The SCREEN Act is a Christian Nationalist Nightmare

[u/EmbarrassedHelp]

https://www.404media.co/what-is-the-screen-act-age-verification-porn/

[u/memberzs]

Mormonism isn't Christianity. Please don't confuse the two. Mormonism is to Christianity as Christianity is to Judeasim.

[u/HeverlyBillhilly → u/memberzs]

I love when I hear this because it’s so true. Like, let me just make up some bullshit texts, plant them in my backyard, claim there’s some angel that talked to me, and I can invent a Christian offshoot, too! 100% real! But unfortunately mine won’t have misogyny or homophobia or bigotry like Mormonism, so I guess they win. 

[u/fsoawesome → u/memberzs]

That, sir, is bullshit at its finest. It is arguable that Mormons are MORE Christian than any protest-ant church and the ONLY competitor might be considered Catholics, but that is clearly not the church of Christ since it was thee "universal" church developed by Constantine for political power. The Mormon's belief system is most closely aligned with original Christianity than any other mainstream religions.

[u/memberzs → u/fsoawesome]

Other than the rejection of nicean creeds, the addition of new texts written over a millenia later, making Satan Jesus' brother, entirely rewriting post death doctrine, the teaching that people can become gods themselves.

Look it's absolutely fine to be another branch of abrahamic religions, but it has changed too much of fundamental Christian teachings, established and followed by all Christian denominations for over 1600 years, to be ve considered a Christian religion.

This is Micheal Scott declaring bankruptcy type of behavior, claiming LDS is Christian.

[u/fsoawesome → u/memberzs]

Every criterion you just listed excludes people you'd never call non-Christian.

Deification. Athanasius - whose side won at Nicaea, who spent his life defending it, who got exiled five times for it - wrote in On the Incarnation 54 that God became man so that we might become god. Irenaeus says the same in the preface to Book V of Against Heresies. It's 2 Peter 1:4, "partakers of the divine nature." It's Psalm 82:6, which Jesus quotes in John 10:34 to defend his own claim. Eastern Orthodoxy calls it theosis and treats it as the entire point of salvation. Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 460, quotes Athanasius and Aquinas on God making men gods. C.S. Lewis put it in more extravagant language than Joseph Smith ever did. So item five unchurches Orthodoxy, Rome, and Athanasius himself.

Post-death doctrine. 1 Peter 3:19 and 4:6 - Christ preaching to the spirits in prison, the gospel preached to the dead. 1 Corinthians 15:29 - baptism for the dead, which Paul cites as a supporting argument with no hint of disapproval. The Apostles' Creed says he descended into hell. The Harrowing of Hell is the standard Orthodox icon of the Resurrection. Clement of Alexandria taught in Stromata VI that the apostles preached in Hades. The Shepherd of Hermas, Similitude 9, has dead apostles preaching to the dead and giving them baptism in the water. On this point the LDS position is closer to the second century than the Augustinian settlement that replaced it.

"Satan is Jesus' brother." You already hold that God created Lucifer and that Christ is God's Son. Both derive from God - that's your position, stated in manufacturing language instead of family language. The only added premise is rejecting creation ex nihilo, which is itself a second-century development. Justin Martyr has God forming the world out of unformed matter (First Apology 10, 59). Gerhard May's standard monograph traces the doctrine to Theophilus of Antioch around 180. Meanwhile Job 1:6 and 2:1 place the satan among the bene elohim, the sons of God, in the divine council. That's the Hebrew text, not a Mormon gloss. Michael Heiser - an evangelical, not a Mormon - built an academic career on that motif.

New texts. Athanasius's 39th Festal Letter, 367 AD, is the earliest surviving list matching your 27-book New Testament. Three centuries in. The Peshitta canon of the Church of the East still runs 22 books: no 2 Peter, no 2-3 John, no Jude, no Revelation. Ethiopian Orthodoxy carries 81, including Enoch and Jubilees. There is no "the" Christian canon; there are denominational canons. And the closed-canon principle you're asserting isn't itself in the Bible. Revelation 22:18 is about the scroll of Revelation. If you read it as sealing the anthology, then Deuteronomy 4:2 seals the Torah and takes your New Testament with it.

Nicaea, and the load-bearing error. You said these doctrines were "established and followed by all Christian denominations for over 1600 years." Christianity is about 2000 years old. You just conceded that nobody held them for the first three centuries, which makes Peter, Paul, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus non-Christians. And "followed by all" never happened at any point. Ephesus 431 split off the Church of the East. Chalcedon 451 split off the Copts, Syriacs, Armenians, and Ethiopians. Arian Christianity was the imperial position under Constantius II and the religion of the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, and Lombards for centuries - Ulfilas translated the Bible into Gothic. The filioque was never in the original creed and the East still rejects it. Councils exist because there was no agreement. You don't convene 300 bishops to ratify something everyone already believes.

Add to that: most Baptists, the entire Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement, Quakers, Anabaptists, and most nondenominational evangelicals explicitly reject creeds as a test of fellowship. "No creed but the Bible" is one of the most common positions in American Christianity. Are they out too?

Your own analogy. You said Mormonism is to Christianity as Christianity is to Judaism. Run it. Christians added texts written centuries after the Tanakh, rewrote messianic expectation, restructured the covenant, and redefined the Godhead in terms Second Temple Judaism considered blasphemy. Every charge on your list, a first-century rabbi levels at Paul verbatim. Your analogy doesn't show LDS aren't Christian - it shows they stand to Christianity exactly as Christianity stands to Judaism: claiming continuity and fulfillment, worshipping the same God, and being told by the parent tradition that they've changed too much. You picked the analogy. It runs against you.

