I actually would be interested in such examples; I have studied many supposed contradictions in Mormon doctrine, and in most cases thus far, I have found that the apparent contradiction is caused because the person suggesting it is choosing a specific interpretation for some verse of scripture, and insists that said verse does not allow for any other interpretation. Other problems people have with Mormon doctrine come down to incorrect information about what Mormons believe, differences of opinion, conflicting hearsay from 150 years ago, and so on.

I have, after many years of study, concluded that my religion's teachings are logically self-consistent (and true, mostly for other reasons); this does not mean, however, that I would refuse to accept evidence to the contrary, if it actually is evidence to the contrary. All I ask is to be given the opportunity to actually figure out whether it is, without anyone telling me that if I come to some other conclusion I'm deceiving myself. Which is to say, I don't like people going into these kinds of discussions with no intention of allowing me to show them flaws in their reasoning, because it proves they're not interested in finding truth, just in demolishing their version of my beliefs.

(Again, in the interest of not derailing the thread further I would prefer to have that conversation via e-mail. I promise not to argue, though I would appreciate it if you allow me to provide resolutions to apparent contradictions if I can. Please don't just link me to some random anti-Mormon website, I've most likely already read it.)

As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread just now, I guess that depends on how you define monotheism. I would define it as the worship of one and only one God, which is a definition that fits Mormons; we worship God the Father, in the name of Jesus Christ. (Technically speaking, Mormons do not worship Christ; Christ is instead the vehicle of our salvation, which matches what is taught in the New Testament.)

I obviously believe I am both monotheistic and Christian, because I worship one and only one God, and I believe that it is only through Christ that I may be saved. As far as I am concerned, that is what matters.

If your definition of "monotheistic" requires the belief in the existence of one and only one god, then I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree :)

We believe that Yahweh is the same being as Christ, which is to say that we believe it was Jesus who acted as the God of the Old Testament. (It helps that Jesus said so himself in the New Testament, and that Isaiah said so in the Old.) We believe that it is not Christ/Yahweh who we are supposed to worship, but rather his Father (sometimes referred to as Elohim).

So in the sense that we believe there exist multiple omnipotent, perfect beings, yes, we believe there is more than one god. However, we believe that there is only one God whom we should worship, that is, we are to worship God the Father in the name of Jesus Christ. (I realize elsewhere in this thread I said Mormons worship Christ. I tend to get sloppy with the specifics of this in most contexts, because it's generally not relevant.)

In the end I suppose it depends on how you define "monotheistic", that is, whether it precludes belief in the existence of other gods, or whether it requires belief in the existence of only a single God. Personally I don't worry about how people label me in this regard ;)

FWIW Mormons (myself included) would agree with a slight tweak of that statement:

Only God's sacrifice of a perfect being could atone for all sins for all time.

As God's Son, Christ was perfect, and was therefore capable of filling that role. Abraham's (aborted) sacrifice of his son Isaac was a rather straightforward foreshadowing of God's sacrifice of his son Jesus Christ.

I don't understand why people insist that the Trinity doctrine is what makes a religion Christian. Mormons believe that it is only through the atonement of Jesus Christ that all mankind may be saved. Isn't *that* what makes a person Christian?

I don't think Shavano is saying that merely calling oneself "Christian" is sufficient; instead, he is saying that calling oneself a worshipper of Christ is sufficient. He is not rendering the term "Christian" meaningless, he is just defining it differently than you apparently define it.

We Mormons believe that both Jesus Christ and his Father are God (or gods, if you prefer), and that Jesus Christ is the literal son of the Father; in addition, we believe that they each have physical, tangible bodies of flesh and bone. (People who believe in the Trinity must necessarily believe that there is at least one physical body involved, because Christ had one after his resurrection, so believing that the Father has one too should not seem too much of a stretch.)

The *actual* difference between our belief and the Trinity doctrine is that we do not include a self-contradictory assertion that they are somehow both separate beings and the same being at once. Instead, we believe that the Father and the Son are separate beings who are one in purpose, that is, they work together in perfect unity. (This has the added benefits of being logically self-consistent, and of not contradicting anything Christ said during his ministry; I can give examples if you wish, but perhaps that would be best done via e-mail so as not to take this thread too far off topic.)

But the real question is, why does believing one or the other affect whether one is Christian? In practice, both beliefs lead to the same basic behavior: we worship the Father in the name of Christ, and believe that through Christ's atonement we can return to live in their presence.

Can you articulate exactly why it matters whether they are the same being and yet not the same being, or whether they are two beings (Father and Son) who are perfectly united in purpose? Why, exactly, does my belief disqualify me in your eyes from being Christian, despite the fact that I believe Christ is the only path to salvation? (This is a serious question; I've never gotten a response to it other than "it just matters!".)

