Widening the tent
Stephen Stone, RenewAmerica President
Few things reveal Mormonism's lack of a moral core as much as the LDS church's recent announcement of its support for welcoming homosexuals into the Boy Scouts.
The church's statement, issued April 25, endorsed a BSA proposal that would reverse a hundred years of officially excluding open homosexuals from Scouting by virtue of the Scout Oath, which requires boys to be "morally straight" as part of their duty to God.
The BSA proposal says,
Undoctrinal authoritarianism at work
In our series "Mormonism under the Microscope," I've argued from considerable evidence that such lawlessness is in fact deeply entrenched in LDS culture — which by tradition is rooted in excessive authoritarianism that overrides God's unchanging laws and doctrines. It's a tradition that exalts an appointed governing elite above the church's own officially-adopted canon (that voted upon by the membership), a canon which includes the Bible.
For the LDS church to defy its own canon — as it has in this particular instance (and as it commonly does in its teachings and institutional behavior, in my experience) — is the height of disrespect for God, His Word, and His saving gospel, meaning His "plan of salvation," which centers in relying alone on Jesus Christ in all things, not upon the fickle "wisdom of men" that guides LDS tradition and belief.
No person (or institution) firmly grounded in biblical teachings could possibly be persuaded to abandon God's clear standards regarding homosexuality in favor of "progressive" trends that accept and accommodate such perversion in today's corrupt world.
Inherent self-contradiction
Catering to homosexuals — and that is exactly what the LDS church has progressively done in recent years (see here, here, here, here, and here) — is just plain wrong. So much for the LDS church's claim of "divine inspiration" among its governing elite by virtue of their high calling, and so much for the church's claim to being "the only true and living church upon the face of the earth, with which...the Lord [is] well pleased" (see D&C 1:30-31).
As I've pointed out elsewhere, even if the church could, on a credible rationale, profess to be accepted of God at the time of its inception in 1830, its own canon soon declared the "whole church" to be under God's condemnation two years later for members' refusal to believe the saving doctrine of Jesus Christ. (See D&C 84:54-60.)
In other words, according to the Mormon canon itself, God is displeased with Mormons as a group for being ungrounded in His doctrine. We see the result of such "condemnation" and "disbelief in the new covenant of the gospel" in the church's shocking endorsement of the latest BSA proposal for reversing the very moral basis of Scouting.
The roots of decline
It's problematic enough that the LDS church's governing leadership have publicly endorsed altering the essence of Scouting to mimic the world. Just as troubling is that the cult of personality that presides over the church will lure nearly all "active" LDS members into mindlessly believing that "God has changed his mind" on something so basic as the evil of homosexuality.
The cultishness at the center of Mormonism all but guarantees a whole people willing to go along with the LDS leadership's folly in this controversy, as the membership have done historically with polygamy, racism toward blacks, culturally-enforced mind control in the form of two-year "missions" that take young people from their families and mold them into the next generation of authoritarian LDS leaders, and the revisionism and secrecy that dominate the church's public relations facade.
Bible readers are aware that ancient Sodom and Gomorrah were literally wiped off the earth by God for tolerating, then pitying, then embracing homosexuality (to paraphrase Alexander Pope), much as those sympathetic to homosexuality's destructive, insidious influence today court the inevitable. If the BSA is swayed by the relativistic foolishness of the LDS church — the largest sponsor of Scouting in the U.S. — we're watching the end of Scouting as we know it, and the weakening of civilized, God-fearing American society with it.
We're also watching the LDS church arrogantly bring about its own demise — notwithstanding the church's comprehensive media and internet efforts to "mainstream" itself into American society in order to "expand its stakes." The LDS church just gave itself away — its real self, that is.
Without question, the church's open acceptance of self-identified homosexual young men as scouts (and within its own ranks, of admitted homosexual leaders) reveals an organization ultimately without a moral anchor, particularly in the heat of battle in today's culture war. This immoral attempt by the church to gain favor with the world will surely cost it any favor it thought it had with the Creator of us all.
Absurd distinction
At the heart of the LDS church's support for admitting avowed gays into Scouting is an untenable distinction between homosexuals who are "chaste" and those who are not.
According to church policy, the first may hold church callings or positions, and may even attend LDS temples, but only those who play out their homosexuality are considered sinful and thus unworthy of such privileges.
The problem with such absurd policy is the terminology itself. By any common-sense definition, a homosexual is someone who engages in homosexual acts. Others who may be tempted to do so cannot rationally be considered homosexual for merely their thoughts or feelings alone — notwithstanding popular trends to broaden, and thus make less disturbing, the definition of a homosexual.
