I received an email from a friend of mine in our stake who is still TBM. He is in the Bishopric (ex sec). He has read my story and knows where I stand on the church and I believe he honestly wants to help me come back. This is the gentlemen that has a buddy who occasionally writes for FAIR. He sent me this email snippet today on who is "Jehovah" that another "ancient scripture e-pal" of his sent to him. I replied that it was simply all cogdis for me, to which he replied that I wouldn't say that if I knew who his buddy was. Here is the quote. What do you think? CogDis or not?


D&C 109 uses "Jehovah" as a name of the Father, as you can see by carefully reading the entire section, and other early Church leaders (and even David O. McKay) used this name to denote the Father. It was James E. Talmage who first suggested that Jesus was Jehovah, a position adopted in 1916 by the First Presidecy. Prior to that time, the name was generally used to denote the Father. There is evidence for both positions, but it's a complex issue. The New Testament frequently quotes Old Testament passages as the Father speaking of his Son, but checking the OT passages, one sees that it is Jehovah speaking. On the other hand, Jesus told the Nephites that it was he who gave the law to Moses, and the OT says it was Jehovah who did so. But was know that the Son (and even angels) can speak for the Father in first person, under the principle of divine investiture of authority (also defined by Talmage in 1916). See, e.g., Moses 5:9, where the Holy Ghost speaks in first person for the Son.

Divine investiture of authority, god it has been forever since I have heard that phrase. It was the invention of Jimmy boy, and was necessary because Joseph and Brigham fucked things up so bad that the only way to avoid total theological meltdown was to make up something equally absurd.

DIA

Elohim: I Elohim hereby anoint you Elohim. You may call yourself Elohim and have all of my power.

Random angel: Kick ass, I am going to confuse the hell out of everyone.

Love it:))) For me, DIA was just another "WHAT?" moment. I simply put it onto my shelf. Now there is no more confusion.

Jesus was a guy who lived in Galilee 2,000 years ago. YHWH
is a Sinai mountain god manifested as the Universal God on
a hill called Zion in ancient Jerusalem.

James E. Talmadge was a genius who understood the science of
his day better than most Mormons. He was also a poor theologian

The Mormon attempt to bypass Trinitarian conventions led to
a strange modalistic view of "God the Son" which is full of
inconsistencies.

Ask a Presbyterian if Christ parted the waters of the Red
Sea for Moses, and he will answer "Yes, as part of the
Trinity that the Jews called Jehovah."

Ask the same question of a Mormon, and he will answer "Yes,
as Jehovah himself, having been delegated power by Eloheim."

Weird stuff.
Don't even try to make sense of it.

UD

he doesn't even realize just how tortured his logic is here does he? I would pose back to him this question phrased however you want - "Its not really complicated the way you put it, who is spouting the BS here David McKay and Joseph Smith or James Talmage and the 1916 First Presidency?"

Sounds like Jehovah is whomever the interpreter wants him/her to be at the moment.

I sent him a link to this thread. Hopefully, he'll respond himself.

I'm just trying to figure out what any of this has to do with anything. His "buddy" could be Jesus Christ and it wouldn't make any more sense.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/14/2013 09:36PM by twojedis.

It all depends on who you ask.

What exactly is your friend trying to convince you? How will establishing some consistency with which being goes by which name change the fact that the doctrine surrounding them is inherently flawed? Look, you can call them both Gary for all I care. Doesn't change the fact that they're fictional characters.

I hate how apologists (amateur and professional alike) "solve" insignificant little nitpick problems like this and somehow think that proves their larger claims are valid.

I don't believe, in this email, that he was attempting to convince me of anything. I think he feels safe sharing some of the more extreme aspects of church doctrine. He just enjoys talking about it.

Christianity spends a lot of time trying to convince themselves that they're not polytheistic. They couldn't resist deifying JC and added the Holy Spook just for good measure. The three-in one, one-in-three trinity doctrine is so confusing that it mostly succeeds in baffling them with BS, but Mormonism just gave up the fight. They're clearly polytheistic. It amuses me how they are trying to wiggle out of the god-was-once-a-man doctrine.

As judyblues says, though, it's all a tempest in a teapot. There aren't any saviors or gods. I am just enjoying the magic show.

