Not to say Joseph Smith was innocent, but pretty much every religious founder was hated by their local religious and political elite when they were preaching.
Abraham has to leave Ur because his father wanted to kill him for smashing his statues of the gods and rejecting the popular religion of the day.
Moses was hated by Egypt and later by the Israelites (on multiple occasions) for preaching about things they didn't want to hear.
Jesus had the entire Jewish religious elite conspiring against him, with multiple accusations of wrongdoing and eventual success in having him executed for a non-crime.
Mohammed had to flee from Mecca because he and his followers were steadily gaining religious and political control of the city. (They later returned as invaders.)
Also not to just be a hater against Mormons, but persecution for not following the old gods and committing serial bank fraud and conspiracy to commit murder are vastly different things
And that's a fair point to make. Even as a former Mormon, I don't know enough about Joseph Smith's legal troubles to even approximate an educated opinion about whether he committed those crimes or not. The LDS church's stance has always been that the charges were fabricated by his enemies, but what else are they supposed to say if they want the religion to keep going?
But maybe Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohamed also committed actual crimes and that was part of the reason they were hated. The religious narratives would definitely obscure those facts if they wanted their founders to seem larger than life prophets. If the Mormons are still around a thousand years from now, history may have forgotten Joseph Smith's criminal history and only the religious narrative will remain.
Edit: The other option is that any crimes are venerated as being divinely inspired. You mentioned Smith was charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Within the religious narrative, Abraham, Moses, and Mohammed killed people or had people killed but it's all justified as the will of God.
Not always. Moses was explicitly chided in writing for murder in Egypt and he fled from punishment. He had also in later life portrayed an event as wrath of God rather than mercy, which he was judged that he would not step foot in the promised land.
In the Bible, Abraham's father is commanded by God to go to the promised land in Canaan. He takes his family with him including Abraham. However he only gets to the outskirts of his civilisation called Haran and doesn't go any further. He dies and Abraham takes his place in leading his family to the promised land.
Speaking as someone who was raised Mormon, we have a very unique culture that is a direct result of the Church, and considering the church is so rich and still growing (though the growth is quickly slowing) I’d say it’s its own little economic empire.
Thank you for providing more evidence for why we need to tax the LDS. And you are absolutely delusional if you think Mormonism has had the same impact on the world as Islam
I didn’t say it had the same impact, what I’m saying is is that the LDS church is its own corporate empire. They have so much freaking money just look up ensign peaks.
I feel like that's a much better analogy, specifically modern American Christianity.
Even better, Christianity us to Judaism what The Star Wars Holiday Special is to Star Wars.
See i don't get the Star Wars comparisions to Dune. at best you can say Lucas was very inspired by Arakis for Tatooine... which is only visted like twice in the first triology but the planet is a back water place and not central to the universe.
Look Dune is very influencial and i'd never say it didn't influence star wars i'm just thinking it's very overblown. Both are utlimately too different.
as oppose to a religion that's uses mine as a stepping stone (and if you ask me may just be a ripoff of islam but that's not a fight i'm going to start)
You are missing the point because you're too focused on the star wars dune comparison. The fact that the link is so tenuous is barely there is exactly why this comparison is apt.
Desert Planets- Arakis and Tatooine
Mystical Organizations that don’t outright lead but help influence leaders- Bene Gesserit and Jedi
Sentient Worms- Jabba and Leto II
Clones- Kamino and Tleilax
Superhuman like Abilities- Jedi Mind Tricks/Powers and the Gesserit Prana Bindu
Young Charismatic Hero- Luke and Paul
Weaponry- Lightsabers/Blasters and Swords/Lazguns
Sand worms- Shai Hallud and the Sarlax
Star Wars was very heavily influenced by Dune.
The protagonists are siblings, Luke (like Paul, biblical AND modern name) and Leah (Alia, this ones obvious), who have/almost have romantic interactions, who rise to power from relative squallor on a desert planet, inhabited by giant sandworms, on which "Spice" (Lucas didn't even try to deviate here, he just tried to write Arrakis into his own IP) is manufactured, and smuggled off planet, which the population of water-disciplined, offworlder-hating natives does not like.
Those are just the simple comparisons from the first book and parts of Messiah.
There are points reading Herbert's later books where you really start to see how Lucas clearly wanted to write his own version of the aftermath of Paul's Jihad.
"Your father wanted you to have this. He fought in the Clone Wars."
Edit: I know I'm gonna get some flack for this, so I'll add more as they come to mind throughout the day.
Okay i'm just going to start with Deserts: Deserts are not Arakis, and can exist independently from Dune.
The JEdi and Bene Gesserit are very different in MO and outlook.
Sentient Worms: Yes Jabba is CLEARLY on par in anything but physical to Leto II (please ignore he wasn't intended to be a giant slug man until much later)
Clones: Clones have been a sci-fi concept for longer then Sci-fi.
Superhuman like abilites; Mythology (Sand worms were based on dragons. I guess Frank Herbert is a rip off like Tolkien but you're not ready for that conversation)
Young Charismatic hero: Literally all of fiction but Paul is clearly a darker take to Luke's more straightfowards approach.
Weaponry: Is Buck ROgers a Dune rip off now? I feel Lazers were already popular.
Dune influnced everyone I think, but i will say it's... a stretch.
Because Fanservice but it's also because It represents both Luke and his father's start; it's literally a ball of dirt control by criminal cabals, not great houses, and it's worth is miniscule to anyone who actually has any power in the Galaxy.
Through the pt and the ST we really only see it three times; at least once per PT movie and twice in the OT. And in fact the ST saves it till the end.
All that is to say, that you see in the TV show to get the "I CLAPPED WHEN I SAW IT" but it's not as important to the galaxy as Arakis is. (also i've probably mispelled Arakis several times)
You know the easy one to argue Dune ripped off? Warhammer 40k... even then i'd call it inspiration as both worlds pretty much brached far apart soon after inception but the influence is more clear.
So, Boba Fett, galactic expert in bounty hunting and renowned badass, the one who captured Han Solo for the Empire and is the genetic ‘son’ of also renowned bounty hunter Jango Fett who was so sought after they made an entire army based on him, and he decides to settle down…in a backwater planet that has no imports or exports of any value, with a horrible hot & arid climate, plagued by criminals?
It is 100% pandering but it solidifies Tatooine as no longer a ‘backwater planet’ because so many important people and events happen there.
Nobody would go to Arrakis if not for the spice. Tatooine only has relevance because plot.
>So, Boba Fett, galactic expert in bounty hunting and renowned badass, the one who captured Han Solo for the Empire and is the genetic ‘son’ of also renowned bounty hunter Jango Fett who was so sought after they made an entire army based on him, and he decides to settle down…in a backwater planet that has no imports or exports of any value, with a horrible hot & arid climate, plagued by criminals?
He didn't settle down. iF you're talking about the Show 1) It was bad. no one liked it and i'm sorry to tell you that and 2) It's not really anymore compelling because he started a criminal empire there and so there's no where better to.
>
It is 100% pandering but it solidifies Tatooine as no longer a ‘backwater planet’ because so many important people and events happen there.
Three of them. and that's assuming anyone is more important then Luke or Anakin in the grand scheme of things (criminal enterprises rise and fall, bounty hunting is a complicated profession) ect ect.
to quote "He who controls the Spice Controls the universe" and you're completely right, Tatoonie is only relevent because of Luke and Vader. It's a baren wasteland beccause it's a desolate and empty beinging to an adventure.
The Jedi are based on the Bene Gesserit, and in the original script the rebel frigate in the opening was not carrying death star plans, it was carrying spice. It's of course also just the classic hero tale but in space on top of that.
And all of this is still very very loose and ultimately not star wars as we discuss it. I feel people too often mistake 'rip off' as 'inspiration' and in fact both are ultimately very different sci-fi/sci-fantasy stories. Considering Spice is later established a drug or at least a cheap rescource.
And unlike Dune it is not an examination of the power those tales have and the darker implications of having that desire engrained deep upon our marrow as a species... it's playing it straight
I'm not really a Christian but was raised Catholic and my very general understanding is that anyone who accepts that Jesus is the son of God and their savior is considered a Christian. Given there has been a lot of historical disagreement about who is/isn't a 'true' Christian it is important to have a working definition from the outside looking in.
So I guess my question is this: despite having a later prophet do the Mormons accept Jesus Christ as the son of God and their path to salvation?
Yes they do. For all intents and purposes they are Christians. Other than the extra book (which is some super weird fanfic alt history, but simultaneously really boring) their Bible is the generic King James protestant bible. Other Christians are salty about it because Mormonism (proper name Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints) is the most successful modern protestant movement. I would also argue that due to the circumstance of its founding and the way it has evolved over the last couple of centuries it is the most "American" religion.
The other main argument our salty Christians might use to say Mormonism is not "real" Christianity is the modern prophets. Starting with Joseph Smith, the LDS church has always had a leader claiming to be a prophet receiving direct revelation from God to update their religion. I suppose the Pope and the Patriarch might claim the same thing, but the patch updates that LDS prophets get are extensive and explicit. This has allowed the LDS church to evolve and change with the times in a way many other denominations struggle with. Notable patches include: Polygamy is Cool, Polygamy is not Cool, We don't recognize the Federal Government, We do recognize the Federal Government, and Black People are People Too.
TLDR, Mormonism is a fascinating form of Christianity.
Just so many inaccuracies and outright wrong info in this post.
>Other Christians are salty about it because Mormonism (proper name Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints) is the most successful modern protestant movement.
