Tuesday, April 5, 2011

The double standard of anti-Mormon Christians

For your readers, Mormonism is what you [the anti-Mormon writer] say it is. It is to establish the thesis that you have been at such pains with your personal buildup. Once entrenched as an official guide, you can take the readers where you please. It is not the thing you are showing them from then on, but your interpretation of the thing. It has been the practice of religious polemic in every age to attack not what the opposition practice and preach but our impression of what they practice and preach. "Blasphemy!" was the heading of the first published report on the Book of Mormon, and Alexander Campbell sincerely believed it was blasphemy. The early anti-Christian writers were just as sincere. Blasphemy had been from the beginning the stock charge against Jesus and the apostles, just as it is the favorite word of anti-Mormon writers. Didn't Jesus recommend publicly that those who "offended" should be glad to have a millstone hung about their necks and be cast into the sea? Blood atonement! Didn't he instruct his followers to hate-yes, hate-their own mothers and fathers and children? Horrible, horrible! To hate their own lives? A cult of suicide, no less! And then to have innocent babes and venerable ancients damned eternally for no other sin than not having had the ridiculous dunking that so shocked Ann Eliza; and to proclaim that an offender should cut off his own hand or pluck out his own eye-a cult of self-mutilation! And didn't the founder spend his time in private "conversations" with women, including women of ill-repute? And weren't his followers the dregs of society, who admitted that respectable people avoided them? Didn't they preach the shocking doctrine of a physical resurrection?--even doctors of the Church like Origen and Jerome squirm uncomfortably. Their notorious "love feasts"--too indecent to write about--show they meant it literally when they called each other "brother" and "sister" and then proceeded to intermarry in a cult of incest. ("Sounding Brass", Tinkling Cymbals and Sounding Brass)

Joseph Smith offered a plot

Religion has no plot. Science has no plot. This means that Joseph Smith is the only entry. He, at least, has given us a picture. . . Joseph Smith gave the world something that nobody else could. That is why I say that Joseph Smith, with nothing going for him and everything going against him, simply could not lose. He told us what the play is all about. If you can come up with a better story than his, more power to you, but up until now no one else has had any story at all to place before us. If only for that reason, I believe, the Prophet's story deserves a hearing. ("Before Adam")

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Christianity's paralysis the result of relativism on teachings of salvation

Every church that has an independent organization once claimed exclusive possession of the saving truth. If it did not, it should never have been organized, for the organization of every church creates divisions in Christendom, and nothing will justify that, short of a peculiar and special claim to enlightenment on matters vital to salvation. In the days of their pristine vitality and conviction, all the churches that now accuse others of thinking they have something better than anybody else thought the same way themselves. If Christianity is anything more than an ethical code or an agglomeration of sentimental attitudes and platitudes, it must be specific in its teachings and clear and uncompromising on matters which by its own profession are of transcendent importance. It is a sorry day when churches apologize for ever having been definite and outspoken on the subject of salvation. Today the fashion is to be neither hot nor cold- and that is the worst state of all. The alternative to being firm and specific is a slippery relativism that leads to nothing but paralysis. ("What Makes a True Church?", The World and the Prophets)