Free will is a hypothetical construct, but learning isn't. Ethics are rules and principles which one learns that guide your life. They're really the same thing as morals with the fantasy universals concept thrown in. You learn your religion just the same as you learn ethics. However, with ethics you know that they're man made and for the purpose of making life tolerable, and not causing it to be a painful waste before you die.

So, the brain's ability to think and remember is the ticket.

Concepts in Mormonism:

http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/00.../mormonism.htm


Top 10 Amazing Facts of Mormonism
1. Mormons can become gods and goddesses.
2. Goddesses will spend eternity in full submission to their god-husband.
3. Mormon women will give birth “forever and ever” to spirit-babies.
4. Mormon men can have multiple wives in heaven—eternal polygamy.
5. Heavenly Father is an exalted man who lives with his goddess wife, Heavenly Mother, on a planet near the great star Kolob.
6. American Indians are descendants of the wicked Lamanites, who were Israelites that God cursed with dark skin.
7. God the Father had sex with Mary to conceive Jesus, who is the half brother of Lucifer.
8. All Christian churches are an abomination.
9. Mormons need 4 secret handshakes to get into the Celestial heaven.
10. Joseph Smith revealed that the actual Garden of Eden is in Jackson County, Missouri.

http://www.exmormon.org/tract2.htm

This is really a good source.

The issue of plural wives is especially interesting, because it's written into Mormon dogma. They only abandoned it when it became clear they had to, to get the U.S. government off their back (though now mainstream Mormons practice a bit of revisionist history and pretend it was never a part of "real" Mormonism).

Then again, as others have pointed out, Mormonism isn't the only religion with weird beliefs and shady stuff in its past. It just has the misfortune of being "invented" in the modern period, so we know a lot of stuff about Joseph Smith (and Brigham Young) that we don't know about, say, Moses.

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[I][FONT=Helvetica][SIZE=-1][COLOR=#000000]"Some people, well, if they don't like Scientology, well, then, f**k you. Really. F**k you. Period."

-Tom Cruise
[/COLOR][/SIZE][/FONT][/I]

The very best of Mick Jagger.

God gave me everything.


Have a listen.

http://mickjagger.com/player.php




.

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Learn the truth about Danny Faulkners
murder and his murderer here:

http://www.danielfaulkner.com/

Just out of curiousity, what is your view on universals and particulars?

I was thinking more along these lines, as expressed by atheist JBS Haldane:

In a longer post, which I'll make later, I'll go into greater detail later. For now, I have to comment on the illogic of Haldane, who I know nothing about.

He's like a driver of a car commenting that he doesn't see how the car can work because he doesn't understand how a car works and further can't accept the explanations he has heard, and further he's doing all of this while hurtling down the road at seventy five miles an hour.

In a less metaphorical example, the atom is a hypothetical construct. Know one knows what's on down there and no matter what you can't rely on a reductionistic argument about the randomness of atoms, when we see materialistic order all around us. Your coffee cup is solid, and that's it, and clearly the hypothetical jiggling of atoms at some level doesn't matter one bit. The brain is made of solid stuff and has a function like any other organ, logic, is one of its jobs.

this thread feels prejudicial against the mormons

if it was a jewish or bhudist candidate would we all be asking the same questions?

heaven for bid if it was a muslim candidate.

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"who pissed in your cheerios of life"?

mormons/jews/buddhist/muslim

they all believe in god

therefore theyre all nuts!

It's not discriminatory to question a person's beliefs, since they're actively chosen (or should be, unless the person is merely a sheep). And, as we've seen the last 8 years, they can play a significant role in the way a president leads the country.

__________________
[I][FONT=Helvetica][SIZE=-1][COLOR=#000000]"Some people, well, if they don't like Scientology, well, then, f**k you. Really. F**k you. Period."

-Tom Cruise
[/COLOR][/SIZE][/FONT][/I]

Has anybody read Jon Krakauer's book on Mormonism? Never thought much about Mormons either way until I read it. Its frightening