Oh Brother
One of the big stories in the press this week is presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. There’s two aspects that are getting a lot of stories posted, some stories cover one or the other and some stories cover both. Now, while I call them two aspects, they really are separate issues, but they’ve been lumped together in so many articles that by mere proximity they have each diminished the other into merely being an aspect of the larger tale.
The first aspect is that Mr. Romney gave a speech about his faith and his religion in order to assuage fears that being a Mormon will negatively affect his ability to be a good president. In this speech he made a big point of stating that he personally believes Jesus Christ to be the son of God and the saviour of mankind. He did not say that this is a tenet of the Mormon church, which appears to be his way of having his cake and eating it too. He doesn’t overstate or oversimplify the views of his church but he gets to claim a faith in common, that many Mormons don’t, with all the other Christians.
The second aspect is that Mike Huckabee, another Republican presidential hopeful, gave an interview to the New York Times in which he asked, “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?” There appears to be a fair amount of Mormon literature that supports this question, or at least there is when you take into account that this is true for a special definition of brother that is used in such discussions and so doesn’t really apply when the subject is taken out of context. Now my reading of the articles about this brouhaha suggests that Mr. Huckabee has been the victim of people trying to misrepresent this belief rather than being himself one of the people trying to misrepresent this belief, but I could be wrong.
So now that I’ve made sure you’re at least somewhat up to date on Mitt and MIke’s muddled match of Mormon messages, what insights did I get on the whole thing from talking about it with God? I’d like to tell you, I really would, but every time I tried to bring it up, he stopped me. He wouldn’t even let me get out the question.
Sometimes I wonder what good it is to be able to talk to God when he pretty much never gives me any juicy information, but then I remember, hey, I’m getting to talk to God; we could be discussing how to properly cream the butter when making chocolate chip cookies and I’d still find it worthwhile.
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily do much for you.
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