Jesus Christ is Lord of All! Husband to a godly wife, Father to four awesome boys, Pastor of Reformed Bible Church, Software Engineer as my tent-making job.
@SqSehrish Does the man have a wife? This is missing information. She could dead. 12 children and 1 father is all that we can know for sure. Could be more.
@JohnJHarwood Come on. We all know that Trump is a liar and corrupt (he's a politician after all), but if for one second you don't think that Obama was too, then you are truly deluded.
@BasedMikeLee I have. It is absolute trash. It is a very obvious forgery that tries to sound legitimate. It reads, legitimately, like a charlatan trying to come up with something that sounds profound and inspired, but it sounds so stupid. Also, large sections Isaiah are plagiarized.
With Mormonism being the scuttlebutt of the hour, thanks to @SenMikeLee demanding the Pentagon undo 2k-year-old historic Christian doctrines to allow their inclusion, you might find my I2I piece on Mormonism and Freemasonry interesting, from a while back:
Joseph Smith became a Master Mason in Nauvoo in March of 1842, advancing through the degrees with astonishing speed, and soon surrounded himself with a leadership class heavily populated by fellow Masons, including his brother Hyrum Smith and future successor Brigham Young. The Nauvoo Lodge exploded into one of the largest Masonic bodies in Illinois almost overnight as hundreds of Mormon men entered its ranks, effectively intertwining the lodge and the church.
Smith himself occupied a unique concentration of power: prophet, revelator, mayor of Nauvoo, lieutenant general of the Nauvoo Legion, presidential candidate, and Masonic initiate, all at the same time. He presided over a movement that functioned as church, government, military force, and fraternal order simultaneously.
Then, within weeks of becoming a Master Mason, he unveiled the Mormon temple endowment, complete with ritual handshakes, sacred signs, ceremonial garments, secret passwords, veiled progression rites, and penalties for revealing the mysteries. He baptized those rituals, declared them divine revelation, and presented them to his followers as sacred ordinances revealed directly from heaven. Millions of people today regard these ceremonies as the pinnacle of God's restored truth, unaware that they originated in a nineteenth-century fraternal order.
The parallels are not vague similarities that only cult specialists can detect. They are so obvious that even Mormon historians are forced to acknowledge them. The secret handshakes. The ritual grips. The sacred clothing. The penalties for revealing temple secrets. The progression through degrees of hidden knowledge. The symbols carved into temples. The veils separating one realm from another. Strip away the pseudo-Christian terminology, and what remains is a structure that looks remarkably less like the New Testament church and remarkably more like a Masonic lodge. The Book of Mormon supplied the mythology. Freemasonry supplied the architecture. Joseph Smith fused the two together and called the result "restoration."
That reality creates an uncomfortable question for Mike Lee or anyone else insisting Mormonism is merely another Christian denomination. If the defining rituals of the faith were imported from a secret fraternity, if its temple ceremonies were constructed from borrowed Masonic forms, and if its doctrines of exaltation and progressive ascent mirror Masonic concepts of advancing toward greater light, then what exactly was restored?
The deeper one digs into Mormon origins, the less it resembles Christianity rediscovered and the more it resembles a frontier-era religious entrepreneur who wraps borrowed rituals in biblical language and persuades thousands that the costume itself is revelation. Once that possibility enters your mind, Mormonism stops looking like an ancient faith restored and starts looking like the most successful act of religious rebranding in American history.
Read at Insight to Incite. Link in the next comment.
@BasedMikeLee This is equivalent to I cut off my genitalia and starting taking hormones. Now I am a woman. Mormons are the transgenders of Christianity. They pretend to be Christian but they are not.
@BasedMikeLee This is basically the same as saying a tranny man is a woman or two sodomites can get married. Itโs changing what is a genuine Christian to capitulate to a demonic cult.
@MamaCAllen So if I created a novel cult that stated that Jesus was actually an alien that was a green lizard creature with 10 arms, would you call into question whether I believe in Jesus as He actually is? I think you would be wise in questioning me. Well, that's Mormonism.
@TheGermanicist Wrong. This is the result of wickedness. I think that Mormonism is a cult, Joseph Smith was a false prophet, and the Book of Mormon is demonic, but my heart is that they would repent and believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ and be saved. I do not wish harm on them.
@fiercepatricks Practicing homosexuality is a crime too. It was normalized in the 60โs and beyond just like they are trying to normalize pedophilia now.
@IFFFMEISTER Hard disagree. There are plenty of black churches or Korean churches in diverse communities. Itโs called the homogeneous unit principle. People naturally flock to others of commonality; shared social and cultural norms. Itโs only called racist when white people follow suit.
@scotchanglican@BradyJBush Just wondering if the outrage went in every direction. I don't agree with a "whites only" church, but it is fine to have a church that is white culture. Everyone should be welcome, as you mentioned with a black church. But, said black church still remains a black culture church.