TRIBES OF ISRAEL. I can't believe so many people fall for this "religion." Whatever floats your boat, I guess, but just leave us out of it. And the whole baptizing dead people is just plain creepy.

that nothing she does will ever make a fundamental change in her religion, so she's better off leaving.

their policies about african americans. And there are some things moving forward on GLBT rights that could change things.

I tend to see them as a bottom line business organization. If they think they are going to lose a portion of the population or see any opportunity to gain another portion, I think they will change.

hurch.

Loves her daughters and wants us to be equal. In Mormon doctrine God has a Wife. They have the bones to create an out for themselves. Just finish Joseph's Revelations thru the current Prophet and give women equal rights just as they did with African Americans when BYU needed taller basketball players.

Are you still floating around Mexico?

I have been back in the states for about a month. We are putting the boat up for hurricane season and going to go for a land trip. Back on the boat in September and will spend the winter in the Sea of Cortex.

It's a rough life, but somebody has to do it!

What are you up to this summer?

To anything on one level. I'm disabled with a crunchy lower back and sciatica. I can't lift more than 20 lbs. So it's now or never. I have a giant Pod in the driveway. And,yes, that means I've been in communication with the Pod People. Cue the spooky music.

I've always tried to look at it as a chance to purge.

Glad you are making what sounds like a good move and I hope you have friends to help you get everything in that pod!

I'm also a tidy hoarder. I have collected massive tea cups, dolls, and miniatures. I've been packing for days and have barely made a dent. I seem to have a penchant for vintage doll dishes and painted shelving to display them. Quite a sickness. This is a good time to purge the less than stellar items.

I told my kids and other family and friends that they could go in and take whatever they wanted, as long as they found a way to get rid of the rest.

It felt great. I moved into a tiny space and have had only a few minor regrets about things I left behind.

In the end, it's just stuff.

But I haven't been a collector of much, and understand that that can be much different.

...about whether it's a good idea to be a member of said church, and then say "thank you" for the excommunication.

But some GLBT people and women are staying in and pushing back. I think either option can be admirable.

...of course that's probably because I see it a lot like "staying in and pushing back" to correct the wrongheaded position on, say, immigration reform of the Flat Earth Society.

(Because you know, if you can just get them to reconsider that then problem solved and the whole organization would be perfectly fine...)

I have stayed in some organizations and been successful, and I have stayed and failed, then got out.

The mormons have a history of changing when it suits their news. They have current prophets so they can pretty easily change the rules when they want.

That doesn't mean that it will be perfectly fine, but I can foresee a change in the GLBT policies and it could happen relatively quickly.

Follow the money.

the mormon church is not. The organizations I have been in have had some policies I felt were egregious but they also had parts I fully supported.

So, I don't see it as the same general principle.

I can even point to the democratic party as an example.

That issue being that a magical deity thing exists that wants them to do stuff.

In fact, I can't think of any that are, though there might be some obscure ones out there.

But I guess one could take a very narrow view and put out the one issue you outline.

If ones only goal was to change the whole deity thing, I would agree that there is no point in staying in.

It's so much easier to demonize, reject and attack a group that one might see as a one issue monolith. That's generally what prejudices are born of.

It takes a lot more to see the complexity and diversity…. and even the things one may have in common with them.

I said they are at root one issue organisations. and that root issue, overriding ALL OTHERS, is the existence of their deity and what it wants.


By all means make an argument that the primary overriding issue for ANY Catholic, r Protestant, or Mormon, or Baptist, or Shiite, or Sunni, or whatever church is not their claim that their God exists and what it wants them to do.


That single thing defines their entire identity. It's the reason for their whole existence as a church. And I'm entirely capable of seeing all the complex ways they dress that up and modify it and express it but the problem is that my issue isn't with all the complex ways they dress that up or express it or modify it. It's with the core issue itself. So all that complexity you're talking about? Irreverent to my objection to the organizations... every bit as much as any degree of nuance in the Flat Earth Societies views on immigration reform are irrelevant to my fundamental problem with them being the Flat Earth society in the first place.


You can make all the arguments and appeals about social outreach programs or political activism or whatever else you want that any given church or religion engages in. Good for them. They're still the "I believe in a magic deity that tells me to do stuff" club and that's the problem.

If one wanted them to stop representing doctors/patients and start representing lawyers, you might have a point.

At the root of it, overriding ALL OTHERS, is their motto - Helping doctors help patients. But how that is interpreted and practiced and used varies tremendously and sometimes can be changed.

I bring them up as a specific example because if you look underneath that you can find tremendous complexity and even contradiction. It's complex, but medicine is the reason for it's whole existence.

