Conversation with a Mormon

[dianaiad]

Evidence please?

According to Wikipedia, historians estimate that the death toll was 1,000 to 5,000 over the two hundred year span of the Inquisition, since records show that only 2% of the trials ended in execution. That would be about 25 people a year, at most.

I was including more than the inquisition. In fact, I underestimated the death tolls reported by many sources for the Crusades that were directly ordered by the Pope (not all of them were) like the Albegensian Crusade…the witch hunts, the 30 Years War that pretty much depopulated Germany, the church ordered killings in the Americas (apart from those which were deaths resulting from military conquest, though quite frankly, I should actually count those!) .

The church has indeed become better. If I had done the same sort of calculation a couple of centuries ago, the death toll per year would have been far higher. I don’t know, though, whether that is more the result of the church becoming less prone to killing off the heretics, or whether it has lost the political power to actually, y’know, DO it.

Both, probably.

As to my numbers, of course they are off. The most I could do to be fair is to overestimate the population of Catholics as much as I could (I highly doubt, for instance, that there really have been 25 billion Catholics on the planet over the last 2000 years) and to underestimate the death toll. (33,000,000 seems a little low for a 2000 year count; after all, we’ve managed, as a species, to kill something like 262,000,000 people just in the last century!).

I guess boiling it down that far is a bit of a shock.

After all one dead man is a tragedy. A million is…a statistic.

 

[dianaiad]

Then start addressing the issue that is being debated, which is not, an assessment of me. Or former mormons in general.

Unless of course you are saying the issue is the person, in which case, you are addressing the person. In your round about passive aggressive way.

And the issue under current debate is…

…what, precisely?

Now me, I think the issue is this very entertaining charge by Jerusha that I am a Nazi, and that Mien Kampf is a treatise on Mormon Doctrine; that Hitler was a 'jack-Mormon" (does she even know what a “jack-Mormon” IS?) that Catholics were the heroes of WWII and were enemies of Nazism and Hitler from the very beginning so that she has the right to condemn Mormons for obeying German law.

…and that you are defending this absurd attack by her.

C’mon, Rebecca. she screwed up. I don’t care how ‘wroth’ she is with me, she SCREWED UP.

What she wrote was unacceptable, unconscionable, offensive and absolutely personally insulting–and you are defending her in it for one reason and one reason only; not because you think I am a Nazi or that Hitler wrote about Mormonism in Mein Kampf–I have far more respect for your brains than to think that–but for a far less honorable reason.

You are defending her because you don’t like Mormonism and you don’t like me.

That I find to be very dishonorable, Rebecca.

Is that aggressive enough?

If not, that’s too bad, because that’s as aggressive as I get.

 

[twopekinguys]

She didn’t call you a Nazi.

She said you hadi Nazi tendencies.

You have done the same thing that you accuse others of, and that is skimming over something instead of reading it.

This whole conversation has degraded to the point where it isn’t useful to anyone.

How about everyone get back to the topic of the original post. I know it is a novel idea, but give it a shot.

 

[dianaiad]

"dianaiad:

Wait.

You have been upset before because the church excommunicates people who disobey the rules and disagree with it…and criticize it for doing so.

Jerusha:

No, I have not, since that is not at the crux of MY problems with the LDS church. Perhaps I was intimidating you into toning down your rhetoric.

That’s rich, Jerusha. I haven’t insulted you at all. I haven’t called you names. You have called me a Nazi, you have insulted me personally in just about every possible manner, and I’m the one who has to tone down the rhetoric? I love how you are now even admitting that you are attempting to intimidate me…has it not occurred to you that intimidation is not considered an appropriate debate tactic?

I don’t think so.

dianaiad:

You are wroth with me because I am defending the church, and you don’t like me a lot–because I am Mormon.

Jerusha:

No, because you first came in here screaming that Catholics rejoice because JS was murdered. for God’s sake, that happened 155 years ago. Can’t you let go of something that happened that long ago? Or are your temple vows still in force? That deeply offended me.

So be deeply offended if you wish. The thing is, some Catholics in here WERE rejoicing because Joseph Smith had been murdered. Forget that part, did you? Do I have to go pull the quotes? I can, if you wish, but I think that if anybody is interested, they can go look.

dianaiad:

Now you are claiming that the only reason that I haven’t been excommunicated is because the church doesn’t have the courage to do so?

jerusha:

Perhaps if there were fewer LDS in good standing like you, the LDS church would have a better reputation.

dianaiad:

Your reasoning is a bit on the labyrinthine side.

