DiscussMormonism.com

I was blocked from posting on the MDD after I made the following post:

After rereading Moroni 10:3-5 with my new perspective on religion (as a non-believer), I realized that there are several implicit assumptions made in taking the "Moroni challenge". For those not familiar with it, here is the text of the promise.

merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that ye shall receive these things, and bponder it in your chearts.
ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not btrue; and if ye shall ask with a csincere heart, with dreal intent, having efaith in Christ, he will fmanifest the gtruth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.
know the btruth of all things.

Assumptions (short list):

1. God(s) exists.
2. Thinking about the scriptures increases the likelihood that said god(s) will answer your prayer
3. Adam was a real person
4. The earth was created by god
5. God(s) are willing to answer human prayers
6. Praying is an effective way to communicate with god(s)
7. God(s) is/are willing to manifest truth to people who pray
8. A sincere heart affects whether you will get an answer
9. Real intent affects whether you will get an answer
10. Jesus Christ was a real person
11.The Holy Ghost is an effective way of communicating with God(s).
12. It will be the god(s) in question answering your prayer and not another god(s).
13. The answer will be confirmation that the Book of Mormon is true.
14. God has been good to the children of men.

Also, not explicitly stated in the verses but implied in Mormon culture are the following assumptions:

15. The answer from God comes almost exclusively in the form of "feelings"
16. Another god is unable to answer your prayer (i.e. Lucifer).

There are also other assumptions built into this "promise", but let's start with these. Do we have any outside (e.g. logical) verification that the above assumptions are valid? In other words, how do we know that Mor. 10:3-5 is a valid way to arrive at objective "truth".

[Mod Scottie: modified title to reflect MDD instead of MDB]

MDB is usually the acronym for this place. I think you mean MDD.

keithb wrote:I was blocked from posting on the MDB after I made the following post:

After rereading Moroni 10:3-5 with my new perspective on religion (as a non-believer), I realized that there are several implicit assumptions made in taking the "Moroni challenge". For those not familiar with it, here is the text of the promise.

merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that ye shall receive these things, and bponder it in your chearts.
ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not btrue; and if ye shall ask with a csincere heart, with dreal intent, having efaith in Christ, he will fmanifest the gtruth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.
know the btruth of all things.

Assumptions (short list):

1. God(s) exists.
2. Thinking about the scriptures increases the likelihood that said god(s) will answer your prayer
3. Adam was a real person
4. The earth was created by god
5. God(s) are willing to answer human prayers
6. Praying is an effective way to communicate with god(s)
7. God(s) is/are willing to manifest truth to people who pray
8. A sincere heart affects whether you will get an answer
9. Real intent affects whether you will get an answer
10. Jesus Christ was a real person
11.The Holy Ghost is an effective way of communicating with God(s).
12. It will be the god(s) in question answering your prayer and not another god(s).
13. The answer will be confirmation that the Book of Mormon is true.
14. God has been good to the children of men.

Also, not explicitly stated in the verses but implied in Mormon culture are the following assumptions:

15. The answer from God comes almost exclusively in the form of "feelings"
16. Another god is unable to answer your prayer (i.e. Lucifer).

There are also other assumptions built into this "promise", but let's start with these. Do we have any outside (e.g. logical) verification that the above assumptions are valid? In other words, how do we know that Mor. 10:3-5 is a valid way to arrive at objective "truth".

You did mean the MADboard, right?

The problem is clear. They prayed about it, but just did not feel the Spirit in your post.

Blixa wrote:MDB is usually the acronym for this place. I think you mean MDD.

Yeah, sorry. I got the acronyms confused.

Another problematic aspect of Moroni's promise is the prerequisite belief in Jesus as the Christ, spelled out in the clause "having faith in Christ".

The world is currently populated by seven billion humans. Approximately two billion of those seven billion are Christians. The other five billion people either do not believe Jesus was the Christ, do not believe he existed, or they have no knowledge of him at all.

The LDS church teaches that Latter-Day saints are tasked with the responsibility of spreading the true gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the world, and that the Book of Mormon is a key element in spreading the news of the restoration of the Gospel.

But the key element that the LDS missionary program relies upon to convert people to the gospel is Moroni's Promise.

As we can clearly see, Moroni's Promise is ineffectual for any of the 5 billion people who do not 'have faith in Christ'. Moroni's Promise cannot be used with a Buddhist, a Muslim or a Jew. It cannot be used for any of the 900 million Hindus on the Earth. It is completely ineffectual for any atheist. Without a pre-existing belief in Christ, Moroni's promise cannot be expected to work.