Impressionable youth may be confused, frustrated, even pulled many directions by contradictory emotions — but they are not truly "homosexual" until they yield to their impulses and act them out.*
It's common knowledge that "normal" males who tend to be attracted to the opposite sex may fantasize about engaging in sexual acts with attractive females. But it is not until they actually give in to their desires that they can accurately be identified as "fornicators" or "adulterers."
To call a male, therefore, who is immersed in thoughts of fornicating but never follows through "a fornicator" is to falsely label nearly all red-blooded males as such even if they've never succumbed to that particular temptation.
A fornicator is someone who commits fornication. Someone who only dreams of it, or thinks about it, even frequently, is not a fornicator — or else the term has no meaning. They may be guilty of lust — and that of itself can be considered a sin; but they are not guilty of the act of fornication.
The same with adultery. Someone guilty of adultery, and thus worthy of death according to the Bible, is a person who has committed an actual act — not merely thought about it. When Jesus said that "look[ing] on a woman to lust after her" was tantamount to committing adultery in one's heart (see Matt. 5:28), he was not literally equating such inward sin with its outward performance; there's an obvious difference. The first may be seriously wrong, being inappropriately
lustful, but it is not adultery in the customary sense.
So how it is that those who think of committing homosexual acts are somehow, in fact, "homosexual"? Any reasonable definition — not clever word games devised by popular culture — would require a person actually to engage in homosexual behavior to be certifiably gay.
A person who is merely tempted to commit such perverse, unnatural sin is not homosexual for feeling tempted alone — any more than a young man who fantasizes about fornicating with the girl next door is a fornicator, or a married man who is tempted to sleep with the neighbor's wife is an adulterer.
The LDS church's naïve, nonsensical labeling of non-practicing "homosexuals" as gay is absurd on its face, utterly illogical, and intellectually bizarre.
Yet that is the basis for the church's all-too-accommodating support for the homosexual agenda.
There's more
Considering that the basis for the church's position is also that it evidently buys into the unsupportable assertion of atheistic behavioral science that homosexuality is inborn, and thus irresistible and irreversible, the church is courting even further disaster with its absurd view toward gays.
Not only is it self-evident that a person is not truly or demonstrably gay until he yields to homosexual thoughts or feelings, but if homosexuality is "inborn," that person is doomed to yield to his urges without hope of ever "overcoming" his homosexuality — being controlled by genetics, not his own will.
The church's mythical notion of a "chaste" homosexual is thus a contradiction in more than semantic terms, and makes the church's stance toward homosexuals wholly impractical, as well as morally dangerous. It renders homosexuals unaccountable for their actions, and makes a mockery of God's gift of a physical body, along with its divinely assigned gender. The chaotic results are predictable in their effect on civilization.
To any true Christian, of course, anyone immersed in the destructive, corrupting, predatory life of homosexuality can indeed put aside such "childish things" and become a true man (or woman) of God, through the miracle of conversion to Christ and its attendant spiritual transformation. Homosexuality — which is more about selfishness and hedonism than "genetics" or environment, and is definitely a conscious choice to reject the ways of God (Rom. 1:18-32) — is not an immutable sentence. A truly repentant homosexual is no longer "gay" if they don't practice homosexuality — any more than they were homosexual before they began actually to give in to powerful temptation.
In any case, it should be clear that a policy premised on a figment of the imagination — the myth of the so-called "chaste" homosexual — as the LDS church's stance toward gays is premised, is bound to cause grief for all who go along with the charade, Boy Scouts included, with American society in its wake.
Better to stick with the laws of God and keep "mercy" and "justice" in balance, not embrace the first and ignore the second, as the LDS church appears prone to do in its unwise and shockingly unChristian gay policy.
As it stands, the LDS church's current policy regarding homosexuality is an affront to God, and lacks a clear, compelling doctrinal basis. Instead or erring on the side of caution — with the Bible and its own scriptures firmly in hand — the church has chosen to throw caution to the wind and let the nose of homosexuals' manipulative, ill-behaved camel into the tent.
That tent is bound eventually to collapse, if plain biblical teaching is to be believed.
May 2, 2013
Few things reveal Mormonism's lack of a moral core as much as the LDS church's recent announcement of its support for welcoming homosexuals into the Boy Scouts.The church's statement, issued April 25, endorsed a BSA proposal that would reverse a hundred years of officially excluding open homosexuals from Scouting by virtue of the Scout Oath, which requires boys to be "morally straight" as part of their duty to God.
The BSA proposal says,
-
No youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone.
Undoctrinal authoritarianism at work
In our series "Mormonism under the Microscope," I've argued from considerable evidence that such lawlessness is in fact deeply entrenched in LDS culture — which by tradition is rooted in excessive authoritarianism that overrides God's unchanging laws and doctrines. It's a tradition that exalts an appointed governing elite above the church's own officially-adopted canon (that voted upon by the membership), a canon which includes the Bible.
