Catholic to Mormon to Catholic?

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September six: when the LDS church leaders cleansed BYU of six professors who weren’t in line with the thought police. You can google it.

You have this idea that the Magisterium has setup shop in my brain. Do you really have this arrogant idea that Catholics don’t think? Is that your conclusion? Honestly? That the only way a person can be Catholic is to shut off their brains and plug into the Magisterium?

I hope you come to realize how incredibly ridiculous that is.
I didn’t have that idea until I read that Fides thing referenced above. Read it. But really this whole “private interpretation” thing is a bit creepy. Why even have scriptures if we are not to read them? Just ban the scriptures, and go by what the pope says and by tradition. Why have those pesky scriptures stirring up disharmony anyway? So I really kinda do have that view of the Magisterium. I mean as Mormons, if we have a testimony that a doctrine is NOT true, then no problem. It might become a problem as indicated below, but we are encouraged to study each item out and get a testimony of it. It is the only defense we have against following the prophet blindly, which we are NOT encouraged to do.

As far as “September 6” (and you call ME a “drama queen”- man these guys want to be martyrs or something!! ) it only makes sense that if you don’t believe the doctrine of a church, you should leave the church, or if you are preaching false doctrine they should kick you out. If I went to confession and pretended to be Catholic, and started teaching some class and then started preaching Mormon doctrine, I would get kicked out of the Catholic church I am sure.

Why pretend to be a member of a church you disagree with?

But “no private interpretation” seems to really lessen my ability to understand and think for myself.

I will admit the distinction is a blurry one - maybe we can discuss it further if you want
 
I will admit the distinction is a blurry one - maybe we can discuss it further if you want
Nah, all I see is you guessing at how Catholics believe, which doesn’t match to any reality I know. It is what you want or need to believe for whatever reason. I don’t have an interest in trying to “fix” you.
 
80% of the church believed in Arianism because it is VERY close both to the original doctrine of the church, and to Mormon doctrine today. In fact, the Arians cited the same scriptures you see on these posts to justify Mormonism
Heretics quote various Sacred Scriptures to make their point. Heresies like Arianism were refuted with Sacred Tradition - which heretics do not have.

You seem to have a strong attraction to conspiracy theories. In that respect I can see your attraction to Mormonism, since it was founded on a conspiracy theory.
 
And you have admitted that 80% of the church believed at least one of these doctrines.

Boy that Joe Smith was pretty clever to research all those church councils and take on the doctrines seen as “heretical”. Very clever indeed. I guess it was that Catholic university education he received. :rolleyes:
😉
Clever enough to hoodwink you ! And you should have the 20/20 hindsight to see/expose his err.

Don’t you realize people of different generations will be held to the knowledge standards of their day/age. Our standards will be much higher that those living in 1-2nd century, while Trinitarian concepts were being worked out.

An Asian living in 1000 BC will have yet another standard. That’s why only God can fairly judge all … and we should never think we could.
 
I know there is a God because I have felt His presence. There is no other proof for God than that.

So ultimately, to me, it is either rationality or the Spirit. And once you have felt the Spirit, you know it’s true.
We know there are a variety of spirits. We are taught in scripture to test and reject those which don’t add up.

Mineral spirits can make you FEEL real good … for a short while 😛 satan’s demons can make lust, etc very exciting to the senses
 
I am not an atheist because I know there is a God because I have felt His presence. There is no other proof for God than that.
So ultimately, to me, it is either rationality or the Spirit. And once you have felt the Spirit, you know it’s true.
I knew a guy in my military days that had the same experience (felt God) when he did LSD… and he felt it was truly God that touched him.
So … this was reason enough for him to keep doing it.

The problem is that truth is not relative and has nothing to do with how you ‘feel’.
Truth is truth, even if you don’t ‘feel’ it.

Jesus called himself ‘Truth’.
To seek truth is to seek Jesus, whether you get a warm fuzzy or not.

michel
 
This is my first problem. I mentioned in the beginning that “to a certain extent, the doctrine is irrelevant…” because no matter how much I want to be married for all time and eternity, if Mormonism is not true, then marriage for all time and eternity is not ever going to happen. I am not looking for what “jives” with what I think. If Mormonism is true, then naturally you have to believe it’s doctrine is therefore true also.

