In my view the thing that seperates us from animals is our intellect and our ability to question. Moreover this place is for fighting ignorance and some of us would fight general SOMA use the same (then again I live in a Brave NW would be prison colony).
All Im saying is that on the subject of religion we should help ppl raise questions, not answer them for them.
Why ask why? In the end the Church of LDS does more good than harm. I can understand forsaking caffine and alcohol as their religion does, but I cannot see the point of forsaking bacon or cheeseburgers, (bacon-cheesburgers?) or pork chops as another religion does.
My religion doesn’t have any food avoidance rules.
its nice.
“the LDS church is the only one that makes falsifiable claims, i.e. describing people, places, and events that demonstrably never existed.”
Eh? What about Genesis, Noah’s ark, the Virgin Birth etc which are all false claims unless one believes in divine miralces? And if one does believe in such miracles pretty much nothing is falsifiable. God can do anything. Even ,say, WW2 could be fake because God could create billions of consisent memories and historical records with a snap of his metaphorical finger.
If one takes Genesis literally, then yes, it’s definitely falsifiable. The Virgin Birth, however is not. We can’t go back in time to give the Virgin Mary a pelvic exam to see if she had an intact hymen, so if people wish to believe that Jesus was conceived of the Holy Spirit, there’s no effective way to dissuade them from doing so.
True, but logic and the rules of evidence are wasted on Last Thursdayists.
I would argue that the virgin birth is falsified simply by the generally accepted workings of the human body. The very necessity of bringing in supernatural entities like the Holy Spirit puts it outside the bounds of rational explanation.
What you seem to be saying is that the Mormon texts contains a kind of falsehood not present in the Bible; ie. archaelogical falsehoods (although archaelogists are pretty skeptical of many of the historical claims in the Bible too). But when you consider that Mormon and Christian texts are contradicted by physics, astronomy, biology, physiology etc., archaelogy is small potatoes. So the additional degree of falsehood is not significant.
a) One man with 9 wives can conceivably have 1 child a month, but 1 woman with 9 husbands cannot. If htere is one thing “new” religions need, it is children to help the ranks of faithful grow. There is a reason for the ban the Catholic Church enforced on birth control: they want Catholic families to make more Catholics! All that “sin” stuff about it is (IMHO) perepheral.
b) If one woman has more than one husband, tracing lineage of the children becomes a nightmare. And if my understanding of things is correct, that sort of thing is very important to the mormons, as they are assembling the largest known geneological record in world history.
Point of order: there is no official position on caffeine in the LDS church, though this is a common misconception (and how to interpret church teachings as applied to caffeine is a point of debate among members of the church).
Well at least we can count on your objectivity. Or at least your sources for objections to the Book of Mormon.
You have yet to name a person, place, or event the Book of Mormon describes that never existed.
Though many people objected to the name Alma as a man’s name, evidence contemporaneous with Lehi shows it was.
As for places, the Book of Mormon doesn’t really describe places in enough detail to definitively identify locations. Though there are candidates for Nahom and Bountiful, as well as rivers in Arabia.
As for events, I don’t know of any specific events claimed in the Book of Mormon that are falsifiable.
We didn’t have it in the first place. You made claims, we responded, you dismissed the responses with ad hominem and hand waving. That’s not exactly a discussion.
At any rate, dangermom (formerly genie) and I posted several references which responded to your criticisms, including steel, horses, etc.
If you were honest, you’d also mention previous objections to the Book of Mormon that aren’t listed here because they’ve been proved to be erroneous objections, like barley (which you casually dismissed) and the aforementioned rivers in Arabia. As I keep mentioning, critics conveniently forget the objections once they’re proven wrong. Yet every step of the way they say the Book of Mormon is clearly wrong because of error X, Y, or Z (and we’ll just not talk about A, B, C, etc.).
Yeah, deluded, stupid, or misguided as we might be. :rolleyes: At least we’re honest.
you may want to get off of that high horse,there.
gobear thinks of all religious folk the same way.
And if search, he has made posts disproving lots of falsifiable things.
But it is a matter of faith, is it not?
An dof the tea, isn’t there (I think some e mailed it to me once) a written item called tea and salvation?
It was explained to me by lds that tea will make you loose your salvation.
Emarkp, your so-called “proofs” have been shown to be wrong, so we’re not going to get into it again. Suffice it to say, the Mayans, Zapotecs, Toltecs, and Aztecs dod not speak Hebrew.
More to the point, if you would bother to read what I said, even though I do not beleive your religion to be true, there is no point in arguing against your theology because there is no way to disprove it.
Your religion makes you happy and I support you in that. If you still want to have your nose out of joint, that’s on you, no me.
I grew up Mormon and although I don’t harbor big resentment toward the church, I’ve pretty much walked away from it all -growing up in the church certainly did me more good than harm (caligynephobia says as he downs another glass of scotch).
