LifeOnaPlate wrote:I disagree; I've found a lot of positive statements about other religions and truths found therein. Ah, well, you find what you seek I guess! ;)
You really don't know what you're talking about. This is not about whether positive statements about other religions have been made. It's actually Scottie who is saying that they are! Let me explain.
In various threads between people such as myself (and undoubtedly others, but I have direct first-hand experience with conversations like this on the boards) a discussion will come up about the claimed "spiritual witness" that LDS people have. Someone, like me, will point out that many other people, from many other churches, claim to have spiritual experiences confirming that their churches are true, and will use often similar verbiage, and claim similar kinds of experiences. The main thrust of the argument being that since these other churches are obviously not the True church, the way the LDS church is claimed to be, obviously their spiritual witnesses must be bogus, and there's really no good way to tell their spiritual witnesses apart from the LDS ones.
Now, there are some different ways this can go down. Older generation LDS might well say hey, the members from other churches who think they are having a spiritual witness are simply wrong, and if anything, their experience comes from the "other side" as a counterfeit, to keep them from finding the real truth in the LDS church. That sort of argument has definitely gone out of style recently, however.
What LDS apologists will often argue nowadays is that in fact the spiritual witnesses the members of these other churches are getting
are not actually wrong. What they'll say is that these other churches have some truth, and that some of the things they believe are in fact true. Since the Holy Ghost will witness to truth, these people are in fact getting a spiritual witness of the things that they believe which are true.
What this argument does is basically undercut a main premise of the critics' argument, that is, that the (apparently indistinguishible from LDS) witnesses of these other church people are all wrong. A critic will say see, all these other churchs' spiritual witnesses are bogus, and so is yours. The apologist making the argument we're talking about here counters this with what amounts to "actually all of these witness are true".
But an LDS person can't really admit that a spiritual witness for a member of a non-LDS church actually confirms the truth of that particular church as God's one true church, can they? No, that's reserved for the LDS church. So it is argued that while the witnesses the other people receive are real, and are witnesses to truth that they possess, they don't have the fulness of truth the way the LDS church does.
Thus the LDS witness can't be shot down as just as bogus as other churchs' witnesses, and yet the claim can still be made that the witnesses are in fact different, by being different in degree. Non-LDS witnesses are witnesses to the truth of only part of what some other church believes, which is part of The Truth. The LDS witness is a fuller witness of not only the truth that the LDS church has, but also that the LDS church really is the true church of God.
This is the way this argument has gone down before, a number of times just with myself, and undoubtedly with other critics as well. This is, I believe, what Scottie is talking about.
Mormonism ceased being a compelling topic for me when I finally came to terms with its transformation from a personality cult into a combination of a real estate company, a SuperPac, and Westboro Baptist Church. - Kishkumen