On an e-mail list of which I was a member back when e-mail lists were a thing, an Anglican priest once summarised the response he got as a missionary in Spain: "Why should I believe in your religion, when I don't even believe in the real one?"
As Carl Spackler might have put it, Catholicism has that going for it.
Seriously, the liturgy of the Mass is surprisingly short and snappy. It's the length of a poem, and it works that way. It survives translation into many languages well.
And with it the Mormon church has literally turned wine into water. How the heck did this get approved? It doesn't sound to me like anything Joseph Smith would have done. Even the other teetotal sects at least use grape juice.
If I recall correctly, in my home town at that time, Mass was almost invariably in Latin.
I don't think that it mattered at all to us LDS that we understood only a small portion of the words - the feeling, the grandeur, transcended the language.
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The Latin text says grand things. If it also sounds grand even in translation, that is partly because younger languages have literally been shaped by the Latin Mass. It was the standard of linguistic grandeur when the western vernaculars were becoming literary languages, and they grew up into the role, in part, by learning how to make the Mass sound almost as good as it did in Latin.
Dan Peterson
...So, that would be one of my complaints about church practice. I would love to see better teaching. I don’t know if we’re capable of it in a typical ward. Maybe this is the best we can do and those manuals are necessary.
So, so, sooooooo, SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO*****FAR AWAY***** from Joseph Smith's exciting theological ideologies and thinking! What an admission! Yea, God shot His wad with Joseph Smith and now has nothing new, interesting, or worth teaching his prophet today... it's all pap n pablum and cleaning toilets from here on out.
Dan Peterson
...So, that would be one of my complaints about church practice. I would love to see better teaching. I don’t know if we’re capable of it in a typical ward. Maybe this is the best we can do and those manuals are necessary.
So, so, sooooooo, SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO*****FAR AWAY***** from Joseph Smith's exciting theological ideologies and thinking! What an admission! Yea, God shot His wad with Joseph Smith and now has nothing new, interesting, or worth teaching his prophet today... it's all pap n pablum and cleaning toilets from here on out.
If only those poor souls left with an endless repetition of bland Sunday teachings could have Consiglieri as their Gospel Doctrine teacher. It is a shame they did not recognize the sounds of truth when they were hearing it, but that probably ties back in with Socrates' cave dwellers stepping out into the theatre lobby and being faced with lights, popcorn, and tubes of Ghirardelli chocolates.
Dan was actually making the argument that *He* should be teaching every Sunday school lesson.
Both Dan and Consiglieri would be heads and tails better than the lessons from my Sundays in the Church. Both could deviate from the correlated material in an informative and interesting manner.
