Wow - lots of questions - I've been to work in between my last post: OK I'll try and address each point with one caveat - I'm just a numpty - I'm not an official spokesperson for the church (lds.org for the public face). If I make mistakes blame me.
Why do LDS have "secrets?"
I don't hear much from the Mormons, I don't get them to my door what are you guys like door-to-door?
Qcmbr, what brings you to this forum?
Ev. LDS have secrets for two reasons:
1/ Some things are 'official' secrets and these are in regard to sacred things such as the temple. Though as many will happily point out the secrets are about as well hidden as the Eiffel Tower if you dig around the internet.
2/ The other secrets are the historical parts of the church's formation regarding such practises as polygamy, blacks and the priesthood, Steve's moon men, Adam God theory, finacial practises, masonry, dannites, mountain meadows massacre etc.. these are the parts of lds history that the church doesn't dwell because 1/ There are few facts (take the moon men quote from the journal - that statement has no record in official church history or as church doctrine ) 2/ The church was in the wrong (and before anyone get's excited the only time I ever heard anything like this was one of our greatest prophets lamenting the fact that the priesthood should have gone to all men sooner and it was our failure that it hadn't) 3/ Current revelation supercedes it therefore we don't argue over it anymore (polygamy is not practised currently therefore anyone doing it is excommunicated however, the practise itself is only right or wrong depending on the commandment at the time - not inherantly so.)
As for door to door - depends on who you get - some are arrogant, cheeky, immature but the majority of our missionaries are happy, fun loving and genuinely pleased to be there. They aren't trying to scare anyone into church - just share the gospel and baptise everything that moves.
All in all the LDS church has done something incredible. It started with the purpose of building Zion and has done a pretty smart job so far.
LT - your points - spot on.
You use the Trinitarian language of "godhead" but don't actually mean that at all - we use the word Godhead to mean 'group' as in a united threesome, united in purpose in testifying of each other.
Whatever you say about people not needing to be LDS to be "saved", you do hold that they will have to be LDS if they are to reach the highest reaches of the after-life promises of God - but LDS is just a moniker. If we dropped that and said 'Christian' I think we'd agree..? Like I said all we really claim different from anyone else is real authority in the form of the Priesthood - and just as baptism was repeated in the bible so a little double dipping helps here:) Theis ties in with the idea of everyone joing the lds faith in purgatory - well no not quit. The LDS faith doesn't exist in (paradise;) just those who believe in Jesus and those who don't (yet). Baptism is required, just as birth and death are, to complete the plan. Everyone must be baptised regardless of faith ('Except a man be born of the water and the spirit he can in nowise inherit the Kingdom of God') No one else is doing this for all of mankind - how can any 'christian' church believe that it is following God's plan if it doesn't have backup for those who never get to hear the message?
U74 - Burned-Over District. I think that only once in America's history could teh LDS church have ever made such an appearance and grown the way it did. I think this time in America's history was a golden age and certainly was partially responsible for Joseph Smith's question ' Which of all the churches is true?'
Steven - men on the moon. It is official church doctrine that the universe is inhabited by life on countless worlds. In all teh quotes given th eofficial church doctrine about teh Celestialisation of the earth and the inhabitation of the universe are alluded to - the moon part however, is their personal opinion. Who knows:) Its in all likelhood cobblers but you have to make a distinction between doctrine and opinion (i.e. all you Christians - do you keep your women quiet in the church, make them wear long hair?) Doctrine leads to action, opinion is fairly meaningless. If I as Elder's Quorum President claim that we never went to the moon - my church position does not lend it any weight - same with our prophets. They are not in some constant state of rapturous revelation. Good point about LDS not knowing their own history! Our history is one of the richest most biblical ever - filled with incredible miracles, angelic visitations, new scripture, intrepid escapes and our own exodus.
Blondie, exactly right about the conflicting laws. Puts a whole new slant on Adam and Eve. The whole plan hinged on Eve making the decision to leave the presence of God and on Adam being smart enough to follow. They are two of my heros. God wants us to grow on our own, we could never truly be free when the only two laws that could be broken involved eating fruit and making babies. That is why we call it a transgression. The law had to be broken.
Our heirarchy for doctrine is as follows:
1/ Word of the current prophet (i.e. you wouldn't have disbelieved Moses if he said something different to what he wrote yesterday.)
2/ Next doctrine of the church. Built up from words of modern and ancient prophets , including certain interpretations of bible scripture (an kind of example is the Articles of Faith I gave above).
3/ Book of Mormon (history of a group of Israelites), Doctrine and Covenants (our current church handbook of revelations) and Pearl of Great Price (additional scripture from the bible period) - simply becasue they aren't translated by scholars but by prophets.
4/ The Bible last - not because it is least respected , simply because it underpins everything else, it is our final yardstick and where it is internally in discord or is difficult to understand we then turn to our additional scripture / words of prophet for clarification.
Sorry that took so long.
Mormons/LDS
by Evanescence 87 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Qcmbr
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stevenyc
qcmbr, thanks for the reply.
