You say that you disagree very much with the doctrine of The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints yet I have seen very little of your reasoning of the basic tenants of our doctrine.
Maybe you weren't around earlier when I spent approximately 700 years trying to explain to Peter1000 how Christianity has traditionally defined the Holy Trinity and Trinitarian doctrine, or talked with Mormons about the relative place of the other two works in their 'triple combination', or tried to get to the bottom of some finer points of LDS theology by looking at the text of some Mormon hymns, or shared videos comparing Mormonism and other new religions, or highlighting LDS leaders lying to people, etc., etc.
Or maybe you're just not paying attention. I don't know. Either way, I don't owe someone who doesn't advance any arguments of their own any semblance of an in-depth discussion that, so far as you've demonstrated, would only be faux-answered with more mangling of scriptures, or, failing that, a restatement of the claim of the poster put in the framework of "claiming X doesn't mean Mormonism isn't true" or "No, we're not whatever you just posted."
You seem to go overboard on things that have nothing to do with Christ's gospel.
As you are free to believe. Of course, the Christ Who is worshiped in Christianity is
not the same as the Christ of Mormonism (see your own former prophet Hinckley on that), who I assume is totally fine with your abuse of words and ideas like love, kindness, charity, faith, thankfulness, etc. so as to use these very nice words and concepts to prop up the Mormon religion, which denies the true Christ.
Sooo...am I supposed to care that the false god of a false religion would not be happy with me for not adhering to that false religion's way of being? I'll freely admit I could be a lot 'nicer', in the social sense, when it comes to objecting to Mormonism here and pointing out the utter falsity and inadequacy of Mormon arguments and apologetics, but I don't really see anything good from participating in a sort of 'nice-off' with the religion whose members are most famously nice, and who use that "golly gee, guys, can't we all just focus on what we share?" Leave It To Beaver quasi-theology in an attempt to cover over or draw focus from very real, important, and dangerous differences between Mormonism and Christianity that not only make me disagree with Mormonism, but that make Mormonism disagree with Christianity even while it attempts to position itself as the proper replacement/restoration of it.
As I've been saying since I first started discussing things with Mormons here several years ago, if you guys would simply stop presenting yourselves as a kind of Christianity, there would be no issue. Of course, that will never happen, because your religion cannot live without the Bible and the characters and themes that it co-opts from it in order to draw members away from actual Christian churches to itself, but hey...that's always going on...from the very first of the proto-Mormons in c. 150s-170s (the Montanists) until today, there's always going to be some wacky 'new light and knowledge' cult that thinks it has what everyone else doesn't but is really just deluded. Ho hum.
Instead of this I see contention, and misinformation.
Well I'm sorry, but my own religion does not tell me that "contention is of the devil" or whatever the popular Mormon phrase exactly is. We're not to quarrel over words to no good end (2 Timothy 2:14), but I think everyone here who is a Christian would probably recognize that getting Mormons to
stop misrepresenting their religion as Christianity when it isn't is a very good goal.
As to 'misinformation' sorry you don't like reading from ex-Mormons (where I get my information on your religion from, since there's so much in it that you guys won't talk about because it's supposedly 'too scared' or whatever) all the things you'd rather not focus on in favor of your cheapened 'LOVE' fixation, but some of us actually care about the fact that ~16 million Mormons (including you) are being lied to about the origins and history of their own religion (and ours), and are not afraid to go places with that you'd rather we not.
Perhaps there are people who find Christ's gospel boring.
...
We also know that evil works and sins are condemned by God.
Is someone suggesting otherwise?
The topic of this thread is not about the gospel.
I'm pretty sure that the gospels have plenty to say about trying to establish your own righteousness. See, for instance, many of Christ's sayings directed towards the pharisees.
God does not make people righteous by stopping them from sinning.
Wait a minute...so who does? Do people just decide to be really,
really good, and really,
really nice, and really,
really 'loving', and then
poof -- just like that, sin gone forever?
I don't think that's how it works. In fact, I
know that's not how it works, because there were righteous people who lived before Christ, and yet Christ still had to come to fulfill the law, and to give Himself up unto death to put to death death itself.
Job was righteous because he feared God and eschewed evil. Abraham obeyed God and it was accounted as righteousness. Righteousness comes through obedience.
From St. John Chrysostom's 17th homily on Romans, which covers the relevant verses alluded to here, we can get a good sense of how the early Church actually viewed concepts like these. I've bolded the portion of the sermon that you should pay attention to:
"And going about," he says, "to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God.
And these things he says to show, that it was from a petulancy and love of power that they erred, rather than from ignorance, and that not even this righteousness from the deeds of the Law did they establish. (Matt. xxi. 38; John. xii. 19, John. xxi, 42.) For saying "going about to establish" is what one would do to show this. And in plain words indeed he has not stated this (for he has not said, that they fell short of both righteousnesses), but he has given a hint of it in a very judicious manner, and with the wisdom so befitting him. For if they are still "going about" to establish that, it is very plain that they have not yet established it. If they have not submitted themselves to this, they have fallen short of this also. But he calls it their "own righteousness," either because the Law was no longer of force, or because it was one of trouble and toil. But this he calls God's righteousness, that from faith, because it comes entirely from the grace from above, and because men are justified in this case, not by labors, but by the gift of God. But they that evermore resisted the Holy Ghost, and vexatiously tried to be justified by the Law, came not over to the faith. But as they did not come over to the faith, nor receive the righteousness thereupon ensuing, and were not able to be justified by the Law either, they were thrown out of all resources.
+++
So, according to the good saint (who is no lightweight; there's a reason why he is venerated across basically all of Christianity that still maintains some conception of saints, and the liturgical text attributed to him is the standard liturgy of the second largest communion in all of Christianity), why is "God's righteousness" considered something other than the righteousness that these people were trying to establish? Because what is called God's righteousness comes not from justification by the Law, but via faith, from above as a gift from God (as it's His). And those who will not accept that, and instead make it about what they themselves can establish by their own labors, will find that they cannot be justified by the law, and are to be classed as among those who resist the Holy Spirit.
Pretty ironic given your religion's emphasis on 'the spirit' in receiving revelations, testimonies, confirmation, etc.
And St. John Chrysostom is far from the only saint to have thought this way, as Ps.-Clement quotes Ezekiel in reminding us in his 'second epistle' (still believed to be composed around the same time that the actual St. Clement of Rome composed his only epistle, c. 95 AD) that "If Noah, Job, and Daniel should rise up, they should not deliver their children in captivity", so then what chance do we have to save ourselves by our own righteousness "if men so eminently righteous are not able by their righteousness to deliver their children"? And, as if anticipating Mormon objections that "you can't just not
do anything!" from 1,925 years in the past, Ps. Clement ends the chapter by asking "Or who shall be our advocate, unless we be found possessed of works of holiness and righteousness?"
So there ya go: No "works salvation", and
also no "be a lazy spiritual slob" (neither of which Christians actually believe, in the main; Mormons I'm not so sure about given your "after all that you can do" idea).
So now what? Now what possible reason could you have to continue to beat us over the head metaphorically with the foam mallet of the Mormon Jesus's commandments regime?