Ask a Mormon....almost anything.

Even the LDS church is not immune to clerical errors. But I think you can agree that it didn't deny them existence - you are a typing contradiction of it.

 

Ideally, I agree. That said, there are some people who won't behave unless they have some kind of fear of breaking a rule. I would rather be around people who behave correctly due to fear, than people who don't behave correctly because they don't have fear of consequences.

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I've found the same thing as well, but I haven't lived out West.

 

We believe that is the gospel which we preach. And it seems to be making its rounds worldwide.

 

It is sexism...as ugly,demeaning, and ignorant as racism....and it's also misogyny.... you can call it petunias but that won't change it...

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"""I would rather be around people who behave correctly due to fear,""""



....would you like to be one?



How lucky I am that I have more choices....

 

You may see it that way, but your opinion doesn't make it that way. It is purely optional by all involved. So it is hardly any of the above mentioned adjectives. Women can choose to engage in this practice, or not, same with men.

I think your big hang up is with traditional gender roles, not so much religion.

 

Another note on fear....it does help to control people ( the object of most religions)but sometimes fearful people break and do drastic things.

Living in fear....hmmm, no wonder I dislike religion.....what a miserable life.

 

What do you make of the findings of the Mormon new world archaeology?

 

Honestly, I have never feared God in my life, perhaps you're seeing the wrong religion? For the LDS faith, there is no fear involved. We believe that everyone will find their own paradise in the end, even if their paradise isn't the same as others. We do believe in a "hell" of sorts, but it's more based on the idea that we will remember what we have done, and we will feel horribly guilty for the sins we have committed. Our pain will be our own doing, not God's. It will be a spiritual hell, and an individual hell, not a pit that God casts us in to cause us pain. Other than that, I see nothing that could bring anyone real fear. If you are good, righteous, upstanding people and you do what is good and right, you'll end up in heaven regardless, and you'll be just fine. We believe that in joining the church, and covenanting with the Lord in the ceremonies and other such rituals, we'll be able to progress further even after life.

I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to. Perhaps you could give a link or something of the sort so that I can properly share my opinion?

 

The findings? Or the utter lack of them? Because I wasn't aware that there were any massive findings in support of Mormon theology. I don't really know much about archaeology to be honest. But I am told varying stories by third parties for and against it, but never looked into it. But after a smidgin of rummaging I stumbled onto this nugget.

Fairly well cited at the source, and addresses the topic fairly well. I'd recommend anybody read it if they have an archaeological beef with the LDS church. But as always, fact check the sources and be the judge yourself.

 

I was responding to the quote bolded above....which is defending fear in religion...

 

Here is one source:

http://www.fairlds.org/authors/ash-michael/archaeological-evidence-and-the-book-of-mormon

Here is a bunch more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeology_and_the_Book_of_Mormon

Some more here:

http://www.watchman.org/lds/bomarch.htm

And a bit more here:

http://mit.irr.org/es/book-of-mormon-archaeology-condensed

Given all this, do you find it at least plausible that Smith's account was mostly a fabrication? My reading is that LDS archaeologists have done excellent, meticulous work, and have been stubbornly resistant to the siren call of confirmation bias (seeing what they expect to see). But this seems to leave them in a position similar to Baptists trying to defend a literal global flood. Either Major Juju was layered on thick, or these fables must be regarded as symbolic, or parables of some sort. But in the case of the Book of Mormon, the necessary level of abstraction leaves little on which to found a belief. So I wonder how this ongoing archaeological effort is regarded.

(And I've seen the Hill Cumorah pageant 3 times over the last 40 years. Scenes are added and removed, it seems, with the social winds...)

 

Bolded above shows a contradiction.

 

Well, of course that's the primary concern, at least as I understand it. A great many findings from those efforts exist, and have been highly informative. They just haven't supported the theology.

Your quote is fascinatingly defensive, and somewhat amusing. My reading is, there is some considerable tension within the LDS church in this regard. Your source says that unbelievers wouldn't accept any evidence no matter how obvious or overwhelming. And THEN it turns around and basically says that what has been found, which bears little resemblance to LDS theology (and a large number of flat contradictions) MUST be what the theology requires, and therefore it IS! And how about such issues as the livestock, the metals, the language, the DNA evidence, and so on? These ought to be interesting matters to a Mormon, since his entire faith basically rests on a history which remains stubbornly and pervasively incompatible with the evidence.

