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bluelake
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I have done some research into the Mormon beliefs, but I would not spend a cent buying their book.
They follow the teachings of Joseph Smith. He was shot in a bar room brawl.
bluelake
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They follow the teachings of Joseph Smith. He was shot in a bar room brawl.
bluelake
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PeanutBono
Guest
why is it so many here mix truth with lies. Truth Joseph Smith was Shot. False he was shot in a bar room brawl. History clearly accounts to his Murder at Carthage Jail here is the account:scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/135/1,4,7#1
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LongJourney
Guest
I am sure she did not mean that. However, they were drinking in the jailer’s apartment. 
Not too far wrong.
Not too far wrong.
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PeanutBono
Guest
They were having wine with their dinner, but that is not close to being shot while in a bar room brawl. I have a hard time finding how a person who can so quickly criticize perceived errors of Joseph Smith and of his perceived distortion of the truth accept the statement that Joseph Smith being shot in a ballroom Brawl is close to the truth and acceptable. It seems that you have a different view of what truth is, if it is convieent to your own belief. Also I typically relate to using the term they were drinking as if they are getting drunk and not having a glass of wine
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bkayw
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Wasn’t drinking wine a sin?
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PeanutBono
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We are getting off of this threads topic. I have started another thread in which you can ask me questions about Doctrine. this will be the last response i give on this thread. The word of wisdom which you reference mentions only strong drink of which wine was permitted for the sacrament of which it is thought Joseph was using it for the night day he was shot. It was not until well after the death of Joseph Smith was the word of wisdom made commandment lightplanet.com/mormons/daily/health/word_of_wisdom2.html
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PaulDupre
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At the time of Joseph Smith’s death, the Word of Wisdom (D&C 89) was not yet interpreted as a commandment (the text itself says it is not a commandment) and was not binding on LDS. Joseph Smith drank wine and ale all his adult life and smoked occasionally. Brigham Young was a lifelong pipe smoker and wine drinker. Brigham considered himself a connoisseur of fine wines and maintained a valuable collection.
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PaulDupre
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When I was LDS, I read the Book of Mormon cover-to-cover several times (twice while on my mission). I kept running into things that made no sense or strained credulity; many anachronisms that simply cannot be resolved. About 15 years after leaving the LDS church, I became active in debunking Mormonism on forums like this one, and so began re-reading sections of the BoM so as to maintain familiarity with it. Now I review sections of it as needed for debate purposes. The more I read it, the more ridiculous it seems.
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Prague
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I tried to read it a few times, just too see what all the hoo haw was about, but was just bored to death.
I will take the Bible any day.
I will take the Bible any day.
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Publisher
Guest
Why? It’s a book…do I believe it? Do I believe it’s only a book? Yes. Do I believe it is historically accurate and that I believe Jews came to the Americas? No. Do I believe it has wisdom contained in it’s pages…Yes. Do I believe it was “brought forth by the hand and power of God.”…No.
It may surprise you to also know…I read the Science and Health as well…and Thomas A Kempis “imitation of Christ”…I have a wonderful translation of the Tao Te Ching by Stephen Mitchell I have sitting with my Bible…I also have a nice English copy of the Holy Qu’ran.
I enjoy…thourougly enjoy…reading others scriptures…it gives insight to me…at least I believe they do…into how others perceive the Light in their lives…I am conastantly amazed at many similarities the various world scriptures share with my own Christian faith and scriptures.
I do not “fear” books…there is nothing mystical or magical about books or the printed page…no “dark spirit” hovers over them awaiting unsuspecting Seekers to ambush and confuse them.
It is a book…and one insight the BoM provides is how it relates to the Hebrew/Christian scriptures and their formation into “scripture”.
I amaze a lot of people by my very pragmatice beliefs about books and their nature.
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PeanutBono
Guest
Well spoken my friend, you articulate well your strong testimony in the living God. It serves you well.
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Publisher
Guest
LOL…yes…that is one aspect of my enjoyment too.
I am amazed at the almost “superstitious” take many have concerning scripture…as though there is some special quality to the pages of a book that make it “sacred”.
It is the people who embrace the various writings of the world’s religions that determine what and what is not scripture. True…many hierachal institutions claim the “authority” to determine what is scripture and claim they are guided directly by God to “know” what is scripture and what is not.
The word of God…“whispers of the Light”…are found in every book of holy writ from the various world’s religions…“That of God”…“Light Within”…Inner Light"…“Inner Word” it at work withing ALL PEOPLE and this “word” is explained in metphore, simile, and word pictures to seek to convey “the Word of God”…some get it right…others do not.