I am not convinced of the truth yet, but I am convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that Mormonism is not true. Doctrinal differences aside, it boils down to two things:
  1. 7 unofficial versions of the “first vision”, of which the official version is not even the last one recorded by JS. Reading all of the versions you can see that they were not simple clarifications but an evolution of the story from angels visiting first all the way through JC by himself and then even God & JC together making the visit.
    a. the official version was released 18 years after it happened with no written history or record of it occurring before then.
    b. JS’s mom has recorded a very in depth history of JS and yet she wrote nothing of the first vision. A later published version by Orson Pratt contained exactly a version written by JS himself (word for word and not even the final version) which has been found to not even exist in the original manuscript that she wrote (actually dictated).
    c. Brigham Young taught some of the earlier versions that stated JS was visited by an angel and told not to join any other church, abomination, etc, etc.
    d. JS joined the Methodist church 16 years after he was supposedly told not to join join any of the other “abominations”
    e. this list goes on regarding problems wit the first vision… but I think most people here already know what they are.
2- Archeology.
a. This is a big one. FAIR and FARMS talk in circles and end up making absolutely no sense as do the other apologists on this subject. As I have stated before, they do nothing other than speculate, assume, & suppose.

b. as you read the churches position on this it too is evolving as to what the possibilities are as technology improves and we are able to prove more things beyond the shadow of a doubt, like DNA. If you look at just the last few years the church is backpedling and even changing completely it’s position as science proves many of there claims improbable, or even impossible.

I appreciate your attempts to answer my questions but with all due respect they just don’t satisfy me.

I did believe at one time that simply “feeling” was the discerner between truth and error, but as I have studied and learned that Catholics believe that your senses and intellect are also an integral part of discerning truth from error, I have come to believe that to be true. As such I can non longer continue on the path that I was on
Well, just for the heck of it, here are two more sites about the first vision. I honestly don’t know how you can persist in NOT accepting these accounts if you get into it. But “a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still”

It is hard for me, because it is so clear, and to you it is not at all clear. And to me, Catholicsm is “a mass of confusion”, God atop a topless throne, all a mystery.

Let me ask you this: Are you really ready to believe the Immaculate Conception and Our Lady of Fatima? And that people have the stigmata? And that you need other people like saints to pray for you? And that you should adore a piece of bread? And orignal sin-- that we are punished for something Adam did? And that babies are born with it and need to get baptized to get clean before God? And that some priest can forgive your sins? Where do you think the sign of the cross came from? (temple ordinances) What about the lost doctrines I mentioned? (pre-existence and 3 seperate persons in God) And that praying the rosary does more than put you to sleep? (very Buddhist) And that prayers can be written down and just repeated because the Church tells you this is how you should pray? Novenas, candles, indulgences, praying people out of purgatory?

To me, that’s a whole lot more to swallow than worrying about what Joseph Smith’s mother MIGHT not have said. (subject to interpretation)

Even if you buy apostolic succession, with all that crazy history, there is a whole bag of stuff that comes with it.

Anyway, these handle all your first vision questions

en.fairmormon.org/First_Vision_accounts

fairlds.org/FAIR_Conferences/2006_Joseph_Smiths_Foundational_Stories.html
 
I knew a guy in my military days that had the same experience (felt God) when he did LSD… and he felt it was truly God that touched him.
So … this was reason enough for him to keep doing it.

The problem is that truth is not relative and has nothing to do with how you ‘feel’.
Truth is truth, even if you don’t ‘feel’ it.

Jesus called himself ‘Truth’.
To seek truth is to seek Jesus, whether you get a warm fuzzy or not.

michel
And how do you know that Jesus is the Christ? Because the church tells you so? Buddhism has a longer history, and Judaisim does too. So how do you know which is correct?

How do you KNOW???
 
Have you ever heard of a little thing called the Inquisition?
Sure. Have you heard of a little thing called postreformation- and enlightenment propaganda?

While the Inquisition is indeed a dark period in Church history (made up as it is of sinners and saints alike), it didn’t come out until centuries after the last Arian died, and was not a very worldwide thing.

The emperors were Catholics from time to time, and so persecuted Arians, and then at other times they were Arians and persecuted Christians…
No I guess you are right. Killing heretics is not “information shaping”. The church didn’t “spin” or “shape” doctrine, it just killed those it disagreed with.
“When”, “where” and “how many” are three great questions that come to mind.

