The only thing "extremist" dudes really need is to get a woman and have a baby. That pretty much deradicalizes almost everyone

@Senator_Armstrong Maybe Muslims should do the thing like Mormons where joining the religion is also like joining a dating service!

@caekislove @Senator_Armstrong It's wild that Mormons are the only ones who have breeding parishes designed for young people to meet and marry.

It seems so obvious.

@opphunter88 @Senator_Armstrong I know, right? I wish a sane and normal religion offered that service!

@caekislove @opphunter88 @Senator_Armstrong >praising Mormons on our sanity and normalcy while bemoaning our lack of sanity and normalcy

Lol. Lmfao even

@NEETzsche @caekislove @Senator_Armstrong The way the LDS Church is organized is brilliant.

The doctrines are the problem.

@opphunter88 @caekislove @Senator_Armstrong Mormon doctrine is saner than Catholic/Orthodox or Protestant doctrine, though. Every time I see somebody attempt to attack LDS doctrine, they either do so in a way that leaves their denomination/mainline Christianity open to criticism, they go on some gish gallop where they just dump a bunch of links attacking Mormonism to me, or they play the game of just admonishing me as a heretic without an argument.

I've yet to see a convincing attack on it that didn't rely on appeals to emotion, authority, or begging the question.

@NEETzsche @caekislove @Senator_Armstrong It's not "insane" in the sense that there's no logic to it. The core thesis that there was a Great Apostasy and a ton of lost teachings that aren't found anywhere in Patristics just makes it implausible imo.

You basically have to believe it was all lost at once the very moment the apostle John died, which is possible, but I don't believe it. It's unlikely.

@opphunter88 The Great Apostasy is highly credible for the reasons you listed before. A lot of these "Orthodox" churches do all kinds of apostate things, and really the only reason they claim the kind of absolute legitimacy they do is because they have some dubious apostolic records saying they were the original. As if being the original grants them license to go off the reservation in a way nobody else may.

In fact, a lot of Gnostic texts describe something pretty much identical to a Great Apostasy. The idea of Orthodoxy being apostate goes all the way back to the early church. It goes back to before we even really called it Orthodoxy.

@caekislove @Senator_Armstrong

@NEETzsche @caekislove @Senator_Armstrong I would date the Eastern Orthodox apostasy, for convenience, at the Palamite synods, which dogmatized a pantheistic/polytheistic system and redefined salvation as a yoga-style prayer. That concluded in 1351, just a century and some change before the Reformation.

There were defects before that point so that date is arguable, but the first 6 Ecumenical Councils are 100% solid and orthodox.

The LDS couldn't affirm a single one of those 6 without major caveats, so I will never see eye to eye with them on this issue.

@opphunter88 Orthodoxy trying to position themselves between man and Christ is absolutely apostate, as it goes against Christ's words according to their own scripture. The instant they did that, they became a false church, and they did that pretty much immediately. The content of their decrees is irrelevant, because they do not have the authority to define Christianity like that in the first place. They do not have the authority to determine what is and is not scripture, and they certainly don't have the authority to edit scripture, which canonized texts absolutely have been demonstrated to be edited.

LDS very matter of factly claims to be The Church in a similar fashion, but with the key difference being that there is an understanding that you don't need to be a Mormon to be saved, and additionally there's also an understanding that LDS can in the future be wrong. That is, it's legitimate until it isn't. Orthodoxy makes no such concessions and in doing so makes it an apostate religion on its own.

@caekislove @Senator_Armstrong

@NEETzsche @caekislove @Senator_Armstrong I disagree with some of this. Paul appointed Timothy as his successor, and told him to appoint others, and the historical record suggests that at least some of the other apostles did the same, though only Paul's is in Scripture.

There is a type of magisterial authority that the Church does have, the Protestant disagreement is simply that this authority is infallible. The Middle Ages proved that it wasn't.

@opphunter88 This presupposes all Pauline texts are legitimate scripture. The Marcionite canon, which as far as I’m aware it’s the first canon, doesn’t include 1 Timothy, and so doesn’t include 1 Timothy 2:7. Please justify accepting 1 Timothy in the first place. A lot of scholars believe that this was written after Paul’s death.

I’m not saying this because I necessarily disregard 1 Timothy. I’m saying this because if you want to advance Orthodoxy as The Church in a way that’s not really possible to dispute you have to really get into the weeds on this kind of thing, and usually all I get is “silence heretic! intense_gregorian_chants.mp3“

@caekislove @Senator_Armstrong

@NEETzsche @caekislove @Senator_Armstrong I do presuppose that the Bible is written by who it claims to be, yes. I'm aligned with Van Til, I think presupposing the Bible is the necessary starting point for a coherent worldview.

