No, not THAT thing!

God, Jesus, and their posse of angels go through the trouble chatting up Ol' Joe, guiding him to the plates, and giving him a mission spread the truth about the only true church on Earth...maybe in the whole universe!...so that everybody can return to them in heaven.

And then they take back the plates? The only physical evidence that Ol' Joe had of an ancient manual written in a heretofore unknown and untranslated language? Evidence that could be used to sway the skeptics and to bolster the faithful?

Talk about setting somebody up to fail!

Does God want people to believe and to return to him in heaven, or doesn't he? It seems to me that if he really does exist, he really doesn't give a damn either way and was just yanking Ol' Joe's chain...and anybody else's who took Ol' Joe's hearsay as scripture.

I unfortunately got into a discussion about Mormonism with a friend last week. It was in good fun, but I still am embarrassed about having been a Mormon for so many years. After a couple of beers I told him, "The only way Mormonism makes sense is if you stop thinking rationally." He laughed and we changed the topic.

The angel with the flaming sword should have given Joe a little cut just to show he meant business. Then he could have shown Emma. Let me guess. Laban's sword was taken away too.

Yup--one of my major problems: in the mind of a TBM, the plates were "taken back to Heaven", but why "back"?? They were never *from* Heaven in the first place.

Were the Dead Sea Scrolls "taken back"? Nope, they were written by humans, on Earth, in the language of the day. Same with the plates. Except that they weren't.

The plates I mean.

Didn't.

Happen.

When I've asked Mormons about why the plates were taken away, the answer I've usually gotten is that this life is a time of testing. And that in order to return and live again with Heavenly Father, one of the things we must develop is a strong faith. And that if we still had the plates, their presence here would eliminate an outstanding opportunity to develop that strong faith.

Yeah, I get the same response from my TBM wife and missionaries, but the whole think smacks of mixed messages if you take everything they say seriously.

TBMs assure me that HF really does want me to return to the CK. They tell me that HF gave us the ability to reason to set us apart from his other living creations. And yet, the only way we can return to HF and the other "intelligences" is to self-lobotomize ourselves?

Yeah...no.

But, even if the plates were around, with no archeological evidence backing up the stories in them, it would still take a great amount of "faith" to believe what's supposedly written on the plates...so the "we must have faith" thing doesn't fly.

And then the supposed "witnesses" didn't have to have faith, how come they didn't have to have faith but I do?

Of course, the story's bullshit. There weren't any plates to take back. Or there was a hastily-put-together fake that fooled a few people, but that Smith knew wouldn't stand up to actual examination, so he ditched it. Either way...no actual plates.

There have been about 108 billion people who have lived on the earth since the beginning. And H.F. has how many other worlds?

Everybody had big families when I was young. One had 15, one 13 and one 12. The thing with those families is the older children looked after and raised the younger ones. The parents were exhausted.

So, yeah. I don't think Heavenly Father is that concerned about making sure everybody gets back for the family reunion. And no wonder he insists on giving them all the same few "new" names. Forget the making the rock so heavy even He can't lift it, what about having so many children even He can't keep their names straight.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/19/2016 03:47PM by blueorchid.

My dad had trouble keeping the names of only four kids straight.

From an apologist site:

"No matter how many plates are dug up from the earth, gold or not, nothing will ever tell us that our church history is true. Nothing, that is, other than the voice inside us that says 'It is true.' It is more important for our testimonies to be engraved on our hearts than for a set of Book of Mormon era plates to be discovered by today’s archaeologists."
--http://lds.net/blog/faith/defending-the-faith/golden-plates-found/

The first line is dead-on accurate!

But it's the second line that makes the church possible. And it requires a certain frame of reference: assume the church is true and facts that don't support the assumption are to be ignored. Praise ghawd's servants for the gift of brainwashing!

I had a conversation with a pair of missionaries recently in which they made the point that I can know without a shadow of a doubt that the Book of Mormon is "true" if I will only read it and then ask God with sincerity if it is true. I told them that that is not how I evaluate whether or not something is true, and that I'd be unable muster the "sincerity" part of it anyway. The Book of Mormon purports to be an actual history of real peoples. To evaluate any document claiming to be history, I believe that one has to look for evidence that goes beyond an inner feeling. One needs to look for archaeological and anthropological evidence, etc. etc. Actually, the first time I even casually looked through the Book of Mormon, I felt that there was no way the events in the book had ever happened in history or that the peoples it describes ever existed.