Matthew Yglesias (December 13, 2007) - Jesus and Lucifer, Sitting in a Tree (Miscellaneous)

Jesus and Satan as brothers fighting as opposing ideals is the essential and epitome of Manichean thinking (mix of Christianity and lots and lots of Zoroasterism)

Posted by shah8 | December 13, 2007 1:13 PM

The part that's a problem for traditional Christians is the idea that Jesus was created by God the father and that he didn't exist before his creation. The "brother of Lucifer" stuff is in some ways merely incidental. (Many Christas, after all, think Lucifer, son of the morning, was the first and most proud of the Angels befor his rebelion and fall. See Milton.) The trouble is with Jesus being another created being- that's a traditional form of Heresy as far as most Christians are concerned since it violates the form of trinitarianism found in the Nician creed. Now, it's all fairy-tales as far as I'm concerned but many, many people have been killed over this over the years.

Posted by Matt (not the famous one) | December 13, 2007 1:23 PM

so I don't really know why the church would be weird about it.

It's that crazy Trinity thing. Jesus is the Son of God, but also God. He has existed as part of the Godhead as long as there's been a Godhead (usually taken as forever, though that leads to a bunch of headaches upon close scrutiny). Lucifer and all the other angels were created beings. So to put Jesus and Lucifer on the same level as sons of God is to reject the conventional formulation of the Trinity. So why would they be weird about it? A religion whose biggest schism prior to the Reformation was over whether the Holy Spirit proceeded only from the Father, or from the Father and the Son?

Posted by mds | December 13, 2007 1:25 PM

Note to self: type faster.

Posted by mds | December 13, 2007 1:26 PM

It's no more weird than the Catholic notion of transubtantiation or the belief in a bodily resurection at end-times. It's just a different set of weird beliefs than those held by orthodox Christians. I don't care that Mormons believe that Satan is Jesus' brother or that black people have dark skin because they didn't take God's side in His battle against Satan, or that God was once a man, or that they believe they (the men anyway) may some day be gods of their own planet, etc.. However, their weird beliefs are completely contrary to the weird beliefs of Christians and therefore Mormons are not really Christians. I don't know why that upsets them so much? If Mormons are Christians then all Christians are Mormons and there is no need to convert us to their faith.

Posted by Colonel Danite | December 13, 2007 1:26 PM

... And Augustine spent a lot of time dealing with Christian Manicheans. It's also similar in certain ways to the Bogomil heresy, which eventually had a strong influence on the Cathars.

The real rub is that this strikes right at the heart of the doctrine of consubstantiation: if Christ and Satan are brothers, then either Christ is not consubstantial with God or Satan *is*. Either answer attacks basic Christian teachings going back to at least Tertullian.

Finally, mainstream Christianity has always downplayed the strength of Satan (or, if you come from my branch of Christianity, tends to view Satan as a mythological construct). Radical evangelical theology gives a more powerful role to Satan -- in some cases even giving the Devil the ability to literally overthrow God's plans -- but even so the idea that Satan is a son of God in the same way Christians see Christ is a bridge too far.

Posted by WatchfulBabbler | December 13, 2007 1:27 PM

... Aaaaand obviously I'm not typing fast enough, either. :)

Posted by WatchfulBabbler | December 13, 2007 1:29 PM

The first statement is a classic non-denial denial.

Posted by gfw | December 13, 2007 1:30 PM

You know why the Church representative might've gotten a little antsy about it? Because when the news broke about that Huckabee quote, some of the journalists I was listening to were squeamish about even relaying it, calling it "incendiary"----and then of course Mormons have been treated to the joy of being publicly judged by armchair theologians as unchristian. The whole damn community is starting to wince and shy away from the slightest hint of a doctrinal jab.

Oh, and yeah, I grew up believing absolutely that Jesus and Lucifer were brothers. There's a lot of specific allusions to really fucked up sibling rivalry all over the Mormon texts.

By the way, Matthew, if you read this: I'd much rather you called the LDS "Christian heretics" rather than "not Christian." The word underscores the fact that you are drawing community boundaries, passing judgment, and casting some out. It's also more historically accurate, I find.

Not that I'm a practicing member anymore or believe, but this whole debate has been annoying the crap out of me. It hasn't evinced any sign of having become more informed or even more curious over the time since Mitt announced. He's been a total dickwad about his family background, so I've no sympathy for him, but I'm not best pleased about the bigoted meta-bigotry on "my side" either.

Posted by Jackmormon | December 13, 2007 1:34 PM

"It's also similar in certain ways to the Bogomil heresy, which eventually had a strong influence on the Cathars."

Hey be nice - I lived down the street from the Bogomils (strange family, though). Talk about questions with unknowable answers (from the Book of Barry Mann and Gerry Goffin):

Who put the bomp
In the bomp bah bomp bah bomp?
Who put the ram
In the rama lama ding dong?

Makes as much sense as the rest of this nonsense.

Posted by BlueStreak | December 13, 2007 1:38 PM

Mormonism is not orthodox Christianity, that's why. They reject Trinitarianism, Nicea, Chalcedon, and all the other councils. Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox may not agree on much, but they do agree on their Christology. Shit, there is even a non-zero chance these sects may have rapprochement-- they are more ecclesiastically and politically far apart than theologically.

Mormonism is, from the perspective of almost the entire Christian world (essentially everyone except Adventists, Pentecostals, and Jehovah's Witnesses), the equivalent of Nestorianism, or Arianism, or Marcionism: heresy that was rejected prior to 300-400 AD. It's waaaaay off the beaten path, even if it is novel.

Posted by gfw | December 13, 2007 1:40 PM

When you push things back a bit further there are even more ways here that Mormons differ quit seriously from orthodox Christianity. Lucifer and Jesus (and all of us!) are "spirit brothers", but why that is so is that we are all "spirit children" of a Father _and mother_ God, children in some literal sense. (Obviously it's not quite in the same sense as physical children are- I'm pretty sure that spirit children don't come out of the heavenly mother's vagina, for example, but still in some way that necessarily involves the procreative actions of both a mother and father god.) This mother and father god have physical bodies- whether the physical bodies are involved in the creation of they spirit children I don't know. The father god may or may not have many wife gods. There are many other such godly pairs. And so on. I don't get very hung up on whether some group are "christian" or not, but obviously this is all pretty far outside of orthodoxy, and Mormons are not, especially right now, overly eager to have it all out in the open. Again, I don't think this is especially any weirder than what lots of other people think, for example, that it's sinful to eat pork, that married women should not show their hair, that the waffer at mass takes on the substance but not the form of the body of christ, etc. But it is very different from what orthodox Christianity professes.

Posted by Matt (not the famous one) | December 13, 2007 1:41 PM

By the way, Matthew, if you read this: I'd much rather you called the LDS "Christian heretics" rather than "not Christian." The word underscores the fact that you are drawing community boundaries, passing judgment, and casting some out. It's also more historically accurate, I find.

Dr. Hibbert: Yes, I remember Bart's birth well. You don't forget a thing like Siamese twins!

Lisa Simpson: "I believe the preferred term is 'conjoined twins'."

Dr. Hibbert: "And hillbillies want to be called 'Sons of the Soil', but it ain't gonna happen."

Posted by Stefan | December 13, 2007 1:46 PM

By the way, Matthew, if you read this: I'd much rather you called the LDS "Christian heretics" rather than "not Christian." The word underscores the fact that you are drawing community boundaries, passing judgment, and casting some out. It's also more historically accurate, I find.

Yes, because "heretics" is such a non-judgemental word.....

By the way, Matthew, if you read this: I'd much prefer that you called Democrats "Republican heretics" rather than "not Republicans." The word underscores the fact that you are drawing community boundaries, passing judgment, and casting some out. Why not focus on what we have in common rather than what sets us apart....?

Posted by Stefan | December 13, 2007 1:52 PM

Stefan,

Adjust your sarcasm radar.

Posted by gfw | December 13, 2007 1:55 PM

Baptists also believe Christ and Lucifer are brothers.

Lucifer is an angel. See Revelations

Angels are sons of God. See Job

Jesus is The Son of God. See Baptist Confession

Sons of the same father are brothers

QED

Posted by bob up north | December 13, 2007 1:56 PM

What a ridiculous situation we Americans are in regarding religion. It's fine to be tolerant of everyone's religious beliefs, but we're also supposed to accept that they're all sacred and deserve to be equally respected. It's my opinion that NONE OF THEM deserve to be respected, any more than a prediliction to wearing one's underwear outside one's clothes or to insisting that all beverages be served at precisely 98.651 degrees fahrenheit. Why should I have to pretend that such behavior is sane, even though I wouldn't dream of dictating fashion or beverage warming/chilling habits?