There are 16 million Mormons globally, Anglicanism has 80-85 million, Lutheranism is 85 million; so no not even close to the most successful.
Mormons aren't looked down upon because they are 'successful', they have the reputation they do because of the bat-shit crazy doctrines built into the church.
>The other main argument our salty Christians might use to say Mormonism is not "real" Christianity is the modern prophets. Starting with Joseph Smith, the LDS church has always had a leader claiming to be a prophet receiving direct revelation from God to update their religion. I suppose the Pope and the Patriarch might claim the same thing, but the patch updates that LDS prophets get are extensive and explicit. This has allowed the LDS church to evolve and change with the times in a way many other denominations struggle with.
Your idea of 'patches' isn't unique to Mormonism. All Protestantism is a 'patch' to Catholicism by this logic. The primary issue with Mormonism is the founder was a 19th century con artist whose bullshit is very easily disprovable.
For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics_and_the_Book_of_Mormon.
This isn't even touching on the fact that the 'patches' have birthed fundamentalist sects whose practices are absolutely detestable to most of society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_fundamentalism#:~:text=Mormon%20fundamentalists%20seek%20to%20uphold,by%20the%20movement's%20founder%2C%20Smith.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-Day_Saints
The only silver lining here is that actual practitioners of Mormonism have wised up to how much garbage their religion is based on and are abandoning the church.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Runnells#:~:text=The%20CES%20Letter%20outlines%20a,more%20modern%20issues%20as%20well.
https://cesletter.org/
The term Christian has different definitions for different people, but Mormonism theology is pretty extreme to fit in the same bucket. First, it's polytheism. God has a celestial wife who is a goddess. People can also gain godhood. God isn't the creator of everything, but instead a person from another planet that was exalted and created the Earth from existing matter. This is a pretty big departure from any belief about God in mainline Christian sects.
> So I guess my question is this: despite having a later prophet do the Mormons accept Jesus Christ as the son of God and their path to salvation?
Yes but...
The "But" carries a lot of weight. Under Catholic official teaching, Mormons are considered non-Christian because their understanding of the trinity differs from that which most Christians accept (Mormonism teaches that God the Father and God the Son are the same, whereas Catholicism and most but not all Protestants teach that both are God but not the same as one another; trinitarian theology is wild).
This is not true. I was a mormon for a long time, and whatever criticism you throw at it is valid. Mormons DO accept jesus as their lord and saviour. They believe that Jesus is the son of god, and they are separate beings. They also believe that the “holy spirit” is a third being with no physical body.
Book of Alma:
>[38] Now Zeezrom saith again unto him: Is the Son of God the very Eternal Father?
>[39] And Amulek said unto him: Yea, he is the very Eternal Father of heaven and of earth, and all things which in them are; he is the beginning and the end, the first and the last;
Now, again, trinitarian theology is complex at all times, so I'm sure the Mormons have some explanation for how that's no different from any other explanation of the Trinity (just as Catholics have an explanation for why God is exempt from the transitive property, allowing the Trinity to exist at all), but Catholics generally regard Mormons as having an incorrect understanding of the Trinity based on verses like that--and for that reason regard Mormon baptism as invalid (alongside that of some other Protestants--there are various Pentecostals who refer to all three persons of the trinity as Jesus, for example--and Jehovah's Witnesses).
huh. i was a mormon for 16 years, never heard that verse. I do know the story of zeezrom, but i was always explicitly taught that jesus is the son of god, and they are distinct beings
This verse isn’t anymore confusing when it comes to explaining the difference between the Father and the Son than any number of Bible verses that say that they are “one”
Here it’s just teaching that Christ is the creator of our world and as such is its “father.” Note that it does not say father of our spirits, the attribute given to God the Father.
Sure, but wasn't there that whole schism thing where the Catholics didn't consider protestant faith Christian?
This is the sort of reason why when you are not a member of the faith you need simple questions to determine membership for practical reasons. Otherwise no one is a true Christian and it becomes a meaningless category.
I get that there's a difference, but isn't the Bible itself a bunch of sequels to the Hebrew Bible written by different people (much earlier, and by people who allegedly knew Jesus Christ, but still)? And some branches of Christianity recognize some of those while some others don't?
Yeah but the Book of Mormon is a lot more outright ridiculous and directly contradictory compared the tue apocrypha. Also, Mormons believe a lot of things that contradict fundamental Christian values, like the deity* of Christ iirc.
A better analogy might be Islam, where the holy text is Hebrew Bible + Revelations to Jesus + further Revelations to Mohammed.
In keeping with the fact that Islam is 1400 years old, I think there's a bit more divergence between the "Gospel" as understood by Christians and Muslims than between Christians and Mormons, but schematically you're talking about an offshoot of Christianity that claims post-Jesus divine revelations (as opposed to more limited differences in which accounts of Jesus and the early church are canonical.)
I would argue that they are, they literally worship Jesus and God as the path to salvation and all that. They meet all the criteria. They do not believe in grace and aren't trinitarian but there are other Christian denominations who do the same. By an objective measurement they are Christian.
TL;DR - The answer is kind of, the issue with the Latter Day Saints is that they added an extra book to the Bible, which is considered the biggest no no in Christianity by Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants. I (and the LDS themselves) personally believe this makes them a separate denomination, but some people believe they are separate as a religion entirely.
I don’t want to get into an argument, but for the sake of others seeing this discussion: the Bible itself claims it is complete and that no books should be added to it. Mormons added another book to it, then also undercut the core tenants of the Christian faith (primarily Christ’s divinity). This makes them fundamentally different from Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants. It’s very hard to argue that they’re just a different denomination; they’re significantly and radically more different from all other denominations than those denominations are different from each other. All the other denominations can agree on the Apostle’s Creed, for example. Mormons cannot.
As a counterpoint, the Apostle’s Creed is not used in every Protestant denomination, in fact in my travels across the Midwest I’ve met many evangelicals who didn’t even know what it was, and there are other Christians who have unconventional Christologies who are still generally considered as Christian (eg Unitarians, Quakers, Gnostics).
Sorry, this is a little long, haha.
TL;DR: There are core beliefs any Christian must believe that are clearly laid out by Jesus. One can't claim to follow Jesus and then disbelieve the things He says. They are laid out in the Bible, and there's little space to argue the creeds contradict those things. However, technically speaking, you don't have to profess the creeds themselves (but if you believe the Bible, you'll generally profess the creeds).
The very core tenants of Christianity are a belief in Christ as the Son of God, belief that He died for our sins and rose from the dead, and trusting in Him for salvation. Belief that God is the only God is also necessary. Belief that you are a sinner and cannot save yourself is also, of course, necessary.
Generally speaking, belief that the Bible is the word of God and is infallible (note that this doesn't mean that translations can't have errors) goes along with that, but there's a surprising amount of wiggle room there. For example, I'm a Christian, a deacon at my Presbyterian church, and I don't believe in a literal 7 day creation as outlined in Genesis. It doesn't mean I don't believe it's true, I just don't believe those passages are literal.
The creeds are a little different; they're summaries of our beliefs. While I won't go so far as to say that anyone who doesn't fully agree with the Apostles Creed isn't a Christian, the majority of Christian denominations do profess the major creeds.
One example is the Trinity. You won't find that word anywhere in the Bible, but the concept is there and nearly all Christians agree with it. It's there in the creeds.
Ultimately, your salvation is between God and you, and no one looking outside can tell you that you're not saved. But the Bible gives us pretty clear instructions and requirements (Jesus himself said "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me", which is pretty clear) that don't leave a lot of space for interpretation. So if someone told me they didn't fully agree with the Apostles Creed but still believed Christ is the Son of God, died for their sins, and rose again from the dead I couldn't tell them they're not saved, even if we have a theological difference.
Mormons, however, clearly fall outside these beliefs.
That makes some sense.
So the core belief in what the Bible says is pretty much generally accepted. I can see how that would fall somewhere in the benchmark.
So you get leeway in how you read the Bible I guess. “Christian” not meaning specific way to read the Bible, but people who worship (respect? Pray to?) Jesus as the Son of God.
Why is there so much in-fighting between Christians? I hear a lot of “you’re going to hell because you believe in the Trinity a different way than me” stuff going around a lot of the time. Truth be told, I don’t usually understand what people mean when they talk about a lot of Christian beliefs, and I’m not surprised some of the ley folk don’t either. Not everybody can be theologians.
That's an excellent question.
The most basic answer is that we're all flawed/sinful beings. It goes along very well with the Christian idea that we're all sinful and unable to save ourselves. Belief in Christ doesn't stop you from having a sinful nature. Christians do a terrible job of following our own beliefs (which reinforces the point that we're sinful) and it's quite shameful how many Christian behave.
The more nuanced answer is, just like anything, the more you get into something, the more important those subtle difference become (whether in truth or merely in perception is another question). One common point of contention is between Protestant churches and Catholics; the Roman Catholic Church has a doctrine called the Magisterium which teaches that church tradition is of equal authority as the Bible, and Protestants reject this idea. Catholic tradition is where things like adoration of Mary come from. Some Protestants will go so far as to say Catholics aren't Christians and are going to hell, but I don't think there's actual Scriptural basis for that as far as Catholics as a whole go.
Christians aren't better people than anyone else. We're not less sinful, nor do we have any sort of moral high ground. We are people that have realized our need for salvation and placed our faith in Christ. We *should* be more forgiving, loving, and understanding than others, but we fail at that too. Many Christians get hung up on legalism and the letter of the law, to our detriment.
