Oh No! We'S A Cult!

[cdowis]

I disagree with you here.

LDS poster Ahab has used the termhttp://www.mormondia...__p__1209050164

LDS poster Zerinus used the term http://www.mormondia...__p__1209031069

and here http://www.mormondia...__p__1208899114

The term is used back and forth between two LDS poster (Lightbearer and Consiglieri) here http://www.mormondia...__p__1208575963

Going back a bit

BCSpace here http://www.mormondia...__p__1208302206

Even further back

cdowis here http://www.mormondia...__p__1208080258

And what leadership positions do these indivduals hold? Read you post, please.

[Calm]

especially considering chauvinistic tendencies among LDS men.

CFR

My personal experience has been to experience much more chauvinism outside the Church than inside. I've had a number of women who worked for my husband come up to me and say he has been their best boss, that he treats them with more respect and appreciation than anyone else, including their female bosses. I've heard it said by them that this is not an uncommon thing, that they like working for LDS men.

[thesometimesaint]

HeatherAnn:

Basic LDS doctrine. Faith, repentence, baptism, and receipt of the Holy Ghost are required for all. That usually happens at the Ward/Branch level where the Church is established. Holy Temples are established to avail our kindred dead the opportunity for that which they can not do for themselves. IE; Baptism, and receipt of the Holy Ghost.

[Calm]

One being LDS does not make one a more suitable marriage partner or parent than the other

What matters according to the stats is to marry someone who shares your own faith if you want to maximize the likelihood of having a marriage that lasts. With the divorce rate at around 50%, why wouldn't you search for a spouse from among a group that statistically speaking has the lowest risk of divorce for you?

Vera Lawlor, from The Bergen Record in Hakensack, NJ., wrote that inter-faith marriages have a failure rate that is 50% higher than same-faith marriages. She does not cite a source for this datum. Since the rate for all marriages is on the order of 50%, this would imply an almost 75% failure rate for inter-faith marriages -- 3 chances out of 4. ₅

Emmanual Clapsis writes:

"Controversy abounds on the topic of survival rates, but the best studies show a higher survival rate for single faith marriages than [for] interfaith marriages."

This may be due to differences in marital satisfaction. He states that several unidentified studies agree that religiously mixed marriages are less satisfying than single-faith marriages. ₆One was a nationwide survey conducted in the 1970's. One factor may be that when spouses follow separate religious traditions, an opportunity for companionship is reduced.

Esther Perel, an inter-faith marital therapist, referring to Jewish - Christian marriages, wrote in New York Magazine:

"The difference isn't just between Moses and Christ. You're dealing with issues of money, sex, education, child-rearing practices, food, family relationships, styles of emotional expressiveness, issues of autonomy -- all of these are culturally embedded."

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A 1993 study published in Demography showed that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) were the least likely of all faith groups to divorce: After five years of marriage, only 13% of LDS couples had divorced. But when a Mormon marries a non-Mormon, the divorce rate was found to have increased more than three-fold to 40%. Similar data for Jews were 27% and 42%. ₈

Another old study published in 1993 by Evelyn Lehrer of the University of Illinois at Chicago, found that at the five-year point in marriage:

• About 20% of marriages between two mainline Christian denominations are divorced.
  
• About 33% of marriages between a Catholic and an evangelical are divorced
  
• Over 40% of marriages between a Jew and a Christian are divorced. ₉
  

A study published in 2009 by Margaret Vaaler, Christopher Ellison and Daniel Powers of the University of Texas at Austin found that other risk factors for divorce were:

• A husband who attends religious services more frequently than his wife, and
  
• A wife who is theologically more conservative than her husband. ₉
  

These factors would apparently be significant even if the couple were of the same denomination.

Egon Mayer, a professor at Brooklyn College, published another study confirming that inter-faith couples experience higher divorce rates. Referring to the case where one spouse abandons their religion and adopts their spouse's faith, he wrote in USA Today:

"When you bury something that is really important to you, all you're doing is building up a kind of pressure within the family relationship, which becomes a source of tension, which ultimately becomes a time bomb. If there's any reason why intermarriages break up, it's because of that time bomb."

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