Why would a loving and merciful God create a plan of salvation and go to all the trouble of restoring the priesthood to the earth if only two-sevenths of his children (less than 29%) could ever even have a chance of accepting the Book of Mormon as the word of God?

Why would a loving and merciful God create a plan of salvation and go to all the trouble of restoring the priesthood to the earth if only two-sevenths of his children (less than 29%) could ever even have a chance of accepting the Book of Mormon as the word of God?

Kinda highlights the fact that the Plan O' Happiness is stupid and not at all happy.

keithb wrote:Do we have any outside (e.g. logical) verification that the above assumptions are valid? In other words, how do we know that Mor. 10:3-5 is a valid way to arrive at objective "truth".

What would be interesting is to perform a controlled scientific experiment in which we might test for the validity of Moroni's Promise.

We would need:

A large sampling of people who are not LDS, around, say, five-thousand people.
We would ask them to use Moroni's promise in answering two questions:
1) Is the Book of Mormon truly the word of God?
2) Who is God's Prophet on the Earth today?

We would collate their answers and see what happens... Of course, this is a pretty big undertaking, getting 5,000 people who are not LDS to seriously consider praying about the Book of Mormon and attempting to use Moroni's Promise.

Wait!

As it so happens, such an experiment has actually been conducted!

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has already undertaken this experiment for us.

There are an estimated six- to ten-thousand FLDS members. Because some percent of them are under the age of accountability, let us assume that at least five thousand of them are over the age of eight.

I think it is safe to assume that these people are familiar with Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, Moroni's Promise, and the belief in living prophets on the earth today.

If you asked all 5000 of our older-than-eight-years-FLDS members if they've used Moroni's Promise to learn about the truth of the Book of Mormon, I think it is safe to assume that an overwhelmingly large percentage of them will answer question one in the affirmative.

If you asked all 5000 of them for the name of God's one true prophet on the earth, a similarly large percentage of them will not say 'Thomas S. Monson" but will instead give the name of 'Warren Jeffs' (or his successor). And virtually all of those will agree that Moroni's Promise has revealed this truth to them.

Of what possible value can Moroni's Promise have when it only 'reveals' what you already believe to be true?

just me wrote:

Why would a loving and merciful God create a plan of salvation and go to all the trouble of restoring the priesthood to the earth if only two-sevenths of his children (less than 29%) could ever even have a chance of accepting the Book of Mormon as the word of God?

Kinda highlights the fact that the Plan O' Happiness is stupid and not at all happy.

QFT

by the way: hope your toe is feeling better.

beefcalf wrote:Another problematic aspect of Moroni's promise is the prerequisite belief in Jesus as the Christ, spelled out in the clause "having faith in Christ".

The world is currently populated by seven billion humans. Approximately two billion of those seven billion are Christians. The other five billion people either do not believe Jesus was the Christ, do not believe he existed, or they have no knowledge of him at all.

The LDS church teaches that Latter-Day saints are tasked with the responsibility of spreading the true gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the world, and that the Book of Mormon is a key element in spreading the news of the restoration of the Gospel.

But the key element that the LDS missionary program relies upon to convert people to the gospel is Moroni's Promise.

As we can clearly see, Moroni's Promise is ineffectual for any of the 5 billion people who do not 'have faith in Christ'. Moroni's Promise cannot be used with a Buddhist, a Muslim or a Jew. It cannot be used for any of the 900 million Hindus on the Earth. It is completely ineffectual for any atheist. Without a pre-existing belief in Christ, Moroni's promise cannot be expected to work.

Why would a loving and merciful God create a plan of salvation and go to all the trouble of restoring the priesthood to the earth if only two-sevenths of his children (less than 29%) could ever even have a chance of accepting the Book of Mormon as the word of God?

I think that you're on the right track, but I think that the problem goes even deeper than that. The whole method is flawed, from beginning to end. Let me try to summarize by breaking it down into steps and then noting a few of the problems with each step.

Moroni's promise:

1. Read the Book of Mormon
2. Think about what you read
3. Have faith in Jesus
4. Ask God through prayer if the things you read are true
5. If you believe enough, God will answer your prayer
6. The answer will come through the HG
7. You can know all true things through the power of the HG

Here are a few of the problems I see:

1. Why is it necessary to read the Book of Mormon to know if it's true? It shouldn't matter if you've read the book or not. If a god exists, he/she/it/they should be able to show you the truth in any case.

2. Again, why is thinking about what you've read important to know if it's true or not? Using the same argument as the first point, it shouldn't matter.