Posted by cowalker | December 13, 2007 1:59 PM

Incidentally the quote over at Andrew's place is a perfect description of a demiurge.

Posted by gfw | December 13, 2007 1:59 PM

That explanation sounds perfectly acceptable to me.

Lucifer has such a cooler name, though. That's probably why all the heavy metal bands pay homage to him.

Posted by The Guilty Carnivore | December 13, 2007 2:03 PM

Well, Bob, your argument highlights the way Mormons can downplay there claims, but the problem is that saying Jesus and Satan are brothers is a summary of the much stronger claims they make (which is heresy*) that others have highlighted above.

*heresy has an inappropriately negative connotation- it simply means contrary to church doctrine. I think we should discourage the idea that this is a bad thing by using it more openly.

Posted by mpowell | December 13, 2007 2:07 PM

Lucifer IS NOT AN ANGEL. Lucifer is the KING OF BABYLON, reigning must be some time between 742-740 BCE to whenever it was that Isaiah died. The whole rebellion in heaven story is just something plastered onto the reference to Lucifer, but the reference to Lucifer is a reference to the downfall of a king who persecuted the Jews. It must be known exactly who it is, but a cursory search has not yet revealed it to me.

So the whole question is just idiotic.

Posted by Mike Toreno | December 13, 2007 2:11 PM

I think what it comes down to is really the central passage in the entire New Testament (and in professional-sports spectator signage), John 3:16--"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." If Jesus has a brother of any kind he's not the only begotten Son of God anymore. That he's the brother of the freaking Devil is just the icing on the blasphemous cake. I know the spokeswoman is sort of dancing around it by saying that every being is God's child in a sense and that the "begotten" part applies to Jesus in the sense that (I think) he was physically conceived by God, but as other commenters have pointed out, that just leads back to the notion that there's nothing unique about Jesus' nature as a "spirit child" rather than as an incarnation of God Himself.

It's confusing.

Posted by Sean | December 13, 2007 2:12 PM

Theological debates aside, I do have to admit that Mormon beliefs are generally no stranger than most mainstream religions -- orthodox Mormon insistence that Native Americans are actually lost Jews may contradict everything we know about archaeological truth, but it has to be admitted that the birth narratives in the Gospels fail on precisely the same grounds.

And, yes, the Mormon Church historically ("historically" meaning "until 1978") had terrible beliefs about Africans and African-Americans, functionally indistinguishable from white-supremacist religious sects -- but they also were anti-slavery (if pro-servitude), very pro-freedom of worship, pro-Jewish and, in some "Times and Seasons" articles, very pro-Muslim (comparing Islam very favorably to Christianity, in fact). Polygamy is technically not outlawed, just on hiatus until God deems otherwise, but I doubt that many Mormons ever expect, or desire, it to appear again. And the temple garments are kind of strange, and definitely not authorized by the Masonic Lodge.

LDS is, to my mainstream ECUSA eyes, a very odd religion, but no stranger than, say, the lifestyle of the Amish, Isma'ili, Lubavichers, or any number of interesting small faiths. Heretical? Certainly -- but not *bad*.

Posted by WatchfulBabbler | December 13, 2007 2:16 PM

Jesus Christ! What a bunch of stupid crap to argue about.

WHo is the son of the flying spaghetti monster?

Posted by how dumb | December 13, 2007 2:34 PM

The Flying Spaghetti Monster (please show respect and use caps next time) is a bachelor and has no children. Duh!

Posted by Colonel Danite | December 13, 2007 2:37 PM

Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox may not agree on much, but they do agree on their Christology.

That's not true. There are plenty of Protestant denominations who don't accept the Nicene Creed or take no position or a different position on Trinitarianism.

But further, it's wrong because it confuses THEOLOGY-- something a few people in church hierarchies care about-- with belief. The average believer IN ANY of those faiths takes no position about the nature of God or Christ or the trinity.

Really, if you want to define Mormons as "not Christian", then the only Christians in the world are a few seminarians and ministers, and we should stop genuflecting to these people as if they are some sort of a majority.

If, on the other hand, you want to define Christian the way believers define it, then yes, Mormons are Christians.

Posted by Dilan Esper | December 13, 2007 2:37 PM

orthodox Mormon insistence that Native Americans are actually lost Jews may contradict everything we know about archaeological truth, but it has to be admitted that the birth narratives in the Gospels fail on precisely the same grounds.

Actually, a better parallel is the books of Genesis and Exodus. There is a lot of contradiction between the archeological truth of 2000 BCE Cannan and Egypt and the stories as presented in the first few books of the Bible. As much as the stories in the Book of Mormon? No - the civilizations in the Bible seem to be based on civilizations that existed around 900 BCE in the same general area, rather than made up whole cloth from 19th century ideas about where the Native Americans came from - but who gets to say where that line gets drawn unless you use an absolute "reality is reality" line?

Posted by NonyNony | December 13, 2007 2:42 PM

Not to pile on, but I'm going to disagree with Jackmormon as well. Christianity had been around for a while by the time Smith came along; they have the right to decide whether LDS's innovations drag it outside Christianity. Similarly, the Jews rejected that the Jewish-Christians (Ebionites) of the first century C.E. and the Muslims today reject the Alawites.

Posted by Garrigus Carraig | December 13, 2007 2:46 PM

LDS is, to my mainstream ECUSA eyes, a very odd religion, but no stranger than, say, the lifestyle of the Amish...

The difference between the Mormons (in this case) and the Amish, is that the Amish are open about their differences. They do not attempt to weasel word around them and paper them over.

"We're driving these horse drawn buggies, damn it."

Not "Well, actually horse drawn buggies are really just like other vehicles so there's really not a smidge of difference between us and you English, er Americans."

Posted by Amish | December 13, 2007 2:48 PM

By the way, Matthew, if you read this: I'd much rather you called the LDS "Christian heretics" rather than "not Christian."

'Heresy' really is judgemental in the burning-at-the-stake sense. 'Radically heterodox' might fit the bill. Then you really get into the 'conceptual field' thing, and acceptable heterodoxy is really a vector based upon where you stand and where you're looking.

As I've said before here, I think the Southern Baptists protest too much on Mormon heterodoxy. But there really are elements of LDS doctrine that aren't vastly dissimilar from, say, the Unification Church, except for an extra century of history.

And I'm reminded of William Carlos Williams' line -- 'the pure products of America go crazy' -- when looking at the religious varieties that have sprung up in the US.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | December 13, 2007 2:50 PM

You know, this Mormonism debate is just a distraction to get us to ignore the REAL non-Christians we need to fear: Native Americans. Why, I had one tell me the other day that the earth opened up and we all climbed out...Isn't THAT the kind of heresy we need to stamp out, and FAST??? I want to know right now if anyone on the debate stage has "injun" blood in 'em, and if so will they solemnly swear to not install a sweat lodge facility in the West Wing of the White House? And do they really believe that some owl or bear or eagle or something is guiding their decision making processes???

I knew they'd slip though the radar someday if I didn't take care of it in the 19th century...

Posted by General Custer | December 13, 2007 2:51 PM

Here's a quick explanation of why Huckabee's question bugs Mormons. It's not that the allegation is untrue, but that "Mormons believe Jesus and Satan are brothers" is a dog-whistle signal to Evangelicals who don't like Mormons that Huckabee is on their team. The only time the issue shows up is among the less-educated ranks of anti-Mormon agitators. Asking if Mormons really believe that isn't an innocent question out of nowhere. It's not something Huckabee (Baptist preacher, spoke at Baptist rally in Utah in 1998) would ask without knowing exactly what he's doing.

It's not about the doctrine; it's about a likely presidential nominee signaling soto voce that he agrees with Mormon-haters. That kind of thing tends to make people grumpy.

Posted by Dr. Eckhart | December 13, 2007 2:55 PM

But really the question is, what does the Unification Church believe?

Posted by Ken C. | December 13, 2007 3:04 PM

This all reminds me of the Judean People's Front.

Posted by Sirkowski | December 13, 2007 3:05 PM

There are plenty of Protestant denominations who don't accept the Nicene Creed or take no position or a different position on Trinitarianism

Like who?

As far as I know, the only "Protestant" denominations to reject the councils or Trinitarianism are very small sects like Pentecostals, Dominionists, Jehovah's Wintesses, Adventists and other small fundamentalist (and generally American) off-shoots.

(I put Protestant in quotes because I don't consider those sects as off-shoots of Lutheranism or Calvinism.)

The average believer IN ANY of those faiths takes no position about the nature of God or Christ or the trinity.

I don't think this is true, at least to my Catholic eyes, nor does it have any relevance as to whether Mormonism is heresy.

I mean, they believe in an entirely new testament. It doesn't get any clearer than that. Debates over the Apocrypha are noting compared to trying to include a 19th Century testament by an American in the Canon.

