Any Mormons on here read the CES Letter?

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You can google Nibley easily enough on your own.

You’re providing old articles of the peep stone translation accounts, in order to assert that the accounts should have been well known. I think you know they were not and are purposely gaslighting.

Maybe you were shocked maybe you weren’t, but it is disingenuous to imply that the general Mormon population was taught this version of events by the Mormon Church. You are rewriting events to suggest they did.

I don’t think you understand what fringe means. Some of the Catholic authors you list are widely read, by Catholics and non-Catholics. It was a very true blue Mormon who informed me that they viewed groups like FAIR and FARMS, as “fringie”. Your references are regularly, and almost exclusively, from the fringes.

Bringing up 2000 years of history in a weekly 10 minute homily, would be “interesting” if not supremely weird and irrelevant to Mass. Homilies usually take on topics from the daily readings. For example, today was the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the homily was about that reading.

Catechumens ask every question you can think of and there is nothing that is off limits, taboo, or anti-Catholic to bring up. People have the time to study any topic in depth they wish. So these what-about diversions you trot out, are not comparable, since Mormonism has nothing that is comparable.

We don’t shy away or try to whitewash bad Catholics, history or bad Popes. More current Popes have apologized on behalf of the Church for past transgresses…something that would go a long ways towards people viewing Mormonism in a better light. As far as I can tell, a Mormon leader will never apologize for anything because Mormons don’t apologize for their wrongs. They rewrite the events instead.

I don’t know Runnels, I only know of him. His CES letter came out decades after I left Mormonism, but I find he organized his thoughts and topics well. I don’t know how devastating his material is to anyone. I’ve never met anyone IRL who has brought him up. I only see him talked about online. Active Mormons worry over him and talk about him online, far more than anyone else that I read. So he must have hit some nerves, I guess.

My experience with normal everyday Mormons, who are my friends and family, is that they Believe, and there could be 10000000 pieces of evidence showing Smith to be a fraud, and their religion just made up from the imagination of a few individuals, and they would still Believe, because that is what Mormons do.

Runnel’s knowledge of the Trinity is superficial but also irrelevant to his point that Mormon doctrines about God, changed, substantially, over time. Smith’s changing doctrine about deity, is well documented, and done so long before Runnels started writing his letter.

You focus on minutia while ignoring what is actually being said.
 
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Catechumens ask every question you can think of and there is nothing that is off limits, taboo, or anti-Catholic to bring up.
Yep. I remember when I was a gospel doctrine teacher and we got into the Book of Jacob and were specifically instructed in the lesson manual not to discuss polygamy.

If it’s at all damning to the faith, you can’t talk about it. Like Boyd Packer said, “There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of Church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not. Some things that are true are not very useful.”
 
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Another perfect example of when an LDS can’t respond to the initial query they go on the attack.

Are you willing to just speak to some of the questions in the CES letter? Are you able to?
It wouldn’t take a whole lot to put together a Catholic equivalent - a “Catholic CES Letter” if you will - full of existing misconceptions and lesser understood dogma and history. I’m sure there are a fair number of low-information Catholics for whom much of it would be a surprise.
 
It wouldn’t take a whole lot to put together a Catholic equivalent - a “Catholic CES Letter” if you will - full of existing misconceptions and lesser understood dogma and history. I’m sure there are a fair number of low-information Catholics for whom much of it would be a surprise.
Actually the more I learn about the Catholic Church, the more true it seems from a logical standpoint. I don’t know how any Mormon could continue believing that with all of the issues. Like there is absolutely nothing historically working in their favor.
 
You can ask certain questions they already have a nice, clean answer to. The thorny ones are the ones you can’t ask.
 
Packy also had a problem with historians because they care about the truth. That right there tells you everything you need to know about Mormonism. Truth doesn’t matter.
 
Here is a funny example of what they do when they don’t like the questions you ask:
 
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I’ve read the CES letter after I left the church. It’s causing huge damage and the church better be worried.
 
Scientology isn’t really even worth discussing anymore. Their numbers are so inflated. Technically I am a member of Scientology because i went to one of their “churches” in college because i was doing a paper on NRMs and i just for hahas took one class and never even finished it. They call you constantly and mail me stuff to this day even though I haven’t responded in ten years. Interestingly they probably consider me an “adherent” and I assume that’s the story for about 95% of their “members”
 
How on earth can you know that is the stone and not just some stone someone found kicking outside?
 
They excommunicated him for asking questions? That is bizarre.
 
I’ve read the CES letter after I left the church. It’s causing huge damage and the church better be worried.
Mormon apologists have put forth a tremendous amount of effort in an attempt to debunk the letter, so you know they are worried.
 
FAIRs response was long and dull and only addressed a fraction of his letter. I admittedly didn’t read much of it. I’m sure Jeremy took them out behind the wood shed.
 
They excommunicated him for asking questions? That is bizarre.
Just one of many. I’ll give you one example. I had a friend in my ward, Brother X, who delivered my first son. He was a high counselor in our stake. He was very brilliant and studied the scriptures voraciously. Somehow, he got wind of many of the troubling issues with the church. First, he took his questions to our bishop. The bishop basically just blew him off. So he went to the stake president who referred him back to our bishop. The bishop sort of scolded him for his lack of faith. Then he started asking questions around the ward. He gained the interest of a number of members. They would hang out after the church meetings and talk. The gospel doctrine teacher got involved and told the bishop that Brother X was asking a lot of questions and getting people stirred up. Brother X was called into the bishops office again. He pressed the bishop for answers and the bishop referred him back to the stake president who removed him from the stake high council. He continued asking questions. A couple in the ward lost their faith and left the church. Brother X was shortly thereafter excommunicated for apostasy. I was in the middle of it all. I saw the whole thing develop. Word spread around the ward that Brother X was excommunicated for adultery.

Moral of the story: Don’t ask questions.

The nice thing about this is that Brother X went on to be a very successful and highly respected doctor. The whole thing turned out to be a great blessing for him.
 
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I don’t think he called her a liar. I think he called her a phony and a fraud. Like there’s a big difference. It was probably almost 40 years ago when I read No Ma’am That’s Not History but maybe I should read it again. But in principle, Rebecca got you on that one.
 
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