Christianity was absolutely based on a deception. All it would have taken would have been one word, one phrase, one whisper about what God's plan really was, and Satan would have swooped in and kept Judas Iscariot from betraying Jesus, or the Sanhedrin from condemning Jesus to die, or kept the Roman soldiers from crucifying Him. Everything was contingent upon Satan not understanding what God's plan really was.Christianity is not an occult religion. Christianity is an open religion, open to absolutely all people.
I am not aware of this test ever being used by Latter-day Saints. Of course that does not mean it hasn't been used.[1] Has this test been used or is this test being currently used by Latter Day Saints ???? Cite some examples.
Well, you can ask a lot of questions like that. In the Hell thread I've asked the question, what good does it do to let the unsaved suffer extreme agony for the rest of eternity? The difference is that if somehow nobody finds an answer to your question, not an awful lot of damage is done; if nobody finds an answer to my question, then an infinite amount of damage is done to all the souls of the unsaved.[2] If it has not been used and is not used why would God give this revelation to Joseph Smith ???
I am not aware of this test ever being used by Latter-day Saints. Of course that does not mean it hasn't been used.
Well, you can ask a lot of questions like that. In the Hell thread I've asked the question, what good does it do to let the unsaved suffer extreme agony for the rest of eternity? The difference is that if somehow nobody finds an answer to your question, not an awful lot of damage is done; if nobody finds an answer to my question, then an infinite amount of damage is done to all the souls of the unsaved.
I never tried to portray God as lenient. I portrayed my God as a Physician, not a Judge. Judges can be lenient; a physician who is lenient ends up with a lot of dead patients.Your gods don't forgive most people. You want to portray your gods as lenient. They aren't.
Holy cow. You believe that God has predestined those to be saved and the rest be damned. You believe that you are saved, not from any act that you have performed in faith but because God has predestined to be saved. You have no choice at all except to saved. Even if you turned to be a serial killer you would still be saved because chose you by his own pleasure. And you have the gall to say our god is not very forgiving?Your gods don't forgive most people. You want to portray your gods as lenient. They aren't.
I've got an idea for how Mormon missionaries can get more converts. They can deliver free Little Caesar's pizza's door to door. Add some jalepeno peppers, or even better, ghost peppers on the side.
Mormon's try to convert people by telling them if they feel the burning in the bosom, they should convert. So if they time it just right, after the pizza and the hot peppers, some of the people will feel a burning right about the time they get to the burning in the bosom part.
Doesn't this make about as much sense as the handshake test?
Btw, what was the source for the OP? Was it from the Kinderhook plates, which Joseph Smith supposedly translated, but then those who asked him to translated him admitted that they had just made the plates themselves? Could it have been from the version Egyptian book of the dead that Smith mistranslated as the Book of Abraham?
Holy cow. You believe that God has predestined those to be saved and the rest be damned. You believe that you are saved, not from any act that you have performed in faith but because God has predestined to be saved. You have no choice at all except to saved. Even if you turned to be a serial killer you would still be saved because chose you by his own pleasure. And you have the gall to say our god is not very forgiving?
Wow- it's not only forbidden, but forbidden under the threat of excommunication?
--- Rather than fears your members will be taken in by false doctrines resulting in closeting yourself off from other false faiths (I'm writing this from the Coptic perspective), why not take the opposite approach? Strengthen you and your children in your Coptic faith such that they know the True faith and can always stand as a beacon of True strength, and are unphased by falsehood? That is the LDS approach, and most other faiths I know.
--- I don't feel like learning and visiting (part of learning) other faiths is degrading to your pearl. After all, your collective faith has survived many persecutions and falsehoods and remained pure to what you believe. This strikes me more that you are considering the faith each individual person has a pearl and are worried about that individual's pearl being contented- is that accurate? I feel like I might be misunderstanding.
