octopus_inkNot that hypocrisy carries any weight on the right, but for those who *are* keeping score.
Wasn’t he a Mormon? Didn’t he already find Jesus Christ? It didn’t seem to make a difference at all…
Mormons aren’t Christians, at least according to those Christians who hate Mormons. They might believe in Jesus Christ but they didn’t find him. This might seem like a distinction without a difference but only because it is.
They found him at a 7/11 in Missouri, and then they get their own planet when they die. They’re like the Scientologists of Christianity. Which I think was L Ron Hubbard’s point.
There is no authority, no person or group of people, authorized to decide who is a Christian and who is not. That’s just not how such identity markers work.
I think most of the early christian churches agreed on which books and gospels are part the Bible and in which order. The interpretations and translations of them often differ though.
Some groups like the Mormons decided to add additional books nobody else thinks is “inspired by God”.
In my personal view a better comparison than Scientology would be Islam. They also added stuff with the difference that they “degraded” Jesus to a prophet and made Mohammed the central figure.
Except we don’t have the outright evidence of fraud for Islam like we do for LDS
Other than the general acceptance that all religions are unsubstantiated fraud.
That’s only because Islam is older than 200 years and from a time before the printing press. If Joseph Smith had lived, say, 500 years earlier, Mormonism would be shrouded in the same “unprovability” that most other religions enjoy.
The catholic church uses thousands of pages of additional made-up stuff that other sects don’t believe in, from ex-cathedra edicts to the canonisation of saints, and the other Christian faiths don’t hold those as “inspired by god”. If that’s the primary difference, then the LDS faith is at the same level as Catholicism, not Islam.
I think the part with the saints is a fair point. Things like the catechism I see more as formalization of how to interpret the Bible. However, I agree with you it’s probably closer to that than Islam but my primary point was that it’s not much like Scientology.
Canonization began in the 3rd century and took centuries to form the canons now used in the various denominations. The Ethiopian Church has the biggest canon, still I never heard anyone arguing they aren’t real Christians because they include Enoch and what not. “inspired by God” is language not all Christians would use. There are no official critieria for what is or is not a Christian, just infighting to belittle some groups.