An Example of the Way Evil Twists Truth

Romney showed himself a hypocrite when he ran for the nomination by distancing himself from himself as governor. He's not a hypocrite because he's Mormon. He's a hypocrite because he calls himself one and now is going against what the church really stands for: Love they neighbour (even thy enemy) as thyself.

This doesn't make him a lying Mormon, this makes him an ambitious human. A neoliberal neoconservative .

 

 

One of the posts that came with this image on Facebook mentioned the following website.

 

Lying for the Lord - MormonWiki.org

www.mormonwiki.orgLying for the Lord refers to the practice of lying to protect the image of and belief in the Mormon religion, a practice which Mormonism itself fosters in various ways. From Joseph Smith's denial of having more than one wife, to polygamous Mormon missionaries telling European investigators that repo...

 

Interesting. I have never encountered that and I'm a convert to Mormonism. You might also consider that when Joseph Smith lied, it was legal, nay encouraged, to kill Mormons and that the ones who are still polygamous are no more Mormon than Jews are Catholics.

 

As one who has been a Catholic, an agnostic, an atheist, a Taoist and a Mormon, I can tell you that this page is radically off-base. There is no more lying in the church than in human society in general, in fact most of the quotes are discouraging lying and saying there is no such thing as a half-truth, only lies or truth.

 

I'm sure everyone has misspoken and said the opposite of what they intended. No one tells Mormons to lie. In fact they encourage personal investigation and knowledge, instead of blind obedience. We have no paid clergy. We are all volunteers. Sure people can go wrong in their path to their intentions, but it isn't a systematic thing. It's a human thing. 

 

Interested in reading the site further before continuing to write this, I have come to realize that it is doing exactly what it  accuses Mormons of being guilty of, as evil often does. It reflects its sins onto its victims.

 

This site is so so full of blatant horseshit that I can't be bothered dissecting it. It's the same all the way through. Though I noticed that it never does really back up its claims and never describes how we are supposedly fostering this "lying for the lord." In fact, our chief method of spreading faith is by testifying in the truth of our own faith and the reasons for that belief. If we don'tt have a personal testimony, we're encouraged to seek it, not lie about it.

 

I have never been the fanatical type - desperately clinging to faith in a narrow interpretation of a belief and  blind to reason. I have Asperger's syndrome and thus have depended on reason to survive. I need to understand, to investigate, to question and to experience for myself. I entertain many ideas but I don't give them my faith until I'm certain they deserve it. 

I became a Mormon because I had experiences that to me proved that the religion was for me. It satisfied me spiritually and intellectually. Not in every detail, nothing can. But it was a good fit between the ideas that my own investigations of reality had developed and a religious system of expression. It gave me what I accepted as personal proof.

This website angers me because it states blatant lies and half-truth as scientific fact. It lacks reason and is an insult to such.

Like many conservative attacks, it use the truth of its own intention - to lie and foster hate -as the half-truth to attack its opponent. If you're guilty of lying and breaking the law, call your opponents crooks, thieves and traitors with every ounce of the weight of your own guilt.

 

Every group has bad behaviour among its members, unless they aren't human. Making a false generalization is one of the basic errors of logic and philosophy. Just because one animal is green doesn't make every animal green, or even every one of that type of animal green. All poodles are dogs but not all dogs poodles. 

Can the Mormon church be criticized, certainly! We are encouraged to question things for ourselves and learn the answers. Every person is responsible for working out their own salvation. We vote in yearly sessions whether to sustain our temporary leaders. No one stays for life and no gets paid. But, African Americans were excluded from the priesthood and there are members who go too far with their individual take on the scriptures. There are zealots, but there are zealot atheists. 

 

From my own experience, the things that bother me with the religion are things that exist within it because it developed in America and took on the faults of its mother country. Polygamy, by the way, was done because, in the beginning, Mormons were killed wherever they went and the number of men to look after families dropped rapidly and radically, so they combined families to survive. (Why else do you think they'd risk death walking with handcarts across the continent in the winter to reach a desert?) Like the priesthood itself, taking on extra wives and kids was more burden than blessing. It was still legal to kill Mormons in one US state until the 1970s, and the Mormon church began accepting African priests around the same time the country accepted them as people. The facts that the church ended polygamy when  no longer vital to survival, and that priests of all ethnicity are accepted now, changes that have taken less than two hundred years, shows that the church is evolving for the better. Unlike some dinosaurs. 

The Mormon church is not perfect. Nothing is, especially when humans are involved.

And for the information of the ignorant author of that website, holding something "Sacred" means that you want to protect it from desecration. From the taint of the world. It adds meaning and importance to otherwise mundane things and encourages symbolic reasoning and serious thought.  That means not discussing or doing some things except in the proper surroundings and with the proper attitude. You no more open the sacred up to ridicule, than you (for argument's sake) whore your wife out on the streets. You know both are realistic possibilities but avoid them by showing proper respect. It has nothing to do with secrecy. 

 

Remember the quaint idea of kissing and not telling? 

It's about respect.