Two comments:
I am amazed that this many people still watch South Park!! I thought I was the only one!
While not scientficaly relevant, I have NEVER met a Mormom I did not like. Is there something in the water they get baptized in or something? They must be the nicest group of people ever.
I stand corrected. I was under the impression that driving, along with other activities, was prohibited to missionaries.
godzillatemple
Awww, I’m sure you were just a late bloomer.
Quite. It was the general tone of his posts that I was commenting on. Sheesh, look at how he responded to my post – curt and insulting, with a thin veneer of civility.
I had to comment on this, yes they do select, in fact I would call it discriminate. But it is not the race thing, now it is looks and intelligence. A friend of the family is good looking, but think Forrest Gump level for smarts. He remains a faitful Mormon, but he has allways resented that he was not allowed to go on mission because of his impediment.
Other Christian denominations hold that if you’re, say, born in Isreal or China or Iran, etc., and you get hit by a bus before you accept Jesus, not only are you denied the highest level of heaven, you’re denied heaven ALTOGETHER. Again I have to ask why everyone picks on the Mormons; how are their beliefs any sillier than any other religion?
I happen to be an atheist, but it seems to me that anyone who accepts the basic premise that there is an all-powerful God doesn’t exactly have standing to assail anyone else’s beliefs, so why pick on the Mormons in particular? It’s like you’re watching a Road Runner cartoon: you don’t bat an eye at the premise of a super-intelligent coyote who can achieve extreme speeds by wearing roller skates and strapping a rocket to his back, but then when he goes over the edge of a cliff and remains suspended in mid air for several seconds before falling, you say “Oh, well THAT’S just stupid.”
I think the difference is that the Mormons did not restrict themselves to inventing a fanciful religion; they also invented a history for the North American continent that explained the presence of the Indians. You can’t really test the propostion that heaven exists, but you can check if American Indians are really Jews in redface.
Look at my post again; you will see that in fact, the Mormon beliefs that **Glory ** assailed are no more or less falsifiable than the corresponding beliefs of other denominations.
Besides which, is being falsifiable really exclusive to the Mormon religion? I’m sure we could come up with a pretty decent-sized list of falsifiable beliefs held by other religions as well. One that immediately springs to mind is the age of the universe. We can certainly test that proposition.
But that only holds for fundies. Liberal Christians have no quarrel at all with the age of the universe.
It’s in the Bible, so that’s only true to the extent that liberal Christians don’t accept all of the Bible. But it is a tenet of every major Christian denomination that the Bible is the word of God. So if we allow that cop out, why are we not allowed the cop out that not all Mormons accept all of the Book of Mormon? You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Or if you prefer another example: Catholics (even “liberal” ones) believe that the bread and wine they consume are the body of Christ. A DNA test could easily clear that up. I’d be willing to wager that they’d only find bread and wine molecules.
Hey liberal Catholic here (well in name anyway). At least give some of us a break. It is a symbolic ritual. Anyway, I’m not certain the bread isn’t cardboard and I’ll bet they’d find DNA in that communal wine goblet.
Well, no, I think I may have mentioned that at the beginning. I just find it a convenient place because it gathers a lot of different items. I certainly would not call him unbiased, or even particularly picky in what he prints up. But you asked what we have, and that’s pretty much it. Which is OK with me, and with most Mormons, because we don’t expect to prove the BoM anytime soon, if ever. More on that later. But you asked what we did have, and what we do have is “not a lot, but more than before, and several of the objections to the BoM have been proven to be illusory, and we expect that to happen a few more times.”
Well, this continent has been pretty overrun, hasn’t it? We don’t see that as saying that the American continents were empty when Lehi & co. got there. It seems pretty clear to us now (from careful study) that the small band from Jerusalem assimilated into native populations. We realize that Joseph Smith seems to have thought otherwise, but you have to understand that we don’t think he wrote it, and so what his intentions were is not all that important, because he only translated it. He didn’t have to be omniscient in order to be a prophet. We don’t feel it necessary to think that he knew everything about the peoples in the BoM, and we figure that there’s a lot he didn’t know. We don’t know much either, but we have the ability to deduce or find things that he may not have realized.
Yep, that’s true enough. But there are only two sides; there are the guys who think the BoM is true and look for evidence, and the guys who think it’s a crackpot theory and who would be labeled crackpots themselves if they thought it might have some merit and so of course ignore the whole thing, or guys who are actively looking to disprove the BoM. So it’s a problem we have. No one is going to take us seriously except ourselves, and there is no unbiased, objective viewpoint. We know quite well that we sound absolutely insane to everyone else, but hey, what are you gonna do?
Right. Because most of us feel that the ‘swords’ in the BoM (and cimeters, sorry, I did a character search on ‘scim’) probably were in fact wood or stone clubs with flakes of obsidian on them; Smith just wasn’t familiar with the word macuahuitl, or whatever.
Of course you would; and here we come to the crux of the matter. Indulge me for a moment—think about what you would do if, suddenly, a report came out of Mesoamerica detailing the discovery of a previously unknown temple, in which were placed piles of records on metal plates. When finally translated, the records turn out to be Mormon’s sources—hundreds of years of history of warfare and peace between two peoples who have names from the BoM, accounts of events which take place in the BoM, and so on. Voila! Suddenly the BoM is proved correct. (Not that I expect this ever to happen, mind you.)