Strengthening your member’s faith would involve things like teaching your members about the faith more. Teach what is right and what it wrong, so they cannot be deceived. Strengthening their conviction to the Orthodox faith more through experience in the faith, knowledge of the faith, and heart in love of the faith. So that when a false idea comes around they are not phrased, for they know the Truth? Why not do that instead?How is that the opposite approach? Maybe there's something I'm not understanding about what you mean here, but HH Pope Demetrius II or any of his successors among the bishops drawing a line in the sand and forbidding something to be done that shouldn't be done to begin with is about strengthening the faith. It is the introduction of foreign doctrines by the missionaries and those who had/have been educated by them which weakens the faith, not the strong response to them that clarifies that we must keep to our own faith and not adopt that of others or mix it with ours or whatever.
But an individual going to a Protestant school or even converting to Protestantism isn’t going to change what Mark wrote. There isn’t a threat there at all.Yeah, that's not really what I mean. By 'pearl' I had in mind instead what we have been given by our fathers -- by the Evangelist and Apostle St. Mark, the pillars of faith St. Athanasius the Apostolic, St. Cyril, our teacher St. Dioscorus, St. Basil, St. Gregory, St. Shenouda the Archimandrite, St. Anthony the Father of the Monks, etc. It's not an individualistic thing (though it does reside in every Orthodox individual, when they live the Church's life), but the lived experience of the Church itself for 2,000 years with Christ, from the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt, to the coming of St. Mark, the birth of Christian monasticism, and so on until today.
Visiting another church is part of learning about their faith. Visiting doesn’t mean you have to endorse their doctrines at all. Again, I’ll cite the example of me attending my infant niece’s baptism.To chase after other doctrines and other churches or whatever else that is not what we have been given is not something that we can endorse. This does not mean that we cannot learn about other faiths (indeed, the Coptic Orthodox Church has played a large role in the modern Christian ecumenical movement since the 1960s, and there are many works on matters of comparative religion written by Coptic Orthodox theologians and leaders, both today and in the past).
I’m sorry, but this is striking me as a hypocritical duel standard. You’re encouraging others to do what is forbidden to others.But it does mean that first and foremost we must have a good sense of what it is right to do and say in the context of our own faith and religion. That's why I wrote before that we are much more strict with ourselves than we are with others. A Protestant in Orthodox dress is much, much more dangerous than a Protestant who is not trying to blur the lines.
Strengthening your member’s faith would involve things like teaching your members about the faith more. Teach what is right and what it wrong, so they cannot be deceived.
Strengthening their conviction to the Orthodox faith more through experience in the faith, knowledge of the faith, and heart in love of the faith. So that when a false idea comes around they are not phrased, for they know the Truth? Why not do that instead?
It is the opposite approach because rather than focusing on shutting up falsehoods, it focuses on speaking truth.
But an individual going to a Protestant school or even converting to Protestantism isn’t going to change what Mark wrote. There isn’t a threat there at all.
Visiting another church is part of learning about their faith. Visiting doesn’t mean you have to endorse their doctrines at all. Again, I’ll cite the example of me attending my infant niece’s baptism.
I’m sorry, but this is striking me as a hypocritical duel standard. You’re encouraging others to do what is forbidden to others.
I don't watch videos to learn about faith, I talk to people (in this case you). While I appreciate the thought of you linking videos, the lack of conversation between me and a video is a real turn off.I don't know if you watched the full video of HH Pope Tawadros II that I linked
I'm sorry, I'm trying to be polite and respectful here but... how can you say that and then point fingers at LDS for having a negative perception of the world? This is so much more cynical.There's a part where HH mentions that exposure to attractive but untrue things tends to deaden a person's receptiveness to the truth. And that's completely true.
I'm going to respectfully disagree with you on both of these statements.What you've just witnessed in the above video (and the video before that) is the absolute truth which shuts up falsehoods. That's the point of speaking the truth in the first place.
Again, I'm going to respectfully disagree.So what you are suggesting is what the Church already does
Note: I am in NO way suggesting or endorsing that type of idea.We're not an "everybody do what you want" church.
Then what pearl are you worried about being tarnished?Where did I ever say it did? Protestant, Mormon, Catholic, and Orthodox bibles all have the Gospel of St. Mark in them. That's not the point at all.
That's not a good thing dzheremi! Hypocrisy is very bad- something we should try so hard to avoid.Of course I am. The Orthodox Christian and certainly the Orthodox Church is to always stand up for Orthodoxy, and also invite the non-Orthodox to come and see what it is we do and what we are about, in a spirit of openness and brotherliness.
