LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY navytron89) Warning  the following may piss off and offend alot of good people here. 

Convention ends with Satan and immigrants

CALEB WARNOCK - Daily Herald   

Utah County Republicans ended their convention on Saturday by debating Satan's influence on illegal immigrants.

 
EDIT: My response: What a bunch of grade "A" assholes these guys are.  

This sounds like a bunch things that a of group of redneck racists would  say and that I hear from  places in the South . It truly amazes me that the LDS community doesn't rise up and smite these bastards. (Channeling the Comedian Lewis Black here).

Its things like this that make the rest of the country look at the LDS community and think that they've lost their minds. While I can see that these guys are a noisy minority who are making the LDS community look like they're racists as well, which is why they should run people like this out of town, and work on finding nicer elected officals instead of ignorant racists that pander to the lowest fears in everyone.

I had Mormon neighbors growing up and they were the nicest people ever and while it is a common joke that Utah is the whitest state in the Union. These jerks that hold office are making people in Utah  and specifically the LDS community sound like a  bunch of racists.  The LSD community needs to work on fixing this image that those morons are showing people and undo the damage that this could cause with their relationships to other faiths and groups.  

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY cheap_laugh)

Edited for Clarity
Once more, their chosen reality pipe has lapped our satire.Don Larsen, chairman of legislative District 65 for the Utah County Republican Party, had submitted a resolution warning that Satan's minions want to eliminate national borders and do away with sovereignty.

Satan, it seems, is controlling those darned illegals. and Democrats. Perhaps Larson's own ha-Satan is at work here assisting Mr. Larson (in looking like a complete nutcase):

Illegal aliens are in control of the media, and working in tandem with Democrats, are trying to "destroy Christian America" and replace it with "a godless new world order -- and that is not extremism, that is fact,"

Senator Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, spoke against the resolution, saying Larsen, whom he called a "true patriot and a close friend," was embarrassing the Republican Party.

"I agree with 95 percent of this resolution but it has some language that is divisive and not inspiring other people to its vision," he said. "This only gives fodder to the liberal media to give negative attention to the Republican Party."

Larson finished with:

"If the Democrats take over the country, we will be dead, and we will have abortion and partial-birth abortion and the Republican Party will go into extinction," he said. "Nancy Pelosi and the ACLU would oppose this (resolution)."

He was booed. Apparently, the Utah State GOP doesn't care about whatever credibilty it may have had...

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LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY shaunathan)

When we talk of Dominionist denominations, our mind instantly turns to the Southern Baptists, Assemblies of God and so on. But would you place such groups as the Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and the such in there?

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

From Boston Globe:

Mormonism may sour Romney for some in Christian right

By Nina J. Easton, Globe Staff | August 30, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The Southern Baptist Convention website categorizes the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a ''cult" that is ''radically" different from historic, biblical Christianity.

A faith guide issued by the influential Christian right group Focus on the Family declares that ''God cannot be identified . . . with the Mormon religion's notion of god." And each year, evangelical organizers behind the National Day of Prayer bar Mormons from speaking at their proceedings.

As Governor Mitt Romney mulls a race for president in 2008, his strategists expect their ''family values" candidate -- who opposes gay marriage, abortion, and some forms of embryonic stem cell research -- to find a natural base of support among religious conservatives. ''As Mitt's traveled the country and tested the waters, he's gotten very strong responses, including from religious conservatives," said Michael Murphy, a political consultant who advises Romney.( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY lilithsaintcrow)

Reprinted from God & Consequences

There is nothing so stubborn in all the world as a religion whose cherished tenets are shown to be assumptions or flat-out lies. There is also nothing more dangerous. But for right now, let's just stick with the stubbornness. Readers, meet Simon Southerton, who has committed the grave sin of writing a book saying that DNA evidence disproves Mormon assertions of ancestry. And the Mormons are getting ready to kick him out because of it.

Simon Southerton has been ordered to appear at a July 31 hearing before church leaders in Canberra, Australia, he said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

Southerton's book, "Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA and the Mormon Church," was published a year ago by Salt Lake-based Signature Books, a publishing house for Western and Mormon studies. It used established DNA data to refute Book of Mormon teachings that ancient American inhabitants were descendants of Israelite patriarch Lehi.

Mormons believe Lehi was an ancient seafarer who came to the New World about 600 B.C., according to church founder Joseph Smith's 1830 Book of Mormon. Smith claimed to have translated the text from inscribed gold plates unearthed from an upstate New York hillside. His book is viewed by many members as a literal record of God's dealings with early Americans.

"We know from evidence that that's completely false," said Southerton, a plant geneticist who abandoned his church and post as an LDS bishop in 1998 in a struggle to reconcile his faith and science. "The church needs to modify its doctrine." (Arizona Daily Sun)

True to form, Southerton isn't being called to account for heresy but for adultery, over an affair he had five years ago- after he had already separated from his wife. This is a case of the mote in Stephen's eye and the beam in the eye of the church whose hardliners still practice polygamy and take teenage brides, no matter how hard the mainstream Mormons wish the whole nasty P-word would just go away. (After all, people like Warren Jeffs and Winston Blackmore are embarrassing in every sense of the word.)

This highlights a behavior I have seen time and again in religion: a church cannot admit to being wrong in the slightest lest its tenuous grip on authority- only propped up through fear and brainwashing- be lost altogether. One would think that if any church or religion truly had a headlock on the Divine, they could admit to being fallible and human with impunity and it would be just peachy. However, they can't, much as an abusive spouse or parent can't admit that they're beating and maltreating the people they love. The parallel, to me, seems clear.

"(The letter) completely ignores what is obviously the major issue," says Southerton, who was baptized as a Mormon at age 10 in 1970. "They've been snooping around. Clearly I should be excommunicated for the most serious offense and, in my view, apostasy is much more serious."

Southerton says church authorities never mentioned adultery when they paid him a recent visit, instead bringing up his book, his renunciation of Mormon faith and his years of postings on the Web site, www.exmormons.org.

"I would have to be regarded as a threat to the church," he said. Arizona Daily Sun

The funniest part of this whole thing is the quote of a Mormon church web page, which a Mormon spokeswoman referred reporters to. Quote: "Nothing in the Book of Mormon precludes migration into the Americas by peoples of Asiatic origin. The scientific issues relating to DNA, however, are numerous and complex."

Um, hello? This is like Enron saying, "We're not disputing that it seems like someone made a lot of money. Oh, look over here at these daisies!" Of course, I could just be laughing until tears roll down my face because I've actually read the Book of Mormon- which Mark Twain justly called "chloroform in print"- and actually had plenty of Mormon missionaries over for dinner and theological jousting.

And as usual, I have a question: if the Book of Mormon is so divine and so utterly right, wouldn't the evidence so support it in such a clear and unambiguous fashion as to convince even me? After all, I believe in quarks and random acts of kindness, though I can see no evidence of the former and little to no use in the latter.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This article talks about the fate of the 'excess' boys in the polygamous Mormon cult that is under investigation:

Polygamy's 'Lost Boys' expelled from only life they knew
Sect's outcasts are casualties of marriage practice

By David Kelly, Los Angeles Times | June 19, 2005

ST. GEORGE, Utah -- Abandoned by his family, faith, and community, Gideon Barlow arrived here an orphan from another world.

The freckle-faced 17-year-old said he was left to fend for himself last year after being forced out of Colorado City, Ariz., just over the state line.( Read more... )