For the LDS church to defy its own canon — as it has in this particular instance (and as it commonly does in its teachings and institutional behavior, in my experience) — is the height of disrespect for God, His Word, and His saving gospel, meaning His "plan of salvation," which centers in relying alone on Jesus Christ in all things, not upon the fickle "wisdom of men" that guides LDS tradition and belief.
No person (or institution) firmly grounded in biblical teachings could possibly be persuaded to abandon God's clear standards regarding homosexuality in favor of "progressive" trends that accept and accommodate such perversion in today's corrupt world.Inherent self-contradiction
Catering to homosexuals — and that is exactly what the LDS church has progressively done in recent years (see here, here, here, here, and here) — is just plain wrong. So much for the LDS church's claim of "divine inspiration" among its governing elite by virtue of their high calling, and so much for the church's claim to being "the only true and living church upon the face of the earth, with which...the Lord [is] well pleased" (see D&C 1:30-31).
As I've pointed out elsewhere, even if the church could, on a credible rationale, profess to be accepted of God at the time of its inception in 1830, its own canon soon declared the "whole church" to be under God's condemnation two years later for members' refusal to believe the saving doctrine of Jesus Christ. (See D&C 84:54-60.)
In other words, according to the Mormon canon itself, God is displeased with Mormons as a group for being ungrounded in His doctrine. We see the result of such "condemnation" and "disbelief in the new covenant of the gospel" in the church's shocking endorsement of the latest BSA proposal for reversing the very moral basis of Scouting.
The roots of decline
It's problematic enough that the LDS church's governing leadership have publicly endorsed altering the essence of Scouting to mimic the world. Just as troubling is that the cult of personality that presides over the church will lure nearly all "active" LDS members into mindlessly believing that "God has changed his mind" on something so basic as the evil of homosexuality.
The cultishness at the center of Mormonism all but guarantees a whole people willing to go along with the LDS leadership's folly in this controversy, as the membership have done historically with polygamy, racism toward blacks, culturally-enforced mind control in the form of two-year "missions" that take young people from their families and mold them into the next generation of authoritarian LDS leaders, and the revisionism and secrecy that dominate the church's public relations facade.
Bible readers are aware that ancient Sodom and Gomorrah were literally wiped off the earth by God for tolerating, then pitying, then embracing homosexuality (to paraphrase Alexander Pope), much as those sympathetic to homosexuality's destructive, insidious influence today court the inevitable. If the BSA is swayed by the relativistic foolishness of the LDS church — the largest sponsor of Scouting in the U.S. — we're watching the end of Scouting as we know it, and the weakening of civilized, God-fearing American society with it.We're also watching the LDS church arrogantly bring about its own demise — notwithstanding the church's comprehensive media and internet efforts to "mainstream" itself into American society in order to "expand its stakes." The LDS church just gave itself away — its real self, that is.
Without question, the church's open acceptance of self-identified homosexual young men as scouts (and within its own ranks, of admitted homosexual leaders) reveals an organization ultimately without a moral anchor, particularly in the heat of battle in today's culture war. This immoral attempt by the church to gain favor with the world will surely cost it any favor it thought it had with the Creator of us all.
Absurd distinction
At the heart of the LDS church's support for admitting avowed gays into Scouting is an untenable distinction between homosexuals who are "chaste" and those who are not.
According to church policy, the first may hold church callings or positions, and may even attend LDS temples, but only those who play out their homosexuality are considered sinful and thus unworthy of such privileges.
The problem with such absurd policy is the terminology itself. By any common-sense definition, a homosexual is someone who engages in homosexual acts. Others who may be tempted to do so cannot rationally be considered homosexual for merely their thoughts or feelings alone — notwithstanding popular trends to broaden, and thus make less disturbing, the definition of a homosexual.
Impressionable youth may be confused, frustrated, even pulled many directions by contradictory emotions — but they are not truly "homosexual" until they yield to their impulses and act them out.*
It's common knowledge that "normal" males who tend to be attracted to the opposite sex may fantasize about engaging in sexual acts with attractive females. But it is not until they actually give in to their desires that they can accurately be identified as "fornicators" or "adulterers."
To call a male, therefore, who is immersed in thoughts of fornicating but never follows through "a fornicator" is to falsely label nearly all red-blooded males as such even if they've never succumbed to that particular temptation.
A fornicator is someone who commits fornication. Someone who only dreams of it, or thinks about it, even frequently, is not a fornicator — or else the term has no meaning. They may be guilty of lust — and that of itself can be considered a sin; but they are not guilty of the act of fornication.
