Do we have any authority, other than JS, that the Lord did these things? I assume that you do not buy into any of the other cult leaders’ claims simply because they said so. I assume that you don’t take JS with such blind faith that you don’t have evidences other than his written word that “the Lord did” these things, ie specify how to modify the Bible and which books to include in it, among many others.
Where is the conspiracy theory to which you refer? The fact that Mormonism is obviously Protestant-derived is simply a fact that cannot be denied. Why are Mormons so sensitive to this? Why do they get so bothered to think that Mormonism sprang from the loins of Luther and Calvin? One Mormon told me that the restoration began with the Reformation, and was completed with JS. I don’t know whether this jives with current Mormon thinking, but if it is true, then there should be no need to be ashamed of being a child of the Reformation.
If JS lived in a Protestant environment, and his religious inventions had almost all the theological earmarks of Protestantism, then the conclusion is an obvious one. If he had lived in a Catholic environment, and yet produced a religion looking the way Mormonism looked in, say, 1844, ie largely Protestant, then THAT would make it less likely that he was merely subject to the ambience of time and place. Take the Lord’s Supper for instance. The Mormon practice is virtually identical to many other Protestant practices, and shares pretty much zero with Catholicism. If Mormonism existed during apostolic times, why would the Mormon church practice a Eucharistic model that is so utterly Protestant, unless it was a product of the Reformation?
Again, I don’t see this as being conspiratorial at all, and am unsure what you mean by that. I will pull BoM out when I’m looking for something in particular, and on those occasions I see lifts from the Bible all over the place. I find it hard to believe that they amount to such a small fraction of the whole. But, since I will not try to prove it one way or the other, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on that issue. As far as what the LDS church needs to do to “calm my conspiratorial mind” I doubt there is anything possible. My mind is not “conspiratorial” and it is not uncalm. I had the advantage of having studied orthodox Christianity at some length over the course of several excursions into various denominations. It seems to me that people most likely to become Mormon (or any other cult, for that matter) are those with very little grounding in orthodoxy, and therefore having no substantial tools with which to judge the claims of Mormonism.
Thanks, and that is the same advice I’ve gotten from by girlfriend’s family recently. However, I am not steeped in anti-Mormon literature. I’ve got the Abanes book, and an evangelical pamphlet titled “How to Witness to Mormons.” That is my entire anti-Mormon library, LOL. I have done a fair amount of reading of Mormon sources, such as the Talmage Jesus the Christ, and the LDS web site, here and there out of the BoM and D&C. Still, without knowing anything at all about Mormonism, I would reject it for the same reason I reject all other Protestant sects: They are not in communion with the Catholic Church, with the Pope. That’s all I really need to know. I began moving towards the Catholic Church when I noticed how miserably fractured Protestantism is. I see LDS as just another heretical branch of Protestantism. An interesting branch, to be sure, but not particularly important in the overall scheme of things.
Obvious to whom? To you it maybe; but not to me!