Faranon

The most annoying part of all this is the people saying stuff like “the Mormons are just figuring out what we think of them!” Or “oh the Mormons should try visiting the South! Haha!” When in reality this discourse is just another Tuesday for us.

@Shmee_Is_Me @Prawcin This is false, despite their best efforts fire emblem fans can't muster up the same hate for FE that smash bros fans hold in their hearts

@Prawcin This is true for every fandom. No one hates their franchises more than the fans of that franchise.

The last few days have reinforced my belief that a lot of dudes simply can't (or won't ) understand something: people of other faiths believe their own religions just as hard as you believe yours. "But anybody can see that their religion is stupid and wrong." Brother.

Whatever you think of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, if you are getting your information from The Godmakers then you are showing you have done little to no research on the topic.

So, in other words...

They've already accepted the terms of the truce!

@mistaj12 Okay, sure, but I think you may have missed my point. I'm okay with you disagreeing with my beliefs and expressing that disbelief. But you must be careful or you'll end up driving people away instead of inviting them to explore your point of view.

@RangerZero37962 It's not on us to recruit you. We have to point out error and it's up to the Holy Spirit to renew the heart. Mormon missionaries believe this very thing too, right? If there is someone who doesn't know the truth, the truth must be told to them.

This is getting sad. Here's a tip from the church that had around 400,000 converts last year: denigrating somebody's sincerely held religious beliefs is a horrible way to convert them. Insulting them is much more likely to make them dig in their heels.

I’ve been thinking for 10 min about this and I can’t decide why those two words are supposed to sound ridiculous at all

"Mormons are Christian!" "No, Mormons are NOT Christian!" The Orthobro subplot:

@mistaj12 You don't have to agree with our theology, but insulting it does not make us want to join your church.

@RangerZero37962 Is it more loving to be silent or cheerlead your error? We are commissioned by Christ to seek and save the lost.

@DiannaDeeley Jesus Christ is the second member of the Godhead. He is just as eternal as The Father. We simply do not agree that The Father is the same being as The Son.

@RangerZero37962 They can sincerely believe they anything they like. They still are not Christians. If Jesus is not the second person of the Trinity, who is He? And how could His sacrifice be sufficient to atone for all sin if He is not God?

@RazorFist Genuine question: do you think saying that is going to make me become a protestant? Because you're only cementing my decision to join the catholics if for some reason I can no longer be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

@RangerZero37962 Your church isn't a church, and it didn't convert 400k people last year, or anywhere near it. The LDS "Church" already stepped back from those numbers. In fact, you're declining in the U.S. and enacting baptism "quotas" to boost third-world conversions. youtube.com/live/sA7oK326w…

The premise of this type of argument, and it is a meme repeated often by otherwise sentient people, is that sacred beliefs have a threshold of ridiculousness past which people should disbelieve them on principle, which they never define and can't comprehend using on themselves

Mike Lee never makes that post and the Protestants/Catholics eat themselves alive trying to decide who the true Christians on the list are, guaranteed.

Allie, Jesus is called God over 700 times in the Book of Mormon.