The same with adultery. Someone guilty of adultery, and thus worthy of death according to the Bible, is a person who has committed an actual act — not merely thought about it. When Jesus said that "look[ing] on a woman to lust after her" was tantamount to committing adultery in one's heart (see Matt. 5:28), he was not literally equating such inward sin with its outward performance; there's an obvious difference. The first may be seriously wrong, being inappropriately
lustful, but it is not adultery in the customary sense.So how it is that those who think of committing homosexual acts are somehow, in fact, "homosexual"? Any reasonable definition — not clever word games devised by popular culture — would require a person actually to engage in homosexual behavior to be certifiably gay.
A person who is merely tempted to commit such perverse, unnatural sin is not homosexual for feeling tempted alone — any more than a young man who fantasizes about fornicating with the girl next door is a fornicator, or a married man who is tempted to sleep with the neighbor's wife is an adulterer.
The LDS church's naïve, nonsensical labeling of non-practicing "homosexuals" as gay is absurd on its face, utterly illogical, and intellectually bizarre.
Yet that is the basis for the church's all-too-accommodating support for the homosexual agenda.
There's more
Considering that the basis for the church's position is also that it evidently buys into the unsupportable assertion of atheistic behavioral science that homosexuality is inborn, and thus irresistible and irreversible, the church is courting even further disaster with its absurd view toward gays.
Not only is it self-evident that a person is not truly or demonstrably gay until he yields to homosexual thoughts or feelings, but if homosexuality is "inborn," that person is doomed to yield to his urges without hope of ever "overcoming" his homosexuality — being controlled by genetics, not his own will.
The church's mythical notion of a "chaste" homosexual is thus a contradiction in more than semantic terms, and makes the church's stance toward homosexuals wholly impractical, as well as morally dangerous. It renders homosexuals unaccountable for their actions, and makes a mockery of God's gift of a physical body, along with its divinely assigned gender. The chaotic results are predictable in their effect on civilization.
To any true Christian, of course, anyone immersed in the destructive, corrupting, predatory life of homosexuality can indeed put aside such "childish things" and become a true man (or woman) of God, through the miracle of conversion to Christ and its attendant spiritual transformation. Homosexuality — which is more about selfishness and hedonism than "genetics" or environment, and is definitely a conscious choice to reject the ways of God (Rom. 1:18-32) — is not an immutable sentence. A truly repentant homosexual is no longer "gay" if they don't practice homosexuality — any more than they were homosexual before they began actually to give in to powerful temptation.
In any case, it should be clear that a policy premised on a figment of the imagination — the myth of the so-called "chaste" homosexual — as the LDS church's stance toward gays is premised, is bound to cause grief for all who go along with the charade, Boy Scouts included, with American society in its wake.Better to stick with the laws of God and keep "mercy" and "justice" in balance, not embrace the first and ignore the second, as the LDS church appears prone to do in its unwise and shockingly unChristian gay policy.
As it stands, the LDS church's current policy regarding homosexuality is an affront to God, and lacks a clear, compelling doctrinal basis. Instead or erring on the side of caution — with the Bible and its own scriptures firmly in hand — the church has chosen to throw caution to the wind and let the nose of homosexuals' manipulative, ill-behaved camel into the tent.
That tent is bound eventually to collapse, if plain biblical teaching is to be believed.
____________________
*It's demonstrable, I believe, that a homosexual is someone who is unwilling to pay the price to learn to live with the opposite sex — an undertaking that is no small challenge for anyone, no matter what otherwise comes "easy" to them. It's human nature to take the path of least resistance, and to avoid the path of self-sacrifice and self-control. A homosexual, in my estimation, has given up on trying to make the "opposite" person sexually and emotionally happy, and has turned inordinately inward toward self-gratification, and mutual gratification in the company of similarly selfish people of the same sex.
I realize it's popular for secularists to widen the definition of homosexuality to include all those who may "feel" attracted to those of the same sex — but that broad, subjective definition, I would argue, is meant to inflate the numbers of gay individuals beyond what is real and measurable, for the purpose of influencing others. It's not valid.
I realize it's popular for secularists to widen the definition of homosexuality to include all those who may "feel" attracted to those of the same sex — but that broad, subjective definition, I would argue, is meant to inflate the numbers of gay individuals beyond what is real and measurable, for the purpose of influencing others. It's not valid.
STEPHEN STONE, RA PRESIDENT — As the gay agenda rolls forth unchecked in fulfillment of its published goals and tactics — dragging Western Civilization down more predictably than the Muslim Brotherhood is likely ever to do — rational Americans need to come to grips with one of the most damnable frauds in the world's history: the belief that there is such a thing as "being gay."... (more)
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In the world, but not of it: Why not just ‘pull up stakes’?
Authoritarianism run amok: The excesses of 'Mormonism'
A closer look at Mitt's Mormonism
The real problem with Mormonism
Our premises as we examine Mormonism
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