ETA: And Randfan, I'm in the middle of figuring out LDS, FLDS, so please pardon my error.
Trinity. Mormonism teaches polytheism (versus monotheism taught in the Bible), believing that the universe is inhabited by many gods who produce spirit children. Joseph Smith declared, "I will preach on the plurality of Gods. I have always declared God to be a distinct personage, Jesus Christ a separate and distinct personage from God the Father, and the Holy Ghost was a distinct personage and a Spirit: and these three constitute three distinct personages and three Gods" (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 370). Mormon Apostle Bruce R. McConkie spoke about the Godhead in this way, "Plurality of Gods: Three separate personages: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, comprise the Godhead. As each of these persons is a God, it is evident, from this standpoint alone, that a plurality of Gods exists. To us, speaking in the proper finite sense, these three are the only Gods we worship. But in addition there is an infinite number of holy personages, drawn from worlds without number, who have passed on to exaltation and are thus gods" (Mormon Doctrine, pp. 576-577).
God. In Mormon theology, the god of our planet is believed to have once been a man on another planet, who through self-effort and the help of his own father-god, was appointed by a counsel of gods in the heavens to his high position as the god of planet Earth, and now has a physical, resurrected, glorified body. Mormonism teaches that through the atonement of Christ and by their good deeds and "holy" living, men can one day become gods, and with their multiplicity of "goddess wives," populate their own planets. (This is what the celestial marriage and the Mormon temple vows are all about.) Mormon theology, therefore, humanizes God and deifies man.3
from
http://www.rapidnet.com/~jbeard/bdm/Cults/mormon.htm
The problem with a lot of the sites I'm finding is that they are Christian sites trying to pick on Mormonism for being a 'cult' when, as RandFan pointed out, their beliefs are no stranger than Christian beliefs. But you can certainly see a bias in this information.
Part of what Articulett was trying to get into my thick skull about my discussions with rcronk is that we don't use the same vocabulary and we have markedly different meanings when we say something. And that's my fault for not understanding it but continuing to try and argue it with rcronk. Much of my argument went on an assumption of monotheism in Mormonism.
When I asked if his god was all powerful, he said yes. That's a kind of difficult answer in Mormonism, is it not? I'm sure the answer is supposed to be yes, but then shouldn't it be followed up with, "but we ALL get to be gods and get to be ALL powerful one day if we do it all really well. We get a planet even..."
How can god be ALL powerful and yet share power with a million billion other schmoes who achieve godhood? How can you have a bunch of gods ALL powerful at the same time? Are there rankings of gods? Is there a number one god, kind of the CEO god and then a bunch of other less powerful gods?
Thinking about this is like trying to think about how Santa organizes his elves at his North Pole factory. I don't mean offense to rcronk, but really. It makes my brain hurt to do the logistical gymnastics in figuring this out... Again, though, I feel the same when trying to get a feed on exactly how many virgins one gets in Islamic heaven or if Hera was the wife of Zeus and the mother of Hercules or when I ponder how the Red Sea supposedly parted...
(and to be fair, I felt that same sort of brain pain in college when we had to do math with infinity in the equation and put a 4 in front of it... so, 4 times infinity... how do you have four of all? Owwwwwwwchhhhhhhhhh....)
Maybe it's just my brain has a slow hard drive.
