R. Ray Depew

I didn't create this page in order to start a religious debate, only to tell you a little bit about my relationship with God. Let me start by quoting myself:

I feel very strongly about my religious beliefs. I've spent 40 years testing them in the fires of my life's experiences....

I credit everyone ..., rightly or wrongly, with having equally strong beliefs, although they may differ from mine. I know that there's no way I can live their lives and understand how they came to believe what they do, and so I will not ridicule or challenge their beliefs. I expect the same respect in return.

Some people will say "but religion is just folklore (or superstition)", or "but religion is ancient urban folklore".... I disagree with these people's basic premise. My religious beliefs are much more than folklore. They are part of an ongoing spiritual journey with something that is real and not just a story recorded in a dead language on ancient parchment. (Yeah, the stories and the languages and the parchment are part of it, but that's not important right now.)

Ray Depew, alt.folklore.urban, 19 January 1999

If you want to have a religious debate, fine. There are plenty of newsgroups and chat rooms just waiting for you. I'm not going to do it. Click here if you want to find out why.

I believe in God, one supreme Being, the Creator and ruler of the universe.

I have accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior.

I believe that God talks to mankind today, individually and to all the world at once.

I believe that mortal life is, as one wise man put it, "a short but oh-so-important second act in a three-act play."

I belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Some people call us "Mormons". We call ourselves "Latter Day Saints", or "Saints" or "LDS" for short. Because Jesus Christ is the foundation of our church, we also call ourselves "Christians", but that's such a loaded term in these (supposedly) enlightened times that other Christians go into convulsions if they hear us using the term.

My moral code

But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.

O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

Romans 7:23,24 (KJV)

I don't expect everyone around me to live by my code. It would be nice if they did. As Paul said to Agrippa, I wish that every man were as I am.

I don't include this moral code here to boast or to chastise. But reading it may help you understand better why I am the way I am. Here's a list, in no particular order, of how Mormons are expected to live.

• No tobacco, no alcoholic beverages, no coffee or tea. These are the ones most people are familiar with.

  Whenever I talk about this with someone, they always ask "What about caffeinated sodas?" There is some disagreement about this. David O. McKay in the 1960s suggested that they should be prohibited. Gordon B. Hinckley told Mike Wallace in his 60 Minutes interview that Mormons don't drink caffeinated soft drinks. However, it's not an ironclad commandment, and this distinction trips up both non-Mormons and Coke-drinking Mormons. Me, I don't drink them, and I teach my children not to.

• No sex outside of the bonds of marriage. Not only does this forbid homosexuality, but it also forbids promiscuous heterosexuality. In an effort to draw the line very clearly, it also forbids pornography, movies rated X, NC-17, R and sometimes PG-13, lousy music, dating before age 16 and dances before age 14, necking, petting, masturbation, abortion, and immodest clothing and behavior.

  You know, once you turn those first two requirements into daily habits, everyday life gets much easier to manage. What might initially look like unbearable restrictions end up being quite liberating.

• Donate ten percent (10%) of your pre-tax income to your church. For Mormons, this money gets sent to church headquarters in Salt Lake City, where it pays for the day-to-day operations of the church, and for things like worldwide disaster relief. If you want to try living like a Latter-Day Saint, but you are leery about giving this much money to a church, maybe you could give it to the United Way or another local charitable organization. The Fraser Institute reports that in 1999, the average Californian gave less than 2% of his income to charity, and in 2007 it wasn't any better.

  Even Christians have a tight grip on their purse strings: In the 2008 book Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don't Give Away More Money, the authors quote a study which found that 22 percent of all U.S. Christians donate nothing to their church, 71 percent donate less than 2 percent of their income, and only 9 percent of them donate 10 percent or more (paraphrased from this review of the book).

• Don't eat for a 24-hour period, once a month. Give the money you would have spent on food during that period to the LDS church. This has several benefits for you, even if you're not a Mormon. For starters, it gives your digestive system time to rest periodically. And it's an easy way to find money to give to charity. By the way, the money collected from fasting is not sent to Salt Lake City, but is distributed locally to assist the poor and needy in your area. Again, if you want to try this but are leery about giving money to the Mormons, then donate it directly to your local food bank. I assure you they won't mind.
• Spend all day Sunday in worshipful activities. Go to church services, and then spend the rest of the day (except for mealtimes) in meditation, devotion, selfless service and quiet activities with your family. No sports activities, no television, no shopping or restaurants or movies. No work unless "the ox is in the mire."
• Spend one evening a week doing things together as a family. Most Mormons set aside Monday night for this activity, but Fridays work just as well.
• Be scrupulously honest in your dealings with others.
• Support the leaders of the church as mouthpieces of God. As with tithing and fast offerings, you as a non-Mormon may not want to do this. But to see what difference it makes in your life, select a group of people who are trying to do good — schoolteachers, for example — and simply try to avoid badmouthing them for a while.
• Pray daily, by yourself in secret, with your spouse and with your entire family. This is more than just a "thanks for the food" prayer. This is an out-loud, on-your-knees, conversation with God.
• Read the scriptures daily. If nothing else, it's a good antidote for everything else you read during the day. For you, "the scriptures" can be the Bible, the Quran or any other holy book. For Latter-Day Saints, it includes the Bible as well as the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price.

Useful stuff

• See if you can write your own Book of Mormon! It ought to be easy, right?
• Tradeja backpacks — a parable
• When was Jesus first called "The Christ"?
• Does Your Wife Work? A tribute to stay-at-home moms
• I Don't Buy It — in defense of American Muslims

1. When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.
2. Don't compare your best to their worst.
3. Leave room for "holy envy." (Be willing to find elements in the other religious tradition that you admire and wish you could adopt.)