That is a fine comment.

Yes, actually, I thought it was a fine comment. Accurate, too.

P.S. If you would learn to deal with the quote functions of this forum, it would be a great deal easier to respond to you.

 

[dianaiad]

Stephen168:
Ah.

So it IS perfectly OK that the RC church, though it has committed many atrocities in the past, has learned from it and it is now fine.

At the same time nobody else is allowed to change, learn from mistakes, and put the past behind them?

Thank you for admitting that, Steph. Nice to know.

 

[valient_Lucy]

I was including more than the inquisition. In fact, I underestimated the death tolls reported by many sources for the Crusades that were directly ordered by the Pope (not all of them were) like the Albegensian Crusade…the witch hunts, the 30 Years War that pretty much depopulated Germany, the church ordered killings in the Americas (apart from those which were deaths resulting from military conquest, though quite frankly, I should actually count those!) .

The church has indeed become better. If I had done the same sort of calculation a couple of centuries ago, the death toll per year would have been far higher. I don’t know, though, whether that is more the result of the church becoming less prone to killing off the heretics, or whether it has lost the political power to actually, y’know, DO it.

Both, probably.

As to my numbers, of course they are off. The most I could do to be fair is to overestimate the population of Catholics as much as I could (I highly doubt, for instance, that there really have been 25 billion Catholics on the planet over the last 2000 years) and to underestimate the death toll. (33,000,000 seems a little low for a 2000 year count; after all, we’ve managed, as a species, to kill something like 262,000,000 people just in the last century!).

I guess boiling it down that far is a bit of a shock.

After all one dead man is a tragedy. A million is…a statistic.

My point still remains, that you are pulling these numbers out of thin air, and without any basis in historical research. As long as that is the case, your numbers are nothing more than propaganda.

 

[dianaiad]

What exactly occasioned these millions of horrific deaths and where did they take place? And exactly who killed them?

Paul, do try very hard not to be more disingenuous than you have to be. I do not deny the MMM. Are you REALLY going to deny that Pope Innocent ordered the massacre of all the Albigensians? That the church ordered the hunting and burning of witches? That it was actively engaged in heretic hunting, torture and burning? That the methods of the Inquisition, while it did not result in quite as many deaths as is popularly attributed to it, were still horrifically inventive in terms of interrogation techniques? That many, if not all, of the Crusades were ordered by the church itself?

C’mon, Paul, you know better than this. Denying one’s history, warts and all, is to deny oneself.

Of course, if you ARE going to pull the ‘True Catholic’ ploy, claiming that no true Catholic would have been involved in such matters, then you cannot then go after anybody else for any wrongdoing people of their sect/belief system/ political group ever did, either.

 

[dianaiad]

Diana lets take the time periods into consideration. You are claiming that because we have had more deaths resulting from the catholic faith, that y’alls church is much better, or is the reformed church of Christ, right?

Would you care to show me where I claimed that? I didn’t, y’know. I am simply saying that a people that HAS such a history has no business telling me that my own people are responsible for more murders and misery than the Catholics have been, when taking population and time into consideration. Well, I TOOK population and time into consideration, and proved that no, we are not worse than you in the ‘causing misery’ department, and making wild claims that we are is likely to get your nose rubbed in some uncomfortable history.
LAMBOFGODGIRLY;4981310:

Well let’s, just for pretend, act like the Catholic Church was also created at the same time the Mormon Church was, we would probably be neck to neck with the amount of dead people. You should already have taken this into account.

Why? the thing is, the Catholic church, even if we go by the LDS view of its formation rather than yours, was NOT created in 1830.

The last 2 centuries are milestones different from the beginnings of Christ’s Church.

Indeed. You didn’t have the political power to do all those things. Makes quite a difference, that.

We, on the other hand…did. In fact, one of the biggest criticisms I’ve seen of Mormon history from Catholics (and others) is that we virtually had a theocracy going in New York, Illinois and Utah. We didn’t, quite, but we certainly had enough political power to commit such atrocities if we so chose. As it happened, we didn’t so choose, even in the face of some incredible pressure. The one incident (that I too think was horrific, atrocious and inexcusable) was neither ordered, nor excused by, the church; BY forbade it, the leaders were excommunicated and lived their lives in hiding, and Lee was executed.