Just remember this: Michael is Adam and Adam is God and God is Elohim AND Jehovah except for when Jesus is Jehovah sometimes when he's not busy being the Savior and then when Jesus is Jehovah, Elohim goes back to being Heavenly Father, and son Lucifer is also Satan and the Devil but prefers to go by The Adversary in hopes of getting his own serial movie deal. Sometimes though, Jehovah subs for the Easter Bunny, God fills in for Santa Claus and the Holy Ghost guest hosts for Joan Rivers. But Thomas Monson always goes by Uncle Scrooge.

And that's the rest of the story!

+1000

Blue Orchid you crack me up!

A perfect thread for this evening! I just had a long conversation with my TBM DW about this very topic. I explained to her about Michael: that only in Jude, on the last page of the Bible short of Revelations, is there a reference to Michael the "archangel". Yet, moism has him as one of those who made the earth and as being Adam. Michael is, essentially, part of Jewish non-scriptural folklore but was useful to Joseph Smith in appealing to those Christians inclined towards beliefs in angels and religious iconography. The second item is the issue of Christ being Jehovah or Jehovah being God the Father. In the Nicene Creed it is clear that the maker of Heaven and earth was the father and in reading the OT it is also clear that Jehovah is the father. For Christ to be the father is to create cog-dis because the difference between Jehovah of the OT and Christ of the NT is so great one would need to determine the figure was schizophrenic.

I never agreed with Talmadge and found his "Jesus the Christ" filled with non-biblical mythology



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/14/2013 08:45PM by rhgc.

Ha, "filled with non-biblical mythology", the only acceptable mythology is Biblical mythology.

Very funny! I should have made it just being full of mythology and being non-biblical. But I do appreciate your humor. I also do accept that there is some mythology in the Bible - mythology which is part and parcel of moism such as the garden, Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, and Noah. Such are not so much part of Christianity except for the fundamentalists who treat everything as literal.

Thanks for sharing this! I never realized that the Jesus=Jehova doctrine didn't originate with Joseph Smith. I am going to have to save this info.

To be fair the Jesus and Jehovah have been alternately the same person for 2000 years.

http://carm.org/christianity/christian-doctrine/jehovah-jesus

http://www.free-bible-study-lessons.com/Jesus-Jehovah-601.html

http://www.letgodbetrue.com/pdf/jesus-is-jehovah.pdf


For Christians who spend time getting to know their beliefs it isn't really that hard to understand. The problems with Mormons is that they decided to muck it up with Elohim.

Let's also get Yahweh in, too. I always guessed that was Elohim's gang name or something. He was quite the thug in those days. Maybe he left gang life and changed it to Elohim??

It is true that some Christian groups in seeking harmony in the concept of the trinity have fallen into a similar trap and equate Jesus with Jehovah. I have always believed in the trinity as encompassing the three but the three also having separate atributes and personality. Hence we can have the harshness of a father/Jehovah, the spirit uniting the three and indwelling in believers, and the son, Jesus, incarnate and living as a man, wholly man, with the feelings and understanding of man, and as such being able to explain man and act as an advocate with the Father.

I believe that Christ is our Savior, the only begotten Son of God. He atoned for our sins. He loves us. He is I AM.

I believe Jehovah is a cruel, heartless demiurge - a fallen angel, also known as Moloch, who hijacked Israel. There are many reasons I believe this. Here is just one.
I AM gave Israel the Ten Commandments. Under Jehovah's tutelage, those simple 10 commandments grew into the Talmud, literally a 6200 page book covering every possible nuance (including the proper way to worship Moloch!). The Savior took those 10 commandments and simplified them even more: Love God, love your neighbor. Talk about the spirit of the law vs the letter of the law.
I spent months on this topic, examining it from every angle I could think of, because to me, the implications of this realization are staggering to ponder.

Exbish, when you come to the Portland ExMo meetup this Sunday let's talk about this. I had never heard the Moloch term used before and simply found the wiki definition. Hebrew Root MLK meaning from Canaanite origin. The Canaanite god. Was it more than that?

With christinsanity you get not one, but three. Yes three, three gods in one !
NOW how much would you pay ?

Hi! Billy Mays here!

There is no such being as "Jehovah" because there is no "j" sound in Hebrew. JS should have known that.

