Before we start analyzing your claim…would you cite the source? That will make it easier to provide an answer…maybe this question should be answered in a thread by itself or some other related thread.
If you are so concerned about the original topic of the thread and sticking to it, why did you wait until now to bring it up? Why not bring it up days ago? Could it be because we are asking uncomfortable questions that you don’t want to answer?
No…I welcome the questions…I will look the truth in the eye…I don’t run from it. but, if you have not noticed Marie brought it up today and I concur…this is something I also realized a while ago, but nobody really seemed to care…so, I continued. Another reason is that there are so many questions asked in this topic that I don’t have time to answer them all. I love to look at each question and investigate it and love to take my time. I love research.
I will look into it if you provide the source where this is stated.
Well, like I said, there are separate threads addressing some of these other issues. I look forward to you commenting on them.
It is well known that the Adam-God doctrine was formally taught by the LDS Church as part of the temple Endowment ordinance, in the “Lecture at the Veil”.
Thanks LW! I’m on my phone and copying and pasting the links would have been difficult.
Funny, you haven’t responded to the false prophecy that I provided regarding smith…hmmmm
The thread kind of went off the rails several pages ago (probably in the first page), but I appreciate you taking the time to address the question (which you already did, albeit in lesser detail than this post).
Pearl of Great Price, History of Joseph Smith, verse 34
No. I am asking questions directly related to your claims about the Mormon Church and why you converted. You claim you converted because Joseph Smith was a Prophet; he was not. You claim you converted because Mormonism is a restored Church of Jesus Christ; yet three times you ignore my post showing that Mormonism is not a restored Church but an invention of Joseph Smith.
How committed can you be if you decide not to go past the basics? Isn’t the point to get deeper in the faith?
I wasn’t particularly impressed either with some of the proof-texts the LDS website provided to defend the idea of a total apostasy of the Church. If that website is supposed to be the official Mormon Church website, then they need to do a better job because a simple search on a Bible software - at least to me - appeared to dismantle the idea entirely.
A conversion based solely upon the intellect is no conversion at all. Christianity is based upon an encounter with the living God and the truth revealed by that God does not contradict reason nor strain the intellect. By this I do not mean that we can comprehend all mysteries. Intellectually, mysteries make sense in that it stands to reason that our human minds could not comprehend the One who created them without divine aid. In fact it would strain reason to believe that we could fully comprehend our Creator.
I became LDS for the same reasons you did. I think that everyone who joins for legitimate reasons, unlike many people I saw baptized on my mission in Taiwan who were merely trying to gain status by having American friends or those who join just for the friendship and feeling of community, joined for those same reasons. Most of the ex-LDS here will agree with me.
I think she believes in the principles the LDS church teaches, goes to church and other meetings, and focuses on the “basics”, i.e. the surface teachings of the LDS church. She doesn’t go into things like Book of Mormon translation matters, archeology, Freemasonry and Mormonism, the priesthood ban, etc.
I realized that many of the the things that I liked in Mormonism are actually found in Catholicism. For example, Catholicism teaches that God still speaks to man, and never stopped. The Church is guided by the Spirit, and we can receive inspiration from God. Apostolic authority continues in the Bishops. Catholic churches, cathedrals, basilicas, etc are “temples”, where the presence of God is found in a special way, and where the sacrificial priesthood ministers (which the LDS church doesn’t have, in discontinuity with the ancient temple). There have been many prophets and prophetesses throughout Catholic history, receiving Heavenly visions and visitations. But foremost, I think the Eucharist was the main thing. On an intellectual level, it was interesting to me that the belief in Real Presence is found in all of the most ancient churches, no matter where they were/are, be it Jerusalem, Antioch, Rome, Constantinople, Ethiopia, Syria, Alexandria, Armenia, etc. I was also particularly drawn by the ancient Jewish connections to the Eucharist (see Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist), which further took me away from the belief that it was a result of an apostasy or Greek philosophy.
Thank you for that, very insightful. Even though this was way before the easy access of the internet , what information did you have available to you? In what ways did this affect your family?I became LDS for the same reasons you did. I think that everyone who joins for legitimate reasons, unlike many people I saw baptized on my mission in Taiwan who were merely trying to gain status by having American friends or those who join just for the friendship and feeling of community, joined for those same reasons. Most of the ex-LDS here will agree with me.
But when my wife and I deep-dived the Standard Works, the History of the Church, and the JoD we realized that none of it really made sense and the whole house of cards came tumbling down. The authorities that I asked for answers had none.
I remember like it was yesterday; After a night of research, I turned to my wife with tears in my eyes and said “I think the church isn’t true”. She began to cry also and said “I know, I know”. We wept for a long time that night.
A week or so later, we wrote a letter to our bishop (at the time I was his 2nd counselor) asking to have our names removed from the roles of the church. It came as quite a shock and a scandal that a member of the bishopric would leave the church.
Even though we had declared that we no longer believed and asked to be taken off the roles, they held a church court on us in absentia and excommunicated us. I still wonder how they did that with only 2/3 of the bishopric present.
That was in 1986. I had been LDS for 11 years. My wife was a BIC Mormon.
Paul (formerly LDS, now happily Catholic)
All we had were church publications. I had no idea that there was such a thing as anti-Mormon literature until the internet came along. We had the 4 “Standard Works” (The Bible, the Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price). We also had a large collection of church magazines, The Journal of Discourses and The History of The Church. We also had all of the church manuals that we had taught from for several years.
A side-issue question - did they teach you the official Mandarin dialect, or the native Taiwanese dialect? From what I understand there are reasonable differences between the two.