Was there an Inquisition for the first 500 years when the major Christological controversies were settled?
It’s information ELIMINATION. Unnatural selection. Suddenly everyone agrees that apostolic succession is true.
I wonder why. The fear of death can be a great unifying factor.
That doctrine was firmly established long before Christianity was even an officially legal religion.
Regarding Arianism, from Wikipedia:
I don’t exactly count wikipedia as an infallible pillar and foundation of truth 😉

But okay.
"Arius posed the question, “Is Jesus unbegotten?” In other words, he taught that God the Father and the Son did not exist together eternally. Further, Arius taught that the pre-incarnate Jesus was a divine being created by (and possibly inferior to) the Father at some point, before which the Son did not exist. In English-language works, it is sometimes said that Arians believe that Jesus is or was a “creature”; in this context, the word is being used in its original sense of “created being.” That doctrine that Arius wrote was the main theology of the first century Christians. Scriptures such as John 14:28 where Jesus says that the father is “greater than I” to John 17:20-26 where Jesus asks that the Apostles become “one as we are one” so that all of them including Jesus and God become one, thus demonstrating that the oneness refers to thought and will, and not a physical Trinity.
There are about as many views on what first century Christianity was as there are scholars… It would be nice to see some reliable sources on this.
(Besides Arius didn’t show up until the late third century)
It is naïve to think, that first century Christianity was a ready-made book of doctrine. The Bible wasn’t even written yet, much less collected (and Arius’ canon wouldn’t look anything like the one that even you as a Mormon hold).
Christ is indeed the fulness of God’s revelation, but Christianity developed - it had to - because it was still an infant. Christianity was an idea, and it was a living idea. On every idea that a man holds, he will excercise the power of thought. When thought is excercised on an idea, it can most certainly not stay the same (in a strict sense), but rather it must develop.
Now, since every man holds a different set of prejudices and pre-conceived ideas, it is obvious that the idea called Christianity would result in a widely different range of “Christianities”. Differing as we see they did in practice, these could not all be true. And that a majority of one period of time would hold to one of these interpretations proves nothing else than that it probably fit quite well to the philosophical prejudices of that age. Now, if everyone believed the same thing, there might be a case for this, but they don’t.
So: since reason is not clean and unaffected by culture, temperament and prejudice, it is clear that this idea called Christianity, could not simply be handed over by Jesus to the Christians and then left to grow without guidance.
Giving us a Revelation we wouldn’t know how to interpret is about the same as not giving us a Revelation at all.
Summa: If Christianity is an idea that must be received in the mind, thought must be applied to it. If thought is applied to it, it will neccesarily develop, for good or bad, rightly or wrongly. If there is no way to determine which development is good (orthodoxy) and which is bad (heresy), we are in effect left without any revelation at all.
It is unthinkable that God should thus give us a useless revelation by Jesus who is even according to Mormon theology bigger than Joseph Smith.
Jesus’ promise to send the Spirit to “guide in all truth” is a promise that somehow, Jesus would provide an infallible guide.
In order to judge which development was good and what was bad, it is neccesary that there exists an external infallible authority. This is exactly the role that the Papacy has been playing ever since the first pages of Acts. Discussion arose about a subject (e.g. the Sacrament of Baptism in relation to the circumcission of the old covenant) which had not been adressed explicitly by Jesus. We see here Peter and the council acting as an external authority claiming implicitly infallibilty.
(continued)
 
…Because most written material on Arianism was written by its opponents, the nature of Arian teachings is difficult to define precisely today. The letter of Auxentius,[1] a 4th century Arian bishop of Milan, regarding the missionary Ulfilas, gives the clearest picture of Arian beliefs on the nature of the Trinity: God the Father (“unbegotten”), always existing, was separate from the lesser Jesus Christ (“only-begotten”), born before time began and creator of the world. The Father, working through the Son, created the Holy Spirit, who was subservient to the Son as the Son was to the Father. The Father was seen as “the only true God.” 1 Corinthians 8:5-6 was cited as proof text:
It is hard to define indeed what the Arians actually taught, and that’s another reason I find it very disturbing that someone would propose that Arianism was the Christianity of the first century…

I don’t doubt for a second that many a heretic was far more orthodox than the impression his adversaries give.
A letter from Arius to the Arian Eusebius of Nicomedia succinctly states the core beliefs of the Arians:
“Some of them say that the Son is an eructation, others that he is a production, others that he is also unbegotten. These are impieties to which we cannot listen, even though the heretics threaten us with a thousand deaths. But we say and believe and have taught, and do teach, that the Son is not unbegotten, nor in any way part of the unbegotten; and that he does not derive his subsistence from any matter; but that by his own will and counsel he has subsisted before time and before ages as perfect God, only begotten and unchangeable, and that before he was begotten, or created, or purposed, or established, he was not. For he was not unbegotten. We are persecuted, because we say that the Son has a beginning, but that God is without beginning.” (Peters, Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe, p. 41) "
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianism

It is fairly obvious how this can be seen as very close to the Mormon position today.