Posted by gfw | December 13, 2007 3:06 PM

One can make all sorts of arguments about it-if you're a lumper, you lump, if you're a splitter you split. I think the interesting thing is that the straightlacedness of Mormonism might come from the fact that they stand barely outside the warm embrace of mainstream Christianity. The Mormons I've talked to seem to hew to "traditional" notions of family life and religious life with more determination than most of the Christians I know. At first I thought this was just because Mormons were a little whacked, but one can see how instead it might just be a maneuver to consolidate one's social legitimacy. The Mormons have to go out of their way to prove that they are "normal," so they are more regimented in their observances of Christian norms.
This helps explain Romney's presidential campaign and also the notions in his speech. The deliberate isolation of secularists is the sort of thing you would expect from second class people trying to cozy their way up the social ladder. It isn't just, "We're on the same side" talk, but, the more insecure "At least we're not icky like those secular humanists." Underneath that one can almost hear the whining of shallow, unpopular children who don't understand why they don't have any friends.

Posted by gerontion | December 13, 2007 3:09 PM

It's not something Huckabee (Baptist preacher, spoke at Baptist rally in Utah in 1998) would ask without knowing exactly what he's doing.

Oh, absolutely. And it's in keeping with the over-riding impression of Huckabee being superficially Mr Nice while making Heather-ish comments sotto voce.

It's all 'well, Tracy's swell -- did you know you could buy make-up in Dollar General, because I didn't?'

Incredibly calculated. And it might be politically valuable for other GOP candidates to point out that Huckabee bitches like a high-school senior girl.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | December 13, 2007 3:10 PM

We "gentiles" have been arguing about this with mormons in Utah ever since I can remember. I remember arguing about it in grade school with my classmates: "you're not christians." "Yes, we are!" "Well then, why do you belive....." "That doesn't make us not christians." "It doesn't make you christian, either." "Am too." "Are not." And on and on and on and on.

Mormon's think all other religions are abominations in God's eyes. Why on earth to they feel like they have to "prove" anything to anyone, except those they want to convert?

Mormon's do not want anyone to know their complete history, or their "theocracy" because it's damning. They believe in blood atonement. Joseph smith was a horny guy. When called out on it by his "brethren", who's wives he was fucking, he came out with a "revelation" about polygamy and he made their wives HIS wives. They revise their history all the time. It's been going on for years. They don't even allow anyone to look at historical documents. Why?

I even remember when they couldn't drink Coke, but try asking a mormon about it, they'll deny it. Coffee? Hell no! But buckets and buckets of Diet Coke, because somehow Coke's caffein is so much better than coffee caffein! Go figure.

Posted by Shaker o Salt | December 13, 2007 3:14 PM

I think something's been lost in the commentary over all of this. While it's somewhat absurd to be debating Mormon theology, the Republican Party has only itself to blame for having spent the last couple of decades attacking the separation of church and state.

All of their candidates are wearing their "faith" on their sleeve. They are all playing the God card. When that happens, it's only natural, and in fact virtually obligatory, to take a close look at which faith someone is attached to.

In Romney's case, I think the bigger story is that the Mormon "church" has a track record of adjusting its doctrines to suit political purposes. It does this by means of a doctrine of continuous revelation, in which the church's council of 12 claims to receive revelations from God.

The most notable example, of course, is polygamy. In 1889, the Mormon president said God had told him that polygamy would be protected in Utah. In 1890, the same Mormon president said God had commanded Mormons to abandon polygamy. In the intervening year, the federal government had stepped up prosecution of polygamy and had offered Utah a path to statehood if polygamy were abandoned. In 1896, Utah was admitted to the Union.

In 1978, a similar "revelation" caused the Mormons to reverse its longstanding ban on black priests, a development that happened to coincide with their stepped-up missionary work in Africa. A continual, lower-profile series of divine "revelations" has caused the Mormons to make less-noticable changes to its scripture and doctrines.

All of this is relevant when analyzing Romney's sudden, 180-degree shifts on the questions of abortion and homosexuality. When he ran for office in Massachusetts, he was pro-gay and pro-choice, but when it came time to run for president he became anti-gay and anti-choice.

The shift, for political reasons, was squarely within Mormon tradition. Thus far, the "news" media in this country resolutely refuses to make the connection, and of course Democrats, being scared of their own shadows and not having many fixed beliefs themselves, are hesitant to point it out.

So, for free discussion we rely on the last frontier of candor, the Internet.

Posted by Charles Wilson | December 13, 2007 3:16 PM

Gerontion: well said.

Posted by shaker o salt | December 13, 2007 3:17 PM

Jesus and Satan are brothers = weird heretical cult belief.

Jesus was born of a virgin, died and was resurrected and ascended bodily into heaven = respectable mainstream religious belief.

Bonus:

Homosexuals are evil because it says so in the Old Testament.

Wearing clothing made from different kinds of fabric is OK, even though it's forbidden in the Old Testament, because...well, just because.

See also: stoning disobedient children.

It's a mad world, my masters.

Posted by commie atheist | December 13, 2007 3:19 PM

It's not something Huckabee (Baptist preacher, spoke at Baptist rally in Utah in 1998) would ask without knowing exactly what he's doing.

Somethin I haven't seen anyone else mention - in the same artcle as the "don't they believe that Jesus and Satan are brothers?" comment appears, Huckabee is asked if Mormnonism is a religious, and he says he thinks it is, but "I don't really know much about it," or words to that effect. Doesn't Huckabee have a degree in theology? Don't they have comparative religion studies wherever he got that degree? Weird that you would have a theology degree without being informed about the theology of various religions.

Posted by commie atheist | December 13, 2007 3:30 PM

Dilan,

Most Christians might not have a position on the precise nature of the Trinity, but they would agree that Jesus is wholly divine as well as wholly human. Mormons, as I understand, believe that Jesus was a created being. They also claim that Jesus Christ and the Father with whom he is consubstantial are corporeal beings who were once men and became gods. Most Christians would find this a diminution of the person of Jesus. It's also, of course, logically contradictory, since to imagine that God is corporeal violates the terms of the cosmological proof of the existence of God.

It's not that I think heterodoxy or even 'heresy' is by its nature a bad thing. Heaven knows, I have some radically heterodox views on some things myself. It is the specific nature of the Mormon heterodoxy that I find both silly, without evidence, and unappealing. Therefore, I feel under no obligation to treat a Mormon candidate the way I would any other.

Shaker of Salt makes a good point. The highly questionable personal life of Joseph Smith, like that of Muhammed (how old was his last 'wife' again?) if nothing else should cast serious doubt on their claim to be messengers of God.

Mormonism is a particularly dangerous heterodoxy because it makes the claim appealing to a materialistic age, that God Himself was a material being. Perhaps this is why some liberals find Mormonism (and Islam too) so appealing in spite of their violently illiberal tenets.

Posted by Hector | December 13, 2007 3:31 PM

The highly questionable personal life of Joseph Smith, like that of Muhammed (how old was his last 'wife' again?) if nothing else should cast serious doubt on their claim to be messengers of God.

In contrast, we know so much about the personal life of Jesus. I mean, it's all right there in the Gospels, right?

Posted by commie atheist | December 13, 2007 3:34 PM

where are the gold tablets?

Posted by moroni | December 13, 2007 3:37 PM

We have no particular reason to believe that Jesus lived anything less than a perfect life. If you can point to a single example that casts doubt on the claim that Jesus "was tempted like us in every way, but did not sin", then I would like to hear it. The fact that we know little about the details of the life of Christ does not give us grounds to suppose that he ever sinned.

On the contrary, the lives of Joseph Smith and Muhammed show ample evidence of sinning, _even in the words of their own followers_. Joseph Smith 'married' a fourteen year old, and Muhammed a nine year old....need I say more?

Posted by Hector | December 13, 2007 3:40 PM

"They believe in blood atonement."

No, they don't. They believe in Brigham Young, and Brigham Young believed in blood atonement, but fortunately for the rest of the world modern Mormon beliefs are not transitive, just inconsistent.

Thanks to WatchfulBabbler for explaining the consubstantiation, connection, BTW. Horror at the "Jesus and Satan are brothers" idea seems to make more sense now. I thought the complaint was about Satan's status, not Jesus's, and from that perspective it didn't seem to make sense. If anything, Mormonism's "Satan is a fallen son of God" is a better explanation of evil than "Satan is a fallen creation of God"; it's easier to buy an evil being misusing free will than an omnipotent omnibenevolent being screwing up.

What's interesting about this whole argument is Romney's reactions to criticism of his beliefs, not his beliefs themselves. Even the nastiest stuff in the Doctrine and Covenants isn't as bad as the nasty stuff in the Old Testament, so it's not like Romney's competition is innocent here. If he'd had the guts to say "Yes, this is what I believe" like creationist Huckabee or "No, this isn't literal" like the evolutionist Republicans, it wouldn't be an issue for me. Instead he dissembles, dodges, and plays the wounded victim of bigotry while trying to get everyone to pick on those evil "secularists" instead. No, thanks.

