Who Knows wrote:I think your question, seth, goes in the same bucket as this question: Can people find buried treasure using seer stones?
...Or does that only work when god's grooming them to be a prophet?
This could really be turned against the apologists.
If I receive a "witness" from the Spirit, that I should prepare myself to someday be the Prophet, and I look to "Rough Stone Rolling" as a sort of master plan, at least to see how God raised up and groomed Joseph Smith to be a prophet, and then start doing the things Joseph Smith did, what do you suppose the church would say?
What if I started scrying for buried treasure using a peepstone in a hat? According to Bushman this is how God was training up Joseph Smith to be ready to do miraculous translations and receive revelations and such. So if I, today, started scrying for buried treasure using a peepstone in a hat, what would the church say?
And let's say I charged money for the service of telling people where on their property they might find buried money, and I obtained this "knowledge" through looking at a peepstone in a hat, what would the church say?
What would the church say if I did rituals like mark circles on the ground, sacrifice an animal and use its blood, and so forth, to appease spirits that were guarding this buried money on someone's yard? What do you suppose the church would think about that?
I'm serious. If Joseph Smith grew up in the Mormon church today, and did all the same things he did as a teenager and so forth, what would the local and other church authorities actually think about that?
And yet that's how God trained up Joseph Smith to be a prophet. Could God train up a young man to be a prophet like Joseph Smith in today's church? I hardly think so.