this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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But I'm sure in the spirit of the Internet you won't accept the first sentence of wikipedia.
I've always been the guy who does consider Mormons christians. I don't think it matters that they're non trinitarian. That just makes one a nontrinitarian Christian. But more and more, with some family having converter and some friends, I'm more leaning towards them being a full blown cult, in the colloquial sense of that word. A Christian cult, but a cult. They're huge which is really the only reason they're not considered a cult. If their membership were 1700 instead of 17 million, pretty much nobody would hesitate to call the group headed by a charismatic "prophet," that initiates members in a secret ritual, demands the wearing of sacred underwear, and teaches that God is an alien who will make you king of a planet when you die a cult. So, yeah, Christian. But a Christian cult.
The line of cult vs. religion has many criteria, but a big one is if it survives a generation or two after the death of the charismatic prophet. Usually it's not considered both a religion AND a cult, it kinda graduates from cult to religion by lasting a long enough time.
I wonder if it having continuous prophets changes that are all
A lot of Christians groups don't consider Mormons to be Christian. They don't believe in the Holy Trinity, which is a fairly core belief of most Christians.
Like in a sense, Christians are just Jews with an extra book. Mormons are Christians with an extra book. Are Mormons Jews?
Mormons have officilly an extra 3 books.
The first book is the Bible fan fiction they hand out (the book of Mormon). It's supposedly about two groups that came to the Americas. One during the dispersal at the tower of babel. The second a group of Jews around 600bce. It's a meandering story plot with terrible grammar and no real theology other than prosperity doctrine (righteous get rich, sinners are poor)
The second is the "prophesies" that the founder and a few of his followers came up with (doctrine and covenants). " It's got the normal stuff you'd expect from a con-artist. God commands such an such to give the founder money etc.. It also has a infamous commandment allowing him to cheat on his wife sleeping around and raping teenagers by "marrying them".
The last book is a real doozy, the Pearl of Great Price. The founder purchased some Egyptian papyrus from a traveling peddler and then proceeded to "translate" it. Amazingly it's the actually writings of Abraham. It basically re-tells Genesis with some weird quirks. He even copied in some of the hieroglyphs he "translated".