Am I supposed to act like this isn't obvious evangelical propaganda disguised as a chart? 😂 Nearly every LDS belief is framed in the least charitable way possible, while every Protestant belief is presented in its most favorable form. Let's go through it... "Mormonism vs Christianity" The title commits the fallacy of begging the question before the discussion even begins. Latter-day Saints worship Jesus Christ as the divine Son of God, believe He died for sins, rose from the dead, and is humanity's Savior. Calling LDS believers "non-Christian" simply because they reject later creeds is not an argument—it's gatekeeping. The real question is whether the Nicene tradition or the Restoration more accurately reflects apostolic Christianity. - "Bible Alone" The chart pretends "Bible alone" is historic Christianity. It isn't. For over a thousand years there was no Protestantism and no doctrine of sola scriptura. Catholics, Orthodox, and other ancient Christians all reject Bible-alone theology. So the chart is ironically presenting a distinctly Protestant doctrine as if it were the universal Christian position. - "God is one God" The chart sneaks in an entire philosophical system and labels it "biblical." The doctrine of an immaterial, timeless, metaphysically simple being owes at least as much to Greek philosophy as to the Bible. The God of scripture talks, acts, responds, loves, grieves, becomes angry, forgives, and enters relationships. The LDS God looks much more like the God portrayed in scripture than the abstract philosophical Absolute developed centuries later. - "Jesus is a created being" This is simply false. Latter-day Saints believe Christ existed before the world and participated in creation itself. Evangelical critics often repeat "created being" because it sounds shocking, not because it accurately represents LDS theology. If a critic has to distort your beliefs to refute them, that is usually a sign of a weak argument. - "Grace + works" This is perhaps the most misleading line in the entire chart. LDS doctrine explicitly teaches that salvation comes through the grace of Jesus Christ. The actual disagreement is whether discipleship, covenant faithfulness, repentance, baptism, and obedience matter after one accepts Christ. Ironically, the New Testament repeatedly teaches that they do. The chart acts as if every passage about obedience suddenly disappears once Ephesians 2 is quoted. - "Humans become gods" Critics often present this as if Joseph Smith invented the idea. Yet early Christian theologians taught deification long before Joseph Smith was born. The famous teaching that "God became man so that man might become god" was not written by a Mormon—it was written by Athanasius, one of the heroes of orthodox Christianity. The real debate is not whether humans can participate in divine life. The debate is how fully that participation extends. - "Atonement not sufficient" No faithful Latter-day Saint believes Christ's atonement is insufficient. None. Every ordinance, covenant, act of repentance, and act of obedience derives its saving power from Christ. This criticism confuses "Christ's grace requires a response" with "Christ's grace is insufficient." Those are not remotely the same claim. The biggest problem... The chart never actually argues for Nicene Christianity. It simply assumes Nicene Christianity is true and then declares every disagreement wrong by definition. That is not evidence. That is circular reasoning. The chart's hidden argument is: Historic Christianity is true because historic Christianity says it is true. But the entire Restoration claim is that major theological changes occurred after the apostles. Merely appealing to later tradition does nothing to answer that claim.

With the 40,000th iteration of “Mormons aren’t Christian,” I’m reminded of how much our pioneer ancestors sacrificed for the restored gospel and their faith in Jesus Christ, detractors be damned. One of those was Stillman Pond, who lost everything, yet maintained his faith (Taken from “It Still Takes Faith,” by Brent L. Top): Pond and his family were among the last to leave Nauvoo in September 1846. Having already endured much persecution and harassment from the enemies of the Church, the Pond family was ultimately driven from their Nauvoo home at the point of a bayonet. Without adequate preparation for their trek, they were left without proper food, clothing, and shelter. Their trek across Iowa to Winter Quarters was fraught with almost unimaginable suffering and heartache. Snow came early to the Iowa territory that year, making travel extremely difficult. Weakened from trudging through the deep snow, Stillman’s pregnant wife, Maria, who had already been afflicted with consumption, then contracted malaria. She, along with every member of her family, suffered greatly from this sickness. Bowed down with grief and aching from the pain and fever of malaria, Maria could no longer walk. Amidst these grim circumstances she gave birth to twin boys who were named Joseph and Hyrum. They both died only a few days later. The deaths of these children coming across the plains from Nauvoo to Winter Quarters were only the beginning of the sacrifice and trials of Stillman Pond. With all of the members of the Pond family sick with malaria, Stillman, who was unable to walk or even sit up, lay on his stomach in the bed of his wagon. Bracing himself with one arm and extending his other over the dashboard to hold the reins, he drove his team the last 150 miles. On October 16, 1846, they arrived at Winter Quarters. During the winter there the Pond family continued to suffer. In the space of five days, three more children died. A sixth died a few weeks later: - Laura Jane Pond, age 14, died of “chills and fever” on December 2, 1846.
- Harriet M. Pond, age 11, died “with chills” on December 4.
- Abigail A. Pond, age 18, died “with chills” on December 7.
- Lyman Pond, age 6, died with “chills and fever” on January 15, 1847. Having survived the heartache of burying all of her children, the hardships of the trek across Iowa, and the hunger and privations of a long, hard winter, Stillman’s beloved wife, Maria, finally succumbed to her sicknesses on May 17 at Winter Quarters. Yet despite all this, Stillman Pond journeyed onward in the pioneer company led by Elder John Taylor, arriving in the Salt Lake Valley in the early fall of 1847. His testimony of the gospel, his faith in the Lord, and the fire of the covenant that burned in his soul gave him the strength to go on. “I am perfectly satisfied with the authorities of the Church,” he wrote in February 1846, “and consider it my indispensable duty to give heed to all things.”

Can confidently say that no Mormons were likely convinced by your jeering today brother.

I’m tired of being told what I believe by Christians on this platform, especially when many of them cannot even explain how the specific tenets of their own branch of Christianity differ from the dozens of others, or where those beliefs came from.