Let the Gospel Teach Itself!

This is a post I recently posted on a Catholic Forums thread that seemed to be getting heated. I don’t normally hang around those places (including the Mormon ones), but on this one, some of the Catholics had some genuine questions. I noticed however that there were a few, especially Catholics that were former Mormons that kept trying to point out flaws in my faith. I also had recently reread some parts of Talmage’s “The Great Apostasy” and it reminded me of a time when I found the Mormon missionaries letting a Catholic investigator borrow that book. Is that not the same thing, the other way around?

I have always been of the belief that we as Mormons need to teach others about our church. Other religions also need to teach us about their churches. We don’t need to teach each other about each other’s churches though. We learn much more the other way around.

I’m a computer programmer by trade, and for those computer programmers in the crowd, software development can be a very religious topic (no blasphemy intended). Often one software developer will say his preferred language is better than the others. My preferred language is Perl. Yet, I’ve come to find that delving into the other languages and finding the good things in them I’ve been able to come back to my preferred language, Perl, and make it better. Does it change the language? No – the language is still the same. I just introduce new ways of using the plain and simple logic behind the language to produce glorious things in my code.

I think between religions we can do the same. Let’s learn from each other! Let’s please not tell each other how to live our religions though. I think that’s the “Christian” (meaning “like Christ” in my meaning) thing to do.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on the early Christian Church, and some of the evidences within that support the Mormon faith. I’ve got some good stuff. More to come later…