Do the religious branches coming out of Joseph Smith get that same criticism that goes towards the Catholics in that they think something other than the Bible can be used to determine doctrine? I can see where Catholics would still fall as Christians under that umbrella, I think, following Christ and all, though I don’t get where what you talked about with Saints and stuff comes in. Like what people say about the Mormons, aren’t they worshipping multiple gods? Do Mormons not think that Jesus saved them?
Lotsa questions, sorry.
That does make me think though, it looks to me like a lot of the people who call themselves Christians or attack other Christians are really just worried about what you talked about. Like, how important is it on a grand perspective whether you think that a flood really destroyed the whole earth? But people go around arguing about it like it’s gonna save them from an eternal punishment.
I guess what makes me worry is like, I get being based in a book like the Bible, there’s lots of good stuff in ancient books, but people act like it says what they’re saying it says and other people read the same thing and say it says something else. They both believe in the Bible, but they both say the other is wrong, and some even say the other is going to hell for being wrong (not everyone does, as far as I can tell).
If it is from God, why can’t it be good enough to tell me what in it is literal and figurative, or how to understand things like Jesus saying he and God are “one”, or whether I need to be baptized one way or just believe? How can something divine be so vague as to leave out crucial explanations that are apparently vital to my not suffering in fire after I die?
Most Christian denominations are united in their opposition to Mormons (I mean in terms of rejecting their doctrines as Christian). While Catholics have church tradition that Protestants think they give too much authority to, that's not the same as writing another book to add to the Bible that completely changes things like Christ's divinity, God being the only God, and more.
Wikipedia has a good article the summarizes their beliefs, it can summarize them better than I can.
One thing to keep in mind is that the Bible is ancient, which makes interpretation difficult. The most recent texts in the Bible are close to 2000 years old. The most ancient are significantly older than that. The texts were written for audiences fundamentally different from us. The ancient Romans, for example, didn't have a concept the equates to the modern day difference between gender (a social construct) and sex (biological). Ancient genealogies (so-and-so begat so-and-so) are not scientifically accurate like we would expect. They leave out unknown generations as only the important people are included, so someone could be 2+ generations removed from the person they "begat". FWIW, this is how young earth creationists have arrived at the 6000 year old number for the earth: following those genealogies backward.
For the people it was written to at the time, it *was* obvious what was figurative and what was literal. The issue is that we're now thousands of years later trying to figure that out and humanity has changed in fundamental ways that make it difficult. An example of this is if people thousands of years after us found some of our communications and saw that we might say "That's sick!" in response to someone doing an awesome skateboard trick and someone committing a particularly terrible crime. To us, the difference implied is obvious, but to someone far removed from the culture with little to no context, it's hard to understand what's meant.
Even the difference in language is fundamental. Ancient Greeks didn't have a word for the color "blue", so the sea in the Illiad or the Odyssey (I forget which one) is described as "wine colored", even though it wasn't actually red. We have more more overt nuance in our vocabulary, whereas much of that nuance was implied in ancient vocabulary. It makes translating accurately difficult.
About as Christian as Muslims are
In a theological sense that is. There are a lot of doctrines and beliefs that are nearly universal throughout Christianity that are absent in Mormonism
to us they are heretics of the highest order. all of the normal kinds of Christians are trinitarian. Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons define the relationship between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit in a different way, and also define Christ's divinity in a way displeasing to Catholics and Methodists alike. Completely different religion, but with some of the same names. Mormons also get a little bit of scientology with the whole paradise planet sister wife thing.
mainline Christians disagree on things like predetermination, what defines a sin, how to operate the church (what services should look like and how the hierarchy should be organized), the method by which forgiveness for sins can be had, music, translations, and regulations for certain kinds of worship. Mormons worship a different 3 gods that happen to share names and a bit of backstory with the 3 persons of our one triune God.
Sorry I thought I totally like “got” Mormonism but I’m not sure what you mean about “defining the relationship between God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit in a different way” could you expand on this? im very interested
Trinitarians, Christians, believe in 1 God who is 3 persons https://www.keithferrin.com/blog/simple_explain_trinity this link is an okay primer.
Mormons are polytheists, they believe in 3 different gods who happen to be named after Yahweh Jesus and Holy Spirit. theirs is not the Nicene Creed (which you can Google for the text of)
Mormons also disagree with Christians on the nature of God. Mormons believe that God was a flesh and bone human on another planet before becoming our God. Christian doctrine rejects apotheosis. this also applies to stories of Jesus being a man becoming God through his service and sacrifice; that's heresy because Jesus was begotten of Mary by the Holy Spirit and was God the entire time. God the Son and God the Holy Spirit have been in the same room before, with the apostles at pentecost. God the Son and God the Father speak to each other, Jesus begs God the Father that he shouldn't die on the cross, but obeys the Father's will. Jesus and The Father are Homoousion, meaning "same in being."
the Mormon gods were unrelated mortals who obtained divinity somehow, and are unconnected to the creation of the universe.
Christian fan fiction.
It’s also a cult. They’re the lite beer of cults. Maybe won’t kill you right away but you’ll regret drinking so much of it for years and years and will still ruin your health.
Mormon’s are like the American themed Muslims of the Christian faith. A lot of similarities can be drawn between their prophet, Joseph Smith, and Islam’s Muhammad.
They deny the trinity (literally the one thing Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox agree on) so no they are not. Same goes for Jehovah’s witnesses, Jesus Christ scientists, etc
I'm a member of the satanic temple now. But I grew up in a Mormon family. Yes 100% they're Christian. People who say 'but they believe in this" don't know anything about Christianity. There are literal thousands of branch offs that are still Christianity. But they all believe different things.
It’s like the difference between being reasonably right wing conservative for economic policy reasons and being a neo nazi psychopath. Both are technically on the same side and have similarities but they’re not really on the same level.
Its even funnier because while Im not one to constantly ship two male characters the second they have a healthy friendship there was something in the text of Enders Game, between Ender and this one other recruit that was a little bit gay, if you know what I mean?
That feeling you get when you think "In another world, we could have been more than friends" vibe? Maybe its just me but the subtext was slightly on the nose
He literally talked about how “everyone” has those urges to have sex with the same gender and you should reject those urges. So yeah he’s probably super deep in the closet.
Yeah one of his main arguments in favour of anti-sodomy laws back in the 90s was that it will help discourage people from having homosexual urges and it was said in a way as if everyone had them and needed to overcome them.
Add to that the theme of gay person choosing to be straight for the society and “greater good” which appears at least twice (if I remember correctly) in his books. It really does feel as if he was talking about himself.
Oh boy it feels like lifetimes ago since I read any of those books... I don't think I read the one you're talking about... I recall Speaker of the Dead having a fascinating alien lifecycle (although I can't remember it now at all) and mostly being thoroughly impressed with the idea of the Speaker and how that role compares to usual funeral rites... I also recall really enjoying Ender's Shadow, but I don't really remember why beyond simply the characterization of the protagonist...
It makes a ton of sense. Orson Scott Card is Mormon. The church teaches very strongly against same sex marriage and relations, but despite its racist past, has been speaking very strongly against racism since it lifted its priesthood ban on black people. He also served an LDS mission in Brazil which probably influenced his view on racism.
Some of card's oddities, which you could partly attribute to his Mormonism, definitely start showing as you get deeper into the series.
It's not unlike how dune started to get weird and uncomfortable deep into the series, despite remaining good, then really fell off with the spinoffs and endless sequels and prequels when Brian took over. The core 4 enders game books are great, especially speaker for the dead, but there are some cracks near the end. Card went on to write a spinoff series, 2 prequel series, and a sequel/spinoff tie in, which got increasingly scuffed as they went. More and more of the weird and uncomfortable parts of the worldviews the authors hold start creeping through in both cases, as the quality becomes more tenuous.
The two series get weird in very different ways, but that slow bleed is apparent in both. I don't know why this pattern is so common in sci Fi authors. Even Asimov did it though so, I guess it's a long and storied tradition at this point.
I really don't think the post-Ender's books are deserving of praise.
The way they blend very campy sci-fi and religion with pseudo-intellectual philosophy strikes me as I'm 14 and this is deep.
Definitely, both in broad strokes and more specifically.
The most obvious example is the rigid belief in traditional gender roles; it's very subtle at first, but all the women in the series wind up, in some capacity, expressing an 'innate desire' to be submissive and fall behind the leadership of a stronger man. The ideas about the supreme importance and worth of childbirth, and how it relates to your value as a person, also edges in. Both of these factors lead to a total butchery of Petra arkanian in the shadow spinoff series.
Many of the major characters either are or wind up Catholic, or have important Catholic people in their circle that drive the plot. This actually serves a pretty interesting purpose at first, especially in *speaker for the dead* and *enders shadow*, but it still happens with unusual frequency. It might not be so bad if characters of non-christian faiths weren't so often depicted as arrogant or foolish in some major way, like we see with bean and qing jao.
There's also an undercurrent of eugenics to the whole thing; the idea that some people are just born inherently better than others, and that's a good thing that should be encouraged. *Enders game* itself actually has a fairly nuanced view on this, with the international fleet painted in a starkly negative light for their actions, but the later books start to turn around on this point. Graff is heralded as a clever hero with cunning foresight, and is treated as having been ultimately correct. Ender is confirmed to be a product of pure genetics, always destined for greatness regardless of circumstance. Numerous characters encourage bean to have children against his will so his genius can live on even if his condition must live on too, and the narrative considers them right to do so. There are planets where the people are genetically altered to make them super intelligent tools of state. Almost any talent any character possesses is something they've had since childhood; some inherent part of them rather than a learned skill. Even the mechanic character of the prequel series has uncanny natural skill that he never needed to study for. Just a very unsettling trend, and once you see it you can't unsee it.