No offense to you, but a lot of these "scholars" are either liberal atheist jews, or funded by them, and their ultimate goal is to discredit Christ entirely. That their opinions are convenient for some Restorationist groups os incidental. If the LDS became the dominate religion tomorrow, they'd be writing books attempting to discredit your literature. Some of them already do.

@opphunter88 >I do presuppose that the Bible is written by who it claims to be, yes.

But you're selective about this. You also presuppose that the Gospel of Thomas is not written by Thomas, for example. Consider: you're the one advancing the claim that Orthodoxy holds all of these authorities, but when prompted on justification, it does boil down to presupposition.

@caekislove @Senator_Armstrong

@NEETzsche @caekislove @Senator_Armstrong I don't know if Thomas was written by Thomas or not. It might have been. There are some sayings in there that seem to make a lot of sense as a source for parables in the Synoptics.

But I do trust that, providentially, if it was inspired Scripture, Christians would ultimately have acknowledged and preserved it as such.

@opphunter88 Yeah I don't doubt that you reject the Gospel of Thomas as a matter of faith, but from an epistemological standpoint you can't justify the Orthodox canon on itself. Your conflation of Christianity with Orthodoxy is incorrect.

@caekislove @Senator_Armstrong

@NEETzsche @caekislove @Senator_Armstrong I mean, it's just not something that's ever been in contention. Early on, there were a few New Testament books that no one was quite sure about. There's a fancy Greek term for them that slips my mind atm, but most of it was unanimously agreed on, and those that aren't have historically been given less weight in establishing doctrine.

So it's not like we're just being totally arbitrary here. This has been accounted for. Catholics call it "Tradition" with a capital T. It's what we've inherited, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

I think the best critique against my position would be that Christians haven't historically agreed on the Old Testament canon. For example, I'm a Lutheran, and we're in the tradition of St Jerome, who only accepted the Hebrew Old Testament. A Catholic accepts roughly 75% of the books that ultimately made it into late Septuagint copies, you can (perhaps inaccurately) call that the Augustinian canon.

But the problem with this whole discussion for me is, when you look at any of the books that were ever even considered to be inspired Scripture by the Church at large, there's no doctrinal disunity between them. I don't particularly care if Sirach or Tobit are in the Bible or not, it wouldn't change any tenant of my religion.

@opphunter88 >I mean, it's just not something that's ever been in contention.

It literally has been since the beginning. That's the whole point of bringing up the Gnostic texts. It's not that I think everything in them is correct. It's to point out that Christianity is not as cut and dry as you're trying to make it.

Also, since you bring up being a Lutheran, you should consider that Martin Luther had his own personal pseudocanon where Revelation enjoyed only a diminished stature. Luther's antilegomena I think it's called.

I don't mean to be insulting by the way. But in some respects you do make my argument for me. Which books count and which ones don't have been an ongoing matter of dispute since before the formation of Orthodoxy as we know it.

@caekislove @Senator_Armstrong

@NEETzsche @caekislove @Senator_Armstrong I think there's a categorical problem here that's hard to address.

The Gnostic books aren't just alternative works that aren't in the canon. Books that could be historical, but weren't given canonicity, are ones like; The Ascension of Isaiah, the Testament of the Patriarchs, the Acts of Thomas, etc.

Gnostic books are a completely different genre of literature. They're commentary, for one. All the Gnostic books do is flip the story of Eden on its head, tell you Satan is God and God is Satan, and then they usually dump a bunch of occultic names of primordial figures, which takes the bulk of the content. These are most likely the names of demons, and I don't even want to imagine what they're used for.

@opphunter88 >All the Gnostic books do is flip the story of Eden on its head, tell you Satan is God and God is Satan, and then they usually dump a bunch of occultic names of primordial figures, which takes the bulk of the content

Actually that's not all they do. They're totally incoherent with each other because Gnosticism wasn't a singular sect but everybody and their uncle who didn't cuck to the bishops forming their own views of Christ. I don't think they should be taken at face value at all, and many are certainly diabolical in nature.

The Gnostics were correct on a handful of key points:

* you gain salvation through direct experience with the divine, not any particular church
* secret knowledge is absolutely real
* the devil controls the world and takes on a sort of demiurgic role

But all those unhinged acid trip screeds about Sophia birthing Yaldabaoth the androgynous abortion or whatever else end at good fiction. I don't take most Gnostic cosmologies very seriously at all.

@caekislove @Senator_Armstrong

@NEETzsche @caekislove @opphunter88 @Senator_Armstrong
To be fair, Genesis is quite a weird story from a modern world view. I kinda myself wondered, if the reverse of the roles made more of a sense for me.