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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
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A lot of Christians don't think Mormons are Christian. They are of course, but many don't think so.
Someone told me the other day that Catholics weren't Christians. I'm like.... They are the og Christians.
The person refused to believe me.
Were they Baptists? I know plenty of Protestants, most especially Baptists, that will definitely be quite vocal about their belief that Catholics are not "real" xtians.
You gotta go to the Seventh Day Adventists, imo, to get some reeeeaaallll hardcore Catholic hate, good lord do they hate Catholics.
(This message brought to you by Corn Flakes: Stop masterbating)
OMG, I'm such a nerd about various origins of things that I fucking laughed so hard at that. You have no idea.
🤣
The thing I know the Seventh Day Adventists for is being rather chill and many/most being vegetarians. But I've only met a few. I've met so many Baptists of the Southern kind that, at least in some cases, within minutes of meeting them, will be denouncing many groups as being "pagan" (lol) such as atheists, Muslims, and especially Catholics.
I didn't realize adventists had this kind of hard-on for Catholics, but it seems the people that splinter off direct their rage at their roots, oddly enough. And of course, it's often the people that were splintered from direct their rage at the "heretics", too.
The... only thing I think I technically agree with them on is that... the holy day should by rights be Saturday, not Sunday.
Beyond that... yeah, some of them are very pleasant, delicate people... whats his name, the guy that Hacksaw Ridge was about... basically fairly close to a real story, he was an Adventist, thus a Pacifist, refused to pick up a weapon during WW2...
Became a medic, saved I think around at least 100 soldiers lives, got a Medal of Honor.
But the flip side of this is that, as best I can tell, at least some of their Preachers/Pastors, they've been conspiracy theory crafting intricate explanations of how the Catholic Church is more or less the most heretical thing that can be, Pope is the AntiChrist, etc etc, many, many other details... been doing that for decades.
I've managed to not meet too many Southern Baptists, due to being nowhere near the South at any point in my life... but yeah, what you say about them comports with what I've heard... seen on youtube, from people covering absolute nutjob, modern fire and brimstone preachers and 'prophets'.
Dear lord that's a whole can of worms there, people and branches that make prophecies and encourage other members to... or, who claim God is directly talking to them... makes for a whole lot of dramatic nonsense real fast, such as the recent Tiktok Rapture mass psychosis event.
If we ever doubted how those old tales of things like 'dancing madness' happened, well, now we know.
Sometimes people just kind of... euphorically, collectively, snap.
Why yes. They were.
That'd more likely be the Copts.
Well yeah that's fair. They were the first mainstream christians but yeah I learned the other day that the og Christians was actually ran by women. And then a king saw people were into it, appropriated it to control them through it. Got rid of all the women and made it so they couldn't be in positions of power.
I never knew it was a women driven religion. But honestly it makes sense cause women are historically invested more in charity. And that was Jesus's whole thing.
Be nice. Share what you have. Don't be greedy.
I grew up with that nonsense. Many evangelical and charismatic Christians think that Catholics aren't true Christians. My "non denominational" high school encouraged students to visit other churches, as long as it wasn't Catholic, Anglican, Mormon or Jehovah's witnesses. I guess they had a direct line to God Almighty in the principles office.
Oh yeah you hear the wildest shit from protestants growing up catholic
Mormons not believing in the Trinity is a pretty solid argument that, at the very least, they're not Christians in the way nearly all other Christians are Christians.
That puts them in the same bucket as Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Unitarians, Iglesia ni Cristo, and Christadelphians.
... thats why most Christians don't think Mormons are really Christians, that they are instead more like heretics.
Not that I personally have a dog in this fight between the finer points of varying forms of mass shared delusions based on a corpus of hundreds of different texts that have been edited and translated and added to and subtracted from, tens or hundreds of thousands of times, over approximately 2500 years...
... but the idea of the Trinity is a pretty big deal, going back through the entire history of Christianity.
Whole lots of nontrinitarians have been called, and killed for being heretics by whole lots of trinitarians, for... what, roughly... 1750 years?
Yeah that's a pretty solid historical precedent.
Following a fraudster who wrote his own scriptures in the 18th century is a fairly extreme deviation from the mainstream. I mean, OK, William Blake wrote his own scriptures too, almost a century before that, but he was self-aware and wasn't a con artist who claimed he could find gold using a magic stone in a hat.