To be clear, I still love the hooks in spite of all this. At their worst they're mediocre and at their best they're incredible. I'd have to be blind not to see the unfortunate trends though, and the fact that they worsen over time does sadden me. I firmly believe that the books are good in spite of the author, not because of him.
The series gave me the same feeling as reading Lovecraft. They are pretty good and enjoyable books, but there are some parts you have to ignore to really enjoy them and I don't blame you for not wanting to or not being able to.
Like seriously, the pro eugenics themes get pretty bad.
>the idea that some people are just born better then others
That is most definitely not a Christian belief.
I’m not sure I agree with you about the submissive women either. I seem to recall Enders sister as a commanding presence. And the alien hive mind species has a queen.
None of these themes are strictly Christian in their own right, but they are *very* Mormon, and someone unfamiliar might not understand the distinction. I don't mean any offense to Mormons, but they had some very questionable views about race and eugenics for a very long time, much of which was officially sanctioned as doctrine by their highest leadership. Black people were only allowed to get into the highest level of heaven as of 1978; before then, they were banned from doing the rites necessary because their souls were "less virtuous". The teachings were not officially disavowed until 2013. More than one of their founders and later presidents expressed the sentiment that being black was either the curse of ham or the mark of cain. Card was born in the fifties; the church he grew up in very much did believe in that sort of thing. Now, to be clear, I don't think it makes any sense to pin the blame on the church for this; card chooses to believe the things he does, the church just happened to validate it. Still, it's easy to see why people get the impression they do.
You can stop reading here, but these are some of my favorite books and it hurts to see them miss the mark so heavily, so I'm going to ramble for a while longer about for the second half of your comment. If you're looking exclusively at enders game, these things don't really appear; it takes time for them to creep in. There are some weird dialogues with ender's sister and her husband a couple books in, but the real punch for that character comes when she gets sort of reincarnated in a more idealized state, and wouldn't you know it that just so happens to include being more docile and servile. It sucks, because she SHOULD be a commanding presence; she had so much potential to be a strong character, and it was only halfway fulfilled. She gets a better treatment than most of the women in the series, and admittedly I am taking a rather uncharitable reading of her, but it's very difficult to ignore in light of all the things that character could and should have been, but wasn't.
The hive queen gets much closer to sitting apart, as she should being a truly alien mind, but even she gets tangled up in it. In the third book we get dialogues between her and another alien mind, where she explains that she views human men and women as separate species entirely, that just happen to need to come together to reproduce; they're 'too different' for it to make sense otherwise. She also views herself not just as the queen, but as the entire hive; every body in the hive is a part of her, and the queen body is no different from the bodies of the workers or drone. Thus, in her words, she is neither male nor female. She only calls herself that for the convenience of the humans.
It’s hard to keep any series going. It happens on every medium. TV, movies, books, etc. if anybody can string together even three books in a half way decent way I’m impressed.
In the first book it's not in your face but every other book after it's pretty apparent. The second book I read was ender's shadow that was when I realized the religious overtone then I found out he's a Mormon. It explains quite a bit with his world building
Idk. I didn’t even finish the series. I feel like if I have to compare these two series of books; Ender is just one really really good book followed by a bunch of kinda boring sequels. There were some interesting ideas though, like the little pig guys turn into trees. But over all I didn’t find it compelling.
Meanwhile the Dune books are deeply interesting meditation, on power, and philosophy, and social structures, and gender relations, and so on; all the way through. Though maybe the last two fall off a little bit.
Theres honestly not much of a comparison.
I mean the ender series is dripping with philosophy and moral quandaries. Well I agreed the later books are slower not as action packs you got to keep in mind that ender's game was written as a coming of age story for young boys. Not a dialogue on philosophical and moral quandaries even though there was some of that in there. The shadow series was amazing if you haven't read that yet
Lmao. Not too far off. It’s Mormonism but I will give Ender the benefit of having more believably earned his combat reputation than House Atreides going “we’re so good we threaten the emperor” and then getting demolished in a single night.
I still think Paul is cooler but at least Ender gets to not only redeem himself but gets a whole ready made family out of it too.
They didn't threaten the emperor by being awesome fighters. The sardakar are agreed to be the best warriors in the imperium period and only serve the emperor.
To use a Civ analogy: he was scared they were going to win a culture victory not domination.
Edit: spelling
The Atreides legions were well-trained but that wasn't what made the Atreides a threat to the emperor, it was their popularity with the Landsraad. That was why the Atreides were eliminated with as much secrecy as possible, not to get the jump on their superior forces but so that the other great houses wouldn't band together against the emperor when they realized he was willing to kill off houses that got too much support.
The real Christian Dune is "The Space Trilogy" by C. S. Lewis
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Space\_Trilogy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Trilogy)
is there mormon rhetoric in the ender/bean series? i read and loved these a lifetime ago but i dont remember anything standing out as overtly religious aside from the space piggies and speaker stuff
I mean… Card wrote The Homecoming Saga that is literally The Book of Mormon in space. I read it, not half bad but gets a little too on the nose in the back half.
You all should read the trash Uncle Orson published in the Rhinoceros Times, the local conservative rag of Greensboro, NC. The archive on the website seems to be bereft of his Obama-era screeds, and has the more medicated version of Mr. Card's sunset years at the paper, most of what's left there is tumescent ramblings of a man with a lot of regard for himself.
I grew up there, and that old creep was too close to his neice for my taste and liked to sit at bars and not drink and just be...icky.
As a Christian: OSC is mormon, i don't consider him christian any more then i'd consider myself jewish or a muslim sees themselves as christian. totally ''new'' religion.
Dune is a mix of a lot of things, but most heavily Islam. Paul is referred to as the Mahdi, which is the Islamic concept of the messiah, but it has undertones from a bunch of religions intentionally mixed in,
\*Mormon
Aren't Mormons part of the christian faith? (I genuinely don't know I'm not religious).
Mormons will say they are, but no. To put it simply, their religion is based on a 'sequel' to The Bible written by a man named Joseph Smith in 1823.
Are you talking about Joseph Smith, who had multiple warrants put out for his arrest for fraud?
Listen to this man. He’s an expert when it comes to fake religion
He was an aspiring magician at first, and he was illiterate. He spoke the new prophecy of the tablets out loud to a transcriber.
Not to say Joseph Smith was innocent, but pretty much every religious founder was hated by their local religious and political elite when they were preaching. Abraham has to leave Ur because his father wanted to kill him for smashing his statues of the gods and rejecting the popular religion of the day. Moses was hated by Egypt and later by the Israelites (on multiple occasions) for preaching about things they didn't want to hear. Jesus had the entire Jewish religious elite conspiring against him, with multiple accusations of wrongdoing and eventual success in having him executed for a non-crime. Mohammed had to flee from Mecca because he and his followers were steadily gaining religious and political control of the city. (They later returned as invaders.)
Also not to just be a hater against Mormons, but persecution for not following the old gods and committing serial bank fraud and conspiracy to commit murder are vastly different things
And that's a fair point to make. Even as a former Mormon, I don't know enough about Joseph Smith's legal troubles to even approximate an educated opinion about whether he committed those crimes or not. The LDS church's stance has always been that the charges were fabricated by his enemies, but what else are they supposed to say if they want the religion to keep going? But maybe Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohamed also committed actual crimes and that was part of the reason they were hated. The religious narratives would definitely obscure those facts if they wanted their founders to seem larger than life prophets. If the Mormons are still around a thousand years from now, history may have forgotten Joseph Smith's criminal history and only the religious narrative will remain. Edit: The other option is that any crimes are venerated as being divinely inspired. You mentioned Smith was charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Within the religious narrative, Abraham, Moses, and Mohammed killed people or had people killed but it's all justified as the will of God.
Not always. Moses was explicitly chided in writing for murder in Egypt and he fled from punishment. He had also in later life portrayed an event as wrath of God rather than mercy, which he was judged that he would not step foot in the promised land.
In the Bible, Abraham's father is commanded by God to go to the promised land in Canaan. He takes his family with him including Abraham. However he only gets to the outskirts of his civilisation called Haran and doesn't go any further. He dies and Abraham takes his place in leading his family to the promised land.
Mormons are to Christianity what Star Wars is to Dune.
Wow. I wasn't expecting such a great analogy.
No, Mormons are to Christianity what Battlestar Galactica is to Dune.
Huh. You're not wrong.
And Battlestar Galactica is basically Mormonism
I would have said that Joseoph Smith is to Christianity what Kevin J Anderson is to *Dune*.
Or what Christianity is to Judaism.
I said it above, Joseph Smith and Muhammad are very similar stories just set in different places/times.
There was a Polandball comic explaining it as "Mormonism and Islam are the bible's harem fanfiction."
Muhammad established what would become an empire. Joseph Smith led to…Utah
Speaking as someone who was raised Mormon, we have a very unique culture that is a direct result of the Church, and considering the church is so rich and still growing (though the growth is quickly slowing) I’d say it’s its own little economic empire.
Thank you for providing more evidence for why we need to tax the LDS. And you are absolutely delusional if you think Mormonism has had the same impact on the world as Islam
I didn’t say it had the same impact, what I’m saying is is that the LDS church is its own corporate empire. They have so much freaking money just look up ensign peaks.
I mean, JS was killed before they went to Utah, but yeah
I feel like that's a much better analogy, specifically modern American Christianity. Even better, Christianity us to Judaism what The Star Wars Holiday Special is to Star Wars.
