At eight I was a borderline rebel, bored-er-out-a-line Mcmormon child, and by the time I was 12 I was pretty sure I’d heard everything there was to hear in the Morg.. After that it was the same meal over and over with slightly different spices and new names for the same dishes, but pretty much the same diet over and over. Yes, it got old.

Jesus seems like a perfectly respectable person and for his various teachings, I revere him. As a personal savior I look in the mirror because that’s where my responsiblity lies, but on those occasions where divine intervention is required, I’d be thrilled if Jesus or someone else stepped up to the plate.

Unfortunately he’d probably look a lot like Osama Bin Laden and would be stopped at the U.S. borders and waterboarded till he gave up the locations of the bones of the 12 diciples or something. He’d be rotting in Guantanamo while I was waiting for his help, so I guess I’ll have to figure it out for myself till he gets released.

Thanks for the compliment (if you weren’t being sarcastic).

When I was in the 3rd grade I saw my first globe and had a wonderful teacher that told me that there were (at that time) about 3.5 billion people on earth. I couldn’t comprehend that number so she showed me her hand and said, that the people in the U.S. represented the tip of the littlest finger. If I chewed my fingernail off and cut the clipping into about 10 pieces, that would represent the percentage of Mormons in the world.

At eight years old this really hit me. If Jesus loves us all how could he possibly exclude such a huge percentage of his brothers and sisters?

Now the population of the world is nearing 6.5 billion human beings. There’s over 1 billion Muslims, most of those in Indonesia and other Asian countries. According to latest counts (hopefully they’re not trying to count the dead they baptize) the LDS church has about 13 million members.

In even the grandest schemes of missionary work, opening borders, language unification, etc. the likelihood that the 13 million present mormons (with about a 30% inactivity rate) would have to personally preach to 5,000 , and that’s if they could even get in the door in the next 20 years before the population is predicted to exceed 12 billion people and up the odds even more.

Even if they could convince them to change their cultural traditions and religious beliefs in order to comply with the LDS lifestyle and doctrine, they’d have a hard time getting them to stick with it. The statistics in S. America and other places are sort of daunting when comparing actual long term conversion rates.

If the LDS (and you ladies should be on board for this) could out produce the Muslims in offspring they might have a chance to make a dent in the number of heathens and unbelievers out there, but while I’m typing this, the chinese have just added 240 little brown babies to their minnions. They seem even less likely to take on a Western Christian sect, especially one as odd as Mormonism.

I suppose if you only ever lived in Utah, and only ever went to the LDS church, and only talked to other Mormons you could hang tight onto the belief that the LDS church is the ONLY TRUE church and the only one sanctioned by a loving God, and that God loves Mormons best. Anyone outside that tight little dark box sees the amazing diversity, the beauty in cultural identity, the value of other religions and their legends, their beliefs, and the variety that the world offers and would embrace the many ways human beings seek and create spirituality.

I for one could never be so arrogant, so short sighted, so exclusive and cold as to suggest that the other 6,498,700,000 children of one or more loving God’s created.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a dynamic, evolving organization inextricably tied to the eternal truths revealed through the Bible and latter-day revelations, as well as priesthood and basic authority infrastructure. The Articles of Faith clearly state dynamic nature of this “church.” Clearly there are many truths yet to be revealed, many that may be present on Earth (and held by those of other faiths) but not yet clearly tied to core Gospel of Salvation principles.

Anyway, I’m LDS, and see a lot of “truth” in other religions, including Buddhism. Even though many Buddhists themselves don’t consider Buddhism a religion per se.

Focusing on the thoughts, Only True Church. D&C 1:30 has the Lord’s views on the subject. I don’t think that just because I believe this to be the only true church on the earth, that I believe it currently has all truth, readily available to anyone that wants to look at it.

2/3rd’s of the Book of Mormon hasn’t even been translated yet, and scriptures (both the Bible and Book of Mormon) speak of other scriptures not currently in our possession.

I suspect that has something to do with, I’m not really ready to understand everything that Heavenly Father understands. Also, the Holy Ghost is supposed to guide us to all truth, which means that there must be some truths that I still don’t know.

However, I do believe that God is a God of order. I believe that the priesthood in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is the only authority on earth at the moment whereby ordinances that are necessary to receive all of the blessings that our Heavenly Father wants to give us, can be found.

Ultimately, if I want to know and understand all truth, I will have to go to the source, and if I do so humbly, He will lead me along the path of truth just as fast as I’m ready to travel it.

Though having said that, I should probably mention that I’ve also had experiences like annegb’s in which I have been struck by similarities. I’ve more than once had the experience of thinking something was unique to Mormonism, only to encounter something like it elsewhere. (For example, Mike Huckabee advocating chicken patriarchy. ) David Tracy proposes that we make use of an “analogical imagination,” that we see possible points of connection between different faiths as analogous, as similarity-in-difference, without losing hold of either the similarity or the difference. I like that approach.

Kevin, thanks for bringing up some of the more pluralist strands in the tradition. I really like that scripture in Alma 29 you mention, that says that “the Lord doth grant unto all nations, of their own nation and tongue, to teach his word, yea, in wisdom, all that he seeth fit that they should have.” That kind of thing gives me hope that my pluralist leanings don’t have to be at odds with my Mormonism.

This is something I’m still sorting out, but I’m not convinced that creeds themselves are inherently problematic. I don’t see that they really do anything that doctrinal formulations in the scriptures (particularly something like the Articles of Faith) don’t do as well. And if the problem is that they get used as a litmus test of orthodoxy and exclude people who don’t subscribe to them, is that any different from the doctrinal questions in the TR interview?

Tony, I really like that Joseph Smith quote. And I like the image of the “living” church being somehow tied to the Holy Ghost. But I still have some reservations about the idea that the gift of the Holy Ghost is what’s unique about the church. There is certainly no shortage of people outside the church reporting spiritual manifestations of all kinds. The standard explanation I hear is that we have the “gift”, whereas other people only have intermittent, unpredictable access. That would maybe be more plausible to me if my own experience with the Holy Ghost (and that of at least some other Mormons, as far as I can tell) didn’t seem rather . . . unpredictable and intermittent. It also raises the question for me, again, of God not being in communication (or regular communication) with over 99 percent of his children on earth. But bringing this back to some of the questions I’m wondering about in this post, here’s the kind of thing I’m trying to untangle: is what’s crucial to our beliefs the notion that we genuinely have access to the Holy Ghost, or that we have unique access to it? (Or is it both?) And would that gift be cheapened somehow, become less meaningful, if it weren’t exclusive to us?

I’m probably not persuaded by this approach to Jesus, though I am intrigued by it. I’m thinking that whether it’s tenable might depend to some extent on what exactly about Jesus you see as salvific. Is it the incarnation itself? Is it his suffering and death? Is it the resurrection? I’m just speculating, but I suspect that if your focus is on the first, there’s more potential room for this sort of approach than if your emphasis on the second or the third.

However, what really fascinates me is the question Knitter raises about the nature of truth claims, and whether allowing for the possible existence of other truth or revelation inevitably undermines commitment to the truth and revelation that you have, or makes it seem less meaningful or significant. From a social science perspective, I’m familiar with the argument about strict churches being strong. And going back to an issue raised earlier in the thread, is this also the case for churches or religious movements with strongly exclusivist claims–do they inspire a higher level of commitment?

We have no monopoly on truth. But, we have the right to certain things no one else does because of the gift of the Holy Ghost. That is where the word “living” comes in to D&C 1:30. “Living” implies continuous revelation. Everyone on the planet has a right to the Light of Christ, but the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost makes the church alive.