Fox Advocacy Group Declares Romney Non-Christian

[_Buffalo]

and announced his intention to "worship him with all my might."

...and later turned around and said we shouldn't worship Jesus. Yes, that McConkie. Apparently he had a "come away from Jesus" moment.

[_MsJack]

Good morning, Dan.

I think you honestly don't realize how you come across

Feeling is mutual.

all the while lecturing me on my alleged obtuseness and nastiness

And raising specific examples which you refuse to address. But the feeling is mutual.

have reinforced my resolution

So long as you keep your private messages out of my inbox, I don't care what you do.

Yeah, truly unsavory characters like MsJack had the audacity to smear Will by, uh, quoting a pervasive pattern of horrible things he's said to people. Just think if they pointed to his habitual lying! In truth, I don't know if the world could handle that much concentrated evil. But I suppose I don't know what the world is coming to when we can sit by while a person is dragged through the mud by odious means such as pointing out things he says. I, for one, am just saddened that he can't get his work published in any venue ever because he was rejected by the Maxwell Institute. Dastardly anti-Mormons.

/applause

@ the thread ~ I have some thoughts on sealings, but I think I'll start a new thread for them. This one has been off-topic enough.

[_Daniel Peterson]

Then later turned around and said we shouldn't worship Jesus.

You're committing -- or being victimized by -- a fallacy of equivocation.

[_Buffalo]

Then later turned around and said we shouldn't worship Jesus.

You're committing -- or being victimized by -- a fallacy of equivocation.

Only in apologetic land is quoting an apostle in context an equivocation fallacy.

[_JohnStuartMill]

You're glossing over half a millennium of evolving religious thought. . . . Your version of history is oblivious to the Protestant Reformation.

You can't really be imagining that I set forth my entire "version of history" in a brief message board post. Can you?

I didn't say that and I didn't think it. I meant that your post didn't appear to be informed by important historical events.

but by the time Mormonism was founded, the idea that Christians would be united with their loved ones in the afterlife was already pretty popular.

I understand that. Hence the reference to the Lange and McDannell book.

Re-read your post. It definitely gives the impression that Mormons should be credited with the concept's introduction: "Before the Mormons came..." "they arrived with the good news...". You might want to just admit that you were overreaching. And at any rate, the idea that Dante's version of heaven was the "default setting" in 19th century America is simply inaccurate.

Mormonism wasn't innovative on this score; it merely crystallized a popular religious belief into a core doctrine, in a process similar to its absorption of the ideas of the temperance movement.

There is some truth to this, but perhaps rather less than you imagine. If you read the accounts of people like Parley Pratt (and others, much less famous), they were delighted and surprised at the doctrine. It didn't merely confirm what they already knew.

This doesn't contradict what I wrote. I didn't say the idea was already ubiquitous; I said it was pretty popular.

[_Daniel Peterson]

Only in apologetic land is quoting an apostle in context an equivocation fallacy.

Only in the mind of a buffalo chip is what you're doing merely "quoting."

I meant that your post didn't appear to be informed by important historical events.

It didn't mention the Protestant Reformation. That's true. But it also didn't mention the Council of Nicea, the Crusades, Thomas Aquinas, the Enlightenment, the rise of theological liberalism, the response of Protestant Neo-Orthodoxy, and the emergence of Pentecostalism in Latin America. But I'm quite well aware of all those things.

Re-read your post. It definitely gives the impression that Mormons should be credited with the concept's introduction: "Before the Mormons came..." "they arrived with the good news...". You might want to just admit that you were overreaching.

I'll admit, more accurately, that it was a brief post and not a detailed, fully-nuanced, multi-volume treatise on the theme.

And at any rate, the idea that Dante's version of heaven was the "default setting" in 19th century America is simply inaccurate.

It was, mutatis mutandis and in the relevant respects, the default setting for most of Christian history. A new and allegedly more sentimental view of heaven was arising in nineteenth-century America, as McDannell and Lange show in the book to which I very deliberately referred.

[_Buffalo]

Only in apologetic land is quoting an apostle in context an equivocation fallacy.

Only in the mind of a buffalo chip is what you're doing merely "quoting."

I realize that you're unable to read the words of inspired apostles and prophets without apologizing for them or pretending those words were never said, but not all of us are saddled with that disability.

[_Daniel Peterson]

So long as you keep your private messages out of my inbox, I don't care what you do.

You're entirely welcome, should you ever feel so inclined, to send me a private message at any time, either via my inbox here, or by snail mail, or at daniel_peterson@BYU.edu.

[_JohnStuartMill]

I meant that your post didn't appear to be informed by important historical events.

It didn't mention the Protestant Reformation. That's true. But it also didn't mention the Council of Nicea, the Crusades, Thomas Aquinas, the Enlightenment, the rise of theological liberalism, the response of Protestant Neo-Orthodoxy, and the emergence of Pentecostalism in Latin America. But I'm quite well aware of all those things.

I have no idea why you're going off on this tangent. I didn't say you weren't aware of the Protestant Reformation, only that your little history didn't seem to be informed by such an awareness.

Re-read your post. It definitely gives the impression that Mormons should be credited with the concept's introduction: "Before the Mormons came..." "they arrived with the good news...". You might want to just admit that you were overreaching.

I'll admit, more accurately, that it was a brief post and not a detailed, fully-nuanced, multi-volume treatise on the theme.

Detail has nothing to do with it -- I don't really care about the level of detail, so long as the post is accurate. But it wasn't: you portrayed your sect to be bestowing theological innovation on a spiritually rusting Christianity. That fits well with Mormonism's self-myth, but it wasn't historically accurate, so you had to selectively ignore five hundred years of history. And now that I've called you out on that, you're getting testy.

And at any rate, the idea that Dante's version of heaven was the "default setting" in 19th century America is simply inaccurate.

It was, mutatis mutandis and in the relevant respects, the default setting for most of Christian history.[/quote] It was the default setting for most of Christian history, true, but that information was irrelevant to your discussion with beastie. Why bring up pre-Reformation Catholicism when you and beastie were discussing American evangelicalism? It's hard to draw any other conclusion than that you were trying to elide history to make Mormonism look good.

A new and allegedly more sentimental view of heaven was arising in nineteenth-century America, as McDannell and Lange show in the book to which I very deliberately referred.

You originally referenced the book to support the idea that such a view of heaven was not "historically taught" by Protestants and is widely assumed only now (i.e., after the Mormons "arrived with the good news"). Now you're trying to say that you referenced the book because it undercuts the view you espoused to beastie? That's some impressive backpedaling. But I guess changing your position for the better while not properly admitting fault is preferable to not changing at all.

[_Buffalo]

But I guess changing your position for the better while not properly admitting fault is preferable to not changing at all.

It's the modus operandi of the corporate church. You can't blame him for patterning his life from that model.