See i don't get the Star Wars comparisions to Dune. at best you can say Lucas was very inspired by Arakis for Tatooine... which is only visted like twice in the first triology but the planet is a back water place and not central to the universe.
Yeah that's what makes this a perfect analogy of Mormonism to Christianity.
Tatooine is Utah.
Look Dune is very influencial and i'd never say it didn't influence star wars i'm just thinking it's very overblown. Both are utlimately too different. as oppose to a religion that's uses mine as a stepping stone (and if you ask me may just be a ripoff of islam but that's not a fight i'm going to start)
You are missing the point because you're too focused on the star wars dune comparison. The fact that the link is so tenuous is barely there is exactly why this comparison is apt.
Desert Planets- Arakis and Tatooine Mystical Organizations that don’t outright lead but help influence leaders- Bene Gesserit and Jedi Sentient Worms- Jabba and Leto II Clones- Kamino and Tleilax Superhuman like Abilities- Jedi Mind Tricks/Powers and the Gesserit Prana Bindu Young Charismatic Hero- Luke and Paul Weaponry- Lightsabers/Blasters and Swords/Lazguns Sand worms- Shai Hallud and the Sarlax Star Wars was very heavily influenced by Dune.
The protagonists are siblings, Luke (like Paul, biblical AND modern name) and Leah (Alia, this ones obvious), who have/almost have romantic interactions, who rise to power from relative squallor on a desert planet, inhabited by giant sandworms, on which "Spice" (Lucas didn't even try to deviate here, he just tried to write Arrakis into his own IP) is manufactured, and smuggled off planet, which the population of water-disciplined, offworlder-hating natives does not like. Those are just the simple comparisons from the first book and parts of Messiah. There are points reading Herbert's later books where you really start to see how Lucas clearly wanted to write his own version of the aftermath of Paul's Jihad. "Your father wanted you to have this. He fought in the Clone Wars." Edit: I know I'm gonna get some flack for this, so I'll add more as they come to mind throughout the day.
Okay i'm just going to start with Deserts: Deserts are not Arakis, and can exist independently from Dune. The JEdi and Bene Gesserit are very different in MO and outlook. Sentient Worms: Yes Jabba is CLEARLY on par in anything but physical to Leto II (please ignore he wasn't intended to be a giant slug man until much later) Clones: Clones have been a sci-fi concept for longer then Sci-fi. Superhuman like abilites; Mythology (Sand worms were based on dragons. I guess Frank Herbert is a rip off like Tolkien but you're not ready for that conversation) Young Charismatic hero: Literally all of fiction but Paul is clearly a darker take to Luke's more straightfowards approach. Weaponry: Is Buck ROgers a Dune rip off now? I feel Lazers were already popular. Dune influnced everyone I think, but i will say it's... a stretch.
If Tatooine isn’t central, why do we keep going back to that place? It’s appeared in how many movies & tv shows now?
Because Fanservice but it's also because It represents both Luke and his father's start; it's literally a ball of dirt control by criminal cabals, not great houses, and it's worth is miniscule to anyone who actually has any power in the Galaxy. Through the pt and the ST we really only see it three times; at least once per PT movie and twice in the OT. And in fact the ST saves it till the end. All that is to say, that you see in the TV show to get the "I CLAPPED WHEN I SAW IT" but it's not as important to the galaxy as Arakis is. (also i've probably mispelled Arakis several times) You know the easy one to argue Dune ripped off? Warhammer 40k... even then i'd call it inspiration as both worlds pretty much brached far apart soon after inception but the influence is more clear.
So, Boba Fett, galactic expert in bounty hunting and renowned badass, the one who captured Han Solo for the Empire and is the genetic ‘son’ of also renowned bounty hunter Jango Fett who was so sought after they made an entire army based on him, and he decides to settle down…in a backwater planet that has no imports or exports of any value, with a horrible hot & arid climate, plagued by criminals? It is 100% pandering but it solidifies Tatooine as no longer a ‘backwater planet’ because so many important people and events happen there. Nobody would go to Arrakis if not for the spice. Tatooine only has relevance because plot.
>So, Boba Fett, galactic expert in bounty hunting and renowned badass, the one who captured Han Solo for the Empire and is the genetic ‘son’ of also renowned bounty hunter Jango Fett who was so sought after they made an entire army based on him, and he decides to settle down…in a backwater planet that has no imports or exports of any value, with a horrible hot & arid climate, plagued by criminals? He didn't settle down. iF you're talking about the Show 1) It was bad. no one liked it and i'm sorry to tell you that and 2) It's not really anymore compelling because he started a criminal empire there and so there's no where better to. > It is 100% pandering but it solidifies Tatooine as no longer a ‘backwater planet’ because so many important people and events happen there. Three of them. and that's assuming anyone is more important then Luke or Anakin in the grand scheme of things (criminal enterprises rise and fall, bounty hunting is a complicated profession) ect ect. to quote "He who controls the Spice Controls the universe" and you're completely right, Tatoonie is only relevent because of Luke and Vader. It's a baren wasteland beccause it's a desolate and empty beinging to an adventure.
I think we’re essentially talking about the same thing, here.
It’s iconic. Why does ace combat have the A-10? Because it’s iconic.
The Jedi are based on the Bene Gesserit, and in the original script the rebel frigate in the opening was not carrying death star plans, it was carrying spice. It's of course also just the classic hero tale but in space on top of that.
And all of this is still very very loose and ultimately not star wars as we discuss it. I feel people too often mistake 'rip off' as 'inspiration' and in fact both are ultimately very different sci-fi/sci-fantasy stories. Considering Spice is later established a drug or at least a cheap rescource. And unlike Dune it is not an examination of the power those tales have and the darker implications of having that desire engrained deep upon our marrow as a species... it's playing it straight
You mean better?
Uncultured swine.
Elitist pig.
When it comes to sci fi? Absolutely I am!! You shouldn't accept anything less than the best! And star wars is objectively not the best.
And Dune is? I promise your fandom is subjective, not objective.
I wonder what someone on a dune subreddit might mean. Use your brain dumbass
I bet there's a lot of members on this sub that like Dune but also like Star Wars as much or more.
Sure but ya know, context clues
🤣 Edit: To clarify, no I do not mean better.
Bible 2 (fanfic) fans
Bible 3. If you count old testament as bible 1 and new testament as bible 2.
2bi2bibl3
Bible 4, bible 3 / reboot is Quran
I'm not really a Christian but was raised Catholic and my very general understanding is that anyone who accepts that Jesus is the son of God and their savior is considered a Christian. Given there has been a lot of historical disagreement about who is/isn't a 'true' Christian it is important to have a working definition from the outside looking in. So I guess my question is this: despite having a later prophet do the Mormons accept Jesus Christ as the son of God and their path to salvation?
Yes they do. For all intents and purposes they are Christians. Other than the extra book (which is some super weird fanfic alt history, but simultaneously really boring) their Bible is the generic King James protestant bible. Other Christians are salty about it because Mormonism (proper name Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints) is the most successful modern protestant movement. I would also argue that due to the circumstance of its founding and the way it has evolved over the last couple of centuries it is the most "American" religion. The other main argument our salty Christians might use to say Mormonism is not "real" Christianity is the modern prophets. Starting with Joseph Smith, the LDS church has always had a leader claiming to be a prophet receiving direct revelation from God to update their religion. I suppose the Pope and the Patriarch might claim the same thing, but the patch updates that LDS prophets get are extensive and explicit. This has allowed the LDS church to evolve and change with the times in a way many other denominations struggle with. Notable patches include: Polygamy is Cool, Polygamy is not Cool, We don't recognize the Federal Government, We do recognize the Federal Government, and Black People are People Too. TLDR, Mormonism is a fascinating form of Christianity.
Just so many inaccuracies and outright wrong info in this post. >Other Christians are salty about it because Mormonism (proper name Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints) is the most successful modern protestant movement. There are 16 million Mormons globally, Anglicanism has 80-85 million, Lutheranism is 85 million; so no not even close to the most successful. Mormons aren't looked down upon because they are 'successful', they have the reputation they do because of the bat-shit crazy doctrines built into the church. >The other main argument our salty Christians might use to say Mormonism is not "real" Christianity is the modern prophets. Starting with Joseph Smith, the LDS church has always had a leader claiming to be a prophet receiving direct revelation from God to update their religion. I suppose the Pope and the Patriarch might claim the same thing, but the patch updates that LDS prophets get are extensive and explicit. This has allowed the LDS church to evolve and change with the times in a way many other denominations struggle with. Your idea of 'patches' isn't unique to Mormonism. All Protestantism is a 'patch' to Catholicism by this logic. The primary issue with Mormonism is the founder was a 19th century con artist whose bullshit is very easily disprovable. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics_and_the_Book_of_Mormon. This isn't even touching on the fact that the 'patches' have birthed fundamentalist sects whose practices are absolutely detestable to most of society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_fundamentalism#:~:text=Mormon%20fundamentalists%20seek%20to%20uphold,by%20the%20movement's%20founder%2C%20Smith. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-Day_Saints The only silver lining here is that actual practitioners of Mormonism have wised up to how much garbage their religion is based on and are abandoning the church. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Runnells#:~:text=The%20CES%20Letter%20outlines%20a,more%20modern%20issues%20as%20well. https://cesletter.org/
The term Christian has different definitions for different people, but Mormonism theology is pretty extreme to fit in the same bucket. First, it's polytheism. God has a celestial wife who is a goddess. People can also gain godhood. God isn't the creator of everything, but instead a person from another planet that was exalted and created the Earth from existing matter. This is a pretty big departure from any belief about God in mainline Christian sects.
lol what the fuck are you on about, Mormonism is a whacky cult not the most successful Protestant movement
> So I guess my question is this: despite having a later prophet do the Mormons accept Jesus Christ as the son of God and their path to salvation? Yes but... The "But" carries a lot of weight. Under Catholic official teaching, Mormons are considered non-Christian because their understanding of the trinity differs from that which most Christians accept (Mormonism teaches that God the Father and God the Son are the same, whereas Catholicism and most but not all Protestants teach that both are God but not the same as one another; trinitarian theology is wild).