Of course, I'm not an archaeologist either. The interpretational division seems to be along theological rather than archaeological lines, with the bottom line being that IF the Book of Mormon had never been written, nothing resulting from New World archaeology would ever have suggested any such history. And that in turn means that the findings are being fitted to the theology, rather than the other way around.

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Well, of course that's the primary concern, at least as I understand it. A great many findings from those efforts exist, and have been highly informative. They just haven't supported the theology.

Your quote is fascinatingly defensive, and somewhat amusing. My reading is, there is some considerable tension within the LDS church in this regard. Your source says that unbelievers wouldn't accept any evidence no matter how obvious or overwhelming. And THEN it turns around and basically says that what has been found, which bears little resemblance to LDS theology (and a large number of flat contradictions) MUST be what the theology requires, and therefore it IS! And how about such issues as the livestock, the metals, the language, the DNA evidence, and so on? These ought to be interesting matters to a Mormon, since his entire faith basically rests on a history which remains stubbornly and pervasively incompatible with the evidence.

Of course, I'm not an archaeologist either. The interpretational division seems to be along theological rather than archaeological lines, with the bottom line being that IF the Book of Mormon had never been written, nothing resulting from New World archaeology would ever have suggested any such history. And that in turn means that the findings are being fitted to the theology, rather than the other way around.

 

Oh,...

But the BoM seems to preach things not known in 32AD, like all the references to people unknown in the day of Jesus, doesn't it?
I thought that the BoM was considered new material expanded and added onto the New Testament that was not then "this gospel."

Matthew 24:14
And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.

So was Jesus leaving part of this gospel out?

Luke 4:18
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach The Gospel to the poor;

 

I refer to the practice itself, both men and women do not have to engage in it. You are deliberately trying to misunderstand this.

Men: may be sealed to more than one wife as per plural marriage.

Women: may have one husband, but hold the keys to plural marriage, if she is unwilling to allow the husband to take on multiple wives, it isn't happening.

But given that plural marriage is not authorized in the church physically, it kind of renders the point moot.

 

Eh...sort of? It is the same gospel, but delivered to different people. But as for references to people unknown? I'd need a reference and go from there. It is another Testament of Jesus Christ as it says. But we also believe that the Bible is missing certain information and that the Book of Mormon fills the gaps and rectifies errors to a degree. But rectifying the errors is primarily the province of the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible which appears in many footnotes on some passages.

Not so much Jesus leaving out, as we believe it was taken out, or went missing by the hands of others. This article give a pretty good explanation of it. The basics anyways.

Basically, we believe it to be the same gospel, but the Book of Mormon has things that the Bible should have in it, but were taken out.

 

So then Jesus really did not have the complete and/or full and actual Gospel, and he was not, technically speaking of course, not really preaching This Gospel which the mormons now have after 2000 years receieved and are helping Jesus get out the second edition, then?

 

For the most part, and unfortunately I've had to skim the last ones, so I'm sorry if I missed something big, I find that these just say they haven't found anything to suggest it yet. Archaeology is such a difficult subject to trust, really, because many times they have gotten it wrong. It's not easy, as the first link points out, for any archaelogists to really say with absolute certainty that they are right or wrong about a culture. They can try, certainly, but they can't be absolutely sure. Think about it: if I remember correctly though I haven't been able to find the right site since I'm a bit short on time, I remember that archaeologists used to say plenty that there was no where where Moses could have crossed the red sea. Everywhere they had looked had always been too steep. Then something, ten or so years ago, changed. They looked in a different spot and found that there was this one area that had been smoothed out, and they thought that with a bit of trouble, people could have walked across if there were no water. What about the city of Troy? For years it was believed that the battle of Troy was just fiction, because no such city existed. Then years passed, and suddenly they found evidence of a city that could very well have been ancient Troy, and people believed it probably was because they found no other record of it. Things are being found all the time in Archaeology, so just because we have't found something yet, doesn't mean we won't.

