ALTERATIONS

I was talking to a friend of mine, a Humanist who loves talking about religion and is very supportive of my faith. She went to the LDS meetinghouse last weekend and was given some Church manuals. As I was browsing one, I could not help noticing how basic everything was. I know there is such a thing as milk before meat, but the LDS diet seems to entirely consists of milk. I also remembered seeing some comparative with the old manuals, and did a search when I got home.

You will see all those changes here.

In that comparative, we see that Gods, including Heavenly Mother, disappeared. Additions (underlined on the page) show a clear effort towards Christianization. Of course, to Christians, those manuals are still not Christian enough (and I'll say it's only a matter of time until they are satisfied). However, there is now much more emphasis on Jesus. Exaltation, for example, is depicted as a free gift by following Jesus.

Some may find the comments section insulting, but here are my personal favorites:

“Oops, we (the LDS) got caught with our weird doctrines and now have to change things to appear more ‘Christian’ even though we know we have the only true church - the one Adam and Eve, Abraham, and Jesus belonged to.”

“More editing to make the claims of j.smith and the following “prophets” of the lds seem less like a polygamous polytheist religion and more like Christianity.”

“Our heavenly parents Heavenly Father... What? Did the heavenly parents have a break-up?”

Also, while searching that page, I came about some reactions on someone's blog about the LDS last leader, Hinckley, who said he didn't know about God once being a man! I remember thinking that was rather odd. I know he later explained during General Conference that people should not worry, that he did know the doctrines of the Church. I guess he didn't want to confuse the world and was following his P.R. people's advice. Still, either he was lying through his teeth, or he had no clue about elementary Mormon doctrines.

See is that blog's entry here.