I mean, can I just say I follow the Jefferson Bible, am I a Christian if I do that?
Yes?
No?
Let me guess:
A bunch of different Christians will disagree about that!
Today, those people are called "red letter xtians", as far as I know. Jefferson was way ahead of the curve, but also probably one of the first who was able to do such "heretical" things like that, given the Inquisition was still going on during his lifetime, but he was living in a free country.
Mormons call everyone else, including other xtians, "Gentiles".
It's amusing how all this works, since LDS members tend to think that they form the real xtianity. Hey, it's not really any more arrogant than the Jewish heresy called xtianity (maybe more appropriately called Paulianity) that now seems to turn around and claim that the OG religion got so many things wrong, but the heretical sect has it right. But, oh yeah, they'll use the old text and claim that is what gives the new heretical sect and its writing its legitimacy, LOL.
Hey, if it's all just made up, who's to say? Remember: the Nicean Creed was voted on, nearly 300 years after the character of Jesus is said to have died.
There are numerous religions that started as revitalization movements claiming that the old-time religion had been corrupted by accumulated human error and self-interest. Islam's a great example of that: it claims to be the same pure religion practiced by Abraham and Jesus. And there are some spin-offs of Islam that believe that, whenever things get too far off track, Allah sends another prophet to do a reboot (though mainstream Islam believes that Muhammad was the last prophet until Judgement Day).
Heresy plus power equals orthdoxy.
It's rather interesting how LDS and Islam have a few things in common. Both made spin-offs (and a fair bit of retconning) and both claim that Jesus is not the last of the prophets...
I remember having a friend who was a recent convert to LDS talking his new thing with me (and me doing a lot of reading up on it at the time since up until then I had paid exactly zero attention to it. My mother was doing some info-dumps on me, too, since she feared I was at risk of falling into what she called a "cult". She didn't need to worry, I had zero interest in something like LDS and if I was going to join up with anything, anything that involved quitting coffee is never going to be on that list...) at nearly the exact same time I had a rather devout co-worker who was Muslim (prior to starting the job, he literally got off a plane from his home country of Saudi Arabia the day before) telling me about his beliefs. The succession of prophets thing especially stuck out, along with each having their own lineage coming from Abrahamic roots....
Wait, Mormons appropriated the term Gentiles, from... Jews?
That's incredible.
I'll be frank: Mormonism is based on the fan fiction of an easily provable, known at the time to be a serial con artist and fraudster.
... Who then went on to lead a cult of what we would now call domestic terrorists.
He specifically tried to destroy any press outlets that were critical of him.
Like, with violent armed force.
Every element of the origin story of Mormonism collapses under any serious scrutiny from anyone who isn't a Mormon, its laughable.
He also just appropriated a bunch of Masonic poses and hand signs and such, like, verbatim, without modification in a good deal of cases, and invented rituals to go make use of them.
The uh, what is it, the papyrus he picked up off of a travelling antiquities merchant, that he then declared was "The Book of Abraham"?
He was just bullshitting around his total inability to read actual hieroglyphs... the knowledge deriving from the discovery of the Rosetta Stone was quite rare at the time, so he felt comfortable making up a nonsense 'translation'.
Then, some decades later, actual Egyptologists get around to reading the original text and the "translation" and uh... welp, long story short, its a copy of a fairly common Egyptian funerary rites text, instructions on how to breathe properly when in the underworld. Has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham, bears no relationship to Smith's fabricated translated story.
Mormonism is literally a fraud.
But!
That hasn't stopped other cults and religions from... making it big time.
Oh yes, it's especially ridiculous given its relatively recent rise. The same kind of criticism can be directed at Islam, for sure. And the same for xtianity.
Plenty of people will try to tell me that the notion that Jesus having no historical evidence of an actual person is fringe and borders on conspiracy theory, but all the so-called evidence is rather...lacking. So not sure why this is considered fringe, other than it annoying believers.
That aside, I remember The Bible Geek guy (Robert M. Price) talking about how because of the belief that he was a historical figure and because of the claims about coming back - before the current generation he was speaking to passed away - that this resulted in early apologists claiming that there was still an apostle roaming the Earth somewhere....um, okay. I guess now thousands of years old?
