I just signed up to have Mormon missionaries visit me at home

[Torie]

no.  no ride.  my friend says he will go with me to the 9am student service next Sunday, and I'll do what I can to hold him to it.  he is the most dependable friend I have up here, not prone to flake, so it seems likely to happen.

also, it's a Temple, BRTD, get it right.

No it isn't. You are not allowed into the Temple, until you are consecrated or whatever the term is in LDS vocabulary, and the stake president signs off that you have tithed on time. You sir, are going to a mere church.

[Torie]

Yeah I always knew the difference between LDS temples and churches. Once an LDS temple was built and opened in Bismarck I remembered how a weird alliance of fundies and liberals would constantly picket and demonstrate outside it.

You can get into a Temple for a grand tour as a mere gentile right after it is built, and before it is consecrated a month or so later. So find out where the Saints are building a Temple near you (does Des Moines have one yet?), and put that on your calendar. Under the LDS president who recently died, the LDS were on a mad Temple building spree. Whether the current president Monson has slowed that down, I don't know.

Sad to say, I missed the grand opening of the one in Newport Beach a few years ago.

[Torie]

So let's imagine there was a huge blizzard and some people got stranded and the only building nearby was an LDS Temple and they basically had to either take refuge there or freeze to death. Would the Mormons be OK with them entering? Because there's no question all Christian churches would let people inside in such a situation no matter what their religion was.

Oh, they have an anteroom designed for the tourists, which would be available to you BRTD, where there will be displays for you to savor (now featuring Christ as the star attraction with the angel Maroni tucked off to the side, rather than covered wagons, and depictions of Brigham Young standing on the mountaintop overlooking "Zion,"  intoning "[T]his is the place"), and I assume that the anteroom has heating.

Man, was't that sentence above just fabulous?