Could you explain something to me. How do LDS view the opinions of their prophets? Those ones from outside the standard bible books. Do you take them with a pinch of salt, or are they seen as gospel?
steve
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oldflame
I used to be a mormon when I was a teenager, it is as far fetched as the JW's let me tell you......
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LittleToe
In connection with "godhead", I've seen Missionaries point to the Bible and "Doctrine and Covenant" and let the householder believe what they will concerning LDS teaching on the Trinity. 'Tis a little dishonest, you surely have to agree?
Regarding double-dipping, I was baptised in water as a JW and again in Spirit as a believer and again in water as a Christian. Dang, I'd be permanently wrinkled if I listened to everyone!!!
If my great-great-great-grand-children were to become LDS you'd expect them to be immersed on my [post humous] behalf, even though I was baptised as a Christian, wouldn't you?
Besides, is there no water in limbo/paradise, given that there's a lake before the throne in Revelation?
Thanks for your candor regarding the "hierarchy of doctrine". The WTS ultimately put the Watchtower above the Bible, but they'd never admit it...
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TD
One of the most amazing things to me about the BOM (No offense to anyone) is the idea of a widespread culture that produced durable objects vanishing without a trace. It doesn't matter if you are atheist; with the Bible you are at least dealing with real places that you can go and see today and real cultures whose artifacts endure.
The Mount of Olives, the pool of Siloam and Hezekiah's tunnel, the Wailing Wall -- these are all things you can see today. Pottery, tilework, ceramics, gold jewelry and bronze-age armor, tablets and steles, masonry structures --- we have these from all the major civilizations mentioned in the Bible. We have so many of these things in fact that you could spend the rest of your life examining these antiquities and still not see them all.
The problem we have today, of not knowing what to do with our "things" once we've made them is nothing new. This is because some things are durable. They don't rust, they don't disolve, they don't burn, they don't dry up and blow away. Not only do they not vanish naturally, some of them, once created cannot be eradicated without a trace even intentionally. For example, once the molecular structure of clay has been altered in a kiln, how do you get rid if the resulatant ceramic? Ceramic is waterproof, impervious to most chemicals and it will survive any temperature you can devise. It can be broken, true but all you get are smaller pieces of ceramic. If you break those you get still smaller pieces, ad infinitum
The BOM describes cultures similar to those that inhabited ancient Mesopotamia:
Abinadi standing before King Noah has been variously rendered by Mormon artists. I've never seen one that is not full of durable objects. Copper alloy armor, gold jewelry, masonry, ceramic tiles, you name it. Personally, I don't see any reason to believe that such a civilization ever existed.
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DanTheMan
the moon part however, is their personal opinion. Who knows:)
Oh, come on!
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Qcmbr
Dan - I personally don't think there are men on the moon however, I don't think we've ever been there either. I like the odd conspiracy theory.
LT - it is very 'tempting' to be sparing with the full truth as you describe but having done my own share of missionary work there is one issue that I used to come up against - time (rather than dishonesty). Unlike JWs we tend to go for a baptism as soon as the individual feels the spirit - a lot more spontaneous approach than the longer JW book study approach (and I'm not saying that LDS speed is better) the point of suggesting baptism isn't at the full understanding of doctrine, its the point that born agains would probably allude to as the point of feeling saved - the witness from God of truth (in all honesty I doubt most christians know all the doctrine at the point when they convert?). I've baptised plenty of people that didn't understand the full doctrine but did actually know Jesus is the Christ. It's more often a balance between constantly saying , 'no - youre wrong this is what you should believe' and actually saying 'OK God says its true, saddle up and we'll teach you how to ride - we'll cover the theory of how to do it along the way.'
On the other hand , I'm still learning the doctrine and I've been a member all my life (and what I mean by that is despite knowing the textbook stuff I'm a bazillion miles away from actually practisisng it fully - I'm a bad lad;)
TD the widespread culture thing is definately a thorn in the side of LDS apologetics - I'll post some info in a sec - I'll just switch browsers. -
Qcmbr
Some Cultural Issues in the book of Mormon: Forget the art used to illustrate the BOM , it's just guesswork and certainly not a statement of how it really was.
1/ No Israelite/semitic dna found in American Indians - in fact almost exclusively asiatic dna.
2/ Hill Cumorah (gold plates hidden there) is in New York area whereas the BOM suggests a more central Americas location.
3/ 'White', bearded Indians. No evidence.
4/ BOM talks about a Christian conversion for the BOM peoples at the time of Christ's death (they were some of the 'Other sheep')
5/ BOM mentions horses / steel / concrete all way before they were introduced to the American continent.
6/ There just isn't enough time for the few people mentioned in the BOM to have grown into a nation that could be waging internal wars.
7/ Writing on gold plates using egyptian heiroglyphic style text.
What I'm going to show is some interesting things found in the Americas:
A maze of man-made chambers, walls and ceremonial meeting places, America's Stonehenge is one of the oldest man-made construction in the US. (over 4000 years old). Archaeological excavations have uncovered an amazing range of historic and pre-historic artifacts-from stone tools, pottery and ancient old world scripts.
