VegasRefugee wrote:ozemc wrote:
Why should those of us, who are not Mormon, believe in an "eternal" marriage that has to be performed in a temple, if Jesus Himself said there's no such thing?
that's the wrapup of this issue in a nutshell. The reason Mormonism exists is because the social constructs it has built revolve around retention of the faithful, otherwise this stuff would have died out after the Mormons were run out of Illinois and scattered to join other kooky religious collectives.
The story of Mormonism are stories of convincing others to hang on until your dead. Because you can never guarantee delivery of the goods the situation snowballs and the meme is perpetuated.
Irony impaired individuals such as Mormons and fundy christians cannot see anything outside their interview. Their brains (and im serious...its proven medically via Cat Scans/etc) are "blind" to the reality of certain siuations. Conflicting data is ignored or discounted if it is blatant.
Well, I used to be one of those fundy christians who believed everything I was taught in Sunday School, creationism, a 6000 year old earth, etc.
At some point, I'm not really sure when, but I think it was when I begin an earnest interest in astronomy, that I started questioning my own beliefs. When you see that vastness of the universe, and how there are stars as big as our solar system, you start to think that what you've been told all your life is really very limiting in scope. I mean, I was reading an article the other day that "proved" that we were alone in the universe. Alone? When we don't even know what's in the next galaxy, let alone one that's 10 million light-years away? I'm sorry, but that's ludicrous.
We might be alone, but the odds are really against it. I kind of take the view that Jodie Foster did in "First Contact": "Well, if we are alone, it's a mighty big waste of space."
As I've written elsewhere, for all we know, there are a million planets, just like this one, with people on them, just like us, with rivers and oceans, just like us, but, we'll never know, because there's 1 million light-years between them.
People that "know" we are alone, are, in my opinion, very close-minded.
I believe that many of the religions out there are insulting to God, or whomever is out there, if anybody. They try to put Him in a box. Whoever He is, He is far greater and more magnificient than any of us could ever know. To think that some words written down by people that were really just as clueless as I am about the big picture is the "truth" or the "way" is closing down your brain, and not using it the way it was intended. Maybe we should be using it the way God wanted us too? To try and understand it all?
I do think that there almost has to be some sort of higher intelligence that made all this. It just seems too logical. Of course, maybe that's just the way it's supposed to be. Who knows?
Anyway, that's my rant. :-)