So, if your aim is to entirely eliminate organizations that claim that god exists and that there are things it wants people to do, you would be entirely correct in not being a member of any of those organizations.

But if you want to address the underlying modifications, expressions or the ways it gets dressed, then you may have more yank from the inside.

You can make all the arguments and appeals about them being so fundamentally flawed at their core that they are not even worth trying to change, and I would never expect you to engage in trying to change them. Your position appears to be as dogmatic and rigid as theirs.

And that's another problem.

don't share their beliefs.

Why exactly do you care if there are organizations to which people choose to belong that have as their basis that there is a god and that that god wants them to do stuff?

If the stuff their god wants them to do is consistent with your own agenda and they are not trying to force you to do things, what's your beef?

Why don't we stand together to combat those that has stuff they feel they are supposed to do that is not consistent with our shared agenda and who want to force their personal beliefs on us?

Why don't we stand together to support those that are doing stuff we like and not forcing us to do anything?

My best guess is that you don't see the difference or you really believe that a simple belief in god is such a bad thing that it should be eradicated.

But it might be something else entirely.

...after spending so many posts explaining something so simple.


"Why exactly do you care if there are organizations to which people choose to belong that have as their basis that there is a god and that that god wants them to do stuff? "

For the same reason I care there's a Flat Earth Society. Only the Flat Earth Society doesn't exercise anywhere within many orders of magnitude the amount of political and social influence the magic diety clubs do.

And the general, fundamental problem with that kind of thinking is that it cannot be meaningfully discussed or debated. There is no arguing the basis of claiming that a magic super being has expressed a desire to someone. They require no justification for their positions beyond "cause I said God said so" or, more often, "cause that guy at the pulpit said God said so"

And that's DANGEROUS. Even if what they're saying today is something nice and fluffy like "set up a soup kitchen" because tomorrow it might be something else.

But are you as sure there is no god as you are that the world is round? Might you be wrong and they be right? Will you ever know for sure?

I've got strong evidence to challenge the flat earth society. I have none with with to challenge the basic tenet of religion.

I think I know, but I am far from sure, so I'm going to let them be and support them when they are doing the right thing.

And in my lifetime alone, they have done many right things. While it can and has been dangerous, it has also been extraordinarily positive. A large number of the agencies in this world working for the rights of women and girls are religiously based.

Have you seen "Under the Same Sky"? Very hard to watch, but needs to be seen by everyone who can access it.

I'm going to fight against and for people who do things that I believe in and not because they are religiously or non-religiously based.

No part of what I just explained to you about my problem with these organizations relied on certainty, or even high confidence, that God doesn't exist.


To be clear, *even if God DID exist* the problem would be exactly the same. That entity is claimed to be a supernatural inscrutable being beyond human comprehension with people running around making totally unverifiable claims that it wants then to take specific actions and whole clubs of people willing to give totally unjustifiable credence to those claims and That Is Dangerous In And Of Itself. On a fundamental level. Regardless of what specifically any one guy at the head of any given congregation is telling it's members God says to do today.


Even if every single religious leader on the face of the earth today was using that claimed authority for nothing but happy fluffy I love kittens and puppies proclamations (which they most assuredly are not) that would change nothing about how dangerous it was. Because there is nothing stopping that from flipping on it's head tomorrow.

I'm listening just fine, I just don't agree with you.

The same arguments you make for religious groups are made for all kinds of groups that think the "know" the truth about something.

So, other than the complete elimination of religion, do you have any suggestions on how you might address the problem?

Mine is to feed the good parts and starve the bad, but you apparently see that as keeping it alive, which appears to be inconsistent with your overall agenda.

I've told you this before, if you insist on taking every explanation and correction as a personal insult, go nuts. Don't know what you get out of it but whatever gets you off.

"I'm listening just fine, I just don't agree with you."

The same arguments you make for religious groups are made for all kinds of groups that think the "know" the truth about something.

"So, other than the complete elimination of religion, do you have any suggestions on how you might address the problem? "

disagree without making it personal and patronizing.

I do get that you have very strong and rather rigid views about religion which are highly unlikely to change, but may if you have more exposure and are able to drop some of the dogma. Rational thought includes keeping an open mindedness for new information and ideas, not clinging tightly to a specific hypothesis.

And I don't agree with your basic take on this.

So this may be a very agreeable place to just disagree.

None of what she claims to want to accomplish requires religion, faith or god, and yet she is obsessively determined to stay with her "beloved", no matter what. She sounds eerily like a woman in an abusive relationship.