Mormons believe that Jesus is begotten, and yet co-eternal with the Father,
When you state it like that, not only Arians but also Catholics could agree with your words.
but yet that Jesus is the “spirit son” of the father.
And here both Arians and Catholics would disagree fervently with you, if you said that Jesus thus had a Heavenly mother.
So in the last two days, without any real research,except what you guys have handed me on a silver platter, I have shown how 2 major points of LDS doctrine existed in the early church and were condemned by councils of the church. (“Pre-existence” and Jesus and the Father being two distinct beings, one the Son of the other)
So were those heretics real Christians, or do you just pick and choose from the enormous amount of heretics?

You guys believe in a great apostasy, so tell me whether the Arians were among the apostates, and if not how their views can be used to support anything.
Boy that Joe Smith was pretty clever to research all those church councils and take on the doctrines seen as “heretical”. Very clever indeed. I guess it was that Catholic university education he received. :rolleyes:
So… If matters of theological controversy were actually resolved by majority vote (which I think Mormons should be glad it isn’t 😉 ), then *two *of Smith’s views would be true since they were dominant in one period of time long ago?

As I see that, it is an argument from tradition. 🙂 And a pretty cherry-picking one at that.
  • CB
 
Heresies like Arianism were refuted with Sacred Tradition - which heretics do not have.
Oh come on, I know you can do better than this!

You mean Sacred Tradition reinforces Sacred Tradition?

Wow, that’s a surprise!
 
And how do you know that Jesus is the Christ? Because the church tells you so? Buddhism has a longer history, and Judaisim does too. So how do you know which is correct?

How do you KNOW???
Obviously, it is not enough to have a long history or simply to be “old”.

We believe as Christians that God revealed himself to mankind at one specific point in time, namely Galilee about the year 30.

We know that Christ instituted a Church, so of course it would look weird if the “real” Church didn’t start until for instance the 1500s.
  • CB
 
Just a few questions.
1- If there is no marriage in heaven then why get married in the church?
a. why get married at all?
2- Keeping the Sabbath Day Holy; define from a Catholic perspective. Mormons keep it Holy by going to church and spending time with family. No work, and do not do things that require other people to work
3- Death bed repentance? Mormons believe this is not acceptable to God
4- Intercessory prayer; have a hard time with this one. Praying to someone else besides God… “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me”
5- I have been studying Eastern Orthodox a little and wonder how do we know that they aren’t correct in there assertions. They also claim to be One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic.

Scriptural references would be helpful.

P.S. Went to RCIA with wife Thursday. She cried at first, but she’ll be okay
I’d just like to point out that the legitimacy of a death bed conversion is very similar to the grace extended to the repentent thief on the cross beside Jesus. So, if one decides this is impossible, one must also discount this account in Luke 23. In fact, there was no indication the thief was even baptized–except in his own blood and desire to be saved with Christ. Look also at the parable of the two brothers from Matthew 21. God’s grace never denies us the opportunity for redemption and forgiveness while our heart is beating. Last, but not least, the parable of the vineyard workers in Matthew 20 serves as a great reminder of God’s abundant grace. “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?’”
 
In fact, the Arians cited the same scriptures you see on these posts to justify Mormonism
The Arian heresy arose out of personal interpretation. It didn’t exist in any teaching, anywhere, until someone thought it up (not Arius). It fooled a lot of people. That JS thought up the same thing 1700 or so years later and is fooling people with a similar (they are NOT the same) heresy, says nothing about truth. Only about the fallibility of personal interpretation.