No!! Again, with the exception of JW, I have never met a church which hypocritically encourages outsiders to visit them and then forbids their members from visiting outsiders. Most people would condemn such as being extremely cultish and fear-based. Instead, they champion the idea that they teach the Truth, and people will always come to the Truth, so they do not need to close their borders.This is no different than any other church
You are encouraging them to do something you yourself condemn (visit a church other than your own).So I'm not seeing any hypocrisy here
Again, I respectfully passionately disagree.just strong ecclesiology which is entirely right to have.
She does attend my Mormon meetings with me when she visits. She joyfully attended my daughter's Mormon baby blessing, drove hours to visit a temple open house with me, and spend many nights discussing faith with me. I in turn have visited her Methodist church numerous times, helped out with events, spoke at the pulpit for her wedding, will be driving hours for her daughter's baptism, etc.When you go to your family member's Roman Catholic church for the baptism you mentioned, do you tell her that it is 'hypocritical' that by allowing you to attend that but not allowing her to attend Mormon meetings
From my study of the Catholic faith (including attending numerous Masses and holiday celebrations) they VERY different than what you describe here. They have zero problem people attending other services, as long as they still fulfill their Sunday obligation to attend Mass.Unless something has changed in the 8 years since I left it, the Roman Catholic Church has a similar ecclesiological viewpoint as the Coptic Orthodox Church (i.e., they don't allow their members to attend just any meeting or service for any reason when there are suitably Catholic services available)
Wow! Not even JW hold such an extreme position. I have never encountered this in any of the many faiths I have studied.I know several Coptic people who are excommunicated for having married non-OO spouses when they came to America, rather than bringing them into the Church before they married as is required if they are to be sacramentally married according to the Church's own law. This law and the punishment for breaking it is known to everybody, so it's not really a surprise to anyone that this happens to.)
Did God choose you to be saved? Did you have any choice in the matter? Since God has elected you to be saved not for anything you have done but by his good pleasure can you become unsaved?Misrepresentation of what I believe is a bad habit to persist in.
"Biblical theology is a living and breathing theology that transforms our entire being. True Christianity is far more than an intellectual assent. For example, it is important to affirm a coherent, orthodox doctrine of the person of Christ, but if we do this without following His example, we have not really formulated an orthodox doctrine at all (1 John 2:22–23, 26)."
Robert Rothwell is associate editor of Tabletalk, adjunct professor at Reformation Bible College, and a graduate of Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Fla.
Christians are not serial killers. No murderer has eternal life abiding in him. Moses was a murderer who apparently repented.
I don't watch videos to learn about faith, I talk to people (in this case you). While I appreciate the thought of you linking videos, the lack of conversation between me and a video is a real turn off.
I'm sorry, I'm trying to be polite and respectful here
but... how can you say that and then point fingers at LDS for having a negative perception of the world? This is so much more cynical.
I'm going to respectfully disagree with you on both of these statements.
Again, I'm going to respectfully disagree.
Note: I am in NO way suggesting or endorsing that type of idea.
Then what pearl are you worried about being tarnished?
Yes, very much so.Are you?
We LDS do keep our sacred things and only talk about them in sacred places at scared times, but we do not discourage going out visiting other faiths. We still live in this world.How do you figure? LDS posters call the world a terrible place and somehow that's nothing compared to a Christian leader saying that there is truth and there is falsehood, and embracing falsehood is damaging?
But the Orthodox theology is not corrupted by the members doing anything. The only thing that can be corrupted is the faith that individual- hence my question about is that the pearl you are talking about, to which you said no. If the pearl is the Orthodox theology which is uncorruptable, what pearl are you worried about dirtying? This I do not understand.I'm not worried about anything. I'm saying that the Orthodox are to be Orthodox, just as Catholics are Catholics, Mormons are Mormons, etc. For Coptic Orthodox people in particular, part of preserving what we have includes having very strict ecclesiology for all the reasons I've already mentioned. The Church is not open to everything, even though it is open to everyone.
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