(For the sake of simplicity I omitted the Holy Ghost from my above comments. The Holy Ghost is included in the standard view of the Trinity; Mormons consider the Holy Ghost a third, separate personage of spirit, who does not possess a physical body as the other two do. In either case, the Holy Ghost serves the same function. However, I do not think this is particularly relevant to the discussion at hand.)

It's funny that people point at the Mountain Meadows massacre as "proof" that Mormons commonly killed people of other faiths. See, that massacre was carried out by a small group of extremists who were *not* authorized to do any such thing, and in addition, such an act is and always has been quite clearly prohibited by church doctrine. (Self-defense is not, but the Mountain Meadows massacre could not be considered self-defense by any rational person.)

But even if it *had* been authorized -- and again, it was not -- pointing to one isolated incident would not prove that such behavior was common. If it was indeed common for Mormons to kill non-Mormons merely for not being Mormon, shouldn't you be able to point to many examples, not just one?

Wouldn't you say that such behavior would undermine the missionary effort we have, from the very beginning, put so much work into?

(Yes, I'm Mormon, but please focus on my logic, not on my choice of religion.)

The Law of Consecration did not (and does not) permit church members to forcibly take property from anyone, church member or not. While we do believe that God created everything and thus everything belongs to God, we do not believe that "any natural resource could be taken by any Mormon from any gentile", nor was this ever a doctrine of the Church.

There are probably as many thieves among Mormons as among any other group of people, but the Church has never authorized or approved of theft, fraud, arson, kidnapping, piracy, murder, etc.

Evidence to the contrary would be gladly examined.

Some NASA guy just explained that the Russian images are no worse and no better than NASA's images; they're just looking at the earth in different ways. There's no hint of blame anywhere (and indeed, there's nothing to be blamed for).

I would be extremely surprised if Could Drive did de-duplication like that. Cloud Drive is built on S3; S3 is not designed to do de-duplication (as a cursory examination of the S3 product page will tell you).

Apple must also think all of their users have Android devices, because that's the only way any of their users could get confused - Amazon's store is Android-only...

We'd only need a receive mechanism. Once we create it, we could hope that someone in the future will figure out how to send, and there would be standing instructions to send a message to the time shortly after the receiving device's invention.

If two particles sent back in time arrive in the same order and at the same interval, then you could send information, even if you're restricted to morse code or something. I'd bet that the timing and ordering of the particles' arrival could not be controlled, but I would not complain if someone proves me wrong :)

I think that's a fine reason for a person deciding to personally not use proprietary software. I think it's a terrible reason to say everyone should only use free software. I'm a software developer, but I don't want to be told "add it in yourself" when I go looking for a new feature, most especially when that feature is already available elsewhere. Certainly, non-programmers do not want to get that answer either! It is unreasonable to expect that of the general population.

To give a concrete example, I choose to use iTunes and/or Windows Media Player because they are easy to use and provide all the features I need without any tweaking; I have never found this to be the case for any FOSS media player. (Quite the opposite.) Why should I spend my time fixing the deficiencies in one of a dozen FOSS media players when I can just use a proprietary one that I know works? "It helps everyone else" is a good ideal, but it is not a good argument. I have better things to do with my time than fix deficiencies in FOSS media players.

My problem with Stallman isn't that he doesn't want to use proprietary software, or even that he thinks proprietary software is inherently evil; my problem is that his reason for opposing cell phones is simply paranoia. Yes, there's a chance someone will use your cell phone to track where you are.The ability to track your location is inherent in the nature of the device - you have to be connected wireless to a tower, therefore you can be tracked with some degree of precision. Has Stallman suggested an alternative technology that allows mobile communication but prevents the device from being tracked? Is it his opinion that we should not use mobile communication devices at all, merely because they can be tracked?

More importantly, why is this small chance that someone will bother tracking my location so bad? It's not hard to find my home address; it's equally trivial to find the address of the building I work in. I must travel between the two locations, so my usual approximate location during commuting hours is obvious. Anyone passingly familiar with me knows I go to church on Sundays, and church building locations and meeting times are also public knowledge. That's all without ever tracking me through my cell phone. I don't care if people know any of that, so why should Stallman's problem with cell phones concern me? I'm not asking why I should care about privacy; I'm generally opposed to government policies that reduce privacy. I'm asking, why I should care that my phone reveals my location when my location is virtually always known anyway?

A good solution to the problem "I don't want to be tracked when I go to location X" that does not require giving up the benefits of having a mobile communication device is to not carry your device when you go to location X. It's a silly reason to abandon mobile communication technology entirely.