Posted by roystgnr | December 13, 2007 3:42 PM

I stand corrected.

Posted by shaker o salt | December 13, 2007 3:58 PM

moroni, if you don't know, how do you expect us to?

Posted by Mike Toreno | December 13, 2007 4:01 PM

Hi, we're The Gold Tablets. Thanks for comin' out tonight. Don't forget to tip your waitresses and bartenders.

Posted by BlueStreak | December 13, 2007 4:20 PM

"Lucifer IS NOT AN ANGEL. Lucifer is the KING OF BABYLON, reigning must be some time between 742-740 BCE to whenever it was that Isaiah died. The whole rebellion in heaven story is just something plastered onto the reference to Lucifer, but the reference to Lucifer is a reference to the downfall of a king who persecuted the Jews. It must be known exactly who it is, but a cursory search has not yet revealed it to me.

So the whole question is just idiotic."

So are you assuming that when Mormons refer to Lucifer, they are referring instead to this ancient Babylonian king? If so, then I seriously doubt that equating Jesus with a mortal would appease many 'true' Christians -- its a safe bet that 'Lucifer' was being used synonymously with 'Satan,' and therefore your comment has no bearing on the situation.

Posted by EpicureanQuaker | December 13, 2007 4:23 PM

In 1978, a similar "revelation" caused the Mormons to reverse its longstanding ban on black priests, a development that happened to coincide with their stepped-up missionary work in Africa. A continual, lower-profile series of divine "revelations" has caused the Mormons to make less-noticable changes to its scripture and doctrines.

And of course you can't forget the need to recruit black athletes to play on the BYU football team and the fact that BYU teams were subject to active protests by students at most of the other campuses they played in the late 60s and early 70s.

http://www.utlm.org/onlinebooks/curseofcain_part3.htm

Posted by Kent from Waco | December 13, 2007 4:29 PM

Stuff like this is why some of us want politics and religion kept apart. It's inevitable once the GOP started expecting all candidates to wear their faith on their sleeve that we'd end up with some dispute about what faith counted as 'good enough'. As a non-Christian, it irks me that I have to wade through discussions of consubstantiation, or puzzle over how Jesus could be both wholly divine and wholly human, whether the heresy is more bogomil or manichean, whatever that means, or whether a 'spirit brother' might be an importantly different concept than a 'brother'.

Personally, I wish we could skip all the debate that feels like one about whether Superman or the Flash would win a footrace, but since some fraction of the GOP base wants our President to take direction from the Justice League, I guess we're stuck.

Posted by biggerbox | December 13, 2007 4:39 PM

"We believe, as other Christians believe and as Paul wrote, that God is the father of all," said the spokeswoman, Kim Farah. "That means that all beings were created by God and are his spirit children. Christ, on the other hand, was the only begotten in the flesh and we worship him as the son of God and the savior of mankind. Satan is the exact opposite of who Christ is and what he stands for."

Speaking as a Mormon, it sounds to me like the target audience of the statement is other Christians, and basically she's saying "look, you believe the same thing we do; all of us are God's spirit children. Saying that Jesus and Satan are brothers isn't all that odd". That being said, it doesn't mean that they're equal, or can be reconciled, or that their kinship should change how we view their roles.

I don't know, though, if most Christians would agree with her characterization of what they believe. I don't think the issue is whether or not she contradicted herself. Rather, I think there is an issue with talking about what Christians believe without knowing for sure. I don't think an ordained minister like Huckabee would throw this out there if his own theology accepted the kinship of Christ and Satan as existing in any sense.

Posted by Node of Evil | December 13, 2007 5:04 PM

The Mormon Church has been growing steadily more savvy about how it presents itself. The current president of the Church spent his whole career doing public relations for it before becoming a General Authority (member of hierarchy, similar to being a cardinal, I guess). The Church recognizes that a lot of its beliefs about the nature of God are weird enough to turn off converts from other Christian traditions (e.g., that he's married, probably polygamously; that he was once a mortal man; that all of us and Jesus and Satan are his spiritual offspring (in an ill-defined, literal-but-mysteriously-so sense); that we, too have the chance to progress in knowledge and power to the point where we become gods and goddesses with our own creations). Mormons also like to see themselves as patriotic, upstanding citizens, the very embodiment of normal (think Osmonds). So some spin on the Jesus/Satan question from a Church spokesperson is to be expected.

Of course, the Jesus/Satan thing is definitely a staple of Evangelical anti-Mormon pamphleteering, and a non-spin answer to it is complicated and weird, so it's hard to blame the Mormons for trying to avoid the real theological issues here.

Posted by Bave Dee | December 13, 2007 5:26 PM

Despite all the "weird religious beliefs" being floated about, isn't the basic thing the following:

Judaism - main REVEALED books being (I'm not sure) the Old Testament, and the Torah.

Christianity - respects and acknowledges the main revelation of the Old Testament, but introduced a new revelation - the New Testament, and the Jesus as Son of God. So the Bible is the main source of revelations. This binds different types of christians together, despite the Catholic and Protestant different interpretations of the Bible, there is agreement that the main revelations IS the Bible.

Islam - respects and acknowledges the Bible's revelations as "words of God", but then accepts the Koran as the newest revelation of God. This is then an acknowledge source of God's word and world.

Mormonism - like Islam, acknowledges the Bible, but then accepts the Books of Mormon as a "newer" "superior" revelation of the word of God.

The problem here for most Christian believers is, the identity for the Christian is, the Bible is acknowledged as the source of revelation, and only that. That identifies Christians.

To accept a "new revelation" - the Books of Mormon - is to specifically mean, you aren't a Bible Christian. And really, not a Christian.

So for a Christian, it seems like an insult for a Mormon to call themselves, Christians, when by definition, they don't accept the Bible as authoritative.

Have your own religion, and it may be fine and dandy. But don't appropriate Christian's name for themselves.

Posted by JC | December 13, 2007 5:54 PM

For those confused about "blood atonement," this is the Mormon belief that a person needs to shed his or her blood to atone for certain sins -- most notably apostasy against the LDS church, "celestial marriage" covenenat-breakers, and interracial relations (as per Young -- see also the controversy over the murder of black LDS member Thomas Coleman in the 1800s).

Today, blood atonement is, like polygamy, still technically an active part of Mormon beliefs, but in abeyance until a divine theocracy (or "theodemocracy") with powers over life and death has been created.

Related is the Mormon Temple ceremony "oath of vengeance" that prayed for divine wrath against the "gentile" United States for the death of Joseph Smith, Jr. The oath was removed under Heber J. Grant's Presidency in 1927.

Posted by WatchfulBabbler | December 13, 2007 6:00 PM

""celestial marriage" covenant-breaking," that is.

Posted by WatchfulBabbler | December 13, 2007 6:04 PM

One thing to keep in mind is that for a lot of Mormons, it seems not that long ago that our farms were being burned, our women raped and our kids shot by the good citizens of Missouri and Illinois while the US and state governments turned a blind eye. Then they sent an army after us because our great grandpappies bothered to marry the multiple women they slept with (rather than our more "normal" Christian neighbors, who simply slept with many women without the hassle of marriage).

And to this day, there are neighborhoods where our kids aren't allowed to play with the other neighborhood kids, where we are being turned down for job offers, and where families are disinheriting their kids for converting. And then you've got wide wonderful internet, where it seems you can't even mention the word "Mormon" without some gem of a human being taking the time to unload with both barrels on how repulsive, weird, and deluded Mormons are.

So we tend to nurse a bit of a persecution complex. It gets set off when people start trying to paint us in ways that are exclusionary.

Posted by Seth R. | December 13, 2007 6:19 PM

And by the way, the "Jesus and Satan are brothers" angle is a very reliable old warhorse of an argument that Southern Baptists like to cart out about Mormons in the hopes their parishoners will be too weirded out to give those Mormon missionaries a hearing. It's in their standard anti-Mormon playbook.

Huckabee can act all innocent all he wants. He's a former minister. The guy knew exactly what he was saying and the theological implications behind it. He threw it out rather casual-like. But across the nation, thousands of Christian fundamentalists knew EXACTLY what he was talking about.

Message sent. Mission accomplished. That he apologized later means absolutely nothing.

Posted by Seth R. | December 13, 2007 6:30 PM

As for the theological implication of Huckabee's statement, this thread has been fascinating and I've even learned a few things about both Mormonism and Christianity in general. I want to thank most of you who have posted for staying away from the name calling that is too often a part of this kind of discussion. But as a couple of people have pointed out, Huckabee's comment wasn't really about theology. Huckabee was trying -- and probably succeeding, to a degree -- to use the marginalization of a minority group for his own gain.

