Jason Bourne wrote:I personally have no problem believing that God created things via evolution nor do I have an issue with believing the Adam and Eve may have been the first two humans God placed a soul in as ridiculous as some thinks that sounds. Or, Adam and Eve could have been to persons God decided to covenant with.
Perfect examples of excuses to which you would never have had to resort had science not come along and revealed as false the teachings of the Prophets, Seers, and Revelators of Mormonism and Mormonism's scriptures. I'm not saying this to slam you, because you're a nice guy, with an open mind, and I kind of understand where you're coming from. But in the end, all of these things you mentioned are just ways of rationalizing, and making excuses for, the fact that your Prophets have just been making this stuff up, and right from the very beginning. There's no evidence that these guys have known things that men could not have invented themselves, no evidence of supernaturally-learned truths that actually turned out to be true, etc. There's no credibility there.
However this does pose a problem for the no death issue so would have to conclude that death did exist in the world for a long time and that religious teachers were simply wrong about this like they have been about other things as well.
Accidentally writing 5 to the question of what is 3 + 3, when you know the answer is really 6, is a mistake. I can forgive mistakes. But claiming to speak for God, and then pronouncing teachings of fairly great detail and explanatory power, that turn out to be just flat-out completely wrong, is not a mistake. They were
making this stuff up. Somewhere along the line the writers responsible for this kind of "no death before the fall" mythology invented these ideas. It's manmade. It's fiction.
I'm not nearly as ready as you seem to be, and the other members who know the church was wrong about "no death before the Fall" and these other kinds of issues, to start excusing this stuff away. Our Prophets, Seers, and Revelators are representing themselves as having authority to teach us the words of the Creator of the Entire Universe. And more than that, they claim to know his mind and will for us, and to be able to pass on commandments to us from that Creator. IE: they claim the right to tell us what to do, with the authorization of the Creator of the Entire Universe. These are very remarkable claims. Many have made them, and these people have been universally shown not to know what they were talking about.
Every single one of them. Including Mormonism's versions of this phenomenon.
Throughout the history of mankind it has been very common for people to claim that they know the mind and will of the Creator of the Universe, and that the Creator deputized this person to go around telling the rest of us what to do. There are probably thousands of instances of this. Mormons would recognize that at least the overwhelming majority of cases where people have stood up and claimed to have been personally empowered by the Creator of the Universe to lead the rest of us, these people have been charlatans and frauds. Mormons see right through the claims of folks like Tony Alamo and David Koresh. What becomes perfectly clear, once one parts the haze of testimony enough to really see Joseph Smith and Mormonism's prophets since Joseph
in the very human context of false pretenders to the Creator's power and authority on Earth, our Prophets, Seers, and Revelators fit right in. It's just the Mormons' particular instantiation of some fundamental human base class of religious charlatans.
And stuff like what's talked about in this thread are some of the ways this can be recognized. When the guys who "commune with Jehovah" are shown to be spouting mythology, fictional nonsense, it pretty much shows what their source of "truth" is - not the Creator of the Entire Universe, but just manmade sources, like every other false prophet that there's ever been.
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