LisaRose: If you want to believe Joseph Smith found golden tablets and spoke to a salamander, well, I guess that's your choice, I really don't care.
Well, no one I know believes that anyone talks with salamanders. You are behind the times, LR. The whole "salamander" thing was a hoax perpetrated by Mark Hofmann in the early 80s. Most likely the most talented forger in history, he obviously drew on scandalous anti-Mormon literature from the early to mid-1800s. The text itself caused many to doubt its legitimacy; however, many others could not prove it was not legitimate. It took a trained investigator months to note that the ink, under a microscope, was cracked. But in known documents of the day, the ink showed no such irregularities.
To slur a religion you know little to nothing about does nothing for your credibility. If you don't, as you say, care, why post at all?
Qcmbr:The lds church is being decimated in the uk....
So is every Christian religion. As stated by LDS apologist Dr. Daniel Peterson:
European Secularism
A more interesting form of secular anti-Mormonism springs out of, or at least is related to, elite European secularism generally.
Some years ago, with time on my hands following the close of an academic gathering in Graz, Austria, I spent the better part of a day looking through the city’s bookstores. The dollar being weak, prices being high, and my luggage being cramped, I did much more looking and browsing than buying. I soon discovered an extraordinarily interesting topic: The treatment of Mormonism in travel books published for America-bound Europeans. Since then, I’ve enjoyed many similar books in French and Italian bookstores as well as across Germanic Europe. Almost uniformly, the tone is one of astonishment–subtly expressed or, often, quite open–at the stupidity and gullibility of the Latter-day Saints. Additionally, Mormon history and doctrine are plainly deemed too patently absurd to justify much effort at accuracy.
But Mormons represent merely an opportunity for a more general European attitude to focus on a particularly ludicrous target. In a recent book attempting to explain the American mind to bemused German-speakers, Professor Hans-Dieter Gelfert observes that, “To Europeans, American religiosity must necessarily seem naive, if not primitive. Here [in Germany], educated people are assisted, above all, by enlightened theologians who reinterpret Christian teaching as an ethical doctrine suited for the everyday, but at the same time philosophically abstract. In the meanwhile, there are pastors who believe that they can get by altogether without mentioning God’s name. It’s completely different in America, where the Bible is still the Word of God.”
According to Phil Zuckerman, of Pitzer College, rates of agnosticism or atheism in Scandinavia, the Czech Republic, and France reach levels higher than fifty percent. There and elsewhere, underused churches are being converted into concert halls, museums, art galleries, stores, restaurants, condos, even nightclubs. In Scandinavia, for some reason, it is popular to transform churches into carpet stores. It is well known that the late Pope John Paul II believed that the future of Catholicism lay not in spiritually dying Europe, but to the south, in Latin America and, perhaps even more so, in Africa. Benedict XVI appears to share that view, with reason.
“In the eyes of many if not most Europeans,” Professor Gelfert observes, “American taste is equivalent to tastelessness.”7 (One is tempted to suggest that, given their own still relatively recent history of something rather worse than poor taste, a bit of humility might be in order for the Germans, at least. And I say this as something of a Germanophile.) Thus, European disdain for American religiosity functions as part of a broader contempt for American culture, nicely embodied, as a surprisingly large number of residents of both the Continent and the British Isles see it, in our religious fanatic cowboy president. And what could be more American than The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known for its freshly-scrubbed, naive, nineteen-year-old missionaries, hailing mostly from the American West?
Anti-Mormonism in Europe is overwhelmingly of the secular variety; evangelical anti-Mormonism, on the whole, is no more than a minor irritant because the same general European secularism that directly challenges missionary success on the continent and in the British Isles also confronts and hampers our evangelical friends. But secularist anti-Mormonism is doing real damage to many fragile testimonies there, and an adequate response has still not materialized. This is a challenge that apologists in Europe itself but also in the Church’s American home base urgently need to address.
You can watch his comments in total at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSwccNZ_mmo&feature=player_detailpage