As for microphones theoretically recording me, I see no real reason for concern there, either. There is a very large difference between theoretical threats and likely threats. My computer could be recording me, too, in theory, whether or not I'm running open source software, but that theory does not mean I should abandon the use of computers, nor does it mean that computers are "tools of Big Brother".

I'll say this another way, because Stallman and many of my fellow Slashdotters apparently don't understand the concept: in any society, we must give up some degree of privacy in order to interact with one another. It is stupid to make interaction with each other much harder on the slim chance that someone might use a person's cell phone to track or listen to that person.

Yes, there's always the possibility that companies will screw up their software, or remove features, etc., like Sony with OtherOS. "Only use FOSS" is not the only solution, nor is it even the best solution in many cases. The most practical solution is to not buy from companies that do this. Companies aren't stupid; if they know removing features will result in a tangible loss of sales, they won't do it. (The problem with Sony right now is that they don't see a tangible loss of sales; we have nobody to blame but ourselves. I am seriously flabbergasted when people's solution to "Sony sucks, they took away OtherOS" is to buy a second PS3.)

I'm not opposed to Stallman having his own opinions, but he's really taking this to an absurd extreme. Supposing the hardware were "open source", that doesn't help; it's much harder to fix a hardware bug than a software bug, even if you have the schematics and the expertise. Other people can't get your fix merely by grabbing your changes from source control, and without expensive equipment and/or disassembling your device piece by piece, you can't even verify that the device you're holding matches the schematics. Open source hardware is only useful to a point.

As for Stallman's reference to Stalin.... I'm pretty sure there's a name for the logical fallacy where you invoke people's emotions to make your point, rather than actually making logical arguments. Let's look at what he said:

Yet he offers no evidence that cell phones are tracking devices which record where we go all the time (i.e. having a GPS does not automatically mean the device is recording our movements, let alone reporting those movements to anyone), nor that they are being used as remote surveillance devices. His only argument is the emotional one, playing on people's fear of Stalin's brand of communism, and the speculation (implied as fact) that the government will track your every move and listen to every sound you make just through your cell phone... merely because you have a cell phone. His argument is made even more stupid by stating that mobile devices running Android are just as untrustworthy as the rest merely because carriers include proprietary software on them, ignoring the fact that tracking is possible regardless of what software is on the device, as long as it is turned on, and ignoring the fact that you can simply remove the proprietary software.

In other words, the only basis for his argument that we should not use cell phones is pure and simple paranoia, and that, my fellow Slashdotters, is why I don't care one bit what Stallman says about cell phones (or really anything else).

And some of us got tired of having to dual-boot just to play games, of trying to hack various things together to get games to run under wine, of having a selection of high-quality games smaller than the selection available for OSX, of having distro updates hork the system (*cough*Ubuntu 10.10*cough*), of getting told "STFU and RTFM" when asking for help, of being told "you don't want to do that" when asking how to do something without being asked why I wanted to do it, of being told "recompile it with X, Y, Z flags" to solve various problems, of being told to "submit a patch" when asking about a bug or missing feature, of running software with fewer features for... what, ideological reasons? Should I go on?

I'm a software developer as a profession and as a hobby, but I have very little interest in fixing my tools (let alone my operating system!) as a prerequisite to working on the stuff I actually care about.

Honestly, I have no reason to fully switch back to Linux, and I will not have a reason unless (or, if you insist, until) I get somehow meaningfully screwed over by proprietary software. Thus far, the only times I have been screwed over by software in any meaningful way have been caused by problems with Linux (e.g. the aforementioned Ubuntu 10.10 update which pretty much made my system unusable).

IMNSHO, it's kind of stupid to refuse to use proprietary software on the chance that it will screw you over someday. If it works well, use it, and if it does screw you over (e.g. Sony removing OtherOS), then switch to alternatives - and that applies to open source software as much as it applies to proprietary software.

Now, before people flame me, I do like Linux, and I use it daily, along with several useful open source tools, but until the open source community can match a lot of the "evil" proprietary software out there, I have a very strong incentive to stay with proprietary software.

As another practicing member of the LDS Church, I second LWATCDR's objection to Cmdr Taco's tag line. We do not practice polygamy, and using a story tag to imply that we do is a deliberate participation in perpetuating that incorrect idea.

I'm also getting quite frustrated with the Slashdot editors' complete inability to do even a quick reading of the referenced article before posting a summary, especially when the summary is inflammatory like this one. The article makes no reference to political party affiliation as a motivation for the bill, nor does it reference the LDS Church in any way.

Why does Slashdot even *have* editors, if they're not going to fact-check?