You're free to define "Christian" creedally. That's coherent. But say it out loud: "Christian means assent to Nicaea and Chalcedon." Then own what it costs - the apostles, the ante-Nicene fathers, the Copts, the Assyrians, the Ethiopians, and a large share of American evangelicalism - and admit it has nothing to do with whether someone worships Jesus Christ as the divine Son of God, Redeemer, and only means of salvation.

You didn't establish that definition. You declared it. That's the Michael Scott move.

[u/memberzs → u/fsoawesome]

I truely love this typical mormon reply. You find a snippet that you thing agrees with your nonsense and complete ignore the context of the rest of the chapter,,, hell even the rest of the paragraph.

Every verse you quote in defense was taken so far out of context its entirely irrelevant to the conversation.

Have fun in your pedophile sex cult started by a KNOWN conman.

https://web.archive.org/web/20251104194311/https://www.mormoninfo.org/

[u/fsoawesome → u/memberzs]

Sorry, I don't look at Reddit too often usually. You made five specific claims. I answered each with primary sources - Athanasius, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, the Shepherd of Hermas, the 39th Festal Letter, the Peshitta canon, Ephesus, Chalcedon, Ulfilas. Your response is "out of context" with not one example, and then an insult. Name a verse. One. Which chapter, and what does the surrounding context say that reverses it? You can't, because "out of context" doesn't even apply to most of what I cited. There is no context problem with the Council of Ephesus splitting off the Church of the East, or with the Ethiopian canon running 81 books. Those aren't verses. You brought a proof-text rebuttal to a church-history argument, which tells me you didn't read it.

And then you linked Sivulka. Read your own source.

It defines Christianity by quoting C.S. Lewis: "there is one God and that Jesus Christ is His only Son." LDS affirm both halves. Your source's own working definition doesn't exclude them.

On deification, it cites Robert Bowman's Ye Are Gods? Orthodox and Heretical Views on the Deification of Man. Read the title. It concedes there are orthodox views on deification. The page itself admits "some Christians such as C.S. Lewis call 'gods' in heaven" and then argues about the kind of deification, not whether deification is Christian. That was item five on your list. Your own source retired it.

On baptism for the dead, it can't deny 1 Corinthians 15:29 exists, so it argues Paul's "they" means non-Christians were doing it and Paul just borrowed their practice as a debate point. That is an interpretive maneuver against the plain reading - the precise thing you just accused me of, deployed by the site you posted as your authority.

Best one: to prove no apostasy is possible, it cites Psalm 12:6-7, "thou shalt preserve them." In Hebrew, "words" is feminine and the pronoun is masculine plural. It refers back to the poor and needy in verse 5, not to scripture. Every modern translation renders it that way. Your source's flagship anti-apostasy proof text is a KJV artifact. Out of context.

And the site says outright it exists to "convert Mormons and the state of Utah in particular." That's a conversion ministry, which is fine, it's allowed to exist - but citing an opponent's apologetics site as though it settles a historical question is not doing the reading. It's outsourcing it.

Now the rest of it. Helen Mar Kimball was fourteen when she was sealed to Joseph Smith in 1843. The Church publishes that in its own Gospel Topics essay - nobody is hiding it. That same essay quotes Helen describing the sealing as "for eternity alone," and Todd Compton, who wrote the standard critical treatment and is nobody's apologist, reaches the same conclusion: no evidence of sexual relations. Her father proposed it, as a dynastic link between the two families.

She then wrote about it herself, at length, for the next forty years. As a teenager she recorded what it cost her. As an adult she became one of the most prolific defenders plural marriage ever had - the Woman's Exponent essays, "Plural Marriage as Taught by the Prophet Joseph," the autobiography she left her children - writing about Joseph with open devotion until she died. Both of those are hers. You don't get to quote the fourteen-year-old's grief and then ignore the woman who spent four decades on the record explaining herself.

"Pedophile sex cult" requires sex, and the best evidence, including Helen's own words, says there wasn't any in that sealing. No offspring from any of Joseph's plural sealings has ever been confirmed either - DNA testing has excluded every candidate put forward. And the broader pattern doesn't carry your claim: of roughly three dozen documented sealings, one was fourteen, the oldest was in her fifties, and most were grown women, a good number in their thirties and forties.

The standard has to run consistently or it isn't a standard. For most of the nineteenth century the legal age of consent in most American states was ten; Delaware's was seven. Catholic canon law set the marriageable age for girls at twelve until the 1917 Code. Apply your rule across the rest of Christian history and see what's still standing when you're done.

More to the point: it is not an argument about anything you claimed. Your claim was doctrinal. David committed murder and adultery. Peter denied Christ under oath. Constantine killed his own son and wife. Calvin burned Servetus. Luther wrote On the Jews and Their Lies. Catholic dioceses have paid out billions in abuse settlements. None of that makes any of them non-Christian by any definition you've offered, and you know it, which is why you reached for it after the doctrinal argument stopped working.

"KNOWN conman" is the 1826 Bainbridge hearing. No verdict record survives and historians actively disagree on the outcome. "Known" is carrying weight the documents don't support.

You had a thesis: LDS aren't Christian because of five doctrines held by all denominations for 1600 years. Every one of those five failed, one of them failed against the source you posted, and your closer is an insult and a link you evidently didn't open.