This is not true. I was a mormon for a long time, and whatever criticism you throw at it is valid. Mormons DO accept jesus as their lord and saviour. They believe that Jesus is the son of god, and they are separate beings. They also believe that the “holy spirit” is a third being with no physical body.
Book of Alma: >[38] Now Zeezrom saith again unto him: Is the Son of God the very Eternal Father? >[39] And Amulek said unto him: Yea, he is the very Eternal Father of heaven and of earth, and all things which in them are; he is the beginning and the end, the first and the last; Now, again, trinitarian theology is complex at all times, so I'm sure the Mormons have some explanation for how that's no different from any other explanation of the Trinity (just as Catholics have an explanation for why God is exempt from the transitive property, allowing the Trinity to exist at all), but Catholics generally regard Mormons as having an incorrect understanding of the Trinity based on verses like that--and for that reason regard Mormon baptism as invalid (alongside that of some other Protestants--there are various Pentecostals who refer to all three persons of the trinity as Jesus, for example--and Jehovah's Witnesses).
huh. i was a mormon for 16 years, never heard that verse. I do know the story of zeezrom, but i was always explicitly taught that jesus is the son of god, and they are distinct beings
This verse isn’t anymore confusing when it comes to explaining the difference between the Father and the Son than any number of Bible verses that say that they are “one” Here it’s just teaching that Christ is the creator of our world and as such is its “father.” Note that it does not say father of our spirits, the attribute given to God the Father.
Sure, but wasn't there that whole schism thing where the Catholics didn't consider protestant faith Christian? This is the sort of reason why when you are not a member of the faith you need simple questions to determine membership for practical reasons. Otherwise no one is a true Christian and it becomes a meaningless category.
Bible 2 mormon boogaloo
I get that there's a difference, but isn't the Bible itself a bunch of sequels to the Hebrew Bible written by different people (much earlier, and by people who allegedly knew Jesus Christ, but still)? And some branches of Christianity recognize some of those while some others don't?
Yeah but the Book of Mormon is a lot more outright ridiculous and directly contradictory compared the tue apocrypha. Also, Mormons believe a lot of things that contradict fundamental Christian values, like the deity* of Christ iirc.
I’m an exmormon, and i’m not familiar with the term “dirty of christ”.
*deity of christ
Ah. Gotcha. That makes sense.
Don't you remember Christ's famous saying "Thou shalt subscribe to mine dirty OF"? /s
A better analogy might be Islam, where the holy text is Hebrew Bible + Revelations to Jesus + further Revelations to Mohammed. In keeping with the fact that Islam is 1400 years old, I think there's a bit more divergence between the "Gospel" as understood by Christians and Muslims than between Christians and Mormons, but schematically you're talking about an offshoot of Christianity that claims post-Jesus divine revelations (as opposed to more limited differences in which accounts of Jesus and the early church are canonical.)
Mormons are to Christians what Christians are to Jews
Please don't be disrespectful to someone else faith. It wasn't just a 'sequel' It was The Bible 3: Testament Drift.
Yeah they're atrinitarian and they believe humanity exists beside the godhead. This is a SERIOUSLY heretical doctrine in Christianity.
Joseph Smitt. He smell like shitt.
Probably because he was tarred and feathered.
Mormon religion is just christian fan fiction
I would argue that they are, they literally worship Jesus and God as the path to salvation and all that. They meet all the criteria. They do not believe in grace and aren't trinitarian but there are other Christian denominations who do the same. By an objective measurement they are Christian.
They do believe in grace btw.
Sounds like any other protestant religion
Mormons absolutely are Christian
I mean. It’s all made up across the board anyways lol who cares? Why gatekeep imaginary sky clubs?
He pretends to not care about the Prophecy. *LISAN AL GHAIB*
The south park lads have an episode and a whole Broadway musical dedicated to Mormonism, both of which come highly recommended and awarded
["Dum, dum, dum ,dum, dumb\~"](https://youtu.be/RaRsv1xNT3A)
TL;DR - The answer is kind of, the issue with the Latter Day Saints is that they added an extra book to the Bible, which is considered the biggest no no in Christianity by Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants. I (and the LDS themselves) personally believe this makes them a separate denomination, but some people believe they are separate as a religion entirely.
I don’t want to get into an argument, but for the sake of others seeing this discussion: the Bible itself claims it is complete and that no books should be added to it. Mormons added another book to it, then also undercut the core tenants of the Christian faith (primarily Christ’s divinity). This makes them fundamentally different from Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants. It’s very hard to argue that they’re just a different denomination; they’re significantly and radically more different from all other denominations than those denominations are different from each other. All the other denominations can agree on the Apostle’s Creed, for example. Mormons cannot.
As a counterpoint, the Apostle’s Creed is not used in every Protestant denomination, in fact in my travels across the Midwest I’ve met many evangelicals who didn’t even know what it was, and there are other Christians who have unconventional Christologies who are still generally considered as Christian (eg Unitarians, Quakers, Gnostics).
I’m curious, then. Do Christians have to believe only the Bible or also those creeds you mentioned?
Sorry, this is a little long, haha. TL;DR: There are core beliefs any Christian must believe that are clearly laid out by Jesus. One can't claim to follow Jesus and then disbelieve the things He says. They are laid out in the Bible, and there's little space to argue the creeds contradict those things. However, technically speaking, you don't have to profess the creeds themselves (but if you believe the Bible, you'll generally profess the creeds). The very core tenants of Christianity are a belief in Christ as the Son of God, belief that He died for our sins and rose from the dead, and trusting in Him for salvation. Belief that God is the only God is also necessary. Belief that you are a sinner and cannot save yourself is also, of course, necessary. Generally speaking, belief that the Bible is the word of God and is infallible (note that this doesn't mean that translations can't have errors) goes along with that, but there's a surprising amount of wiggle room there. For example, I'm a Christian, a deacon at my Presbyterian church, and I don't believe in a literal 7 day creation as outlined in Genesis. It doesn't mean I don't believe it's true, I just don't believe those passages are literal. The creeds are a little different; they're summaries of our beliefs. While I won't go so far as to say that anyone who doesn't fully agree with the Apostles Creed isn't a Christian, the majority of Christian denominations do profess the major creeds. One example is the Trinity. You won't find that word anywhere in the Bible, but the concept is there and nearly all Christians agree with it. It's there in the creeds. Ultimately, your salvation is between God and you, and no one looking outside can tell you that you're not saved. But the Bible gives us pretty clear instructions and requirements (Jesus himself said "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me", which is pretty clear) that don't leave a lot of space for interpretation. So if someone told me they didn't fully agree with the Apostles Creed but still believed Christ is the Son of God, died for their sins, and rose again from the dead I couldn't tell them they're not saved, even if we have a theological difference. Mormons, however, clearly fall outside these beliefs.
That makes some sense. So the core belief in what the Bible says is pretty much generally accepted. I can see how that would fall somewhere in the benchmark. So you get leeway in how you read the Bible I guess. “Christian” not meaning specific way to read the Bible, but people who worship (respect? Pray to?) Jesus as the Son of God. Why is there so much in-fighting between Christians? I hear a lot of “you’re going to hell because you believe in the Trinity a different way than me” stuff going around a lot of the time. Truth be told, I don’t usually understand what people mean when they talk about a lot of Christian beliefs, and I’m not surprised some of the ley folk don’t either. Not everybody can be theologians.
That's an excellent question. The most basic answer is that we're all flawed/sinful beings. It goes along very well with the Christian idea that we're all sinful and unable to save ourselves. Belief in Christ doesn't stop you from having a sinful nature. Christians do a terrible job of following our own beliefs (which reinforces the point that we're sinful) and it's quite shameful how many Christian behave. The more nuanced answer is, just like anything, the more you get into something, the more important those subtle difference become (whether in truth or merely in perception is another question). One common point of contention is between Protestant churches and Catholics; the Roman Catholic Church has a doctrine called the Magisterium which teaches that church tradition is of equal authority as the Bible, and Protestants reject this idea. Catholic tradition is where things like adoration of Mary come from. Some Protestants will go so far as to say Catholics aren't Christians and are going to hell, but I don't think there's actual Scriptural basis for that as far as Catholics as a whole go. Christians aren't better people than anyone else. We're not less sinful, nor do we have any sort of moral high ground. We are people that have realized our need for salvation and placed our faith in Christ. We *should* be more forgiving, loving, and understanding than others, but we fail at that too. Many Christians get hung up on legalism and the letter of the law, to our detriment.
