Proctor and Gamble Company provides a helpful background on the issue of outright fabrication. It all began in the bowels of the religious right. The rumor was started in the early 1980s that P & G, the soap company, was owned by satanists and that all the profits went to none other than the Church of Satan. A "Christian" noticed their trademark which shows a man in the moon and the thirteen stars honoring the thirteen colonies and in the total absence of any evidence decided that this was a satanic symbol. The story exploded into deeper insanity as more and more maliciously, intolerate, ignorant "Christians" expanded upon the fiction. Proctor and Gamble tried at great expense to quell the growing, rampant lies but after many years was forced to simply change the trademark instead.

The religious extremists set aside the truth for the joy of shooting at a target. The simple soap company could not stop the willful and intentional fabrications.

The point is this: If a company so unspeakably innocent as a soap company can become the target of religious irrationality and be totally unable to stop the viscious lies, what chance do the Latter Day Saints have?

Well, the Latter Day Saints just continue to teach their beliefs, their real beliefs, to those who will listen.

Posting and commenting on the stream, Latter Day Saints are denied the basic privilege of defining and interpreting their own doctrines ... invariably the interruption comes with the retort, "No, that's NOT what you believe; THIS is what you believe!" Here they are shouted down with mind reading misrepresentations. In this way anti-Mormons expose their bias.


Many times, many - many times in our professional careers my husband and I had occasion to say, "I'm sorry, but I don't believe that." My husband has been declared to be "intellectually dishonest" on the stream when he persistantly corrects misrepresentations of Mormon doctines. Shall Mormon doctrine be what the Mormons say it is or what their opponents say it is?

When non-Mormons attempt to impose doctrines on the Latter Day Saints or interpret them for us, the fictions that transpire usually fall into 1` of 3 categories:

1. Outright fabrications

2. Distortions of genuine LDS doctrines into bizarre forms

3. Representations of anomolies within the LDS tradition as IF falling into the mainstream of official LDS teaching.

Latter-day Saints are condemned for things they DON'T believe. That is what rejection by misrepresentation is all about. The US Constitution provides the liberty where people can believe and worship as they choose. No group has the right to compel others with their beliefs. Most people would confirm consistant with this that churches have the right to define and interpret their own doctrines for its own use. Catholics decide what Catholics believe. Baptists decide what Baptists believe

Latter-day Saints are regularly denied this basic right of defining and interpreting their own doctrines. The are denied repeatedly right here on the Stream. But there real chuckle comes when a Baptist minister or some other self-professed "expert" on my faith (but never having lived it) tries to tell me, "No, Streisand - this is what you believe!" Well, let me tell you what I tell them.

"I am the world's authority on what I believe, and I have never believed what you have said I believed." But we Mormons do this to no avail. The anti-Mormons of the world have a fixed mind supposing that Mormon doctrines are best interpreted by nonMormons than Mormons.

If each of us took the opinion of our acquaintances from those who know them second hand, there wouldn't be two friend in the world. The best way to understand what we believe is to listen to us. And to read from us.

Most of the time when the clergy make the charge that Mormons are not Christians, they are not thinking of Webster's definitions at all. The clergy defines the term for themselves, thereby thinking they control it. In this manner, the Latter-day Saints Could define the term CHRISTIAN to require a belief in the divine mission of Joseph Smith. This is foolishness. For Mormons to define CHRISTIANS as "people who believe what Mormons believe" and then reason that non-Mormons fail the Christian test would be nothing more than to say that non-Mormons aren't Mormons. Note that this would be without any consideration for what they may or may not believe about Jesus Christ.

So, those who reject the LDS do it in a narrow sectarian sense which actually rejects all those who doctrines differ from their own.

Those who reject the LDS on the surface make the strong charge that Latter Day Saints do not believe in Jesus Christ or do not attempt to follow His teachings.

So, the game is rigged. If you define a Christian as one who believes in the fundamentals of conservative Protestantism, as an example, then only they are real Christians. Playing this kind of word game is like defining a duck as an aquatic bird with webbed feet and a flat bill only to reject the male duck for having different plummage.

Mormons are Christians when they believe Jesus Christ to be God and live by His teachings as identified in the Bible.

An intermission in the process of evaluating the question "Are Mormons Christians"?

Just earlier today, a four-star General provided an enlightening news conference. This is the gentleman overseeing the war situation in Iraq. He described the coalition government in Iraq, the partnership so painfully assembled, as a "zero sum" situation. Zero-sum describes a situation where combatant gains or losses are exactly balanced by the losses or gains of other combatants. This is what is happening within a supposed Iraqi government. It is so named because when the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero. Thus, there is no progress, no promise, nothing better expected.

American orthodox Christianity is a finer example of the zero-sum game: it is impossible for one American orthodox Christian church to win without another closing it's doors. So entrenched are they in their differences that it is now shrinking in America.

Let's call it the "subzero-sum Christianity".