So, MormonsFollow

I don't think most Nicene churches view the Mormon church as being siblings (at least not any more than in some universal "we're all humans" sense).

I was referring to:

Why? A view should be liked or disliked based on the view itself, not where it comes from. A person can hold just as many dangerous and illogical views as a result of non-religious ideological alignment as he can from religious ones. I just don't understand the reasoning you're using here.



Sure.



You're making the mistake of assuming that something is either religious dogma or "facts". There's a whole range in the middle, right? I have no more reason to accept a politician saying that he's not going to support a military action because his faith precludes violence than I do for a politician doing the same thing because he's adopted an ideology which simply states that "violence never solved anything". Both are capable of equally irrational and illogical decisions.




No, there really isn't. I know that you want desperately for this to be true, but I've seen no evidence to show me that non-religious ideologies produce any better results, or are any less likely to be based on irrational premises and flawed logic than religious ones.

If you're faithful to a religion it goes without saying that it dictates your decision making.

I don't know anything about the Mormoms v Christians issue except the small bit that may make mainstream political banter. But from what I've heard, it sounds like the Mormon's don't have any much of a problem living congenially with Christians but some types of Christians have real heartburn with Mormons.

I keep meaning to start a cult, but all the really good cultee demographics are already taken.

Join the pro wombat, anti spider cult. We have Cookies!

Whatever you do, don't drink the Kaolaid.

That's been more or less my experience as well. Every Mormon I've ever met has been awesomely nice. I think their religion is a load of hooey, but my experiences with their believers have been consistently very positive.

I agree 100%. You do realize that's not what I said, right? I said nothing about liking the conclusion. I said that you we should judge a viewpoint/opinion/whatever on its own merits and *not* the source it comes from.



Absolutely. That's what I said. What you said is that those which come from religion should automatically be viewed as invalid (or less valid) than those which don't. Do you see how you are violating the very methodology you claim to support? A religious person might believe that it's wrong to steal because it's a sin, but that doesn't mean that his opinion about stealing is wrong. At least not from a social policy perspective, which is what we care about here.

Where we go off the rails is assuming that because someone's opinion is based on their faith, or just expressed within the context of faith, or even just that the person has some religious faith, that their opinion must be wrong (or at least judged more harshly than otherwise). That's essentially what you argued before.



Ok. But that's not what you said before. Also, I'd modify that to "and if there are no compelling non-religious arguments...". It's not so important that the person in front of me can or will provide them, but whether they exist on their own. Which ties back to the whole "judge the argument/viewpoint/whatever on its own merits and not its source" bit I started with.




My concern with our elected officials is about what policies they're going to enact once in office. That's it. I guess my issue here is that I see far more negative reaction to the assumptions about what "religious people" will do once in office than ever actually happens. At some point, it becomes apparent that it's about making people afraid of some assumed actions someone might do because of their religion. But it's funny that those things seem to never actually happen. Some of us remember the wild claims about Bush and his evangelical background and how this meant he was going to push for prayer in school, teaching creationism as science, and a host of other things. Amazingly, not only did those things not happen, I don't recall the GOP even putting anything remotely similar on the table.

I've just seen this particular brand of fearmongering used a hell of a lot in my lifetime. It's not really about the religion. It's about the party, and religion is a convenient method to use to get people to fear a party and not vote for them.



No. That's not what you said at all. You directly contrasted religious ideas to "fact based" ones in a manner which strongly suggested that they could be only one or the other.



Um... Ok. But you're failing to allow for the fact that for many people, expressing things in religious context is just a way of speaking. A great example of this was the amount of hay made on the left by Bush's comment that he "spoke to God and asked for guidance". It's a figure of speech. Call it soul searching, thinking through a problem, whatever. But the left took that as him thinking he was literally talking to God and god told him to invade Iraq (or whatever) and made a huge deal out of it.


It's just as wrong to dismiss ideas simply because they are presented to you within a religious context, or using religious language, as it is to assume that something must be right because it's what your religious beliefs tell you is right. As I said before, we should judge things based on what they are, not who says them, and not how they say them, or why they say them.



Assuming you meant "I never said a religious viewpoint can't be true", that's a straw man response. I didn't say you said that. I said that "both are capable of equally irrational and illogical decisions". That has nothing with whether one or the other "can't be true". It has to do with the fact that both can be irrational and illogical. I've seen lots of hard core atheists present arguments that are chock full of fallacies, flaws, and emotional silliness.

Most religious people are quite capable of separating those ideas based on pure faith and those which have grounds in good policy and social theory. It's interesting that it's usually the hard core secularists who have a hard time with this.



But its presence does not affect whether those requirements are present either. Your earlier claim seemed to be that because a decision was based on someone's faith (or just appeared to be, which IMO is more often the case), it must be less logically provable. I'll point out again that just because someone has a religious reason for holding a position does not mean that the position is wrong, or that it does not have a host of non-religious arguments in support of it.



That's not the point though. Because "sin" is an inherently religious concept. The correct question is whether there are good non-religious reasons why sex before marriage might be something a society might want to discourage. And sure enough, there are a large number of reasons having nothing to do with religion. Dismissing it just because someone says "Pre-marital sex is a sin!" is going to lead you to a mistaken conclusion.

Edited, Jul 16th 2011 3:16am by gbaji

For clarity to an earlier question:

Fundies hate the Catholics because they are seen as idolaters (all those statues/praying to saints for intercession).
Fundies hate the Mormons because they are seen as heretics (adding books to the Word when the Word is "complete and unchangeable").



Perhaps my memory is fuzzy on this, but din't the LDS church exhort their members to financially support the "anti-gay-marriage" ballot thingie in California? Maybe that social policy?

Statement of principles to support the black community: CRAZY INSANE DANGEROUS!!!
Holy vow before God and the angels that everything you own, do or have belongs fully to growing the church: Eh, that's just some meaningless generic statement...


Yeah. No reason to take you seriously at all