3. As beefcalf already noted, this is a major problem for about 5/7 of the world's population.

4. Again, a seemingly unnecessary step. Why wouldn't God just reveal the truth to you without you having to ask?

5. Believing should play little or no part in finding out if something is true. In fact, in most other fields (e.g. science), skepticism about the proposition is considered a necessary part of discovering the truth of the proposition.

6. Think about this statement carefully. What on earth does it actually mean? Of all of the parts of the promise, this might be the most problematic for me.

As I've noted in a previous thread, this statement is has so many assumptions built into it that, from an objective standpoint, it really doesn't even have any meaning. To see this, try replacing the words "Holy Ghost" with the words "chicken bones", "entrails", or "divining rod" and you get a statement that is approximately equivalent. What are the forms of these supposed answers from this ghost? How are you supposed to recognize them? How do you know that they come from the ghost and not from another spirit or an elf or a leprechaun?

The current Mormon understanding is that these answers come in the form of "good feelings", pretty much exclusively. In fact, I've been told by a TBM before that to ask for answers in another form is equivalent to tempting God. But, here again, this whole idea carries a ton of assumptions. For example, there is the assumption that a good feeling equates to something true and a bad feeling equates to something false. It makes me happy to think that Santa Claus is going to bring me presents this Christmas. It also makes me happy to think that I will be a billionaire next year. It makes me unhappy to think that I will die someday. Also, it makes me unhappy to think that 6,000 people per day starve to death in Africa. However, I would argue that the first two statements are probably false and the last two probably are true. So, does the fact that a certain way of looking at the world makes you unhappy really mean that way of looking at the world is false? Maybe true facts equate to bad feelings and not the converse.

Also, is there really any reason to think that those good feelings are externally generated, by supernatural means, as an answer to your prayer? Of all the possible explanations for where these feelings come from, this is perhaps the most unlikely. As a first guess, most atheists looking at the situation would say that the feelings in question are entirely generated by the person with no external influences. This explanation has such a strong probability of being true that, without evidence to the contrary, it's hard to understand how another explanation could be feasible.

Even if I was to accept that those good feelings were externally generated, it still is not indicative of the Book of Mormon being true. Maybe Mormons are actually getting tricked by Satan (as many Protestants would claim) and the promise can't be trusted. Or, maybe the good feelings are a manifestation of God's love (or God's hate even) and mean nothing in terms of the truthfulness of the book. I can think of several alternative explanations, each of which seems to be just as plausible of an explanation as the one preferred by the Mormon church.

Also, who says that the answer has to come in the form of a "good feeling". What if I wanted God to answer in the form of sending Moroni to visit me or having Tom Monson call me and recite a 10 digit random number I generated on my computer. If we are to accept the answer to Moroni's promise as supernatural in nature, are events like these (due to their highly improbable or difficult to mistake nature) much more indicative of a supernatural event than an easily misinterpreted good feeling?


7. This seems to be obviously not true, as evidenced by the large amount of false doctrine taught over the pulpit and in writings by leaders of the church.

For this, and many other reasons, I think the whole method -- the whole premise of the method -- is flawed.

keithb wrote:I was blocked from posting on the MDB after I made the following post:

Assumptions (short list):

1. God(s) exists.
2. Thinking about the scriptures increases the likelihood that said god(s) will answer your prayer
3. Adam was a real person
4. The earth was created by god
5. God(s) are willing to answer human prayers
6. Praying is an effective way to communicate with god(s)
7. God(s) is/are willing to manifest truth to people who pray
8. A sincere heart affects whether you will get an answer
9. Real intent affects whether you will get an answer
10. Jesus Christ was a real person
11.The Holy Ghost is an effective way of communicating with God(s).
12. It will be the god(s) in question answering your prayer and not another god(s).
13. The answer will be confirmation that the Book of Mormon is true.
14. God has been good to the children of men.

Also, not explicitly stated in the verses but implied in Mormon culture are the following assumptions:

15. The answer from God comes almost exclusively in the form of "feelings"
16. Another god is unable to answer your prayer (i.e. Lucifer).

Moroni 10:3-5 isn't true because of what verses three through five say. Anybody who thought that should have his head examined. The principle embodied in 10:3-5 is true because of how it resonates with common sense. That being the case the only relevant assumptions are #1, #5, #8, and #9. Assumptions #6 and #7 follow from #5.

keithb wrote:

There are also other assumptions built into this "promise", but let's start with these. Do we have any outside (e.g. logical) verification that the above assumptions are valid? In other words, how do we know that Mor. 10:3-5 is a valid way to arrive at objective "truth".

Objective truth? Whoever said Moroni 10:3-5 resulted in objective truth? I certainly never have. It's subjective, all right, but what's the alternative? What other way is there to find out the truth about God's will in our lives?

KevinSim