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Location: On the "Left Coast", somewhere in "the Land of Fruits & Nuts"
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Katzpur
In Mormonism? Absolutely not, and I can prove that it's not. There is a pro-Mormon website, www.mormonwiki.com. (Note, that's .com, not .org.) An anti-Mormon group started a new website and guess what they call it? www.mormonwiki.org. Real similar, huh? Easy to confuse the two (no small coincidence), but the anti-Mormon site is .org. The blog the OP provided a link to itself provides a link to an article on "lying for the Lord" that is on the anti-Mormon "mormonwiki." The article that is posted there appears to be written as some kind of an explanation that "lying for the Lord" is part of LDS doctrine. Anyone who clicks on the "mormonwiki" link can see that it's the .org site. It intentionally and maliciously attempts to come across as a legitimate source of information for people seeking to understand Mormonism and yet it contains information that directly contradicts what the LDS Church teaches its members. I don't have a clue as to how many people have been taken in by this site, but I bet it's quite a few. In my opinion, this is just about as deceitful as it gets. If ever there was a good example of a "wolf in sheep's clothing," this is it.
So in other words, we should only pay attention to "official" and "pro-Mormon" information, and dismiss everything else that's obviously "anti-mormon"? Guess I'll have to reconsider all that "anti-KKK" "propaganda" the Southern Poverty Law Center puts out, and instead go straight to the "official" KKK site (which is obviously more "unbiased")...
Romney is a liar AND a flip flopper, but I think it's inappropriate and wrong to try to tie that to his Mormon faith. Besides--it doesn't explain Lyin Ryan, who's a radical conservative Catholic and holds his own with Romney in the big whoppers department. It has nothing to do with the churches that they attend, but everything to do with their personal character. There's a difference.
So in other words, we should only pay attention to "official" and "pro-Mormon" information, and dismiss everything else that's obviously "anti-mormon"? Guess I'll have to reconsider all that "anti-KKK" "propaganda" the Southern Poverty Law Center puts out, and instead go straight to the "official" KKK site (which is obviously more "unbiased")...
The Southern Poverty Law Center also has a big pile of dung on their website. It's not just anti-KKK. It's anti anything that's anti-their views.
Romney is a liar AND a flip flopper, but I think it's inappropriate and wrong to try to tie that to his Mormon faith. Besides--it doesn't explain Lyin Ryan, who's a radical conservative Catholic and holds his own with Romney in the big whoppers department. It has nothing to do with the churches that they attend, but everything to do with their personal character. There's a difference.
I asked one of you liberals to list his lies last night, and it was almost funny. It was a list of things that mean, "Liberals do not agree with him on this." However, Obama has an entire track record of lies. List of Obama's Lies | Barack Obama Lies I'm sure this is not even up-to-date since Obama has been lying every day since the debate and it's hard to keep up with.
"I can’t tell exactly how the Obama campaign reached that characterization of my work,” Rosen said in an email to the Standard. “It might be that they assume that Governor Romney wants to keep the taxes from the Affordable Care Act in place, despite the fact that the Governor has called for its complete repeal. The main conclusion of my study is that under plausible assumptions, a proposal along the lines suggested by Governor Romney can both be revenue neutral and keep the net tax burden on taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 about the same. That is, an increase in the tax burden on lower and middle income individuals is not required in order to make the overall plan revenue neutral.”
Romney is a liar AND a flip flopper, but I think it's inappropriate and wrong to try to tie that to his Mormon faith. Besides--it doesn't explain Lyin Ryan, who's a radical conservative Catholic and holds his own with Romney in the big whoppers department. It has nothing to do with the churches that they attend, but everything to do with their personal character. There's a difference.
Ryan's places much faith in Ayn Rand philosophy which is in direct contrast with Catholicism.
You don't care, why did you bring it up? You must care....
No contradiction there unless you have reading comprehension issues. Bolding type does not prove your point...btw. What don't you understand about the downside of a representative or government official interjecting their religious beliefs into governing this nation? That concerns me much and I said so. I know that many on the right would support an American Taliban or a Theocracy, but I must remind you that you are outnumbered by the ones that don't. You know that little nuisance thing...seperation of church and state.
As I said in this post that you did not respond to, you don't know what a lie is. Therefore, there is no use of trying to explain to you about the hate and intolerance promoted by the SPLC.
