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.