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Originally Posted by MikeWaters
You make some good points.
I think a lot of Mormon mullahs would be taken aback by their own behavior if they realized how close it is to Islam.
Because almost none of these people want to say that they admire Islam. Since 9/11. Before 9/11, yes, some would probably say they admired Islam.
I've mentioned before, one of our CG members who spent time in Afghanistan, years ago, commented on how similar Islam is to Mormonism, in a positive way. But I think he's abandoned that line of thinking. At least in public.
Just had someone today on FB rail on the clothes that the women playing beach volleyball are wearing.
I think it's a bad look for Mormon men to be railing on the use of bikinis in sport. Maybe I'm possessed by Satan to think this (as has been intimated on CB).
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The LDS Church is what it is. Harold Bloom and others have written some interesting stuff about the earliest schism in Christianity between Pauline Christianity and James's original, more hard core, more Jewish derivative, more ascetic, more rural monotheism that probably was the form of Christianity most influential to Islam (a close reading of the NT reveals the split; for example, the council that was very tense during the famine in the 60s and the debates over circumcision; and James's diminishment as a character in the canonized gospels). (I dramatized that schism in my novel Logos.)
It's interesting how looking back you see this split in the monotheism tree rising up to today. I submit that the Germanic part of the Protestant reformation itself was a reaction to the Renaissance--rediscovery of Europe's Classical heritage and achievements--and yearning to go back to James, and of course occurred sort of in the sticks and outside of the Renaissance ferment. The Protestant reformation informed Mormonism---as obviously did Islam--and these inputs were attractive to many who disapproved of the Enlightenment and modernism. You see this division within Judaism--orthodox and reform Judaism.
Mormonism's role seems to be on the Jamesian branch, or, it will cease to be Mormonism.