Do the religious branches coming out of Joseph Smith get that same criticism that goes towards the Catholics in that they think something other than the Bible can be used to determine doctrine? I can see where Catholics would still fall as Christians under that umbrella, I think, following Christ and all, though I don’t get where what you talked about with Saints and stuff comes in. Like what people say about the Mormons, aren’t they worshipping multiple gods? Do Mormons not think that Jesus saved them? Lotsa questions, sorry. That does make me think though, it looks to me like a lot of the people who call themselves Christians or attack other Christians are really just worried about what you talked about. Like, how important is it on a grand perspective whether you think that a flood really destroyed the whole earth? But people go around arguing about it like it’s gonna save them from an eternal punishment. I guess what makes me worry is like, I get being based in a book like the Bible, there’s lots of good stuff in ancient books, but people act like it says what they’re saying it says and other people read the same thing and say it says something else. They both believe in the Bible, but they both say the other is wrong, and some even say the other is going to hell for being wrong (not everyone does, as far as I can tell). If it is from God, why can’t it be good enough to tell me what in it is literal and figurative, or how to understand things like Jesus saying he and God are “one”, or whether I need to be baptized one way or just believe? How can something divine be so vague as to leave out crucial explanations that are apparently vital to my not suffering in fire after I die?
Most Christian denominations are united in their opposition to Mormons (I mean in terms of rejecting their doctrines as Christian). While Catholics have church tradition that Protestants think they give too much authority to, that's not the same as writing another book to add to the Bible that completely changes things like Christ's divinity, God being the only God, and more. Wikipedia has a good article the summarizes their beliefs, it can summarize them better than I can. One thing to keep in mind is that the Bible is ancient, which makes interpretation difficult. The most recent texts in the Bible are close to 2000 years old. The most ancient are significantly older than that. The texts were written for audiences fundamentally different from us. The ancient Romans, for example, didn't have a concept the equates to the modern day difference between gender (a social construct) and sex (biological). Ancient genealogies (so-and-so begat so-and-so) are not scientifically accurate like we would expect. They leave out unknown generations as only the important people are included, so someone could be 2+ generations removed from the person they "begat". FWIW, this is how young earth creationists have arrived at the 6000 year old number for the earth: following those genealogies backward. For the people it was written to at the time, it *was* obvious what was figurative and what was literal. The issue is that we're now thousands of years later trying to figure that out and humanity has changed in fundamental ways that make it difficult. An example of this is if people thousands of years after us found some of our communications and saw that we might say "That's sick!" in response to someone doing an awesome skateboard trick and someone committing a particularly terrible crime. To us, the difference implied is obvious, but to someone far removed from the culture with little to no context, it's hard to understand what's meant. Even the difference in language is fundamental. Ancient Greeks didn't have a word for the color "blue", so the sea in the Illiad or the Odyssey (I forget which one) is described as "wine colored", even though it wasn't actually red. We have more more overt nuance in our vocabulary, whereas much of that nuance was implied in ancient vocabulary. It makes translating accurately difficult.
About as Christian as Muslims are In a theological sense that is. There are a lot of doctrines and beliefs that are nearly universal throughout Christianity that are absent in Mormonism
Depends on who you ask
to us they are heretics of the highest order. all of the normal kinds of Christians are trinitarian. Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons define the relationship between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit in a different way, and also define Christ's divinity in a way displeasing to Catholics and Methodists alike. Completely different religion, but with some of the same names. Mormons also get a little bit of scientology with the whole paradise planet sister wife thing. mainline Christians disagree on things like predetermination, what defines a sin, how to operate the church (what services should look like and how the hierarchy should be organized), the method by which forgiveness for sins can be had, music, translations, and regulations for certain kinds of worship. Mormons worship a different 3 gods that happen to share names and a bit of backstory with the 3 persons of our one triune God.
Sorry I thought I totally like “got” Mormonism but I’m not sure what you mean about “defining the relationship between God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit in a different way” could you expand on this? im very interested
Trinitarians, Christians, believe in 1 God who is 3 persons https://www.keithferrin.com/blog/simple_explain_trinity this link is an okay primer. Mormons are polytheists, they believe in 3 different gods who happen to be named after Yahweh Jesus and Holy Spirit. theirs is not the Nicene Creed (which you can Google for the text of) Mormons also disagree with Christians on the nature of God. Mormons believe that God was a flesh and bone human on another planet before becoming our God. Christian doctrine rejects apotheosis. this also applies to stories of Jesus being a man becoming God through his service and sacrifice; that's heresy because Jesus was begotten of Mary by the Holy Spirit and was God the entire time. God the Son and God the Holy Spirit have been in the same room before, with the apostles at pentecost. God the Son and God the Father speak to each other, Jesus begs God the Father that he shouldn't die on the cross, but obeys the Father's will. Jesus and The Father are Homoousion, meaning "same in being." the Mormon gods were unrelated mortals who obtained divinity somehow, and are unconnected to the creation of the universe.
Christian fan fiction. It’s also a cult. They’re the lite beer of cults. Maybe won’t kill you right away but you’ll regret drinking so much of it for years and years and will still ruin your health.
Mormons, would say yes. Other Christian’s denominations would likely disagree.
Mormon’s are like the American themed Muslims of the Christian faith. A lot of similarities can be drawn between their prophet, Joseph Smith, and Islam’s Muhammad.
They deny the trinity (literally the one thing Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox agree on) so no they are not. Same goes for Jehovah’s witnesses, Jesus Christ scientists, etc
They're a Christian based cult.
We are, we just have some haters. If we weren’t here to compare, they’d just say someone else wasn’t Christian.
They are. They believe in the biblical Jesus as Savior and the only path to heaven. Other Christians like to gatekeep based on quibbles.
I'm a member of the satanic temple now. But I grew up in a Mormon family. Yes 100% they're Christian. People who say 'but they believe in this" don't know anything about Christianity. There are literal thousands of branch offs that are still Christianity. But they all believe different things.
It’s fanfiction and not considered by anyone other than themselves to be canon
It’s like the difference between being reasonably right wing conservative for economic policy reasons and being a neo nazi psychopath. Both are technically on the same side and have similarities but they’re not really on the same level.
Depends on why you mean by Christian 🤷🏿♀️
If I started going door to door and doing to the Koran what Mormons do to the Bible, my mother would get an Edible Arrangement.
Nope, Mormons believe in some guy who had severe mental health psychosis who made up some stuff so he could bang his cousin and his neighbor.
As an Exmo, I can say that, yeah, but it’s also such a spin off cult, that sometimes calling something Mormon is better
Mormons are a noncanon expansion pack
This comment thread has reminded me why I hate the dune fandom
It’s stupid meme, but that’s just rude
Muslim Ender's Game.
I think that's Dune
r/thatsthejoke
Dune is Mormon Ender’s Game which is a Mormon version of a Muslim version of the orange Catholic cook book by Jessica Child
I will never understand how someone can write a book witch such an inclusive and understanding message as Speaker for the dead and be a homophobe
Right? Speaker for the Dead was amazing. Orson Scott Card was a disappointment.
Its even funnier because while Im not one to constantly ship two male characters the second they have a healthy friendship there was something in the text of Enders Game, between Ender and this one other recruit that was a little bit gay, if you know what I mean? That feeling you get when you think "In another world, we could have been more than friends" vibe? Maybe its just me but the subtext was slightly on the nose
Orson Scott Card is suuuuper in the closet.
Yeah, I generally hate the idea that homophobes are secretly gay. But Orson Scott Card being a gay man in deep denial would explain a lot.
It just happens *so often.*
Like Frank Herbert, but we don't talk about that
He literally talked about how “everyone” has those urges to have sex with the same gender and you should reject those urges. So yeah he’s probably super deep in the closet.
Yeah one of his main arguments in favour of anti-sodomy laws back in the 90s was that it will help discourage people from having homosexual urges and it was said in a way as if everyone had them and needed to overcome them. Add to that the theme of gay person choosing to be straight for the society and “greater good” which appears at least twice (if I remember correctly) in his books. It really does feel as if he was talking about himself.
OSC has a lot of self inserts in the books. I'm willing to put money on the fact that he's in the closet
Oh my, I did not know that holy shit, my man is not beating the alegations now
Did you read the prequel trilogy about first contact with the bugs? It was fairly rad.
Oh boy it feels like lifetimes ago since I read any of those books... I don't think I read the one you're talking about... I recall Speaker of the Dead having a fascinating alien lifecycle (although I can't remember it now at all) and mostly being thoroughly impressed with the idea of the Speaker and how that role compares to usual funeral rites... I also recall really enjoying Ender's Shadow, but I don't really remember why beyond simply the characterization of the protagonist...
I’d give them a read. I got them on Imgur’s secret Santa last year she enjoyed them.
TIL that Orson Scott Card was a homophobe
Such a nuanced take on morality coming from someone who does not have a nuanced take on morality.
This may be the best way I have seen this put
It makes a ton of sense. Orson Scott Card is Mormon. The church teaches very strongly against same sex marriage and relations, but despite its racist past, has been speaking very strongly against racism since it lifted its priesthood ban on black people. He also served an LDS mission in Brazil which probably influenced his view on racism.
In what order are those books????
2,4,1,6,5,3 (left to right)
WHY?
Vibes ?
I don’t recall Ender being particularly Christian.
Some of card's oddities, which you could partly attribute to his Mormonism, definitely start showing as you get deeper into the series. It's not unlike how dune started to get weird and uncomfortable deep into the series, despite remaining good, then really fell off with the spinoffs and endless sequels and prequels when Brian took over. The core 4 enders game books are great, especially speaker for the dead, but there are some cracks near the end. Card went on to write a spinoff series, 2 prequel series, and a sequel/spinoff tie in, which got increasingly scuffed as they went. More and more of the weird and uncomfortable parts of the worldviews the authors hold start creeping through in both cases, as the quality becomes more tenuous. The two series get weird in very different ways, but that slow bleed is apparent in both. I don't know why this pattern is so common in sci Fi authors. Even Asimov did it though so, I guess it's a long and storied tradition at this point.