The Roman Catholic church, however, chose.

Fairly often, as a matter of fact…

The people involved were not only not excommunicated or executed, a few of them were made Saints and are prayed to–like St. Constantine the Great.

We have law now, and not to mention money, structure, amenities, most people are not suffering and in need of things like they were then.

This is true. Of course, an argument might be made that people were better off because the church was no longer in complete control of their lives…

People were much more tolerant of people killing others than they are today, am I not right?

Oh, sweetie…do you have ANY idea how deep the hole is you are digging for your argument here? Are you aware, for instance, that more people were murdered in the 20th century than were killed in the previous 2,000 years, added together?

People were killed over anything back then!

I guess you don’t know how deep you are digging that hole…

OK, yes, they were…but I only counted the deaths of those who were killed because the church didn’t like them…and because the church had the power to do something about people it didn’t like.

Also, your Church was created in America! There a lot of different reasons where we could go on this comparison of the death toll. How big could the Mormon Church possibly have been? You are talking hundreds, verses tens of thousands! You are not approaching this statistic in an accurate way!

Actually, I’m talking about millions in comparison to thousands, but hey, who’s counting?

I took population and time into account…and I did so in a way that gave Catholics as much advantage as I could, being extremely conservative regarding the body count, and as liberal as I could with the population so that the Catholics would look as good as possible. On the other hand, while I tried to divide the body count up among all the Catholics who were born and grew up since the beginning to spread it out as much as possible, I have taken only the current population of the CoJCoLDS so that the body count for us would be divided among as few as possible. It still came out that the RC church is responsible for ten times the death toll, per 100 people, as the Mormons over the history of the two groups.

And the ONLY reason I did any of that was because Jerusha claimed that Mormons were more murderous and responsible, directly and indirectly, for more human misery than the Catholics.

Y’know, people really shouldn’t say stuff like that if they don’t want someone to take them up on the challenge. It could be embarrassing.

 

[dianaiad]

She didn’t call you a Nazi.

She said you hadi Nazi tendencies.

SAME THING!

Especially when she has no clue what tendencies Nazi’s actually have, and is using it simply as an insult.

You have done the same thing that you accuse others of, and that is skimming over something instead of reading it.

Possibly. But not to THAT extent!

This whole conversation has degraded to the point where it isn’t useful to anyone.

How about everyone get back to the topic of the original post. I know it is a novel idea, but give it a shot.

Love to.

Anybody care to apologize to me and then get back to it?

???

Didn’t think so.

 

[twopekinguys]

SAME THING!

Especially when she has no clue what tendencies Nazi’s actually have, and is using it simply as an insult.

Possibly. But not to THAT extent!

Love to.

Anybody care to apologize to me and then get back to it?

???

Didn’t think so.

No, it isn’t the same thing. You are splitting hairs. Which is a tactic many of us have seen before, and are quite frankly tired of.

You don’t know that she doesn’t know what Nazi tendencies are, therefore you don’t know that she necessarily meant it as an insult.

Yes you have, come on, admit it, it will make you feel better

Why don’t you apologize to her first. Early on in this thread, it appears, and I could be wrong, that you were looking to provoke. Here is a quote from one of your early posts on the thread. “Perhaps I am wrong about this, but it does look as if you elided some of ‘woundedimmortal’s’ comments” Somewhat passive agressive don’t you think?

Either way, I stand by my earlier statement, that this whole thread has degraded to the point where it is no longer useful.

 

[twopekinguys]

Rebecca, you are a Catholic on a "non-Catholic religions’ forum engaging mostly in threads about Mormonism.

Wanna try that again?

Actually, you are on a Catholic forum, which has a section devoted to “Non-Catholic Religions comparing and contrasting beliefs”

forums.catholic-questions.org/forumdisplay.php?f=1

I don’t see a section like this over at MADB.

 

[PaulDupre]

Paul, do try very hard not to be more disingenuous than you have to be. I do not deny the MMM. Are you REALLY going to deny that Pope Innocent ordered the massacre of all the Albigensians? That the church ordered the hunting and burning of witches? That it was actively engaged in heretic hunting, torture and burning? That the methods of the Inquisition, while it did not result in quite as many deaths as is popularly attributed to it, were still horrifically inventive in terms of interrogation techniques? That many, if not all, of the Crusades were ordered by the church itself?

