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So ... Dispensationalism in Mormonism (at least what is seen today) is built on two issues. First, premillenialism was a part of early Mormonism's restorationism. Second, the idea of dispensations was used in particular in the debates between B.H. Roberts and Joseph Fielding Smith over the age of th...

[*]Telling a lie means telling someone something that you don't believe. [*]Telling the truth means telling someone something that you do believe. Here I think is where the issue is. Truth and lies aren't binaries. So you can lie by saying something that you don't believe. But this doesn't mean tha...

So Ben, after that explanation, do you know that the Church is true? No. And I would be very unlikely to ever make this statement. This isn't to say that I can't enumerate my list of propositions. And, with my personal philosophical leanings, I suspect that my list would be one of those that is qui...

I have (for a long time now) been more than a little fascinated by this statement that gets used that "I know the Church is true". The idea that "the church is true" is at least grammatically a funny thing. It has a very specific function that isn't necessarily obvious. A Church (as a thing) can't b...

The problem that I have with most of these discussions is that the statistical models are simply being abused. If you all will indulge me for a moment, let me illustrate with three ideas. The first problem is the issue of predictability. Suppose I take a 10 sided dice. And I roll it. In theory, gett...

My question is about how that reading works on the social level, so it's a sociological and theological question I'm getting at. Is it safe to say that that is not your concern? Yes, it's not really my concern. Part of the reason why I engaged this discussion is that I wanted to show how someone (u...

I don't really disagree, but we're not talking about the same thing. If I failed to make it clear, I'll try again: the Book of Mormon has a reception history, not a little of which is derived from the text, that is not easily overcome. I don't know your views of the Church, but I don't think its le...

One of the problems I think is unreasonable is assumptions that make communication from God so poor. I don't think it's unreasonable at all. And perhaps this is where our disagreements begin. Even if we assume that God can communicate perfectly with an individual, a text isn't a one-to-one communic...

But there is actual history attached to the Proclamation on the Family. It sprang into existence in order for the Church to have something official sounding on the topic of gay marriage. And for something about a world conference on the family. And I mean it sprang from the leaders of the Mormon ch...

The gnostic part is not that the Book of Mormon has an esoteric meaning to be uncovered only by initiates but that, in order take the textual approach you discuss (advocate?), one has to have a fairly esoteric skill-set. If one needs Derrida and Kristeva and Lacan or whatever to get over the histor...