Posted by Dan | December 13, 2007 6:48 PM

Is Lucifer a brother to Jesus? Is Lord Voldemort the illegitimate son of Albus Dumbledore? Is Darth Vader the father of Luke Skywalker? All good questions. All EQUALLY good questions.

The US has this much in common with Iran: neither nation is grown-up enough to elect an atheist president. At least the Iranians are not hypocrites about it.

-- TP

Posted by Tony P. | December 13, 2007 7:11 PM

As far as I know, the only "Protestant" denominations to reject the councils or Trinitarianism are very small sects like Pentecostals, Dominionists, Jehovah's Wintesses, Adventists and other small fundamentalist (and generally American) off-shoots.

gfw:

Pentecostalism has 20 million adherents in the US and 110 million worldwide. That's not a small sect or offshoot. That's a pretty significant slice of American and worldwide Christianity for you to declare non-Christian.

Jehovah's Witnesses-- 7 million members worldwide. That's not small.

Seventh-Day Adventists-- 15 million members worldwide. That's bigger than the LDS Church.

I don't think this is true, at least to my Catholic eyes, nor does it have any relevance as to whether Mormonism is heresy.

Really, gfw? Do you think the average poor Catholic in Bolivia has anything more than the faintest idea of how the Trinity is supposed to work?

And even among people who UNDERSTAND it, how many people really BELIEVE it? A lot fewer than who believe Jesus is the Son of God, I will tell you that.

Look, since you are a Catholic, I would just tell you to remember how many of your bretheren believe the Church's teachings on sexuality, contraception, and abortion are completely full of it. It's a pretty large number here in America. So don't start making claims about how people really buy the Nicene Creed. Come on. When you get past pretty basic beliefs, it's only the people who REALLY drank the Kool-Aid who are certain of these things.

I mean, they believe in an entirely new testament. It doesn't get any clearer than that. Debates over the Apocrypha are noting compared to trying to include a 19th Century testament by an American in the Canon.

Only to a theologian. I bet you that you will find many, many Catholics and Protestants who believe that revelation is ongoing, the God still reveals itself to believers, etc.

Again, there are a small percentage of true believers who really buy all the BS. To them, Mormons aren't Christians, but by their standards, very few people are.

And then there's the rest of Christian America. By their standards, Mormons are clearly Christians.

Posted by Dilan Esper | December 13, 2007 7:31 PM

Most Christians might not have a position on the precise nature of the Trinity, but they would agree that Jesus is wholly divine as well as wholly human. Mormons, as I understand, believe that Jesus was a created being. They also claim that Jesus Christ and the Father with whom he is consubstantial are corporeal beings who were once men and became gods. Most Christians would find this a diminution of the person of Jesus. It's also, of course, logically contradictory, since to imagine that God is corporeal violates the terms of the cosmological proof of the existence of God.

That paragraph is complete nonsense. There is no definition of "divine". There is no set of criteria for determining what is "divine" and what is "human". The concept of beings being "consubstantial" has never been observed and was made up by theologians. The "cosmological proof" of the existence of God is circular and doesn't prove anything. There is no "logic" to contradict when one is advancing claims of faith that are not supported by any emperical evidence.

But most importantly, most Christians have no idea about any of this stuff. Nor should they. The fact that theologians spend a lot of time debating complete and utter BS doesn't mean that the ordinary believer should waste their time with it.

Mormons believe in the divinity and resurrection of Jesus, and that he was the Savior.

Other Christian believers believe the same thing. The fact that their churches have theological arguments, i.e., arguments over phenomena that there is no evidence for, with the Mormon Church doesn't change that.

Mormonism is a particularly dangerous heterodoxy because it makes the claim appealing to a materialistic age, that God Himself was a material being. Perhaps this is why some liberals find Mormonism (and Islam too) so appealing in spite of their violently illiberal tenets.

If someone believes, or doesn't believe, that we can become Gods is of no import to me. It doesn't affect my life.

The dangerous people are the people who believe that God ordered that the Israelis occupy the West Bank, or that the only people who should ever have any sort of sexual contact are married opposite-sex couples who are attempting to conceive a child, or that people who hold offices allegedly ordained by God and maintained by apostolic succession should be immmune from prosecution for child sexual abuse.

Those people are dangerous. People who think they will become Gods, not so much.

Posted by Dilan Esper | December 13, 2007 7:42 PM

We have no particular reason to believe that Jesus lived anything less than a perfect life.

Talk about shifting the burden of proof! Since everyone who ever walked the earth made mistakes and did stupid and evil things, it seems to me that it is the burden of religious Christians to prove that Jesus didn't, rather than telling us that there's no evidence either way!

Posted by Dilan Esper | December 13, 2007 7:44 PM

Christianity - respects and acknowledges the main revelation of the Old Testament, but introduced a new revelation - the New Testament, and the Jesus as Son of God. So the Bible is the main source of revelations. This binds different types of christians together, despite the Catholic and Protestant different interpretations of the Bible, there is agreement that the main revelations IS the Bible.

Except that Christians don't even agree on what books are part of the New Testament.

Posted by Dilan Esper | December 13, 2007 7:53 PM

The kind of Manichaeism is considered heretical by most Christians. Mainstream Christianity considers Jesus to be fully human and fully divine, not simply the Son of God but also, in trinitarian terms, God the Son (incarnate). Lucifer is a mere fallen angel, a "created" being like humans or llamas. God the Son is co-eternal with the other components of the Trinity, God the Father and God the Holy Spirit.

It all sounds crazy to non believers, but centuries of theological discussions and arguments have centered around these questions.

Posted by adrian | December 13, 2007 8:01 PM

Other Christian believers believe the same thing. The fact that their churches have theological arguments, i.e., arguments over phenomena that there is no evidence for, with the Mormon Church doesn't change that.

Dilan: "Other Christians" don't believe an anti-American pedophile was shown gold tablets by an angel purportedly giving evidence of a pre-Coloumban Christian tribe. "Other Christians" don't believe in the existence of multiple gods. "Other Christians" don't believe a New Jerusalem will be established in the western hemisphere. Their beliefs really are so outside the bounds of what Christians believe to be "Christianity" that it seems pedantic to insist they're wrong in claiming Mormons don't pass muster, theologically. I mean, most Jews would aver that "Jews for Jesus" aren't practicing the religion called Judaism. Who are gentiles to argue with them? Anyway, even if to you Mormonism is a form of Christianity, it isn't a form of Christianity to the vast majority of Christian theologians. Who cares what ordinary Christians think? They're not the ones who establish what is orthodox and what is not. Every faith has guardians of doctrinal purity. Christianity is no exception.

Posted by Ruffles | December 13, 2007 8:04 PM

To those of you who think that having a seminary-level theological debate will move you anywhere near an understanding of why Mormons are not considered Christians by ordinary American Protestants, Catholics, and atheists, you have a seriously deficient understanding of xenophobia.

You may as well read the Qu'ran, read the Bible, and then try to extrapolate from the contents of both the theological reasons why white, fundamentalist Christian Americans hate and distrust 21st century Muslims, even American Muslims.

Also, please read Edward Said's "Orientalism" for the pitfalls of representation of the other by the dominant. In other words, if instead of blindly striking out at the origins of Christianity and canon formation and referencing obscure doctrines that play no role in the lives of either ordinary mainstream Christians or ordinary Mormons, you instead asked some real Mormons why they would prefer to be shielded from the vitriol and detestation of the rest of society by being normalized as Christians, you would, in an instant, be light years ahead of every armchair theologian in this thread.

Posted by StJoe | December 13, 2007 8:50 PM

Who cares what ordinary Christians think?

We care what ordinary Christians think because we are discussing a coded political remark made by an evangelical designed to mobilize ordinary Christians against a candidate who is a member of a marginalized religion (a religion whose adherents nevertheless predominate an entire American state). Huckabee wasn't publishing a theological article calling for clarification of the status of Mormons. He wasn't mobilizing the seminary. He was mobilizing hatred for political ends. In a society that styles itself as tolerant, people should be called out on such acts.

Posted by StJoe | December 13, 2007 9:09 PM

Theology is the only recourse left to the intellect when science has been rejected.

Posted by gerontion | December 13, 2007 9:13 PM

Dilan,

I would agree that Mormons are Christians. They are extremely heterodox Christians who hold (or historically have held) beliefs that I hold to be false, absurd, and pernicious. Heterodox Christians, but Christians nonetheless. That doesn't stop me from believing that their kind of heterodoxy is extremely repellent to me.

