Diana - the difference is Catholics have the **Catechism **as a primary source. What **uninformed/ex/poorly catechised Catholics **have to say doesn’t matter if contradicts it.
Er…no.
It wasn’t all that long ago that I had a very long, and very hotly contended, conversation with Catholics right here on this board regarding excommunication. Boy, did I get it in the neck! I had the effrontery to quote canon law regarding it…only to be told that canon law was too complicated for regular people to comprehend (yet these same people must abide by it…go figure…). I finally found the relevent information in the catechism…or someone else did, I forget. At any rate, it was found and it turned out that what I claimed that the church taught about automatic excommunication and those who obtained abortion was indeed what the church taught. Between my first claim and the denoument, however, I was accused of everything from lying about it, “telling Catholics what they believed,” right down to having my claim thrown in the dustbin because I spelled the term incorrectly.
Hey, wait…that one was you, wasn’t it?
ANYway, it turns out that I was right; excommunication is automatic and instant when one obtains an abortion. All manner of things were used to argue with me about this, matters that were completely irrelevent to the point, such as the difference between the LDS view of excommunication and the Catholic view, spelling (again…) the incomprehensibility of canon law and the unreasonable demand that I was making that Catholics understand canon law (well, that was before the bit about abortion resulting in an instant, automatic excommunication was pointed out in the catachism…).
The point is, lax, that it doesn’t really matter what the catachism says. Individual Catholic beliefs are what the individual Catholic says they are. As I remember, NOBODY here was particularly grateful to learn something new about Catholic beliefs as a result of me pointing out what ‘the church teaches.’
If anybody changed their mind about it, it wasn’t because of anything
I said. Trust me, anybody who learned something new did so because he or she went to the catachism and looked. If anything, my (name removed by moderator)ut made it more difficult to change opinions or learn something. Who wants to be taught about one’s own belief by someone who disagrees with it?
As you have pointed out, the CoJCoLDS has no catechism as the Catholics do. Come to think of it, the CATHOLICS haven’t had this particular catechism for more than fifty or so years, though y’all have had catechisms…plural, for quite a long time.
As well, we believe that since there is a prophet hanging around actually recieving revleation when required, closing the canon and setting doctrine in stone seems to be a pretty dumb thing to do. God has a habit of shaking up preconceptions and comfortable opinions.
On the other hand, sometimes ex’s have good insight (but you are right, they usually have an axe to grind).
Sometimes…though in all honesty they have to prove themselves considerably before such insights can be examined properly. Accepting the word of, and information from, an ex is a little like looking at an anti-landmine exhibit I saw once. A woman has been knitting replicas of lethal land mines in pink, very expensive, yarn for many years. If you didn’t know what they were, they look like, oh…a fuzzy chess set, kitty toys or baby huggables. Some of them are actually as soft as they look, but most of them have the actual landmines inside (with the explosives removed for the display, of course…). The POINT is that dealing in the land of ex’s is like exploring that knitted display…everybody looks fuzzy and nice, and presents him or herself as soft, gentle and huggable. The problem, of course, is that while they all might look harmless…well, you get my drift.
Mormons, on the other hand, are the primary source. If I have a question, I am told to ask a missionary. If the missionary can’t answer it, I am told I ask too many questions.
What is the diffference between an anti and a critic?
Both are critical of a faith or belief system. As soon, however, as the critic begins to use mistatements, insults and lies to defeat that faith, those actions define him as an ‘anti.’ Believing that any action that defeats the target belief is acceptable is ‘anti’ behavior.
Repeating often answered calumnies against a faith even after those insults have been answered–without referring to the answer–is ‘anti’ behavior.
For instance, there is an idiot on alt.religion.christian.roman.catholic who used to (I haven’t been there in awhile, but he probably still is…) claim that Catholics pray to Mary because they believe that she is the earth goddess, an incarnation of Gaia–and that the worship of Mary was an ‘adoption’ of pagan goddess worship in order to convert pagans. He has been told the truth about Marian doctrine. Many Catholics have done so. I have done so. He will wait several days, and repost the same thing.
Ed Decker still makes money with “The Godmakers,” even though everybody…the most critical of mainstream Christian academia, condemns the thing as assinine and mostly untrue. I STILL get people who quote the thing to me as if it proved how horrific Mormonism is.
Oh, you know what I’m talking about. Simply disagreeing with doctrine that one actually holds is not being ‘anti,’ unless one is insulting about it. However, reinterpreting beliefs so that they bear little resemblance to actual doctrine, insisting that the new interpretation is what the faith actually teaches, and then objecting to THAT—well, that is ‘anti.’
Jack Chick is Anti. Ed Decker is anti. You…seem to fall more into the ‘critic’ mode. Some other posters here are solidly anti. (shrug) Does that help any?