You seem to be pouting about that you can’t believe what you want to believe. You want truth to be relative and the Catholic Church says, no, it isn’t.
Have you ever heard of a little thing called the Inquisition?
You seem to be stuck on the Inquisition. Perhaps you should start a thread on it so you can get it all out.
No I guess you are right. Killing heretics is not “information shaping”. The church didn’t “spin” or “shape” doctrine, it just killed those it disagreed with.
The Church did not kill people.
It’s information ELIMINATION. Unnatural selection. Suddenly everyone agrees that apostolic succession is true.
So now, truth is about natural selection? What makes you feel good? Do what you feel, feel until the end?
That doctrine that Arius wrote was the main theology of the first century Christians.
Of all the sources in the world, you pick wikipedia. Wikipedia rarely has anything correct. For one, the bold, underline you have going there looks like a Mormon edit. Something wikipedia suffers from on any topic that effects Mormon theology. I have NEVER seen any proof that this has any facts behind it.*
…Because most written material on Arianism was written by its opponents, the nature of Arian teachings is difficult to define precisely today.
So, you’re arguing a probability. A supposition? A guess? Maybe a hope?
“Some of them say that the Son is an eructation, others that he is a production, others that he is also unbegotten. These are impieties to which we cannot listen, even though the heretics threaten us with a thousand deaths. But we say and believe and have taught, and do teach, that the Son is not unbegotten, nor in any way part of the unbegotten; and that he does not derive his subsistence from any matter; but that by his own will and counsel he has subsisted before time and before ages as perfect God, only begotten and unchangeable, and that before he was begotten, or created, or purposed, or established, he was not. For he was not unbegotten. We are persecuted, because we say that the Son has a beginning, but that God is without beginning.” (Peters, Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe, p. 41) "
*I don’t think you are able to grasp at all what you have copied and pasted here and how it relates to Catholic doctrine.
It is fairly obvious how this can be seen as very close to the Mormon position today.
Mormons believe that Jesus is begotten, and yet co-eternal with the Father, but yet that Jesus is the “spirit son” of the father. The Father was the Father “before” Jesus was the “Son”, and all of this occured outside of our current temporal references. In some sense, He is subservient, which is obvious from his acknowledgement that the Father is, well, the Father.
So this position is VERY close to the Mormon position, at least in the relationship between the Father and the Son.
Close, but not quite. And, you are leaving out other Arian doctrines that have nothing in common with Mormonism, at all. You can’t claim Arianism and not adhere to all the beliefs of that heresy. All you can show is that personal interpretation produces similar errors. Which is exactly why personal interpretation cannot be relied on. It always leads to false teachings, thus false beliefs.
Mormons would totally disagree with them in relation to the Holy Ghost however.
So, the gospel of Arian wasn’t the correct teaching after all. Not the true church. Make up your mind.
So in the last two days, without any real research,except what you guys have handed me on a silver platter, I have shown how 2 major points of LDS doctrine existed in the early church and were condemned by councils of the church. (“Pre-existence” and Jesus and the Father being two distinct beings, one the Son of the other)
EVERYTHING is Mormonism to you, or proof that Mormonism is “true”. I think you would say this about any random quote that I pulled out of anywhere. You tug and pull and twist it until it matches your beliefs. That is what you do. Which has nothing to do with truth.
And you have admitted that 80% of the church believed at least one of these doctrines.
99% of the world could believe that God were a flying purple people eater. That wouldn’t make them right.
Boy that Joe Smith was pretty clever to research all those church councils and take on the doctrines seen as “heretical”. Very clever indeed. I guess it was that Catholic university education he received. :rolleyes:
Quite the opposite, I have never seen anything, anywhere, that indicates JS was ever exposed to Catholic doctrines. What he came up with is pure personal interpretation. The same as every heretic that has ever been born.
But his mom didn’t write about the first vision. Oh well I guess that proves he was a fake. I better get to confession before the Inquistion gets me. :eek:
There is much more than that that proves he was fake. For one, he came up with false beliefs and doctrines that he taught as truth. The list is endless but maybe you can start with polyandry.
 
Rebecca, I have heard of an LDS “beehive” mentality, a figurative defending of the hive . I can see some of that in the desperate attempts to glue the LDS house of cards together.
 
Christ is indeed the fulness of God’s revelation, but Christianity developed - it had to - because it was still an infant. Christianity was an idea, and it was a living idea. On every idea that a man holds, he will excercise the power of thought. When thought is excercised on an idea, it can most certainly not stay the same (in a strict sense), but rather it must develop.

Now, since every man holds a different set of prejudices and pre-conceived ideas, it is obvious that the idea called Christianity would result in a widely different range of “Christianities”. Differing as we see they did in practice, these could not all be true. And that a majority of one period of time would hold to one of these interpretations proves nothing else than that it probably fit quite well to the philosophical prejudices of that age. Now, if everyone believed the same thing, there might be a case for this, but they don’t.

So: since reason is not clean and unaffected by culture, temperament and prejudice, it is clear that this idea called Christianity, could not simply be handed over by Jesus to the Christians and then left to grow without guidance.