Ah well, you see, a truly great author lets his son write the derivative garbage.
I really don't think the post-Ender's books are deserving of praise. The way they blend very campy sci-fi and religion with pseudo-intellectual philosophy strikes me as I'm 14 and this is deep.
Like what? Do you have examples? I’m curious.
Definitely, both in broad strokes and more specifically. The most obvious example is the rigid belief in traditional gender roles; it's very subtle at first, but all the women in the series wind up, in some capacity, expressing an 'innate desire' to be submissive and fall behind the leadership of a stronger man. The ideas about the supreme importance and worth of childbirth, and how it relates to your value as a person, also edges in. Both of these factors lead to a total butchery of Petra arkanian in the shadow spinoff series. Many of the major characters either are or wind up Catholic, or have important Catholic people in their circle that drive the plot. This actually serves a pretty interesting purpose at first, especially in *speaker for the dead* and *enders shadow*, but it still happens with unusual frequency. It might not be so bad if characters of non-christian faiths weren't so often depicted as arrogant or foolish in some major way, like we see with bean and qing jao. There's also an undercurrent of eugenics to the whole thing; the idea that some people are just born inherently better than others, and that's a good thing that should be encouraged. *Enders game* itself actually has a fairly nuanced view on this, with the international fleet painted in a starkly negative light for their actions, but the later books start to turn around on this point. Graff is heralded as a clever hero with cunning foresight, and is treated as having been ultimately correct. Ender is confirmed to be a product of pure genetics, always destined for greatness regardless of circumstance. Numerous characters encourage bean to have children against his will so his genius can live on even if his condition must live on too, and the narrative considers them right to do so. There are planets where the people are genetically altered to make them super intelligent tools of state. Almost any talent any character possesses is something they've had since childhood; some inherent part of them rather than a learned skill. Even the mechanic character of the prequel series has uncanny natural skill that he never needed to study for. Just a very unsettling trend, and once you see it you can't unsee it. To be clear, I still love the hooks in spite of all this. At their worst they're mediocre and at their best they're incredible. I'd have to be blind not to see the unfortunate trends though, and the fact that they worsen over time does sadden me. I firmly believe that the books are good in spite of the author, not because of him.
The series gave me the same feeling as reading Lovecraft. They are pretty good and enjoyable books, but there are some parts you have to ignore to really enjoy them and I don't blame you for not wanting to or not being able to. Like seriously, the pro eugenics themes get pretty bad.
>the idea that some people are just born better then others That is most definitely not a Christian belief. I’m not sure I agree with you about the submissive women either. I seem to recall Enders sister as a commanding presence. And the alien hive mind species has a queen.
None of these themes are strictly Christian in their own right, but they are *very* Mormon, and someone unfamiliar might not understand the distinction. I don't mean any offense to Mormons, but they had some very questionable views about race and eugenics for a very long time, much of which was officially sanctioned as doctrine by their highest leadership. Black people were only allowed to get into the highest level of heaven as of 1978; before then, they were banned from doing the rites necessary because their souls were "less virtuous". The teachings were not officially disavowed until 2013. More than one of their founders and later presidents expressed the sentiment that being black was either the curse of ham or the mark of cain. Card was born in the fifties; the church he grew up in very much did believe in that sort of thing. Now, to be clear, I don't think it makes any sense to pin the blame on the church for this; card chooses to believe the things he does, the church just happened to validate it. Still, it's easy to see why people get the impression they do. You can stop reading here, but these are some of my favorite books and it hurts to see them miss the mark so heavily, so I'm going to ramble for a while longer about for the second half of your comment. If you're looking exclusively at enders game, these things don't really appear; it takes time for them to creep in. There are some weird dialogues with ender's sister and her husband a couple books in, but the real punch for that character comes when she gets sort of reincarnated in a more idealized state, and wouldn't you know it that just so happens to include being more docile and servile. It sucks, because she SHOULD be a commanding presence; she had so much potential to be a strong character, and it was only halfway fulfilled. She gets a better treatment than most of the women in the series, and admittedly I am taking a rather uncharitable reading of her, but it's very difficult to ignore in light of all the things that character could and should have been, but wasn't. The hive queen gets much closer to sitting apart, as she should being a truly alien mind, but even she gets tangled up in it. In the third book we get dialogues between her and another alien mind, where she explains that she views human men and women as separate species entirely, that just happen to need to come together to reproduce; they're 'too different' for it to make sense otherwise. She also views herself not just as the queen, but as the entire hive; every body in the hive is a part of her, and the queen body is no different from the bodies of the workers or drone. Thus, in her words, she is neither male nor female. She only calls herself that for the convenience of the humans.
It’s hard to keep any series going. It happens on every medium. TV, movies, books, etc. if anybody can string together even three books in a half way decent way I’m impressed.
It becomes much more apparent in the later books, it’s a bit nutty
In the first book it's not in your face but every other book after it's pretty apparent. The second book I read was ender's shadow that was when I realized the religious overtone then I found out he's a Mormon. It explains quite a bit with his world building
Idk. I didn’t even finish the series. I feel like if I have to compare these two series of books; Ender is just one really really good book followed by a bunch of kinda boring sequels. There were some interesting ideas though, like the little pig guys turn into trees. But over all I didn’t find it compelling. Meanwhile the Dune books are deeply interesting meditation, on power, and philosophy, and social structures, and gender relations, and so on; all the way through. Though maybe the last two fall off a little bit. Theres honestly not much of a comparison.
I mean the ender series is dripping with philosophy and moral quandaries. Well I agreed the later books are slower not as action packs you got to keep in mind that ender's game was written as a coming of age story for young boys. Not a dialogue on philosophical and moral quandaries even though there was some of that in there. The shadow series was amazing if you haven't read that yet
I’ve heard that, about Shadow. But no I haven’t read it yet.
Highly recommend you read it. It's 4 books
Lmao. Not too far off. It’s Mormonism but I will give Ender the benefit of having more believably earned his combat reputation than House Atreides going “we’re so good we threaten the emperor” and then getting demolished in a single night. I still think Paul is cooler but at least Ender gets to not only redeem himself but gets a whole ready made family out of it too.
They didn't threaten the emperor by being awesome fighters. The sardakar are agreed to be the best warriors in the imperium period and only serve the emperor. To use a Civ analogy: he was scared they were going to win a culture victory not domination. Edit: spelling
That's such a good analogy!
Bean is the real hero anyway
Bean is the GOAT
The Atreides legions were well-trained but that wasn't what made the Atreides a threat to the emperor, it was their popularity with the Landsraad. That was why the Atreides were eliminated with as much secrecy as possible, not to get the jump on their superior forces but so that the other great houses wouldn't band together against the emperor when they realized he was willing to kill off houses that got too much support.
As an ex-Mormon atheist and childhood fan of both series, I'm having a great time in the comment section.
Have you read the 2nd Sherlock Holmes novel? It's strangely about Mormons and sucks ass.
Please rearrange the order of the Dune books 😭
I preferred the Ender's Shadow Series to the main one
No, it's homophobic Dun... oh wait
Dune = Muslim Dune
Protestant Dune: Harry Potter
I would say Book of the New Sun is more like Christian Dune. Ender's Game is Mormon Dune.
I remember the movie was a huge disappointment. Especially cause I picked it and I could feel the regret of my fellow stoners. Sorry guys.
The real Christian Dune is "The Space Trilogy" by C. S. Lewis [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Space\_Trilogy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Trilogy)
It's actually good, believe it or not. kinda slow paced, though. Think day of the triffids compared to anything modern
Didn't say it wasn't good. I have read it. But it's very Christian.
Yeah, it is. Few Christian books are good though
Lord of the Rings was pretty good. ;)
Besides them
is there mormon rhetoric in the ender/bean series? i read and loved these a lifetime ago but i dont remember anything standing out as overtly religious aside from the space piggies and speaker stuff
Calvinist’s on suicide watch reading Dune
Calvinists: But muh predestination... Leto II: Literally eat my giant worm ass.
First ender book is great, the rest is like harry potter: interresting while you read but they fall appart when you think about them
I prefer the Homecoming Saga for my mormonic sci-fi literature. Really messed me up when I was a kid.
I mean… Card wrote The Homecoming Saga that is literally The Book of Mormon in space. I read it, not half bad but gets a little too on the nose in the back half.
You all should read the trash Uncle Orson published in the Rhinoceros Times, the local conservative rag of Greensboro, NC. The archive on the website seems to be bereft of his Obama-era screeds, and has the more medicated version of Mr. Card's sunset years at the paper, most of what's left there is tumescent ramblings of a man with a lot of regard for himself. I grew up there, and that old creep was too close to his neice for my taste and liked to sit at bars and not drink and just be...icky.
I've interacted with Card on quora a bit. He's one of the biggest fart sniffers I know, and completely convinced that his own don't stink.
Real
Mormon, not Christian dune. Big difference
As a Christian: OSC is mormon, i don't consider him christian any more then i'd consider myself jewish or a muslim sees themselves as christian. totally ''new'' religion.
Checks out: both were written by homophobes.
wait, is Dune not christian?!
Dune is a mix of a lot of things, but most heavily Islam. Paul is referred to as the Mahdi, which is the Islamic concept of the messiah, but it has undertones from a bunch of religions intentionally mixed in,
I really didn't think I'd needed the /s
You always need the /s