Joe Kovacs at WND is reporting on a kerfuffle among some Christians regarding ‘scripture’:
“A Christian health-care group is getting tough on Mormons, telling them to rethink their beliefs about God, or leave.
“According to KSL-TV in Salt Lake City, Samaritan Ministries is contacting members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, urging them to align their faith more strictly to what it has posted in its statement of faith…
“The letter sent to [a Mormon member of this Christian health care ‘community’ group] says Holy Scripture teaches everlasting life is a free gift granted solely by God's grace, ‘while Latter-day Saints believe that, while resurrection is a free gift, exaltation is based on good 'works' and adherence to commandments,’ the station reported.
“Also at issue is portions of the statement of faith Samaritan Ministries has posted online. Its three main points include:
- "We believe that all people have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory and can be saved from eternal death only through faith in Jesus Christ, Whose atoning death and resurrection secures for us eternal life."
- "We believe Jesus Christ was God in the flesh, and continues to be such even after His resurrection -- fully God and fully man. He was born of a virgin, lived a sinless life, died on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins, was bodily resurrected on the third day, and now is seated in the heavens at the right hand of God the Father."
- "We believe in the triune God of the Bible. He is one God Who is revealed in three distinct Persons -- God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit."
“The letter from Samaritan Ministries says Mormonism doesn't accept ‘the triune God of the Bible,’ the belief that God is three persons in a singular Being, but rather claiming that God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are three separate and unique Beings…”
Oh. Dear…
The Mormon in question asks, fairly enough, one would think:
“‘Are the differences ... so significant that people whose conceptions of deity vary slightly can't cooperate in a practical and earthly endeavor such as sharing health care costs?’”
Amen. But as to the larger question…
Having been born and raised in the Mormon faith, and then having read my way out of it, and then having discovered some information that led me back into it, and then, continuing my research, having read my way definitively out of it - all another story - I think that I can make a helpful contribution to this discussion.
First of all, I can assure all those Christians who have been told that ‘Mormons aren’t really Christians’ that they certainly are. They just have some additional aspects to their faith based on a belief in a modern-day prophet (name of Joseph Smith). But they buy the whole New Testament thing. A ‘rock’ that is not as solid as all Christians think it is.
Long story short. There is, er, ‘solid’ evidence that the New Testament was a story concocted by members of the Flavian imperial household, of emperor Vespasian, his eldest son Titus, and younger son Domitian, said household particularly including a Jewish general-cum-governor-cum historian named Josephus. The purpose: To attempt to get the Jews to stop their incessant rebelling against the might of Rome (which in any event was endangering the Jews’ very existence) by pretending that their awaited Messiah, who they thought was going to come and lead them to victory over their enemies, had already come, in the form of a pacifistic itinerant Jewish teacher named (in the story) Jesus, who counseled them to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s…obey authority” and who ‘taught’ them that “My kingdom is not of this world,” so stop with your infernal rebellious nature, you Roman citizens in the Judean region of the Empire; the character placed back at the beginning of the generation (reckoned as forty years in those days) that saw Titus’s military campaign in the area, resulting in the siege and sacking of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple there, with Titus made out, in the fable, to be the Son of Man of Jewish literature, who thus was (made out to be) chastising them for failing to recognize and accept the Roman emperor as their god, like all the other good citizens of the Empire. The beauty of the counterfeit lies in how the authors of the story made Titus’s actual historical campaign be ‘foretold’ by their character’s concocted public ministry, down even to such niceties of detail as the ‘fishers of men,’ back towards the beginning of the 'fabled' Jewish itinerant preacher's ministry,
‘foretelling’ how Titus’s soldiers (actually) stabbed Jews caught in a battle in the Sea of Galilee
I could go on with the intriguing details of this ‘foretelling,’ but you can read them for yourself in Joseph Atwill’s major piece of research called ‘Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus’. I will just close this part of this commentary by noting that the aforesaid Josephus - who saw the writing on the wall as to what was going to be the outcome of the hotheadedness of his fellow Jews in thinking to overcome the might of Rome, and chose ‘to live to fight another day,’ by joining forces with Vespasian; and wrote a part for himself into the fable that he and others of the imperial household concocted to make their point. As a character called Saul become Paul.
Christianity having been founded by a Jew, alright. Just not the one that people believe in.
Another take on these things:
“In Hinduism, especially, a literature has grown up that incorporates divine consorts and sacred partnerships, all deriving from the original coupleship of the Father and the Mother, the Source and the Creator…
“My vision in 1987 showed me that we’re embarked on a common journey from God the Father to God the Father. God the Mother’s material world [mater, matter, Mother] is our school where we learn our true identity until, having seen it, we experience the moment of enlightenment that constitutes our graduation.
“At that moment God meets God. God the Child, having been birthed and raised to awareness by God the Mother, reunites with God the Father, who is the All.” The quote is from Steve Beckow, of Golden Age of Gaia. And many other truth seekers talk about our ’Father/Mother God’.
That’s about as close as I come as well, in my research and thinking on the, er, matter; there being no actual gender on that level of reality. The formless Absolute identified with ‘the Father,’ and God with form as ‘the Mother’.
Now, it’s true that the Mormons believe (kind of behind the scenes) that ‘As Man is, God once was; and as God is, Man may become’ - i.e., pretty much the same thing as the Hindu take on the, er, well, you know.* But in practice, they accept the idea of Jesus as being One with the Godhead.
But then, so are we all, in this whole context.
And so, let’s be about
our homework.
Our Home work.
The bottom line of which is:
Be more loving to one another. After all, we are all the fruit of our One Source. That means, in practice, to cultivate qualities of honesty, integrity, peace, and harmony - the latter as well as in living life in harmony with Nature.
And if we do, we can return to Eden.
The wiser for the experience of having gone walkabout.
Hopefully.
Each to your own inheritance.
On the spiral stairway to the heavens.
Or dropping off the stairway altogether. Having lost
the plot.
—
* The main difference being that the Mormons, like the Christians, believe in one bite at the apple - that who you are incarnated as is who you are in your essence; whereas the Hindus believe in reincarnation, and our progressing on our path through the schoolroom of matter that way.
As more and more evidence is accumulating in our time is the truth of the matter.
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