Now, I realize that your automatic response is “Well, that’s not gonna happen” –just as I respond when someone asks me what I would do if an astrologer could really tell my future. Still, imagine for a moment that it did. What would you do? Would you say, “I’ll be darned, the Mormons are right. Guess I’d better go be a Mormon!” and go get baptized, and live the Word of Wisdom? Of course you wouldn’t. But realize what proof of the BoM would constitute: that God exists, that Jesus Christ is the Savior, that miracles happen, that Joseph Smith was a prophet, and that the crazy Mormons are right. Because there is no other way for Joseph Smith to have written the BoM correctly. He could not possibly have gotten the gold plates from a passing tinker, who picked them up from a Mexican soldier, who got them from his grandmother, and then learned Reformed Egyptian by himself and translated the whole thing by dictation in a few short weeks, and lied about it to impress everyone (and incidentally make everyone around mad enough to try to kill him). So if the BoM is correct, then the whole package is—and what would do you then?
This is why Mormons don’t expect the BoM to be proven—because we don’t think that God gives out proof of himself. If you’re going to convert to the LDS Church, we want it to be because the Holy Ghost told you that it was the right thing to do, and because you want to change your life, not because you’ve been unwillingly convinced that some people down in Central America 2,000 years ago wrote down some of their history and we know about it. So most of us really are convinced that proving the BoM is the wrong way to go—and it wouldn’t work anyway. We like finding bits and pieces, and studying Hebrew–well, some of us, I only do this for you–but we don’t expect it to convince anyone who isn’t praying about it, and we don’t really want it to. Sure, that attitude drives you up the wall; but if it went your way, it would infringe upon your free will. You’d have to believe in God, or rebel outright, and that’s not how earthly life works.
–Thanks for the links; I’ll read Mesoweb sometime when I have the time. The religioustolerance.org one is kinda inaccurate in places, but I have no argument with most of the quotations.
Darn, I forgot my new sig:
(Woo! I’ve been meaning to change my name for about 2 years now…)
Argh!
why the name change?
Anyway, what is your answer to those who have read the entire BoM and God told them it wasn’t true?(happened Many times)
Are they ALL wrong and deceived? Yes, you think so,but that is a heads we win, tails you lose deal.
my sig
Oh, I’ve been dangermom on other boards for a long time. Genie was the only thing I could come up with at first, but I like dangermom better. I just finally got around to asking the mods about it.
As for people who don’t get the same answer, I dunno. All I know is what he told me to do. It’s not my job to figure it out for you.
Whatever the Mormons do works, for some of them. In the hazy crazy world of faith, that’s good enough. That was the real message of the episode. Picking through all the implausible sounding stories in various religious texts would take millenia. Or they are explained away through geological or astronomical events instead of “God’s wrath” the way they used to think of it.
I was dismissive of a prosthelytizing Mormon at my door the other day. But, why waste his time? What works for him, won’t work for me. He was OK with that and went away. No skin off my nose. I don’t even need to get to the issue of the “truth” of the myths as I assume most mythology is a bizarre blend of truth and fiction.
Brief hijack:
The RCC may consider the Orthodox and themselves to be two wings of one church, but the Orthodox definitely reject this view. For the Orthodox, the Orthodox Church is the Church, period. It is possible that individual Catholics may be de facto members of the Church, but in no way can the RCC be considered as an organization part of the Church.
Catholics may allow Orthodox to commune in their churches, but Orthodox are not permitted to do so.
The “mormonism is no more crazy than mainstream Christianity” response from many in this thread was predictable, and frustrating.
The one thing the mainstream Christians have going for them is that all their questionable claims happened so far in the past that they aren’t really verifiable now, or are unverifiable by their very nature (miraculous events occuring without pattern can’t be scientifically tested, just observed or not.)
In the name of “religious tolerance” alot of people around here will go to great lengths to make all religions seem equally plausible (or implausible). But when it comes to historical claims, we can easily discriminate between theories. We certainly don’t consider all theories about the boyhood of Abe Lincoln, or the reign of Louis XIV, or the Black Plague to be equally plausible.
Traditional Christianity makes a number of claims through the bible about the history of a particular region over the course of hundreds of years. While some of the stories are clearly apocryphal (in the non-theological usage of the word), the bible seems to be fairly accurate in describing various cultures, and really existing people and places (with a few notable exceptions, like the wrong king in Judith, but that book wasn’t written to be historically accurate anyways.) This is why we believe it actually was written by people who lived in those times. We might not (and I don’t) believe in the miraculous events described therein, but we know enough to conclude it wasn’t just fabricated from whole cloth by some monks in the Vatican basement in 300 AD.
The Book of Mormon, apparently, makes ludicrous claims about the history of the continents of North and South America, the inhabitants, and their civilization(s). We know where the inhabitants came from, and when, and it wasn’t Israel 600 BC. We have evidence of the actual civilizations there dating back a long while, all the way back to the Olmecs who existed over a thousand years before the arrival of the Spanish to the Americas.
So for the same reasons we generally accept that the bible was actually written by the people whom its stories concern (by which I mean ancient Jews), we should conclude that the Book of Mormon is a fabrication. If miracles ever occured, an accurate retelling of them is far less likely to be contained in an obvious fabrication riddled with fanciful lies about past civilizations (BoM) than in an authentic anthology representing a written tradition of a people’s culture, laws, and history (the bible.) Traditional Christianity is therefore much more plausible than Mormonism, even though I think it highly probable that neither is actually true.