IMO, scripture must teach us how to love our neighbor…and love God…unless those two things occur…any scripture is useless…if scripture is a “hammer” to “beat the truth” into people…it is a waste of the paper it’s printed on…but if scripture inspires us to “love one another”…“live in peace”…“do good to those who do evil against us”…"seek justice…show mercy…walk humbly with your God’…then it is a valuable tool to learn of God with.
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SteveVH
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Well, if we are talking about Sacred Scripture, there is some special quality that make it “sacred”. We believe that it is the word of God, that the words are inspired by the Holy Spirit. It is why, when another book is proclaimed as “scripture”, that it deserves severe scrutiny. If we cannot tell the words of man from the words of God then we have a real problem.
The Catholic Church believes that it is guided by the Holy Spirit, and was guided by the Holy Spirit it determing the canon of Sacred Scripture. Because the world obtained the Bible from the Catholic Church, it seems logical that they would at least hope that this is true becasue if it isn’t, then no one can be sure of the inspired nature of the Book that everyone calls the word of God. Therefore, we do not believe that “people” determine what is and what is not scripture, rather it is the Holy Spirit that makes the determination.
Yes, I agree that there are “seeds of truth” or “whispers of light” as you call it, within every religion, otherwise no one would follow them. The Catholic Church agrees with this. We believe it is a preparation for the the truth of the gospel. We also believe, however, that the “fullness” of truth exists only in the Catholic Church, and only then, because Christ is its head in Whom all truth subsists.
My favorite quote is from St. Francis: “Preach the gospel to all the world. If necessary, use words.” You are entirely right on this. If we do not put flesh on the words of Scripture, it is dead and of no use. It is suppose to affect our lives, to make us a new creation, turning from sin to God by loving our neighbor. I believe St Augustine said “In the essentials, unity; in the non-essentials, diversity; in all, charity.”
God bless you brother.
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Returning_Home
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If you feel this way about a fictional book written by a liar, a fraud, an adulterer, and ultimately a murderer, just imagine how you’d feel if you read the Bible without the LDS-issued rose-colored glasses.
No, the BOM doesn’t speak of the real Jesus, but of a pale copy of him, a weak potato-head of a savior who not only makes mistakes as documented in 3 Nephi 20:23-25, but is the product of incest, offering you the way to become a god like him. Thanks, but I’ll stick with the real, true, and living savior that stars in the Bible.
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Returning_Home
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You might not understand it but I found some very simple explanations of how the process worked:
David Whitmer, one of the three witnesses who attested to having seen the gold plates said: “I will now give you a description of the manner in which the BOM was translated. Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine. A piece of something resembling parchment would appear, and on that appeared the writing. One character at a time would appear, and under it was the interpretation in English. Brother Joseph would read off the English to Oliver Cowdery, who was his principle scribe, and when it was written down and repeated to Brother Joseph to see if it was correct, then it would disappear and then another character with the interpretation would appear. Thus, the BOM was translated by the gift and power of God, and not by any man.” (An Address to All Believers in Christ, David Whitmer, 1887)
“In the July 1993 Ensign, Elder Russell M. Nelson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles said He (Martin Harris) also stated that the Prophet translated a portion of the BOM with a seerstone in his possession. The stone was placed in a hat that was used for that purpose, and with the aid of this seerstone the Prophet would read sentence by sentence as Martin wrote, and if he made any mistake the sentence would remain before the Prophet until corrected, when another sentence would appear.”
Though we have a small discrepancy between the two accounts, both say essentially the same thing. Therefore we can see that Smith’s role in the “translation” was minimal because the stones did all the work. And after the loss of the Book of Lehi, the Urim and Thummim were allegedly taken away from Smith but he was supposedly given another stone so all of the BOM as we have it today was actually translated via one single stone, which may be the same stone that he had before he knew anything about the gold plates and such.
The plates, therefore, must have contained Elizabethan English because if God were ‘restoring’ his church, it makes sense that he would use the language of the day, which Elizabethan English was not in Smith’s lifetime. So we have the plates, containing the holy words directed by God written in the language of their captors even though they were actually Jewish and therefore spoke Hebrew, that, when translated, equate to a region-specific dialect, and in many cases, word-for-word identical to th KJV, which wouldn’t be published for another 2,200 years?
Does that really make the least bit of sense?
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Esdra
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I am also evangelical (In the meantime) and I got the Book of Mormon from a Mormon Elder ministering in Innsbruck, the capital of my county.
And I have read it, well not entirely of course!
Well, I can recommend it to every Evangelical/Protestant Christian.I have found no single passage that would contradict the Holy Bible and I got a much deeper understanding through this book of my own, Baptist, doctrine.
