quote:
You tend not to make allies when you declare that those churches are full or false doctrine.
That's what Christian reform groups do – they say: "we are the true faith." We make no apologies about the fact we believe that we have a restoration of truth. But those sorts of claims are substantially different than dedicating resources to attack other faiths. And it is factually false that we believe that other faiths are "full of false doctrines." In fact quite the opposite.
And bringing up nineteenth century religious polemic in the context of twenty-first century dialogue isn't going to help you either. Most of the time, those statements were responding to the largely Protestant mobs who had driven LDS members from state to state, murdering their leaders. Some of these were led by Protestant preachers whose rhetoric was laced with references to "extermination" and willing to describe Mormons as subhuman.
I regret that there were some angry and bitter things that were said, sometimes, by some LDS leaders. But it is a falsehood that the tough talk was one-sided. It was absolutely not.
Mercifully, times have changed.
The truthfulness of the claims of more traditional Christian factions necessarily entail the incorrectness of the claims of my church. But you won't see us publishing anything remotely comparable to "The Godmakers" against evangelical faiths. I have never once attended an LDS meeting that was devoted, even in part, to attacking anybody else's faith. We regularly have magazine articles promoting tolerance and understanding. I don't think the same can be said for the other side of the aisle.
If evangelicals and others feel what they teach and believe is correct then by all means, they should argue forcefully and with vigor about their philosophical concept of deity, and the completeness of Biblical revelation. But again, this is substantially different than asserting that LDS are Satanists, going to hell, that our beliefs are a crude joke, that we can't nominally call ourselves Christians, and that our leaders are liars and thieves. You won't see anything comparable to the images and video I posted on the other thread -- and any members found doing such things would likely be told to stop immediately at the peril of their membership.
In todays modern context, there is nothing on the LDS side comparable to what we have to put up with. Attempts to make the LDS look like offenders are disingenuous at best.
[This message has been edited by groove (edited 9/6/2007 11:56p).]