The one that always bugged me is the same doctrine proscribing booze, hot drink and tobacco also says that meat (“the flesh of beasts and fowl”) is to be used “sparingly” and only in winter, cold or famine - but you’ll be hard-pressed to find very many vegetarian Mormons. Can’t say I knew ANY in my time, but I didn’t care since I loved a good burger as much as the next LDS kid . . . just shows how human nature lets us pick and chose which “sacred” doctrines we actually give a shit about. Even the LDS site about the WOW doesn’t mention meat, but the actual scripture does:
Word Of Wisdom
Oh, that does get discussed. Our very own Monty (and I don’t know why he hasn’t shown yet) is vegetarian for doctrinal reasons, and you’ll hear some Mormons talk about how we shouldn’t eat too much meat. I try not to do a lot of meat-cooking myself. I heard a BYU professor speak a couple years back on how much better things would be if everyone ate less meat. Come to think of it, I hear quite a bit about the glories of grains and veggies and fresh food and gardening (and nothing about the joys of a big ol’ steak); perhaps it’s generally felt that pushing the positive is better in this case.
It is not doctrinal to preach strict vegetarianism (that is, feel free to live it, but don’t tell others they have to for salvation, because they don’t). Many American Mormons would undoubtedly do well to cut back on their meat consumption. But I suppose that’s human nature; it’s easy enough to measure obedience to the parts of the WoW that prohibit certain things, but not so easy to pay attention to the parts that seem to be more left up to personal interpretation and which constitute something of a grey area. (As in caffeine and all soda, fast food, chemical-laden convenience food, and snacks full of sugar, as well as too much meat.)
Following your logic here, if someone makes a statement saying that banana’s grow from only doorknobs and trees, you would consider it DISHONEST for them to later omit doorknobs as a source of bananas?
I would think that repeating refuted points would be something that would be counter-productive. I guess on the other hand, it would give you something intelligent to write.
So on that note, lets talk some more about something thats already been a) discussed, and b) resolved/verified/concluded.
For some reason that’s really good to hear, dangermom. Thanks for sharing. It could be rationalization on the part of carnivorous Mormons, but it’s certainly one that many seem to blow off.
Minor hijack - I personally have a tough time feeling angry or resentful towards the church like I know a number of exes (including a sibling) do - I think it boils down to sort of a tribal identity on my part if that makes any sense; you know, family spending generations in Utah/Idaho, all of the baggage that goes along with growing up in primary and mutual/young adults and having to attend early-morning seminary in high school. I find I relate very much to guys who “grew up Catholic,” strapped with a bunch of unique indoctrination, inhibitions and mythology (for lack of a better word. Mom-and-Dad-believe-it, so-it-must-be-true! - kind of thinking). Different, but similar.
Monty hasn’t posted at all since 26 November 2003. I don’t know why. Some of the threads he was participating in at the time got quite heated.
The United Was campaign is underway at my workplace… this is what our CEO told us!
Just to pick up on the theme raised by gobear, (over which I’ve had a couple of pretty heated debates with Monty): the more remote an alleged event, the less possibility there is for drawing an inference from the lack of evidence proving that it occurred.
Nothing at all can be inferred from the lack of existing evidence to prove the loaves and fishes miracle 2000 years ago. Even if it occurred, you could not expect there to be any evidence still in existence to prove it, so you can infer nothing from that lack of evidence.
If someone claimed to have carried out exactly the same miracle last week, but could not provide a single photograph, cam-corder tape, newspaper clipping, tape recording or whatever, you could certainly reasonably infer from the lack of evidence that the claim was BS.
This does not provide any support whatsoever for the miracles of older religions, but it does illustrate how it is comparatively easier to attack the veracity of miracles of newer religions.
Let me make it clear that I don’t believe in any religion, but I think that those who say that the falsifiability of the miracles of older religions and the miracles of newer religions are precisely equivalent are wrong.
My friend Monty has decided not to post for his reasons which will remain his, and I agree with him on them.
He’s doing fine.
I am sure dangermum can defend her religion just fine without his help.
Hey, if it makes you happy: Mormons should not eat so much meat! No they should not!
I just want you to also know that I am not the only one who thinks in that way. It does get discussed–though possibly more often here in granola-esque Northern CA than in the cattle-ranching lands of the Midwest. You would have missed it, since you seem to have only really spent time in the youth programs (where the main goals are to get the kids safely to early adulthood without major trouble of various kinds and with their selves intact, and hopefully to help them learn to feel the Spirit on their own). Relief Society types talk about these things more often–I wouldn’t know about the Elder’s Quorum, but I rather suspect that they’re too busy planning the next rib cookoff. :o 
There really isn’t a good smiley for this. Oh well.