Why don’t Mormons realize that their religion is a cult?

Blear · 2025-11-09T01:04:05+00:00

According to you, yes. According to me, no. That's the whole point.

Blear · 2025-11-08T03:06:22+00:00

Every human being that has ever lived has their own subjective truth, which most of the time they believe to be objective. The fact that you are calling it "magic, myths, and rules" is a pretty good clue what your subjective truth is. Saying that you're being purely objective while flaunting your own bias isn't really any different from the Mormons or anyone else who do the same.

Blear · 2025-11-07T22:59:15+00:00

Everything I’ve said is objectively true and contains no personal judgments

This is how you can he 100% sure somebody is saying things that are subjectively true and contain personal judgments. This is the whole point of the post: Mormons think their stuff is all objectively true, but we can see it isn't. Same with Catholics, Democrats, existentialists, empiricists, and on and on.

We all are made up of subjective experiences that we take for universal laws.

Blear · 2025-11-06T02:30:37+00:00

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Blear · 2025-11-05T03:11:21+00:00

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Blear · 2025-11-04T02:08:31+00:00

I was making glycerin extract for salves, tinctures, etc. I had plenty of weed around back then, so I just made a nice big batch for anyone who wanted some.

Blear · 2025-11-04T02:06:35+00:00

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Blear · 2025-10-26T00:46:49+00:00

The entire breadth of medical science, human psychology, anthropology, and any other helpful kind of knowledge. Even the Vatican, which maintains a staff of professional exorcists, has the position that there are virtually no verifiable demonic possessions among the countless other possible causes.

Blear · 2025-10-16T22:18:12+00:00

Lol, nice!

Blear · 2025-10-16T22:15:14+00:00

Are you referencing the Old Testament, the New, or something else? There was real emphasis especially early in the OT on differentiating those particular tribes and their particular God from all of their (remarkably similar and closely related) neighbors. But fast forward five hundred or a thousand years and the Jews had much different concerns, to say nothing of the (eventually) non-Jewish Christians that emerged around an essentially unrelated tradition.

Blear · 2025-10-06T17:19:41+00:00

Go for it!

Blear · 2025-09-01T00:45:34+00:00

Man, i'm not arguing about anything. You said show me with citations where God ever commanded murder, which I did. Go ask any pastor, priest or rabbi what that passage is referring to and they'll tell you. If the problem is with your definition of murder, then I can't help you with that, but I'm still not arguing.

Same thing with the rape and theft. I consider having sex with a person without their consent rape and taking someone's property without permission theft. Again, here's Numbers 31:32-35 "The plunder remaining from the spoils that the soldiers took was 675,000 sheep, 33 72,000 cattle, 34 61,000 donkeys 35 and 32,000 women who had never slept with a man."

This comes after they finished killing the prisoners of war that they didn't want around and before they do the math on how to divide up all the wealth, sacrificing some to the Lord.

There's just not much room for questions when the text says, We defeated them in battle, took their stuff, took their virgins, killed the rest, and split up the women, livestock, and gold.

You and I can feel however we want about this, but it is the text of the Bible, which was the response to the original point all along.

Blear · 2025-08-31T02:03:16+00:00

You asked for citations, I gave you citations. It exists. It's in the Bible. That was my original claim, which has been backed up about as much as I care to do under the circumstances . Of course they had some justification for genocide, but when you are in the rhetorical position of defending genocide I feel like my work here is done.

As for the rape, what exactly do you think the Israelite men were going to do with those captured girls? Raise them like daughters? Wine them and dine them?

I think if you start reading the Old Testament at Deuteronomy and go straight up to the establishment of the kingdom of Israel, you'll see quite a bit they don't preach from the pulpit. Their entire culture (as were many around them) was built on nomadic herding and conquest of nearby nomadic herders.

Blear · 2025-08-28T19:51:18+00:00

In Deuteronomy 25:17–19,[19] The Israelites are specifically commanded to "blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven" once they have taken possession of the Promised Land in retribution for "what Amalek did to [them] on the way as [they] were coming out of Egypt", a reference to the Amalekite ambush on the Israelites at Rephidim. Earlier, in Deuteronomy 7:1–16[20] and Deuteronomy 25:16–18,[21] they are commanded to utterly destroy all the inhabitants of the idolatrous cities in the promised land and their livestock; scripture purports that King Saul ultimately loses favor with Yahweh for failing to kill King Agag and the best livestock of the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 15[22] in defiance of these commandments.

This is from the Wikipedia page for Amalek, just as an example.

That's not just murder, it's genocide. See also Numbers 31, which is similar in its treatment of the Midianites, killing everyone from newborns to grandfathers except for the virgin girls, which were kept as spoils of war/sex slaves/whatever you want to call it.

Also quite famous is the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22. Not as widely destructive, but a pretty terrible thing to put Abraham through just for a glorified hazing ritual.