If the Book of Mormon is of divine origin or if Joseph Smith has made it up, I will leave to each ones decision.
Well, I am not up to became a Mormon now, but I got interested in their believes and even ordered a “Triple Combination” from them - for about 20 Euros.
I then started researching about the Mormons - and while reading parts of the D&C I got to know that the LDS Church is not really a Christian Church.
But through my searches I also found the RLDS Churchs, especially the CoC.
I even got in email contact with one of their ministers and I must say: I like the RLDS Church.
He then has sent me the D&C and the BoM in the RLDS Edition as a pdf document via Email and I was happy to find a Book of Mormon Reading plan in the BoM.
Since then I have been studying the BoM more intensly.
Before that I used: this plan.
For anyone interested in the BoM, whether of academic interest of anything else, I can recommend this plan, however, one needs the RLDS Version of the BoM (because the RLDS and LDS Church use a different chapter and verse division).
[Note: The RLDS Churches even provide the BoM in “modern English” - called Revised Authorized Version!
]I have “converted” the readings from RLDS to LDS chapters/verses via internet. (Up to know I still don’t own a RLDS BoM… They charge 12 US Dollars for their Version. They say because they are smaller than the Utah LDS Church…) That was a hack of work. - Sadly enough I can’t provide that to you because my computer crashed a month ago and all more recent data than 2009 is erased now…
In Christ,
Esdra
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JHow
Guest
Both describe a similar mechanical process of looking at the stone in the hat, but there is a very big difference between translating character for character and translating word for word.
The first process could be something like a simple cipher, such that a character on the plate would correspond to one of the 26 letters we use in English. Frankly, such a system would be so simple that most people would soon learn to read it without magical stones, once exposed to a series of “translations”. It would also suggest that the original text, if there was any, was simply en-ciphered English.
If the process was word-for-word, then it suggests that each character on the plate is functioning like an ideogram, standing for one or more words. You would still need a lot more information, however, to translate such a system, such as knowledge of the underlying grammar and syntax for the language. Just to illustrate the kind of problems translators face, for example, in many languages part of speech is signified by case, not word order (as it is in English). ‘Man bites dog’, can be ‘Dog man bites’, as long as the words are in the right case.
To me, the accounts suggest that neither Smith nor the witnesses had any real knowledge of languages. Not knowing any of the problems that real translation encounters, they describe a mechanical/magical process that reflects what they see to be the chief difficulty: “here’s a word, the stone told me it means this”. But the system as described seems unlikely to yield good results. Today we have language translation software, which frankly leaves a lot to be desired. If I gave you a Polish text, for instance, and a Polish English dictionary, you would struggle to translate it just through the simple mechanical process of looking up words. The best translation is still done by a person(s) knowing both languages really well.
It is most defensible for Mormons to say that they don’t know how the translation was accomplished, except to say by magical or miraculous means. It is really just an extension of the real problem, which is that text cannot be subjected to any scientific scrutiny. The original is missing. The characters or letters or system of writing is unknown. The language is unknown. No real means of translation has been proposed. There is no evidence that anything was translated at all, except the word of Smith and his associates (and the hostile witness Dr. Anthon).
I also find it more than co-incidental that the real business of translating Egyptian hieroglyphs was accomplished shortly before the time that Smith is doing his translation work (1822). The really interesting breakthrough was the realization that the hieroglyphs were in fact mostly a phonetic system, combined with ideograms. This was an un-expected result. I doubt whether many people outside universities at that time understood the significance of this finding, and the problems it would pose to somebody supposedly de-ciphering an Egyptian text with magic stones (each character represents a sound, not a word).
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Marie5890
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I was a convert to Mormonism early on in my life and had read the BoM many times through out my LDS journey…I found some portions more inspiring than others…
Always found the Gospels much more of interest to me, however.
Always found the Gospels much more of interest to me, however.
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Marie5890
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If you were staying at a Marriot hotel, that is why it was there…The Marriots are one of the big LDS families…
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bkayw
Guest
I did LSD a few times and I have to wonder if Joseph Smith and friends were walking out into the woods to hunt psilocybin mushrooms, stare into a hat and view a couple of rocks for inspiration.
They didn’t actually need the hat, the tablets or the rocks.
I smoked hashish once as well, and received “visions” that normal humans wouldn’t otherwise contemplate.
magic-mushrooms.net/dangers.html
They didn’t actually need the hat, the tablets or the rocks.
I smoked hashish once as well, and received “visions” that normal humans wouldn’t otherwise contemplate.
magic-mushrooms.net/dangers.html
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