christians do you really believe

[_Tobin]

So, all knowing God selects people who misrepresent Him and His doctrine and that's not a mistake.

Drifting, what do you mean by "all knowing"? People use that phrase a lot, but I'm not sure any of them know what it means.

But regardless, no matter what God knows, there's no way to get around the fact that any given human being will misrepresent Him to some extent, and His doctrine to some extent. If you believe in a God who is all-powerful (once again, whatever that ill-defined adjective actually means), perhaps you can argue that God is capable of creating men who will always describe God and His doctrine perfectly, without any error.

But Latter-day Saints don't believe that God has the power to do literally anything that can be imagined. In particular God cannot create intelligence, and a pretty much universal tendency to mess up comes with intelligence. So God is forced to choose as His spokesmen men who He knows will eventually mess up to some degree. God chose men who He knew would distort Him and His message as little as possible, and yes, that choice was not a mistake. Better to have spokesmen who get the general message right than to have no spokesmen at all.

God's spokesmen, the prophets, try to get everyone to repent and come to the Lord instead and see and speak with the Lord directly. That way there is no-one in-between to mess it up.

[_Aristotle Smith]

If you believe "the Mormon god" is an evil impostor, then I've got to ask you, what has "the Mormon god" ever done that convinced you he's evil? Has he ever done something that caused more damage to the souls of men and women than letting them spend the rest of eternity in unbearable agony, when he had the power to cause them to cease to exist at any time?

MCB and Aristotle Smith, were either of you planning on responding to this?

I simply believe that marrying other men's wives, lying about the Book of Abraham, lying about the Book of Mormon, changing his accounts of the first vision, inventing the concept of priesthood authority after the fact, changing the D&C revelations, constantly lying to Emma, constantly lying to the rank and file LDS members, trying to establish a theocracy, and stealing Masonic ceremony and passing it off as a revelation from God disqualifies Joseph Smith from being a trustworthy source for any doctrine about God. As such I don't take a position on whether the Mormon God is evil or not, he doesn't exist.

[_KevinSim]

I simply believe that marrying other men's wives, lying about the Book of Abraham, lying about the Book of Mormon, changing his accounts of the first vision, inventing the concept of priesthood authority after the fact, changing the D&C revelations, constantly lying to Emma, constantly lying to the rank and file LDS members, trying to establish a theocracy, and stealing Masonic ceremony and passing it off as a revelation from God disqualifies Joseph Smith from being a trustworthy source for any doctrine about God. As such I don't take a position on whether the Mormon God is evil or not, he doesn't exist.

Then I guess the question is, which makes more sense, believing in a God for whom there is extremely little evidence that S/He exists, but who, if S/He does exist, is good; or believing in a God for whose existence Biblical Christians say there is a lot of evidence, but who is the very personification of evil?

If all the things the critics say about Joseph Smith turn out to be true, then, Aristotle, I agree with you that it would be very easy to conclude that Smith just made everything up. But I would believe in the deity Smith described any day, long before I ever brought myself to worship someone who had the power to cause souls to cease to exist, and yet chose to let the unsaved endure unbearable agony for the rest of eternity.