What a frustrating thread. It seems that any eyewitness testimony with potentially negative implications for the church's truth-claims or the prophet's reputation, even if reported by a believer, even if not intended to reflect negatively, even if multiply corroborated, must be rejected as "filthy garbage". It also seems that Joseph Smith was expected to be omniscient and immune to the temptation to exaggerate, such that when everyone around him made inflated claims about church membership numbers, the prophet would never have gone along with them. The resistance to the obvious there is nothing short of baffling. It seems that the "New Mormon History" is not so generally accepted as its proponents believe.
Tom wrote:I gather that Will Schryver has color copies of the KEP. If that is true, how did he acquire them?
I think they were on loan to him when one of his friends murdered the proprietor. Since then he has illegally kept them.
I think that is Brent you are referring too..
God has the right to create and to destroy, to make like and to kill. He can delegate this authority if he wishes to. I know that can be scary. Deal with it. Nehor.. Nov 08, 2010
antishock8 wrote:But... But.... CC... Are you sure? How do you know you're not going to Hell? Maybe the Islamists are right, and you're wrong?
CC is (like the rest of us) a tiny microblob of living matter on the little blue globe that is our home, floating in the immensity of the cosmos. But the tiny microblob that is CC has found the answers to everything: all this immensity comes from the works of an infinitely inflated image of CC's self that he calls "God" - and (guess what?) CC has sussed out exactly what this "God" means to do to all of us! You aren't clever enough to appreciate how he has done this, but it is all worthy of immense respect and deference, and you mustn't laugh.
No, stop it, really.
So shut the **** up (asterisks mine, by the way) and let CC tell you the way it is.
Zadok: I did not have a faith crisis. I discovered that the Church was having a truth crisis. Maksutov: That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
Serendipity, chance, and a bit of luck have played big roles in my life. Or... we can say that God's been watching over me and mine.
What difference does it make to which source the result is attributed, since the result is the same?
(Nevo, Jan 23) And the Melchizedek Priesthood may not have been restored until the summer of 1830, several months after the organization of the Church.