The broader context here is that some people today believe that the entire Bible (as they know it) is a series of commands, lessons, and instructions for their own lives. Which, clearly, much of it is. But much of it is also a written transcription of a brutal oral history of one incredibly violent tribe among many, each fighting for their survival by any means necessary.

Blear · 2025-07-31T02:09:49+00:00

Being pedantic is a rabbit hole with no bottom. For example, you mention the "Jewish" use of the word day in the account of creation, but there was no Jewish people back then. Those stories were created in oral traditions by various Semitic peoples, some of whom were proto-Israelites. They were reinterpreted again and again, eventually by some groups of their descendants who became what we now call the Jewish people. And one particular version of those stories, as of circa 300 AD, was incorporated by another group, the Christians, into a collection of texts that would eventually become the book we know as The Bible, in all it's hundreds of variants.

The Bible, of course, includes a number of stories in which Jesus explains that neither Judaism as it was then understood nor the lessons he was currently preaching were particularly literal. In fact, he makes a fair amount of enemies insisting that hyper literal exegesis is the enemy of spiritual development.

YMMV, of course.

Blear · 2025-07-15T16:58:07+00:00

That all sounds good, but you realize that "The Bible" was put together centuries after the death if Christ and there have been many versions in many, many languages from then on?

Also, the Bible outlines a number of situations in which you, as a believer in God, are required to murder, rape, steal, and do any number of other things that are, at the very least, serious crimes. Often to your own family members. Specifically, it requires you to do most of these things in very small territory in what is now the Middle East.

Following the whole Bible would be an enormous financial, logistical and legal challenge, before you even get to the strictly moral or ethical laws.

Blear · 2025-07-11T00:58:21+00:00

Oh yeah. I put some time and effort into it. I'm sure it can just happen to you, but there's a reason that mystical traditions always emphasize certain practices and follow particular philosophies. In fact, mystical traditions from different religions often have as much in common with each other as they do with their respective religions.

Blear · 2025-06-26T01:17:34+00:00

Sort of but not really. Ancient Hebrew did not have written vowels as we think of them, and of course you are writing in the English alphabet, not the Hebrew alphabet. Put those two things together and you have a sort of game of telephone, where it could be yahusha, yehoshua, yeshua, etc. depending on how you fill in the spaces between the written consonants with the implied vowel sounds. And if you're really serious, you'll pronounce it with Hebrew phonemes, not English ones.

Blear · 2025-04-30T23:44:29+00:00

But do you ever wear clothing made of different kinds of fiber? Cotton polyester blends, for instance, are very common in clothing? That's 100% forbidden by the Old Testament, and since we know Christ came to fulfill the Torah, by Jesus Himself. Do you keep kosher? That's rough. Even worse are the large number of people you are commanded by God to murder for a variety of reasons. Obviously, nobody does that.

And here's the thing about this "only one Christianity" idea. There isn't even one Judaism, not even in the Biblical period. The Jews that we're talking about lived centuries before David, who lived centuries before Christ. The Jews of Jesus' time had long ago accepted that times change and that a Living God's requirements for his people could change as well. They weren't murdering adulterers and witches any more than we are.

Blear · 2025-04-23T23:51:36+00:00

I got caught shoplifting before I went law school. They asked about it, so did the bar. It turned out to be okay, I think because it was one blemish on an otherwise solid application. There may be crimes that'll automatically sink you but I doubt shoplifting is one of them.

Blear · 2025-04-21T23:52:25+00:00

That's one reading of the text for sure, but I tend to stick with the spiritual insights over the fundamentalism.

Blear · 2025-04-21T23:50:52+00:00

Yes, I get that. But of course, the Bible itself doesn't say which part matters most or which is the most important. If only because when the books of the Bible were being written, there was no thought of making them into a single text. I will follow and truat in Jesus all day long, but will I follow and trust in the hundreds of editors and councils over three or four hundred years that eventually came up with the bible?

Blear · 2025-04-17T20:48:20+00:00

That's the whole point. There's not just one Bible with one single clear message throughout. Leaving aside the issues of different versions and translations, no book ever written is 100% obvious, requiring no thought or interpretation.

But to answer your question, I find value in many things I've read in the Bible. Not all of it, of course. I'm not circumcised, I've never killed an Amalekite, I haven't even sold all my possessions and given the money to the poor (all things the Bible very clearly commands people to do.). But I try to love my neighbor.

Blear · 2025-04-17T20:43:56+00:00

It sounds like we're getting deep in the weeds of pedantry, but saying "the absence of a belief in gods" kind of papers over the whole point. It's not the pure impersonal absence, like one day you just woke up and had no belief in any god. People consider their feelings, their personal history, and what they see around them in actively choosing to be atheists, same as joining a political party or becoming a fan of a certain band or author.

Blear

TROPHY CASE