With one of those links, sorry, once again, I'm rushing due to lack of time, but it talks about how certain things weren't found, like horses or cattle or what not. For one thing, you have to remember that the Book of Mormon probably wasn't translated directly. It wasn't translated for scholars, or people with lots of knowledge or understanding of how the world works. It was created for the common man to understand. God was the one who gave the words to Joseph for him to write. God could very well have changed some words, such as cattle, horse, sheep, swine, and such, to make it so that the common man of the 1800s wouldn't have to struggle to understand the physical aspects, they could more easily focus on the spiritual.

Sorry if I missed something else, but I need to go. I'll try to check in soon and see if I missed anything.

 

Quick note before I go: Jesus was teaching the same Gospel as the Jews needed to hear, and what they were ready to hear. The LDS church believes that over time, God has revealed more of that same gospel to us, though the basics and the doctrine remain the same. God doesn't change his religion. But there are some things he cannot tell men because they are not yet ready to receive it.

 

Sorry, bad delivery on my part. Jesus did have the whole gospel - it is his after all. What I am saying is that the records of his gospel in the bible were corrupted over time.

So in a way, the Book of Mormon is the second edition that clears up the clerical errors/corruption of the Bible.

 

I understand what you're saying, but I find it disingenuous. It's not just that they have failed to find anything that would support Smith's history, but also that they have found a great deal that would tend to refute it. Yes, there is the long list of livestock, language, technologies, materials, crops, etc. of which there is no trace, but which if the history were even a little correct would have left vast quantities of evidence. But also there's all the stuff that has been found that would have dominated the lives of those people but which isn't given even a mention. There is the DNA evidence showing the Asiatic ancestry of all the people of those times. There is the linguistic evidence showing not even a hint of Smith's languages.

My reading is that Mormon archaeologists have done very good work - the workers on the ground haven't fabricated what they expect to find, and swept under the rug stuff they didn't expect and which doesn't fit. But today, some of the leading Mormon archaeologists seem to be coming to the conclusion that many decades of meticulous study have resulted in a consistent, comprehensive documentation of the lives, histories, languagues, trade, interaction among civilizations, crops, animals, ad nauseum which rules out Smith's history beyond any reasonable doubt.

And reading the Mormon apologists' attempts to explain away all the horses, sheep, goats, cattle and other common aspects of Smith's daily life in New York, as somehow being llamas, tapirs, and whatnot, seems (at least to me) like an effort to plug one hole at a time with no real historical pattern.

I grant this is quite possible. And God could also have papered over the fact that the nearest Central American equivalents weren't similar enough to be put to the uses Smith has them used for. But here, it's like saying that God collected the animals for Noah by miracle, and made them all fit by miracle in an ark that needed a miracle to float, and redistributed them around the world by miracle afterward, etc. Too many miracles, and you lose so much verisimilitude that archaeology itself is a waste of time. Smith painted on a very broad canvas - thousands of years, millions of people, battles relocated from the Yucatan to Palmyra NY - that it challenges credulity to miracle away all trace of it.

But if you're content to stick with the most conservative voices within the LDS church, in saying that we'll just keep looking until we find it, and if we don't, we'll just believe it all happened anyway, then that's fine. I personally think the Christians were a bit more discreet in this respect, having their messiah live as a poor person in a very small town, who wouln't leave any more physical trace than any other poor person, or even be noticed by anyone (except those who tell the tale, and even then secondhand or third hand). If the Received Wisdom had Christ leading a civilization of millions of people for thousands of years, holding sway from the Urals to Britain while speaking Chinese and riding alpacas, archaeologists might also divide along theological lines...

 

First, I think you missunderstood part of what I said. It wasn't "a miracle" in it's own right for God to change some of the words in translation to make more sense to men in the eighteen hundreds. The miracle was Joseph being able to translate at all, indeed, but in that translation God could easily have made it look as though it said ox to Joseph. Or it could be that they really haven't found the evidence.

Of course, regardless of all that, were getting into the realm of speculation. None of this is proper Church Doctrine. They don't teach us what we should say to answer these questions, or at least I believe they shouldn't. I believe in these cases God will say one of two things, either, "See if you can figure it out." or "I'll tell you, but not yet." I'm no scholar of Mormon doctrine, and I certainly know very little about archeology, but I can tell you what I do know, and that is that I trust in God that eventually I will understand.