Personally, I think it is more likely than not that somebody named Yehoshua existed, and did at least some of the things described in the Bible.
Because there were a good number of other Apocalyptical, Messianic Jewish type preachers/cults around the same time, the same area.
Getting conquered by the Romans ... yeah, makes sense this would make people think they're living in some kind of end times, a seemingly unstoppable heretical force is now in charge of near everything, forcing the Jews to endure heresies and descrations... surely God must be pissed and have something up his sleeve, to make things right.
I'm a fan of Paulogia's minimal witnesses hypothesis, basically, you more or less only need Paul and Simon Peter to have something approximating post-bereavement hallucinactions or guilt based psychotic breaks, and then word of mouth and legendary development takes care of the rest from there.
Jesus, imo, probably was a real dude, who got crucified for eventually causing too much trouble. Thats entirely believable to me.
Resurrection? Miracles? Uh no, but, its pretty believable to explain how things roughly similar to, or based on things he may have actually done, got exaggerated and reformulated into the original Gospels.
But yeah, as Price says, he very directly states that he thought he would return before all of his contemporaneous followers passed away.
So... thats why a good deal of the theology is basically based on "well he did actually, in a way, from a certain point if view."
... Because he very clearly did not do so literally, matter of factly.
It gets even more wild if you look into the 'Gnostics', the Sethians, the Valentinians, etc, the stuff that didn't uh, make the final editors cut, as it were.
To be clear, I think it is probable that there was a real person they are referencing, probably even likely. Occam's Razor and all that...but I'm talking more about people insisting that there is historical evidence for a claim on a historical Jesus. Like we are talking about Benjamin Franklin or something.
When you actively seek it out, it becomes a lot more elusive to find some real credible evidence than I think most people realize.
Right. And we're talking about Christian on Christian crime. Take a parallel, make it about race, then tell the same story.
It's an interesting thing to do when discrimination comes into play... Swap out gender or race or LGBTQ and see what the parallel feels like to your gut.
How is it an interesting thing to do?
Hateful bigotry is bad, is that your point?
... Religion is the only one of those things that, by definition, constitutes a worldview that... very often serves as a generator of violent bigotry, in and of itself.
'Race', gender, sexual orientation, those things can lead to the actual enactment of violent bigotry against outgroup members... but they have to be paired with an accompanying worldview and/or material economic situation of disparity for that to arise.
Religion is the only one of those that doesn't need any extra components for its adherents, its members, to enact violent bigotry against outgroup members.
I'm not justifying violent bigotry.
I'm explaining what causes it:
So long as there are idiotic squabbles over nonsensical and contradictory and logically incoherent worldviews, that are deeply held with great conviction, there will be violent bigotry.
Further, 'race' itself is an ultimately incoherent construct, it is a worldview, one that is just so ingrained into so many that we don't even realize this.
People groups exist, ethnolinguistic groups exist, heritages of haplogroups exist... 'race' doesn't, 'race' is a way of thinking, promulgated by some societies, that just clumsily and incoherently defines people into ingroup and outgroup members, and then oppresses the outgroup members so hard that they are functionally forced to adopt it as a practical, lived identity.
Imagine trying to do the 'one drop rule' with the US conception of 'white people'.
Oh, sure, you're uh I dunno, Norweigan, eh? Well, there's actually a German, and even a Spaniard, somewhere in your set of great great grandparents, so clearly, you're some kind of white mochalatto, not really pure white, thus impure.
... Absolute nonsense.
Gender and sexual orientation?
These are unchangeable, naturally arising aspects of people, that some other people with some worldviews may choose to hate, or not.
Religion?
Very often the worldview that chooses to hate.
'Race'?
Yeah, more complicated, more like a clumsy worldview that is enforced onto others untill they adopt it or have no choice but to adopt it... by certain other kinds of worldviews, which are very often religions.
That's a belief that some people have. But gender isn't as binary as you might think. And more importantly, how gender is manifested is a social construct, and it is, in some uncommon chases, changeable. And I know a number of people whose sexual orientation has changed in the course of their lives, or who could be said to have no fixed sexual orientation at all.
And views on race are a complete dog's breakfast, full of clinal attributes that are forced into bullshit binary categories that miserably fail to reflect the incredible multidimensional spectrum of human phenotypes and cultures.