C’mon, Paul, you know better than this. Denying one’s history, warts and all, is to deny oneself.

Of course, if you ARE going to pull the ‘True Catholic’ ploy, claiming that no true Catholic would have been involved in such matters, then you cannot then go after anybody else for any wrongdoing people of their sect/belief system/ political group ever did, either.

Wow, you have quite an imagination. I wasn’t going to say any of that. I just want to know which of the many popular versions of the Crusades and Inquisitions stories you subscribe to. Most people know next to nothing about what really happened, how many people were imprisoned or killed, and who actually carried out these activities.

 

[PaulDupre]

I guess everyone has noticed that the Mormons have taken off their plastic smiles and are showing their true selves. It doesn’t take much, does it?

I hope all the lurkers are taking notes, so they will see through the phoney nicey-nice smiles of the Mormons they meet. Under that pleasant exterior they truly hate us.

I think its time to post some Brigham Young about how Mormons see non-Mormons…

 

[twopekinguys]

I guess everyone has noticed that the Mormons have taken off their plastic smiles and are showing their true selves. It doesn’t take much, does it?

I hope all the lurkers are taking notes, so they will see through the phoney nicey-nice smiles of the Mormons they meet. Under that pleasant exterior they truly hate us.

I think its time to post some Brigham Young about how Mormons see non-Mormons…

I would like to think that no one hates anyone, but I am seeing a pattern.

When things don’t go their way, and there is no way for them to admit their errors, they either take off, or get rather snippy.

I also see all of their demands for proof, but rarely provide any.

All of which is sad. I would have more respect for someone if they simply said, I don’t have proof.

 

[PaulDupre]

There’s definitely a pattern.

The Mormons come here preaching their apostasy-restoration story, for which there is absolutely no evidence, citing the Book of Mormon and other LDS scriptures. When we point out that they have no evidence and that the BoM is an obvious fake with no evidence to support it, they:

1. Start cutting down the bible. Apparently they think that if they can get us to doubt the bible, we will be more likely to accept the BoM which is mostly plagiarized from the bible.
2. Start bringing up things Catholics did (or may have done) hundreds of years ago.
3. Call us stupid, ignorant, insane, liars, sinful, etc.
4. If none of that works (and why wouldn’t it? ), they bring up the “pedophile priest” scandal - as if nothing of that sort goes on in Mormonism.

 

[dianaiad]

Stephen168:
Was there a point to this?

 

[PaulDupre]

Sometimes it helps to sum up.

 

[sweetnay]

Dianaid, again you miss the point, the Dogmatic teachings of the Catholic Church are perfect, without error, protected. The people are not. The Mormon teachings are errant, and have seen COMPLETE reversals. There’s no way around this.

I see you have been deeply, deeply programmed from day one, as you admitted you don’t have a problem w polygamy etc.

Really. Wow.

You’re in so deep, you HAVE to make this mormonism thing work.

You just keep thinkin’ the sure sign of the nail and secret handshakes etc will get you to goddess hood and your own planet.

And hopefully, your husband will pull you through the veil after you die, he doesn’t have to ya know–yikes.

Thank God for the freedom of the blood of Christ…

 

[twopekinguys]

There’s definitely a pattern.

The Mormons come here preaching their apostasy-restoration story, for which there is absolutely no evidence, citing the Book of Mormon and other LDS scriptures. When we point out that they have no evidence and that the BoM is an obvious fake with no evidence to support it, they:

1. Start cutting down the bible. Apparently they think that if they can get us to doubt the bible, we will be more likely to accept the BoM which is mostly plagiarized from the bible.
2. Start bringing up things Catholics did (or may have done) hundreds of years ago.
3. Call us stupid, ignorant, insane, liars, sinful, etc.
4. If none of that works (and why wouldn’t it? ), they bring up the “pedophile priest” scandal - as if nothing of that sort goes on in Mormonism.

Thanks for the link

 

[PaulDupre]

I’ve found that the best thing to do with Mormons is to just keep them posting. The more they post the more deluded and foolish they seem, the less logic they evince, and the more hateful and un-Christian they become.

The lurkers are watching - and learning.