by the text, and certainly doctrinally there are differences.
 
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