Giving us a Revelation we wouldn’t know how to interpret is about the same as not giving us a Revelation at all.

Summa: If Christianity is an idea that must be received in the mind, thought must be applied to it. If thought is applied to it, it will neccesarily develop, for good or bad, rightly or wrongly. If there is no way to determine which development is good (orthodoxy) and which is bad (heresy), we are in effect left without any revelation at all…

Jesus’ promise to send the Spirit to “guide in all truth” is a promise that somehow, Jesus would provide an infallible guide.

In order to judge which development was good and what was bad, it is neccesary that there exists an external infallible authority. This is exactly the role that the Papacy has been playing ever since the first pages of Acts. Discussion arose about a subject (e.g. the Sacrament of Baptism in relation to the circumcission of the old covenant) which had not been adressed explicitly by Jesus. We see here Peter and the council acting as an external authority claiming implicitly infallibilty.
(continued)
This is a very interesting argument, a portion of which perhaps a Mormon could make, but it is flawed and perhaps self-contradictory.

The first part says essentially, that all human institutions must change, (let’s call this “rule 1”) and that it was “inevitable” that Christianity would change.

So you have admitted that the gospel has changed from its original state. We call that “apostasy”

"Christ is indeed the fulness of God’s revelation, but Christianity developed - it had to - because it was still an infant. Christianity was an idea, and it was a living idea. On every idea that a man holds, he will excercise the power of thought. When thought is excercised on an idea, it can most certainly not stay the same (in a strict sense), but rather it must develop."

And yet this “development” was OK because you have an infallible pope guiding you.

But you only have an infallible pope if Catholicism is true.

So Catholicsm is a self-referring infallible system that evolves over time, and it is true because it says it is.

And I guess that pope is not subject to rule 1, which is that all institutions must change, because he is an “external authority”.

In order to judge which development was good and what was bad, it is neccesary that there exists an external infallible authority. This is exactly the role that the Papacy has been playing ever since the first pages of Acts.

So the pope is not Catholic?

Interesting argument.

On one hand it is a very Mormon way of looking at the world.

On the other hand, if I made the same argument, you would laugh me off the boards. Any doctrinal change is ok because it was made by an “infallible external authority”. So we kick out Arianism, the pre-existence, say that Mary was Immaculately Conceived

C2M2C, are you listening? That is how we get apostolic succession. The pope is the pope because he says he is, and after all, he is infallible. And in all those cases where there was a fight over who would be pope, the right guy won.

He had to. He was infallible.
 
Obviously, it is not enough to have a long history or simply to be “old”.

We believe as Christians that God revealed himself to mankind at one specific point in time, namely Galilee about the year 30.

We know that Christ instituted a Church, so of course it would look weird if the “real” Church didn’t start until for instance the 1500s.
  • CB
You don’t get it. You say you know these things but you haven’t answered the question

How do you know? The same as Peter. “Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto you, but your father in heaven”

I guess Peter had the warm fuzzies too.
 
This is a very interesting argument, a portion of which perhaps a Mormon could make, but it is flawed and perhaps self-contradictory.

The first part says essentially, that all human institutions must change, (let’s call this “rule 1”) and that it was “inevitable” that Christianity would change.

So you have admitted that the gospel has changed from its original state. We call that “apostasy”
Institution, gospel, two different things.
On the other hand, if I made the same argument, you would laugh me off the boards. Any doctrinal change is ok because it was made by an “infallible external authority”. So we kick out Arianism, the pre-existence, say that Mary was Immaculately Conceived
There has been no doctrinal development.
C2M2C, are you listening? That is how we get apostolic succession. The pope is the pope because he says he is, and after all, he is infallible. And in all those cases where there was a fight over who would be pope, the right guy won.
He had to. He was infallible.
You are just making stuff up again.
 
Have you ever heard of a little thing called the Inquisition?
Have you ever heard of a little group called the Danites?
No I guess you are right. Killing heretics is not “information shaping”. The church didn’t “spin” or “shape” doctrine, it just killed those it disagreed with.
That just goes to show that you know nothing about the various inquisitions (there were more than one and they were all very different from one another). The Church never killed anyone, though in at least one inquisition people found guilty were imprisoned or executed by the civil government.

The Danites, on the other hand, were an official LDS death squad that murdered anyone who opposed the “prophet”. The Danites "blood atoned " opponents in the name of God and the LDS Church.

Those who live in glass churches should not throw stones.
 
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