Expect a lot more of that before they can stop the bleeding.
"Inspired translation"? If that doesn't set off your B.S. detector, then it's in serious need of a tune up. Either you translate something or you don't. If your translation doesn't have the same meaning as the original, then IT'S NOT A TRANSLATION!!! Call it something else, but don't call it a translation!
What they're trying to say is that the papyrus was JS's inspiration for receiving a revelation that JS wrote down and called the BoA. If they remove the word "translation" from the BoA's description, I would have no bone to pick.
Good point. It frustrates me immensely that most TBMs completely fail to see what's happening here and how the leaders think nothing of adapting history to fit current apologist thought.
If the current view is that both the 'gold plates' and Egyptian papyri now only allowed JS to be inspired to receive the BoM & BoA scriptures respectively, why didn't JS & any later prophets mention this?
Either current leaders are disingenuous in rewriting history or previous prophets were abject at revealing the truth.
In his book "Animal Farm" George Orwell describes a farm yard where the animal's rules are written on the side of the barn. But these rules subtly change over time. "All animals are created equal" eventually gets the addition,"... but some animals are more equal than others."
No one notices these changes except for the Old Horse who happens to be illiterate and thus has to rely on a well-developed memory. Naturally that horse's good memory becomes a problem to conventional farm society.
Today, Mormonism is in the same fix.
God's reveled, fundamental facts (supposedly given through "Prophets, Seers, and Revelators") should never change. We're not talking about policies and procedures here, we're talking about facts.
For instance, you cannot say that God was once a man until (let's say) 1996, but after 1996 God was no longer once a man!
Some of us are like the Old Horse in "Animal Farm". Our memories are just too good for the sake of the most current variations of Mormonism - and so are our reasoning abilities.
The Mormon church has a monstrous lie on it's hands -- changing the current rules will never change that fundamental reality.
That horse in Animal Farm also represents my family, hardscrabble working people with no say in anything whatsoever. In the end the glue wagon comes around to pick up the old ones, after they have willed their estates to the church.
I didn't just quit Mormonism, I quit in horror.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/10/2013 09:41PM by donbagley.
One of the comments came from a Mormon, which said, "One can look at these changes either positively or negatively, but the reality is they are the result of the past 30 years of scholarship coming out of the Church History Dept, amplified by the past 10 years of Joseph Smith Papers. Even if some people see this as a political move from the LDS Church, I, for one, am happy to see that the general authorities are amenable to scholarship. That the LDS Church is flexible can be argued as a strength not a weakness."
Well, I'm glad the general authorities are amenable to scholarship, because it makes up for their lack of revelatory abilities. That's right, let scholars and scientists do all of the heavy lifting, then put a cherry on top and call it your own. Nice.
Why didn't God or Jesus or the Holy Ghost tap JS on the shoulder, (or appear to him with a flaming sword) and say, "Um, nice try, My Faithful Servant, but you got it wrong. Now, grab a pen and paper and write this down word of word. Can't have the faithful believing wrong things. And mistakes like this will just cause problems in the future. Ready? Here we go..."
Yeah, I particularly liked reading that church historian Simon Southerton's research about Lamanite DNA. Isn't it wonderful that the Church is flexible enough to deny 180 years of teaching that the Lamanites were the ancestors of the American Indians? When some people turn on a dime like that, you wonder if they have any principles at all -- but with the Mormon church, it's about the strength of their lack of convictions.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/10/2013 09:34AM by Makurosu.
Apologetic defenses of the BoM are so bad I dare call them lies.
They ALL fall through if crosschecked.
Some say we have the wrong papyrii and/or we are missing pieces of the papyrii. This isn't true because the "translators" did us the favor of COPYING the egyptian and matching it to a line-by-line translation...so we can trace it right back to the papyrii line for line. And voila, there it is, right in the existing fragments of the "wrong" papyrii.
So they're saying Smith just THOUGHT he was translating? God was just using the papyrii as a prop to prompt him to get a direct revelation that wasn't in the papyrii?
OK. Then I resort to my backup that the book itself has bogus claims in it.
This is the primary source of the church's 130-year ban on Africans holding the priesthood. It says the curse of Cain was black skin, and that the Egyptians inherited the curse as descendants of Cain via a matriarch named "Egyptus" who resettled Egypt right after the flood.
Just THIS is LOADED with bullsh1t. Get it from papyrii, pull it out of thin air, get it from gold plates, get it from god, get it from a toad...it's no more or less BS depending on the source.
( So they're saying Smith just THOUGHT he was translating? God was just using the papyrii as a prop to prompt him to get a direct revelation that wasn't in the papyrii? )
I've heard this also but my thought was 'he could not read egyptian to begin with so this makes zero since. Soooo he was inspired just by looking at the writing? I don't get it.
"These are the most significant changes made to Mormon scripture since 1981."
John_Lyle says:
"Nobody outside of the TSCC cares. The brainwashed will believe anything."
John_Lyle is correct. What kind of media attention do these "most significant changes" garner? Very little, and nothing on a national or international level.
Significant changes to an insignificant organization aren't particularly significant, are they?
If it wasn't a literal translation, why did Smith put numbers on the facsimiles that tied to footnotes that literally explained what the figures represented?
why didnt God just give Joseph Smith prophetic visions and words to write then. Joseph needed the story of the plates to make his fiction seem to have a foundation. People began doubting him so he made up a translation of a real historocal document, that everyone could see, but most other people at the time could not translate.
He was inpsired to make up a new "Gospel" that is flawed in that you must beleive God punished bad people, by making them dark skinned.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/10/2013 08:22PM by delt1995.