Nonsense. Utter nonsense. Romney and his Mormonism as totally fair game.
Loud voices on the right have been trying to tar Obama as a Muslim for the last 4 years, even though to anyone who isn't a conspiracy theorist, the evidence isn't there (questions about what portions of Reverend Jeremiah Wright's Black Liberation theology he agrees with seem much more relevant, since by all accounts he did align himself with that church). Obama's race speech in 2008 in many ways was as much a way of explaining his relationship to liberal black churches as it was to blackness more generally. And that was worth knowing; some black churches do have some very explicitly political stances.
We all remember John F. Kennedy's speech as a triumph for Americans to overlook Catholicism as a disqualifying feature for a president. And that's a good thing! But that doesn't automatically mean that from now on we should ignore Catholicism entirely as a feature of candidates. I don't want a presidential candidate who takes direct orders from Rome. That has nothing to do with religious intolerance. That's an actual deal breaker for me, regardless of someone's religion. Honestly, no offense, but Rick Santorum's Catholicism disqualifies him from office for me. He chooses to make it an issue for the public sphere, therefore it is an issue. JFK chose not to. Santorum chooses to.
Religion isn't like ethnicity in the following way. You are exactly as affiliated with the Catholic or Mormon or Islamic or whatever organizations as you choose to be in normal life. A black person has to be black when he's shopping at a convenience store whether he likes it or not. I don't think people choose what they believe, but they do choose how they support organizations in the broader world.
So on to Romney and religion. I say the following with all due respect: listening to mormons talk about the "truth" about mormonism is very similar to listening to mainland chinese folks talk about the "truth" about the chinese communist party. It is NOT like listening to an educated Catholic or Lutheran talk about the truth of their religions. Sorry, but it's just true. I know there are some hyper-thin-skinned mormons patrolling these boards, and I feel for you guys, because you're not very accustomed to enduring the kind of critical inquiry that has been the hallmark of the best features of the West since the time of the Enlightment, but it's just TRUE. Sorry.
The Mormon church has treated their past roughly the way that Stalin treated soviet history in the 30's. Their relationship to it all is entirely provisional and about how useful it is, not how true it is. As one of the Mormon great authorities, Boyd K. Packer, once said, "There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of Church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not. Some things that are true are not very useful." This was when the church was excommunicating and driving off a number of intellectuals who had the audacity of applying some modicum of intellectual standards and rigor to the way the church talked about its history. For a church that spends so much time shouting about how it has the "TRUTH", it seems to hold intellectual honesty and integrity in frightfully low regard.
So yes, "Lying for the Lord" is in fact definitely the sort of thing that you know about as Mormon... until you are thinned skinned and suddenly need to deny such a thing publicly. Part of the issue is that Mormons have a sort of shell-corporation thing going on - what the leadership actually says is pretty meager; instead they rely on massive amounts of norms, apocrypha, and urban legends to circulate amongst the membership with their tacit blessing until a moment comes along where it becomes inconvenient, and then they become like Bill Clinton debating what the meaning of the word "is" is. It's functionally lying, but like all great cons, its has a little seed of plausible deniability to it so they can never be pinned down.
Here's a perfect example of this, on the whole "god is a perfected man, man can become a god" doctrine - once the church started feeling like it needed to tidy up its PR more and align itself more with right wing christianity, its leaders started erasing massive amounts of stuff the even little mormon children have repeated hundreds of times: The Mormon Curtain - GORDON B. HINCKLEY
Alright mormon patrol, I'm done - time to bring on your "But Kim Jong Il really did 11 holes in one on a regulation golf course!" I understand that you're constitutional incapable of stopping yourself. But just remember, if you want to participate in the public sphere, you don't get to dictate other people's standards for fact-finding and the truth. (This is why, incidentally, that all the mormon leaders can kvetch about any more is the way that the internet is causing droves of members to leave in apostasy - it turns out that if you're not willing to be honest about your past and make peace with it, which is possible, of course, then you better make sure you control all the information your members get).
With all that said, I'm on the fence about how much Mitt Romney's behavior looks Mormon. I'm personally inclined to think his Bain background seems much more reasonable as a lens. But I think asking questions about his Mormonness are totally fair game.
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