About me:
I have never been a mormon. I am an atheist.
My knowledge of mormonism is limited but I have seen a few documentaries about it.
Religion fascinates me.

Now, let’s boogey!
This is what he wrote:

This is what he writes
“He (Jo Smith) doesn't know anything about reformed egyptian, so someone else (perhaps Moroni, perhaps others--the evidence points to someone with a mastery of 16th century English) translates them and they appear on the stones like a computer screen. He sometimes worked with the 2 stones, sometimes with a single rock (that he had to stick in a hat to block out the light so he could see the English words). It may seem strange to us, but since I've gotten in the habit of carrying a "glowing stone" in my pocket (i.e., a phone), I don't see such things as out of the range of possibility.”


It is interesting how this mormon apologist has turned a magical thing into a piece of technology.
An iphone puts together various scientific domains together:
The chemistry to produce, copper, silver, indium, iron, tin, glass, silicon.
To produce the PCB, to etch the copper.
The physics of semiconductors.
The designers that drew the circuits of the CPU, GPU and glue chips.
The programmers that wrote the compilers to aid other programmers to write applications and an OS.

It is layers upon layers of knowledge, with thousands of people working across multiple generations.

This mormon is saying that 2 pieces of stones are the same thing. It is an ultra high tech equipment created by some gods.
There are parts of the bible where you have a talking donkey, a talking snake, blowing on dirt and it turns into a human, speaking words and a universe is created, a stick turns into a snake, the cure for leprosy.

So, when Santa Claus has flying reinder and a flying slay, that is not magic. It is super hyper technology from another dimension.
The 3 little pig story, that is factual as long as the god uses his technology to create anthropomorphic wolves and pigs.

~~~~iceman9090

All it takes is a testimony and knowing that the spirit never lies to mormons.

So you end up with "...and a mormon just believes..."

+elderolddog:
No no. We are talking about special hebrew things in the book of Mormon that Jo Smith could not have known about and mastery of 16 th century english which he did not possess.

~~~~iceman9090

I hear Rock 2.0 will have a higher contrast screen so you won't have to put it in a hat to read it. Steve Jobs told God he was an incompetent hack, and threw him out of the lab.

+Brother Of Jerry:
Yes, from what I see, people enjoy their iphone during daylight, nighttime, in the bus, in the subways, in the mines. Just put a light sensor and give some control to the user.
User requests are what computers are for.

~~~~iceman9090

I think you will find that every conversation with mormon apologists will end up being totally non-sensical. Just reading FARMS as a mormon gave me a headache and I still wanted to smash my head into the nearest wall.

You will present them with facts, they’ll dispute said facts, you’ll present evidence, they will come up with a non-sensical explanation, you will point that out, they’ll present a strawman argument, you will explain again, they will use more illogical arguments, ad hominem attacks and so on... If you actually get past those and win the debate in an obvious way, they will bear their testimony that they know the mormon church is true regardless. Have fun!!

I have never read the FARMS stuff but I’m guessing that where this material comes from.

It’s not about winning a debate. I’m just interested in learning how the religious mind works.
It is interesting seeing how people believe all sorts of things from anti-vaccine, anti-global climate change, homeopathy, .. The world is a smorgasboard of religions :)


~~~~iceman9090

From my limited interaction (face to face) with professional apologists they entertain a lot of theories, they postulate, they extrapolate, they dump all kinds of info on their adoring listeners, all carefully couched within the boundaries of what mormons will currently still accept as possible. The intellectuals within BYU, write books and essays on this stuff and the membership (the ones who are curious) eat it all up and keep buying their books.

Years ago I went to one of their meetings with an eager audience, the topic was how did Joe translate ancient scripture. Most intellectuals on the panel came to the conclusion that it was the brilliance of his mind, basically it's all made up by a genius, and god approves of that. The only intelectual who believed otherwise was Richard Bushman. He still believed like the traditional viewpoint of what mormons are suppose to believe.

Mormonism is a job for which logic need not apply. As is all religion.

Mormon God is Omni-Omni to the nth degree. Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and Omnicscient along with a few other "O's". So if His Holiness wants to communicate through a rock, why not? The Bible already had everybody primed for such nonsense.

God wrote some very obvious and unoriginal rules for life with his finger into the stone tablets for Moses. God appeared as a burning bush to instruct Moses. Just for fun His Magnificence also turned staffs into snakes as a party trick for the Pharoah.


Some prefer top hats and bunnies, but God likes sticks and stones which may break your bones, and, also apparently break one's ability to think critically.

All I'm saying is anyone who believes in the Bible has no business pointing a finger at the Mormons. I assume you don't believe in that either Iceman?

Is Omniabsurd a word?