Re: Mormon church makes anti-war statement

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Hunter Gray replies:


> That's about what one would normally expect from you, Stuart Elliott --
> whose only creativity lies in a unique mix of shallow-creek "knowledge,"
> superciliousness, and bigotry.

To Stuart Elliott's assertion that

> The Mormons are not a mainline Christian denomination.  Anyone who
> seriously maintains this is ignorant of both religious sociology and
theology.

-----

To which I reply: Stuart Elliott is absolutely correct, and Hunter's silly
ad hominem response does nothing to undermine the point that, in terms of
sociology and theology, Mormonism is not a "mainline" Christian religion.
Unlike mainline Christian sects, it does not adhere to doctrines on which
mainline sects can all agree and thereby recognise each other's ministration
of the sacraments, to use the Catholic terminology. This is certainly the
case with baptism, for example.

Is it not the case that Mormons believe that they can be baptised as proxies
for their ancestors? Hence the significant resources invested in
genealogical research by the Mormon church. But no "mainline" Christian sect
would ever claim such a thing.

Here's an article from an impeccably Mormon news source in which it emerges
that, thanks to the practice of baptism for the dead no less than David
ben-Gurion, Sigmund Freud and Anne Frank have been registered as baptised
Mormons:

http://www.mormonstoday.com/010504/N1JewishBaptisms01.shtml

Perhaps by "mainline" Hunter means that 11 million adherents more than
satisfies some as yet unspecified quantitative criteria for assessing
whether or not a sect is "mainline". In which case we might agree that
Mormonism is a "mainline" religion, but, theologically at least, it is not
"mainline" Christianity.

But more power to their anti-war agenda.

Michael Keaney



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