Jehovah/ Yahweh is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He is also the God who called Moses to liberate the Israelites from Pharaoh, and gave them the Law. The name Yahweh, or YHWH, literally means "I AM THAT I AM."

"But before Abraham was, I AM" said Jesus to the Jews who questioned his authority (John 8:58). Jesus claimed for himself the I AM, the God of Abraham.

“You are not yet fifty years old,” they said to him, “and you have seen Abraham!” (John 8:57). The craziness of the claim was evident even then. Either Jesus was a lunatic for making these incredible claim, or he was telling the truth. There is no middle option. The idea that he was merely a great moral teacher is not there.

The easy way out here would be to abandon the Gospel of John, and stick only with the synoptic gospels. The result would be Arianism, a doctrine that essentially denies that Jesus is God.

The Trinitarian doctrine is the result of the centuries-long Christian struggle to understand what Jesus meant in the Gospel of John and elsewhere in the NT. It is a tragic struggle interspersed with shameful anecdotes, like the man who must chew his honor to keep body and soul together.

It only looks CogDis to those who haven't lived long enough to understand the conflicting issues involved. Like Dawkins or Hitchens who condemn religion even as they breathe in an intellectual environment that Christianity's struggles made possible.

As atheist philosopher Michael Ruse said about Dawkins and the new atheists, they're an embarrassment to humanists like him because they want to view religion as simple when it is in reality a very complex thing.

"Dawkins et al bring us to disrepute"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/nov/02/atheism-dawkins-ruse

Fortunately for atheism, these days a new breed of "new atheists" are rising with a more attentive ear to what religion has to say.

"Dawkins has lost: Meet the new New Atheists"
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8885481/after-the-new-atheism/

"....but it is a complex issue..."? Complex because it is all religious, contradicting nonsense from a myriad of sources. Christians can't figure who their god is even while making it up as Joseph Smith was.

How Christ-like was Jehovah? Send your friend this Dawkins quote:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Or Mark Twain in "Letters from Earth":

"Now here is a curious thing. It is believed by everybody that while he was in heaven he was stern, hard, resentful, jealous, and cruel; but that when he came down to earth and assumed the name Jesus Christ, he became the opposite of what he was before: that is to say, he became sweet, and gentle, merciful, forgiving, and all harshness disappeared from his nature and a deep and yearning love for his poor human children took its place. Whereas it was as Jesus Christ that he devised hell and proclaimed it!

Which is to say, that as the meek and gentle Savior he was a thousand billion times crueler than ever he was in the Old Testament -- oh, incomparably more atrocious than ever he was when he was at the very worst in those old days!

Meek and gentle? By and by we will examine this popular sarcasm by the light of the hell which he invented."



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/15/2013 01:17AM by No Mo.

Ever since the days of Voltaire, Rosseau, Hume... those who deny the existence of a benevolent God seem to have a perfect idea of how or why God ought to do things. I find that rather ironic.

Dawkins is a great scientist as long as he sticks to science. He becomes problematic once he speaks and behaves like a philosopher.

Michael Ruse is a philosopher, so when he sees a quack philosopher like Dawkins, atheists should pay close attention.

"In a recent Al-Jazeerah interview, Richard
Dawkins was asked his views on God. He
argued that the god of "the Old Testament"
is "hideous" and "a monster", and reiterated
his claim from The God Delusion that the God
of the Torah is the most unpleasant character
"in fiction". Asked if he thought the same of
the God of the Koran, Dawkins ducked the
question, saying: "Well, um, the God of the
Koran I don't know so much about.""

http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/comment/102653/facing-uncomfortable-truths

----------

Right, he doesn't know. Or maybe, prefers
not to know while being interviewed in a
program that Muslims might be listening to.

As anyone with a basic knowledge of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the God of the Koran is no other than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

If Dawkins doesn't know this (or prefers not to say what he knows in public), then what we're hearing is a quack philospher. Someone who says he knows something about religion and philosophy but really knows nothing.

Michael Ruse is therefore right to be ashamed of him.

God, Jesus, & the Holy Ghost are like an egg. Three separate beings all working together for the same purpose. God....... damn, I just dropped my egg and its all mixed up.... Just like religion... a mess.