Dilan, theology is a legitimate discipline. It has its axioms just like mathematics has its. The fact that you appear to be lacking any higher spiritual faculties and therefore can't understand the substance of theological debate, has no more relevance than someone who is weak on arithmetic complaining that he can't understand when someone integrates a hyperbolic function, and claims that 'it's all bs'. If you can't understand, then I'm sorry for you, but there's no need for the rest of us to dumb down our theological debates for your comfort.

That said, the cosmological proof makes the (to me)inarguable point that the material universe, since it had a beginning, must have had a non-material cause. You can debate what that nonmaterial cause may have been. But it doesn't make sense to claim that God Himself is material, because that leads to the problem of infinite regress- if God is material, then what created God.

Dilan, as for the point that Jesus "was tempted as we are in every way, but did not sin" there are many independent accounts of the life of Jesus, four canonical ones and many apocryphal ones. Not one of them shows him doing anything that we today would consider a sin. This is in contrast to Muhammed or Joseph Smith, the accounts of whose lives show them sinning abundantly. It is even hard to imagine Jesus sinning, given the picture of him that we are given by both the canonical and apocryphal gospels. The point I am trying to make is that the figure of Jesus we are given is different in kind from that of Muhammed or Joseph Smith. As Dostoyevsky said, "In all the literature of the world there is only one figure of perfect beauty, Christ. That perfect beauty is in itself a perfect miracle."

And actually, Dilan, there is lots of evidence of the fact that Jesus Christ was the son of God, most importantly the mystical experiences of myriad men and women over the last two thousand years.

Posted by Hector | December 13, 2007 9:21 PM

St. Joe,

You appear to be so open minded your brains have fallen out. In the name of tolerance, you would have us act as though every religious claim deserves equal respect and that we can't take any of them more seriously than any others. On the contrary, anyone who takes his religion seriously OUGHT to feel that it is better and truer than any other. I would be much more disturbed by someone who said "Mormons, Christians, what's the difference".

To despise and feel contempt towards a loathsome charlatan like Joseph Smith is not a bad thing. The reason that Mormonism has been historically marginalized is because it is an absurd sect that diminishes the person of Jesus Christ and makes ridiculous claims about God being material.

Posted by Hector | December 13, 2007 9:28 PM

Jesus was a loathsome charlatan, the king of outrageous and impossible claims. The idea that Joseph Smith deserves more umbrage than the so called "son of god" is absurd.

Posted by gerontion | December 13, 2007 9:48 PM

Pentecostalism has 20 million adherents in the US and 110 million worldwide. That's not a small sect or offshoot. That's a pretty significant slice of American and worldwide Christianity for you to declare non-Christian.

Even if I were to accept the wildly inflated numbers that you've pulled off of Wikipedia, they would only account for about 1 tenth of 1 percent of Christians world-wide. I would still call them Christian, however, because they don't believe in Joseph Smith, and their debate is with the Canon and Tradition, not an attempt to add onto the Canon and Tradition.

I would just say that I do think Huckabee was using coded language to appeal to xenophobic tendencies in the evangelical community. I just also happen to think that Mormonism isn't Christianity. I would rather that religion wasn't a part of politics at all.

average poor Catholic in Bolivia has anything more than the faintest idea of how the Trinity is supposed to work

Actually, yes.

And then there's the rest of Christian America. By their standards, Mormons are clearly Christians.

Actually, I don't think that's right, but I'd have to look into it further. Rather, I'm objecting on theological and semantic grounds. (I like calling a spade a spade.)

Posted by gfw | December 13, 2007 9:58 PM

Hector, on the contrary, I think that most religious claims deserve equal disrespect. You cite the same evidence of "mystical experiences of men and women" that Mormons cite in their personal testimonies of Christ. Yet, I do not go so far as you in saying that persons holding absurd beliefs deserve to be marginalized. Of course I reject Mormon doctrine, but I find modern-day Mormons to be sincere and decent, and that's what motivates me to reject their marginalization.

Posted by StJoe | December 13, 2007 10:04 PM

"Dilan, as for the point that Jesus "was tempted as we are in every way, but did not sin" there are many independent accounts of the life of Jesus, four canonical ones and many apocryphal ones. Not one of them shows him doing anything that we today would consider a sin."

Do tell. At least one apocryphal work contains the tale of a young Jesus killing a playmate essentially simply to prove that he could. Of course, counting the Gospels (especially the synoptics) as "independent accounts" reveals the basic intellectual dishonesty in your argument.

Posted by jjcomet | December 13, 2007 11:34 PM

gfw - As far as I know, the only "Protestant" denominations to reject the councils or Trinitarianism are very small sects like Pentecostals, Dominionists, Jehovah's Wintesses, Adventists and other small fundamentalist (and generally American) off-shoots.

Add Unitarians and Deists (kinda irrelevant as a religion today but VERY relevant to past Presidents).
Ironically, much of this talk of Christian purity and forced discussion of religion by candidates to "heighten voter consciousness" - is being shaped by Leftist Jewish media people in an effort to define and frame the 2008 Battlefield.
Republicans = Kooky theocrats. Terri Schiavo! Mitt is a heretic. Huckabee a stereotypical stupid white Southerner out to force his beliefs and agenda down other people's throats like he was a legitimate gay activist or something. Giuliani is evil scum that was a bane to us media masters of the universe!

The manipulation is a good one, tactically. Steer the Reps away from substantive issues into doctrinal matters of private faith and from Manhattan and LA. Seek to cast it as a debate that has a legitimate place in American politics. Unlike other non-Christian candidates given a complete pass on private faith - Lieberman, Bloomberg, Wellstone, Feingold, and Muslim Ellison who bring "laudable diversity" - the main issue should be "Is a Mormon Acceptable????"

This is a disgusting example of how America has retrograded on matters of religion. Meaning the agenda-advancing aggressive Jewish-run segments of the media, the militant anti-Christian gays and secular humanists, hostile ACLU types. Plus the Religious Right. In 1976, Mo Udall battled Jimmy Carter with scant mention of that liberal Democrat's Mormonhood. Romney's Dad ran in 1968 as a business success and a two term governor of a non-Mormon state that did not bash him on religion, nor did the media seek to drag him into a confrontation. In 1960, we had the famous Kennedy issue with Catholicism.

But before that, in 1952, Eisenhower, a Jehovah Witness of quiet participation was sworn in with his mother's Watch Tower Bible. Then decided he liked a nearby Episcopal church and switched. History shows that there was no real discussion of Ike's quirky religion when he was Supreme Allied Commander of 20+ million military in Europe. Or President.

For all my adult life that started under Reagan's days - I believed that if someone was a Jew, a Catholic, an atheist, an evangelical Southerner running for office - their faith was their own business.

Now we have regressed, and I think it sucks.

======================
Pentecostalism has 20 million adherents in the US and 110 million worldwide. That's not a small sect or offshoot. That's a pretty significant slice of American and worldwide Christianity for you to declare non-Christian.

gfw - Even if I were to accept the wildly inflated numbers that you've pulled off of Wikipedia, they would only account for about 1 tenth of 1 percent of Christians world-wide.

Your math is really bad. Take the time to do the calculations on 110 million of 2.2 million Christians and get back to us.

Posted by Chris Ford | December 13, 2007 11:48 PM

Oh, do fuck off, Ford, and take your namesake's anti-semitism with you.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | December 14, 2007 1:38 AM

"Who put the bomp
In the bomp bah bomp bah bomp?
Who put the ram
In the rama lama ding dong?

Makes as much sense as the rest of this nonsense.

Posted by BlueStreak"

I'm with BlueStreak on this one.

Who was that man
I'd like to shake his hand

Posted by cal1942 | December 14, 2007 1:40 AM

Take the time to do the calculations on 110 million of 2.2 million [sic] Christians and get back to us.

You're right, that should be 5 percent. Last time I use my calculator widget. Only goes up to hundred millions; thought I had shaved off the correct number of zeros.

Still not sure that qualifies as mainstream. And not sure I understand the rest of your comment. As far as I know, Ike and the others never put their faith at the center of their campaigns... Not so with today's religious right. No one is saying there should be religious tests for higher office. I'd rather no one talked about religion. We're just having a discussion about the definition of the phrase "Christian Church." As for the anti-semitic stuff: screw you.

Posted by gfw | December 14, 2007 3:17 AM

"Those people are dangerous. People who think they will become Gods, not so much."

Heh, heh, we Transhumans will prove you wrong on that one.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 14, 2007 6:59 AM

Wow, all of these comments and only one of you know that the 'Lucifer' referred to in the bible was an earthly king and not a fallen angel. Biblically, 'Satan' and 'Lucifer' aren't even the same entity. Given modern biblical scholarship, there is just no way to reconcile the belief that they are the same entity with what is actually written in the bible. Given that the majority if Christians in this nation, and the majority in this thread, believe that they are the same entity, then a majority of Americans are wrong about a significant matter of theology. Does that mean they aren't really Christian?