 

Yes. Or it could be that Smith made it all up (I read that he was known for this, and quite good at it). My point, even so, was that for God to have made it more accessible to Smith, God must have done some truly heavy-duty impression-creating. Perhaps heavy enough so that the entire archaeological enterprise is misdirected, because the Nephites and Lamanites (much less their horses) could be "massaged" symbols of other aspects of the human condition.

Uh, not really. Archaeology is not speculation, it really is science. I suppose you could say that we must speculate as to why we find no hints of all that sturm und drang inherent in the Book of Mormon. But without question (at least to an outsider), simple fabrication is far and away the simplest and most likely explanation.

OK, let's try a somewhat different tack here. You seem to be saying that whether or not all that history ever happened is actually not central to, or even perhaps relevant to, church doctrine. In other words, you could read it entirely as entertaining fiction along the lines of Paul Bunyan, or ignore it altogether, and it wouldn't make any difference to you as a Mormon. And that's basically what I was asking - does the archaeological non-support mean anything to your church?

(As kind of a comparison, I've met Christians who regard the resurrection as such a detail, not critical in accepting Christ's words and chumship or whatever as the key to entering heaven.)

 

You contradict yourself and , even though you ASKED for questions , you accuse posters of ""deliberately trying to misunderstand this""".

It sounds like LDSs don't believe in the "sanctity" of marriage.

They had multiple wives and may be permitted to have multiple wives so I would think some do now.

It doesn't matter, the fact that they ONLY would allow men to have multiple spouses is sexist and tyrannical.
Any man who would ask his wife who he presumably loves and respects shows neither when he asks her to accept his mistress into her home.
In the real world he's called a sleazebag.

 

Unfortunately, I'm not sure whether you are deliberately misunderstanding me, or whether I really don't make sense of this, so I am going tell you this as clearly as I possibly can, after that, I honestly don't know what to tell you. You can take what I say and think about it, or you can leave it.

I believe that our Father In Heaven loves having us, as Spiritual Children of him, learn and understand what he does and how he works. He is very much like a father or a teacher in this respect, and much like a teacher or parent would, he tells us more when we are ready and willing to understand what he has to share. I have faith and trust in him, and much of what he has revealed to the Church I understand with many hours of thinking it out in my mind what it could mean, doing everything in my power to understand him.

Whether you believe in God or In a higher being, or in the lack of any such: I believe in our Heavenly Father's existence. In fact, it's more than just a belief, it's a knowledge. I know that is hard for many to understand, but try as I might I cannot explain this knowledge, or how I know so certainly, but though many can say I am dillusional or mislead, I know He lives and loves us all with unmeasurable knowledge. I can't deny that, no matter how much I try, and there have been times when I have tried very hard to do just that.

Now, knowing what I know, I know that Joseph Smith did not lie in this. I know that the Book of Mormon is true, regardless of what human knowledge may find or say. Gods knowledge is far greater still, and I trust that my faith in God would be sufficient that if it were not true he would tell me so. I have felt His prescence, and in fact it has said that it is true, and that Joseph Smith was not a liar. I have doubted on this topic before, I doubt a bit of everything, but why would Joseph Smith suffer for so long, and cause pain to everyone he cared for and loved, if it was all for a lie?

So I say again, I don't believe for a second that the Book of Mormon is a lie. I understand and I trust that when the time comes for us to find more concrete proof, God will reveal it to us, and I understand that We may not learn until we are dead and gone from the Earth, but I trust that God will tell us one day. If you really want the answer to this, pray to Him yourself, and read the Book of Mormon. If after you've done so you still feel as though it must be a lie, I feel very sorry indeed.

That is all I can tell you. Whatever human knowledge says, I trust in God more than I can trust in humans, because unlike him, we often make mistakes, and are rarely perfectly correct. I can't tell you any more because I have already told you everything I know, and everythig I can think of. Trust me on this: if you knew God lived as I know he does, you wouldn't doubt the Book of Mormon either.