In "The History of the Cross" we are told that, "In Palenque, in Mexico, are the remains of an ancient Aztec temple. At the back of one of the altars in that temple is a bas- relief cross some ten feet high. It is a superb design, rich in symbolic carving. Above the cross perches the figure of a bird.... The Mayans and Aztecs of Meso-America and the Nazca, Ica, Moche, and Inca civilizations of ancient Peru [all] used crosses."
This ceramic bust of a bearded man with distinctly Old World features was found in Veracruz, Mexico, and has been dated to 300 AD or earlier. Beards were (and still are) almost non-existent among most indiginous Meso-American tribes.
This first century BC city, now an ancient ruin, can be found 30 miles northeast of Mexico City. Teotihuacan, literally translated from the Nahuatl, means "place where men become gods." Teotihuacan had already been deserted for 600 years when the Aztecs found it. Cement and stucco are found in great quantities at this site.
When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, among them was perhaps the most intriguing scroll of all - the Copper Scroll. It was found in 1952 in Cave 3 at Khirbet Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea. Since then, several other ancient scriptural texts have been found on metal plates or scrolls.
Professor Dorothy Hosler of MIT's Center for Materials Research has found pre-Columbian evidence of copper smelting at El Machon, Guerreo, Mexico. Copper was used to make bronze, and various bronze alloys were often referred to as "steel," even in the KJV English translation of the Bible.
This 2500 year-old Etruscan artifact was discovered 60 years ago in a tomb uncovered during digging for a canal along the Strouma river in south-western Bulgaria. It contains six bound sheets of 24 carat gold, with illustrations of a horse-rider, a mermaid, a harp and soldiers. The Etruscans were wiped out in the 4th century BC.
A 1998 DNA study conducted by The Center for Molecular Medicine, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA has discovered a mitochondrial DNA strain in some 3% of Amerindians called "Haplo-group X" which supports a pre-Columbian migration of caucasians to the Americas. Haplo-group X is NOT found in Asians, demonstrating it did not come across the Bering Strait.
Ancient Pre-Columbian
Bearded Incense Burner
with Semitic facial features
found in GuatemalaIn addition to numerous bearded figurines, carvings, and murals, there have been numerous finds of representations of people who are plainly caucasoid (not resembling the typical Mayans or other Meso-Americans) and very Semitic in appearance.
One of the best kept secrets of Mayan archeology is that quite a lot of Mayan art shows dark and light skinned peoples. The Bureau of American Ethnology calls this "wearing the skins of one's enemy," and dismisses it as as religious ceremony .
The Micmac language was discovered by Catholic priests in 1609 when, as they preached to the Indians, they were shocked to see them taking notes in a strange language. The priests copied the characters, which much later were compared to hieroglyphs used by ancient Libyans and Egyptians and found to have many of the same meanings
The Pontotoc Stele
unearthed in Oklahoma by
Gloria Farley and Weldon Stout. The Pontotoc Stele, according to Dr. Barry Fell, a celebrated if not controversial epigraphist, is written in a Phoenecian language called Iberian Punic and contains a “Hymn to the Aton,” by Pharaoh Akhnaton. It reads, “When BaaI-Ra rises in the east, the beasts are content, and (when he hides his face?) they are displeased.” The artifact has been tentatively dated to approximately 100 BC. The Hymn, an ancient Egyptian heresy, supposedly expunged, infiltrated Israelite tradition after a lapse of many centuries, and is reflected in the 104th Psalm.
I have more pictures of things like elephants / horses / wheeled artefacts / ruins that look like baptismal fonts. I have articles on the amazing number of arrowheads found in upstate New York indicating a huge battle there (BOM ends in a huge battle at the Hill Cumorah - in NY state.) Burial mounds dotted all over north America with steel weapons found in them.Why where the indigenous people expecting a white , bearded God to return to them (a fact used by the Spanish and Captain Cook to their advantage?)
Last bit - the dna issue: The BOM describes a population coming from Asia at the time of the tower of Babel - this civilisation was millions strong only a few years before the Israelite migrants arrived. The few Israelite settlers clearly intermingled with the native population and all but wiped out any DNA trace very rapidly.
If anyone is interested I have some other internal things in the BOM that are internally consistent with an ancient culture. Either Joseph Smith was a friggin' genius / lucky in the extreme/ he copied it from someone who was a genius/lucky or it was what he claimed it was.
After all this I don't believe due to any of above - they are merely random ideas and fragments of evidence. I believe because I read the book and asked if it was true. Please feel free to refute any of the above. I don't defend any of them as real evidence, just curios.
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Qcmbr
interesting effect! not quite what I was hoping for.
knickers. -
DannyHaszard
Mormons have schools of higher education,and institutions to help their people prosper and have a high standard of living.
I also hear (may be in error) that you really have to piss them off to get shunned,that they don't bust up and wreck familys like the Watchtower cult.
Moreover,Mormons didn't screw me the JW/WT did