There is only one real requirement to be a Christian. That would be believing in the divinity of Jesus. That's it. There is no requirement that they be trinitarian, or that they accept him as both wholly human and wholly divine. Last time I checked, Jesus didn't say 'The only way to the father is through me, provided you acknowledge the holy spirit and accept that I am both divinely born and completely like human.'

Posted by Soullite | December 14, 2007 9:13 AM

Soulite is absolutely correct. The self-named 13th Apostle, Paul, was the one who said you had to believe in Jesus as your savior.

Further, people are throwing about the Trinity like it is a basic principle of all Christians and it isn't. The Eastern Church split from the Western Church after the death of Constantine because the Eastern Church believes the Trinity represents three separate manifestations of God. They say the Apostles Creed during worship. Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans all say the Nicene Creed which was written at Constantine's orders to avoid a split in the Church and a schism that was dividing Rome at the time. The Nicene Creed clearly dictates the belief the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one and the same. Mormons do not believe the three are the same but separate.

Evangelicals hate the Catholic Church but follow all of its basic theology and observances with exception of their views on the Pope and what it means to BE a Christian (to them, baptizing a baby is weird because infants cannot willingly accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior). They even use the same Bible for crying out loud. The term "we are all God's children" doesn't apply when it comes to Jesus being my brother or your brother because Jesus is the Son of God and you and I are fleshy, disgusting hedonists who can't possibly have any divine lineage. So is the belief with Jesus and Satan. God is the Alpha and the Omega and is responsible for creating Satan but Satan cannot possibly be cut from the same cloth as Jesus or be considered a "child" of God. The Mormon's belief that Jesus and Satan are Spiritual brothers falls right in line with their basic views on who Jesus was and they shouldn't hide this. A Romney run at the White House was the worst possible thing for the LDS Church, IMHO.

Posted by Derek | December 14, 2007 10:49 AM

Channeling my inner PZ Myers for a moment.

Does anyone else find this whole teacup tempest preposterous?

Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny are siblings; offspring of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. One of them lurks under the spreading branches of Yggdrasill while the others charge about annually on invisible pink unicorns.

I read all of that in books. Books written before I was born. So it must be true.

Posted by Paul G. Brown | December 14, 2007 12:49 PM

I'm confused. Why would anyone think Jesus and Lucifer are brothers? Lucifer, as mentioned in the bible, is the King of Babylon and not Satan, the devil etc. The only place in the bible the name Lucifer is mentioned is in the book of Isaiah 14: 11-13. The name was attributed to the devil character early in church history due to the passage alone taken out of context. The name Lucifer appears in Greek mythology as the name given to the planet Venus which is also known as The Morning Star or Morning Sun (misread as Son). The mistake continues to be passed down mostly by preachers who wouldn't know the truth if it kicked them in the ass and by Sunday School teachers are are barely qualified to teach shoelace tying much less theology. As for Jesus and Satan being brothers, probably not. Maybe half brothers as God has a penchant for raping mortal women and impregnating them with his holy seed.

Posted by S. Bennett | December 14, 2007 2:05 PM

Anyway, even if to you Mormonism is a form of Christianity, it isn't a form of Christianity to the vast majority of Christian theologians. Who cares what ordinary Christians think?

I do. Because they are only a few thousand theologians, and there are millions of believers. If only the few thousand theologians who actually buy all the BS are Christians, then it is a tiny minority religion and we should treat it as one ignore them and abolish all the special privileges they get in law and culture.

Theologians don't matter. Believers do.

Posted by Dilan Esper | December 14, 2007 2:06 PM

Dilan, theology is a legitimate discipline. It has its axioms just like mathematics has its.

Mathematical axioms, such as that A always equals itself, are consistent with emperical observation.

Theological axioms are simply conjured up by people who desperately want to believe in something that there is no evidence for. They are a bit different.

Theology is, in some sense, a legitimate discipline, because it is perfectly appropriate to think about what God must be like, if she exists.

But theology attached to particular religious hierarchies is bunk, because there's no reason to believe that if God does exist, she is anything like the speculations of ignorant people hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Posted by Dilan Esper | December 14, 2007 2:10 PM

That said, the cosmological proof makes the (to me)inarguable point that the material universe, since it had a beginning, must have had a non-material cause. You can debate what that nonmaterial cause may have been. But it doesn't make sense to claim that God Himself is material, because that leads to the problem of infinite regress- if God is material, then what created God.

There's all sorts of problems with the cosmological argument. First of all, even an immaterial substance would itself need a creator, right? Further, there are all sorts of ways that a finite, mortal, material being could be involved in the creation of the universe. For instance, somebody in a prior universe might have set off the big bang. Or there may have been no end and no beginning to time, and the big bang was a result of an endless cycle of big bangs and big crunches. Or perhaps, there was a finite, mortal, and material being in a parallel universe with enough power to start ours.

The point is, the cosmological argument doesn't get you anywhere. It certainly doesn't get you to the proposition that whatever started the universe had to be an omnipotent nonmaterial being, much less the vengeful, petty Judeo-Christian God of the scriptures.

Dilan, as for the point that Jesus "was tempted as we are in every way, but did not sin" there are many independent accounts of the life of Jesus, four canonical ones and many apocryphal ones.

Yeah, and those four canonical gospels make fantastic claims about Jesus. Books that claim people rose from the dead aren't credible.

We don't have any accounts from any OBJECTIVE contemporaneous biographers of Jesus, or any OBJECTIVE historians writing soon after the fact. All we have is accounts by people who drank the Kool-Aid. They are no more credible than the witnesses who saw Joseph Smith translating the Book of Mormon; indeed, they are probably less credible, because at least those people talked to the press.

Posted by Dilan Esper | December 14, 2007 2:20 PM

Even if I were to accept the wildly inflated numbers that you've pulled off of Wikipedia, they would only account for about 1 tenth of 1 percent of Christians world-wide.

1. Do your math. If 11 million is 1/10 of one percent of all Christians, then there are 11 billion Christians. Unfortunately, there are only 6 billion or so humans, so that's not right.

2. I have spent a fair amount of time in Latin America. Pentecostalism has caught like wildfire down there, with Assemblies of God popping up everywhere. I wouldn't assume if I were you that those numbers are incorrect.

Posted by Dilan Esper | December 14, 2007 2:23 PM

I followed this thread - posted too - because it was fun. A lot of solid thinking went into most of the posts.

Here is an observation I haven't seen on the web before: the controversy over the intent of Gov Huckabee's lightly veiled attack on Mormon theology actually demonstrates the basic tolerance of Americans.

When I was a boy, JF Kennedy had to give a speech explaining that it was OK to elect the first catholic president in the US.

Current presidential aspirants include a woman, a black man, a catholic, a mormon, and a baptist preacher. Every one of these candidates would have been impossible 60 years ago.

Posted by bob up north | December 14, 2007 4:11 PM

Dilan,

Don't you see that youre conclusions are not convincing to anyone who doesn't share your presuppositions. The Gospels are only 'unconvincing' 'incredible' etc. if you ASSUME starting out that miracles cannot occur. I don't find it incredible at all that Our Lord rose from the dead. God is not bound by physical laws. It was through His power that heaven and earth were made. He can suspend those laws whenever He pleases. I don't believe that miracles happen often, and in any given case I would probably look for another explanation, but in this case there is no other credible explanation. The Gospels do not read like works of fiction, they read like works of fact. I accept it as historical fact that Our Lord was born of a virgin, performed miracles, and rose from the dead on Easter Sunday.

I find the Muslim creed notoriously unconvincing in part because there are no miracles in its holy scripture. I find it hard to believe that a God would not perform miracles. A God who would not perform miracles is a God unworthy of the name. If Muhammed was such a great man, how come he couldn't rise from the dead?

Your criticisms of the cosmological proof are worthless. An immaterial intelligence needs no explanation; good and evil need no explanation; matter and energy, however, do. Our experience in this world shows us that material events do not happen without a cause and that matter and energy had a definite origin in the Big Bang. Which forces us to suppose that they must have had a cause, and that cause is by definition one outside the material universe.

I believe in God for the same reason that I believe in imaginary numbers. I can't prove to you that the square root of minus 1 exists. I can't see it or touch it or even conceive of it. But I know that the square root of -1 exists, without doubt, because only by assuming that it exists can we explain aspects of the real world.

Dilan, how do you explain St. Joan or Arc, who saw God? Was she insane, or lying, or was she truly a messenger of some Divine or Diabolic power? These are the four alternatives, there are no others. Go ahead, I want to hear what explanation you have of the visions of St. Joan or Arc, before I blow it out of the water. The visions of St. Joan of Arc are one of the many things that the agnostics can't explain.

