Nuance Hoe claims missionaries now using bait-and-switch "we're Christian" tactics

[I Have Questions]

When a sister missionary contacted me through Facebook recently, she did not identify herself as LDS and asked only if I wanted to know more about Christ. I suspected she was LDS and confirmed it by looking at her Facebook page.

Do you know how and why this young woman identified you, an adult male “stranger” as a potential target?

[Res Ipsa]

When a sister missionary contacted me through Facebook recently, she did not identify herself as LDS and asked only if I wanted to know more about Christ. I suspected she was LDS and confirmed it by looking at her Facebook page.

Do you know how and why this young woman identified you, an adult male “stranger” as a potential target?

I didn't ask. I do have LDS friends and family, so it could have been that. Or it could have been similar to tracting.

[I Have Questions]

Do you know how and why this young woman identified you, an adult male “stranger” as a potential target?

I didn't ask. I do have LDS friends and family, so it could have been that. Or it could have been similar to tracting.

My first reaction is that it sounds a little creepy and deceitful. Internet stalking of peoples “friend” lists without being upfront about who they are and what they’re intending by making contact. When out tracting missionaries wear a clear name badge indicating what they’re about. Sounds like they aren’t being that upfront on the internet.

[Kishkumen]

I criticised your response to bill4long because I evaluated it (and still do) as being an unfair response to what she/he/it had written in the post you cited.

I regard your assessment of the situation to be entirely off base and unfortunate.

[Kishkumen]

This.

Weird. I don't see that I am blaming anyone else for anything. I see bill4long being insulting and trollish, and then several of you pile on me as though I were the bad guy for defending myself from this person's trollish and insulting behavior.

Oh well!

[huckelberry]

kishkumen, there is a possibility that a few of your comments on this thread came across as more hostile than you intended.

[Rivendale]

kishkumen, there is a possibility that a few of your comments on this thread came across as more hostile than you intended.

This

[drumdude]

kishkumen, there is a possibility that a few of your comments on this thread came across as more hostile than you intended.

This

I do appreciate Kish’s pushing back on the anti-church dogpiles and bad arguments. But in this case it could be much less acerbic and insulting, that is not needed to get his point across.

[Rivendale]

This

I do appreciate Kish’s pushing back on the anti-church dogpiles and bad arguments. But in this case it could be much less acerbic and insulting, that is not needed to get his point across.

Very well put. Great contributions and wonderful insights lose their luster with hyperbolic language.

[Canadiandude2]

The first incoherency that immediately springs up is that it’s not apparent that the original authors of the respective texts that make up the New Testament actually had a homogeneous and consistent understanding of the relationship between “the Father” “the Son” “and the Holy Ghost”. Debates and decision-making by early church leaders on the matter seems to suggests that early church fathers had to pick, choose, sometimes write, rewrite, and reinterpret the text(s) to arrive at the decisions they did- but without any consistent way of ensuring the validity and reliability of this process nor resultant outcome(s) even to this very day.

Why do you call this an incoherency? No-one claims that either the Deity of Christ or the Trinity is emphasised clearly anywhere in the Bible. Catholics happily say that the church figured them out gradually afterwards, and even sola Scriptura Protestants acknowledge that the Trinity is pretty implicitly there in the New Testament.

I am confused how God can simultaneously be father, son, and Holy Ghost while maintaining the same degree of distinctiveness and respective personhood that the Bible often suggests. When Jesus speaks to or refers to his father is he talking to himself? Referring to himself in third person ? How can he be at two material places at once? The Bible’s narrators talk about Jesus ascending/descending to/from the father or apparently referring to such.

The Trinity has never meant that the three Persons are only one Person. The Athanasian Creed beats this into the ground at repetitive length. There are not three Gods, and there is not just one Person. Exactly what "Person" and "God" mean are loosely defined, if at all, but there are plenty of at least weakly analogous cases in which a simple concrete thing is one thing, yet simultaneously is more than one of some kind of other thing. A single cube is six squares. If things as simple as cubes and squares can be like that, why is it incoherent for the ultimate being to be in some kind of way three and yet one?

If God the father is spirit- how did he ejaculate into Mary so as to impregnate her?(edit assuming that trinitarians are even certain of the existence of god, his incorporeality, and material as opposed to metaphorical paternity of Jesus) Did these gods exist prior to materiality? After?

This seems to be based on materialistic Mormon theology that strikes mainstream Christians as bizarre. The author of reality does not need to have semen to bring about a virgin birth. Mainstream Christian theology no doubt strikes many people as bizarre, too, but the Mormon version seems kind of like postulating an afterlife that will take place in Cleveland. It's like, "An afterlife? Sure, okay, maybe—but why the heck Cleveland? Isn't an afterlife supposed to be a lot more than that? Do we go there by bus?" That's the kind of reaction. "A God? Sure, okay, maybe—but why the heck with a flesh-and-bone body?"

Of course the Trinity is not an evidence-based scientific theory, but you can't support a charge of conceptual incoherence by pointing to lack of evidence. That's a different issue, and it's even important in science to keep those issues separate. I'm not going to waste time looking for evidence for a hypothesis that isn't even coherent.

I believe some of your interpretations of what I’m saying in these quotes are a lil suspect. I also believe it unlikely that you or I will ever agree on the meaning of the word “Incoherence” or “incoherent” given that I do require a concept to be based upon formal and informal logic, with as less severe and as few internal contradictions as possible.

I’m not convinced of the validity and reliability of the trinity, nor it’s essential necessity to Christian identity. You keep skipping over the fact that Christ wasn’t even originally deified in the early church, and interpretations of his and the other two’s relationship to one another have not been consistent nor homogeneous, and to this day there is no way to determine the validity nor reliability of one interpretation over another- including Christian ideas on godhood that denies its relevance.

I am also not the only one who has described it as incoherent, as this Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy describes:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/trinity/

The Athanasian Creed beats this into the ground at repetitive length.

You can believe that if you wish but upon reviewing it again, all I can say is that I’m not convinced of the matter. Your particular way of interpreting the text furthermore does not seem to be all to different from Mormonism’s ‘three persons’ explanation aside from believing the father to be a spirit- but again it’s not clear from new or Old Testament that this is the only valid interpretation, and the reasons for why “this” interpretation or “that” interpretation seem rather arbitrary, and more informed by what groups were in power at the time and their interests and preferences for gatekeeping.

As for “materialistic Mormon theology”
I’m an agnostic atheist and methodological naturalist. You wanna believe in ghostly-daddy dicks that’s up to you bud. Your duty to provide evidence for, not mine.

I’m not gonna ‘win the internet’ today. I’m okay with that. I’m still convinced the trinity is incoherent, though to be fair, so too are most supranatural concepts. I have no love for Mormonism, but ain’t gonna debase myself agreeing to that which is equally logically-incomprehensible in my view just to get back at them.