Back when I was younger and more impetuous, I engaged in several freewheeling religious discussions on USENet and on USENet-like newsgroups provided by my employer. Most discussions started off with a simple "I'd like to ask a simple question about the Mormons ...", and after a helpful response or two was provided, the questioner said "Yabut" and listed several objections to the responses. When someone (me, or any other Mormon in the discussion) tried to address the objections point by point, the questioner set the hook and the "simple question" turned into a raging debate on the subject. The debate often spawned other threads, each of which also began with a "simple question" and exploded into something much larger.

After a while it got really tedious. The loudest "antis" would come back with the same objections (or "questions"), over and over again, and we'd end up fighting the same battles again. I finally realized that it was a waste of my time, because the Mormons will never win a religious debate — the "antis" won't allow them to. To understand why, go watch Rollerball (James Caan, 1975).

Here's a list of reasons I no longer engage in religious debate.

1. They don't change anybody's mind. All they do is make each combatant think that their opponent is an idiot.
2. So many of them devolve into an ignorant person trying to tell me what I believe. They say: "No, that's not what you believe. You don't even know your own religion. Here's what you believe, and I'm quoting one of your own leaders." Then they quote from a book written by an avowed "enemy" of the Mormons, who carefully extracted and rearranged his material from the primary source, or who is quoting from yet another book. Look: I have studied the doctrine of my religion for over 40 years, and I teach it daily. My opponents in religious debates, on the other hand, have read a book or two written by an "anti", or are being coached behind the scenes by somebody who won't speak for himself. I know what I believe, and they don't. (I keep trying to explain it to them, but they won't listen. Which takes us to the next point ...)
3. "But foolish and unlearned questions avoid, knowing that they do gender strifes". The Apostle Paul said that, in 2 Timothy 2:23. Most of the arguments used by "anti's" in religious debate are poorly thought-out, or based on misunderstanding or only a part of the truth.
4. You can find many other places on the Web to argue religion, just like you can find many places on the Web to discuss photomicrography or benthic lifeforms. This isn't one of those places. Live with it.
5. It just seems wrong to talk about the Prince of Peace over crossed swords.

Some resources to avoid if you want to debate with a Mormon:

• Kingdom of the Cults, by Walter Martin. "Doctor" Martin has been exposed and discredited as a fraud and a fake. His list of characteristics of a "cult" would tag Jesus Christ, his apostles and their little band of followers in ancient Judaea as a cult. Martin's arguments are old and unoriginal, and have been addressed many times in print, before the Internet was even invented. While he claims to use primary sources, he has pulled his quotations and references from other published works — he never did a lick of original research on the Mormons. The book also contains glaring errors about some of the other so-called "cults" he tries to expose. I mean, I don't even like the Jehovah's Witnesses, but I caught a lot of errors in his chapter on the JWs. Even in the most recent edition, published in 2003 (14 years after his death, but still listing him as author), the errors persist.
• Anything by the Tanners, professional anti-Mormons. In one religious debate, an "anti" was quoting one of the early Church leaders, and I asked him for the source of his quotation. He told me the source, and I asked him if he had seen the original. No, he said, he was quoting from "an undated, photostatic copy of the original" in one of Tanner's books. You have to do better than that.

• Are Mormons Christians? by Stephen E. Robinson. (Be careful! There are many books with similar titles.) If you're going to debate this topic with a Mormon, you can save yourself a lot of time by reading this book first. The author is a Mormon, and a former dean of the Yale University College of Religious Studies (I think). He takes an objective, scholarly look at the question. Warning: You can find other books with similar titles, written by "antis". Before you can converse intelligently on the subject (see that "foolish and unlearned questions" quotation above), you need to read a Mormon's side of the story. Another warning:You can also find other books with similar titles, written by other Mormons. Some of them are objective and scholarly, but some of them are no better than the writings of the "antis", albeit from the other side. I'll stick with Robinson.
• Tinkling Cymbals and Sounding Brass by Hugh Nibley. The author, a Mormon scholar, reviews 150 years of anti-Mormon writings, draws the common themes out of the lot, and picks them apart, one fallacy or contradiction or fabrication at a time. If you're going to argue with a Mormon about his church, you'd better read Nibley's book first, so you don't get egg on your face by using an argument he's already disposed of.
• The Book of Mormon. I'm sorry. You have to read it. From beginning to end. Let me use an analogy to explain why: you can't expect to talk intelligently about what's wrong with the original Star Wars movie unless you've sat all the way through it — at least once. Just reading some reviews of it isn't good enough. Likewise, if you want to argue intelligently about or against the Book of Mormon, you'd better know what's inside it, and not just from reading someone else's interpretations of it. If you can't put forth that much effort, then you're not worth my time.
• Books like How to Handle the Mormons, How to Witness to the Mormons and so on. (I saw a whole rack of these in the local Bible Superstore, so I stopped and perused a couple of them.) You can ignore most of what they say, because their material is lifted from Martin, Tanner and all the others. But pay careful heed to the chapter that says (quoting from an old memory):

  Don't try to quote scripture to a Mormon. Just don't. These people know their Bible inside and out, and they can probably quote it better than you can. Their teenagers study the Bible every morning for two years while they're in high school.

  When I read that one, I laughed all the way home. It's not always true, but you don't want to be on the receiving end when it is true.