Posted by Hector | December 14, 2007 5:10 PM

Don't you see that youre conclusions are not convincing to anyone who doesn't share your presuppositions. The Gospels are only 'unconvincing' 'incredible' etc. if you ASSUME starting out that miracles cannot occur. I don't find it incredible at all that Our Lord rose from the dead. God is not bound by physical laws.

Hector, in a sense you are correct. My conclusions are not convincing to people who are fervently convinced that things that completely contradict emperical reality actually happened.

In another sense, though, you are not correct. I think, actually, a lot of people who believe in the core tenets of Christianity, i.e., not the Nicene Creed, but the belief that Jesus was the Son of God and was resurrected, can nonetheless concede that there is no reason to believe that the Gospels, written years later and second- and third- and tenth-hand and contradictory of each other, and written before any standards of historical research and biography had been agreed upon, are particularly credible sources about the life of Jesus.

The Gospels do not read like works of fiction, they read like works of fact.

This is a purely aesthetic matter, I guess, but to me, they don't read like works of fact. They read like fantasy literature. The Gospels-- and in fact, the entire Christian scripture-- are a lot closer in my mind to "The Lord Of the Rings" than they are to "The Life of Samuel Johnson". But, you know, perhaps that's why I'm an agnostic.

I find the Muslim creed notoriously unconvincing in part because there are no miracles in its holy scripture. I find it hard to believe that a God would not perform miracles. A God who would not perform miracles is a God unworthy of the name. If Muhammed was such a great man, how come he couldn't rise from the dead?

This is a very strange criticism of a religion that holds that in the third holiest place in the world, the Prophet rode to Heaven on his steed.

In any event, since "miracles" (in the sense of events that cannot be explained through scientific hypothesis, not simply events we haven't yet explained) don't actually happen, I would take the absence of them in a religion to be a factor that would make that religion MORE likely, not less likely, to be correct. Indeed, what gets religions in trouble is when observed reality tends to contradict them-- and that is true whether we are talking about Mormonism, other forms of Christianity, or Judaism. In every case, crucial parts of the allegedly inerrant scripture have turned out to be in error.

Your criticisms of the cosmological proof are worthless. An immaterial intelligence needs no explanation; good and evil need no explanation; matter and energy, however, do.

OK, so something that has never been observed and which contradicts the laws of nature as we understand them (i.e., intelligence without material substance) "needs no explanation", and matter and energy, things we observe every day with our own senses, do?!? Hector, people like you are the reason we had an Enlightenment. I refute Berkeley thus!

Our experience in this world shows us that material events do not happen without a cause and that matter and energy had a definite origin in the Big Bang. Which forces us to suppose that they must have had a cause, and that cause is by definition one outside the material universe.

Even if that were conceded (and it doesn't have to be-- the big bang could have been proceeded and caused by a prior big crunch, after all), you assume only one universe. Quantum mechanics and wormhole theories tell us there can be multiple universes. And even if we exclude those potential causes, it doesn't get you to God, because you know NOTHING of this alleged "cause" and there's no reason to speculate that it is intelligent, immaterial, infinite, omnipotent, immortal, good, etc. At best, your argument gets you to a very formal sort of Deism that is completely rejected by the Christian Bible.

believe in God for the same reason that I believe in imaginary numbers. I can't prove to you that the square root of minus 1 exists. I can't see it or touch it or even conceive of it. But I know that the square root of -1 exists, without doubt, because only by assuming that it exists can we explain aspects of the real world.

2 points. First, I am not sure that is right. The square root of minus one "exists" in the sense that it can be defined as an axiom (as "i") and one can do calculations using it. But that doesn't mean that we need "i" to explain aspects of the real world. As far as I know, we don't.

Second, though, we CERTAINLY do not need religion to explain ANYTHING (except, perhaps, a formal sort of incohate Deism to explain a first cause if you wish it to). Indeed, the ENTIRE HISTORY of organized religion is that it GETS EVERYTHING WRONG. It keeps on getting used to explain things, from why there are stars in the sky to how the earth was populated to why there are floods to why particular societies win wars to how old the universe and the earth are to why there are echoes in canyons. And every single explanation it ever offered turned out to be WRONG. Why? Because it was all made up thousands of years ago by ignorant people who had no idea that science would eventually be able to detect the actual answers!

So, you can't compare organized religion to mathematical axioms. A better comparison might be to discarded scientific theories like alchemy and the theory of the four humours. Just like with organized religion, people many generations ago came up with explanations that made sense in their ignorant minds to explain things that they observed. Then science came along and we were able to find out that these explanations weren't true.

The difference is, because nobody thinks alchemy will make them immortal, nobody believes in alchemy anymore. Organized religion, thanks to Pascal's wager, has more staying power.

Dilan, how do you explain St. Joan or Arc, who saw God? Was she insane, or lying, or was she truly a messenger of some Divine or Diabolic power? These are the four alternatives, there are no others. Go ahead, I want to hear what explanation you have of the visions of St. Joan or Arc, before I blow it out of the water. The visions of St. Joan of Arc are one of the many things that the agnostics can't explain.

Hector, thousands of Americans report UFO's or ghosts or angels every year. We have even discovered substances (called "hallucinogens") that activate portions of our brains that trigger people to see things that aren't there.

I don't take somebody's report that they saw God-- whether it was Joan of Arc or Joseph Smith-- as any proof of the existence of God than I take somebody's statement that they saw a UFO as proof of the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life.

Indeed, in every religious tradition you reject there are people who report similar visions of Gods you don't believe in, Hector. You only take those visions as "proof" that confirm things you already believe. Everyone else, you accept, is hallucinating. Well, so are the Christians.

Posted by Dilan Esper | December 14, 2007 9:33 PM

Re: there is no reason to believe that the Gospels, written years later and second- and third- and tenth-hand and contradictory of each other, and written before any standards of historical research and biography had been agreed upon, are particularly credible sources about the life of Jesus.

The Gospels are at most second hand accounts, written based on the notes of people that knew Our Lord personally. Anyway, it doesn't matter. People back then had more of a head for memory and for accurate oral transmission of information than modern people like you whose oral memory skills have been spoiled by books, TV, radio, etc.

Re: This is a purely aesthetic matter, I guess, but to me, they don't read like works of fact. They read like fantasy literature. The Gospels-- and in fact, the entire Christian scripture-- are a lot closer in my mind to "The Lord Of the Rings" than they are to "The Life of Samuel Johnson". But, you know, perhaps that's why I'm an agnostic.

Haha. Really. So then what was the point of including irrelevant little details like the fact that Our Lord died at three o'clock in the afternoon, the name of the governor of Syria at the time of His birth, the exact details of every town he visited, the fact that at one point he bent down and wrote in the dust with his finger. These add nothing to the story and wouldn't make sense for a fiction writer to include.

Re: In any event, since "miracles" (in the sense of events that cannot be explained through scientific hypothesis, not simply events we haven't yet explained) don't actually happen

Don't you see that you are ASSUMING that without any reason. I don't share your assumption. I believe that miracles do happen and in particular that miracles did happen with great frequency during the life of Our Lord, beginning with His birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Re: Hector, people like you are the reason we had an Enlightenment. I refute Berkeley thus!

And your Enlightenment brought us capitalism, Bolshevism, Nazism, slavery, colonialism, the destruction of the environment, abortion, and the gradual erosion of all sense of meaning in life.

Re: 2 points. First, I am not sure that is right. The square root of minus one "exists" in the sense that it can be defined as an axiom (as "i") and one can do calculations using it. But that doesn't mean that we need "i" to explain aspects of the real world. As far as I know, we don't.

Yes, we do. At the simplest level, we use imaginary numbers to solve cubic equations or to describe overdamped harmonic motion (think of a pendulum swinging through some dense medium like molasses). You can't solve either of those types of equation without using imaginary numbers. At a slightly higher level, you need imaginary numbers to explain basic equations in quantum physics and electromagnetism.

Re: I don't take somebody's report that they saw God-- whether it was Joan of Arc or Joseph Smith-- as any proof of the existence of God than I take somebody's statement that they saw a UFO as proof of the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life.

OK, so you have no explanation. Good. Because psychiatrists have analyzed St. Joan and concluded that she matches none of the clinical symptoms of schizophrenia, nor of hallucinations, and she probably lacked the psychological sophistication to lie. They have no explanation for the visions of St. Joan, one of the many things they can't explain. (actually, I wonder whether psychiatry can explain anything much.) But I have an explanation. I believe that if you have reason to believe that a witness is neither lying nor insane, at least some prima facie credence should be given to what they say. So let's hear it, Dilan. What's your explanation of the visions of St. Joan?

Posted by Hector | December 15, 2007 9:10 AM

Jesus and Lucifer, Sitting in a Tree

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